22 Dreams

I just read an Augusten Burroughs short story. In it he depicts a childhood obsession with his heartbeat. He accounts for all the fears and dreads of the possibility of it stopping beating, and with that, an acute continuous awareness of its presence in his body as something vital yet seemingly fallible, ready to cease beating at any given moment. I couldn't believe I was reading this; I went through precisely the same thing when I was 8-9 years old. I remember nights when it was just me and dad. Mum was at work. It was all weird because we sat in front of the TV in that dank living room and dad never talked to me. All I could do was muster up a fast heart-beat and fill my eight year old mind with worries and neurosis that have taken a lifetime thus far to gently dissipate, waft away, like spots of crude oil drifting away atop the vast ocean. I could never talk about this stuff to anyone back then. I vividly recall worrying about my heart and making myself anxious about t...

I bought an i-Pod recently. I've discovered it to be a most useful toy. It's fun to be able to listen to music in the car shuffled, so that you hear songs out of context with each other. Somehow you tend to listen better to each song, hear it fresh and new, and not take it so much for granted as you do when you're listening to it as part of an album. Besides, you get to hear songs you haven't heard in ages, songs from albums that you don't usually think to bung into your stereo, and that can be delightful to the musical senses! On the flight home from Cairns, as I was gazing down 10,000 metres onto the Queensland hinterland, I had the headphones of my i-Pod firmly entrenched into my ears. Only I didn't shuffle the songs this time, instead I was moved to listen to the Beatles' Abbey Road . As all my close friends would testify I'm a beatlemaniac if ever there was one. The Beatles are in my blood, so much so that I don't really need to listen to...

Saturday, 27 June Life becomes complex as you merge into the wet tropical regions of the earth. Ecosystems become more elaborate within the soup of year-round heat and humidity. The fauna becomes even more plentiful. The fish, the birds, the butterflies become even more fantastically exotic and delightful to the human eye. I saw some lovely tropical fish off Green Island yesterday. There was this blue/purple fish that was just amazing, miraculous in its supernal sheen of striking blue. There were fish with stripes of colour combinations, some even resembling tigers. The beauty of these fish exuded a great innocence. I realised yet again in viewing these fishies that the earth is abundant with life and all of this life is true, is sacred, and that human endeavours are of no greater value, instead they have merely ruined the earth. Today I stepped out onto the Daintree Forest in tropical Far North Queensland. I say I stepped “onto” it because I didn’t really touch it, I floated ...

Tues, 30 June Early this afternoon, on my way back from Palm Cove on the northern beaches of Cairns, the bus drove past the rainforest sky-shuttle entry. I’d known of the sky shuttle, it’s one of the tourist things that people do here, but I wasn’t interested enough to partake in that. It’s just that next to the skyshuttle sign was an Aboriginal theme park sign, and lo and behold the bus drove on past the entry to this theme park as it turned back onto the highway and made its way south back to central Cairns. I was a little miffed by this. I hadn’t heard or read of this park at all. No-one had discussed this or offered it up as a possible tour option, although I hadn’t asked for it to be fair. I do wish I had heard about this park as it’s someplace I really would have wanted to go. I love hearing and reading of Aboriginal culture and it would have been great to participate in learning of Aboriginal life in this area of Australia pre-white settlement. I’d love there to be a boo...

Thursday, 25 June I landed in Cairns this morning; the flight from Sydney took three hours. It felt good taking off from the cold dawn tarmac, to watch the city submerge into playbox houses beneath me as we zoomed far away and into the cloudy altitudes where no-one and almost nothing exists, barring the promise of heaven in the form of mystical cotton-balls in the sky. And where mortgages and property values hang as utterly meaningless and frankly absurd concepts.. As we descended into Cairns I noticed how different the landscape underneath me appeared. There were swirly rivulets and rivers that no doubt carry crocodiles and other tropical delights. On the ground I realised how majestic the area around Cairns is, the city being surrounded by mountains and tree-covered peaks. Sometimes these peaks were covered with clouds, though in this latitude they resembled heat-packs in the sky moreso than mere clouds. Cairns in the dead of winter is about the same as an average Sydney summer’...

You know, sometimes I do have this fantasy of the world blowing up and our civilisation collapsing along with it, to see the whole structure and edifice coming down like fluff cards, bringing down volumes of dust and rubble that'll see the end of us all. Many are predicting that this will happen one way or the other, and not before too long too. I mean, I love life. I love nature, trees, walks in the park. I love the people I love, I love acoustic guitars made of beautiful wood, I love ukuleles, I love garden-fresh salads.... it's just that...I'm continually dismayed at civilisation's drawing card - money - and the power and sway it has on people, along with the bondage, burden, sacrifice and humiliation it inflicts upon the majority of the world's people and their lives, particularly us lot in the west. How capricious is investment. Investing in property for fuck's sake, or the friggin' share market. The non-Westerners (and Easterners) had it right by l...

Port Arthur in Tasmania is an amazing place. A 90 minute drive out of Hobart, Port Arthur is blessed with a stunning natural harbour and lush green vista of rolling hills. It is also home to a penal colony that flourished in the 19 th century and today there is a historical site that is maintained by tourist dollars. The tourist site is fabulous. The site is open from 8:30am in the morning up until about 9:30pm at night, when the last ghost tour ends. We got there in the early afternoon and stayed for the ghost tour in the evening under full moon. There's an eerie vibe when walking through Port Arthur. It feels pregnant with the pain of anguish, yet there is a tranquility that calms this to some degree. You can almost hear the moans and screams of generations past as you wander through the remains of the penitentiary, the asylum, or the dark cells where some patients or convicts were locked away in total darkness for days on end. As I see it, the entire system of convicts s...