22 Dreams

The trouble with climate-change denial people is the underlying premise to their arguments that it's "ok" to continue to spew untold amounts of fossil fuels into the atmosphere, to continue to pillage and destroy the pristine forests of the planet like they're bowling pins, and to use the earth's magnificent oceans as some perpetual plastic-dumping tank.  Sure, climate is "always changing" and some parts of the planet are "getting colder" and the planet "hasn't significantly heated since 1998" and all the rest of it.  Ok.  Weather patterns are always in flux.  They've been noticeably out of whack over the past few years and becoming increasingly so, but no bother.   And if even it's the ...'straight-line stuff in the sky coming out of airplanes'... that's causing the weather disruptions, and not the deluge of atmospheric carbon-dioxide or methane, is it still an excuse to continue to rape and denude the pla...

Reading Hancock's 'Fingerprints of the Gods' reminds me of how palpably vast we are.  We as individuals and as a species are beings of inherent authority and true power, eternal beings that have been around forever and beyond.  We a modern 'civilisation' that at best skimps the surface of all that is worthy and right and true, trashing our beautiful planet and its habitats and each other in the process to nothing, to nowhere.  What the fuck is going to become of us?  If the last ice age wiped out the previous "pre-historical" civilisations to leave behind only their extraordinary monuments like the ancient cities of Peru and the great pyramids of Egypt, the next round of calamitous events will find it hard pressed to wipe out all evidence of 20th/21st century 'civilised way of life'.   Nuclear radiation, crisp packets and plastic bottles may hang around for a depressingly and embarrassingly long time.  We've really fucking screwed it.  We'v...

I spent way too much time over the late-spring and summer  weighing myself down  over  a work-based project-management certificate course.  The thing was due on Boxing Day but all of us six participants were granted extensions to the end of February due to our pack-procrastinationary inclinations.  I took three days off in November to do it, managing only a third of the assignment in those three days.  The process wasn't helped by this awful sheet-metal grey weather that hovered over the city throughout the late spring and early summer.  It sure didn't feel like an Aussie Christmas, and even Christmas day was cold and rainy. I deliberated over the assignment throughout those few weeks I had off during January.  I'd be at my desk indoors with the ceiling fan whirling crazily above me while the city outside cracked with its highest recorded temperature of around 46 degrees.  I finished the assignment with days to spare, and to my pleasan...

Part 5 : I've been with the same job for over 16 years now.  I'd never have dreamed that I'd be looking down the barrel of sixteen-plus years when walking into that job back in January of 1996.  Just couldn't have conceived it.  Even 2000 seemed a long way off back in the mid-nineties.  And here we are, spiraling towards the finish line of 2012.. January 1996.  I hadn't heard of the word 'internet'.  Paul Keating was Prime Minister.  I was living in the Cross.  And I scored a job at a reputable theatre training institution in which I'm still immersed, still enjoying.  The aim of undertaking library work was to do something 'professional', earn enough money to pay the bills, and to have the time and energy to pursue music.   Today, there's a less time for the music, but I find the job to involve a good level of stimulation or creativity nonetheless. I suppose I had three jobs in all the time I've been there: there was the 'old...

Part 4: 1988.  New university, new freedoms, new experiences, new friends.  New learning curves, and plenty of mood swings.  Yet amidst all this exciting new activity, in a strange way I realised I missed playing the trombone.  Not so much the trombone itself, but more the experience of sitting in with ensembles and reading charts and being part of a larger group of musicians.  So I started learning clarinet and taking lessons.  And sure enough, I was soon back into it, rehearsing with concert bands and starting to do the odd gig or two. By 1989 I decided to change my degree from Social Science to Arts to which I readily took up music again.  Luckily, thankfully, in 1989 one could study music at this institution without being particularly good at any instrument, which I wasn’t.  I had dabbled and spread myself around musically, but I was no trained monkey.  And just like at school, I enjoyed having a base where I could feel at h...

Part 3: While 1985 may have been the year of ‘Choose life’, 1986 seemed altogether more subdued.  It was an auspicious year for me as I, at 16 and in year 11, found myself seeking, discovering, and then assimilating more enduring, character-shaping influences.  I’d made a decision during the previous year to give up on the sciences.  I kept on with maths but my study load otherwise delved around the humanities.   I needed the succor of the arts to nourish a being thirsty for muse, for inspiration, for love. My favourite subjects were Ancient History and English.   I topped Ancient History at my school and believed that it was teacher bias as to why I didn’t get the Ancient History prize.  I loved Ancient Greece in particular and took great pleasure in dissecting Cicero’s speeches and writing essays about them. English was another bombshell.  Having not been much of a reader as a child I came to love reading and exploring all this ...

Part 2: I laboured with viola lessons throughout 1983, guiltily aware that my parents were forking out their precious work-for-a-crumb ( beer : dad) income for an instrument I found onerous to play.  Alternately, as an antidote to this tedium, and being terribly bad and bored by viola, I discovered pop music with all of its refreshing charms. Simple, contemporary pop, straight from my little transistor radio I kept at my bedside table.  I’d taken scant notice of pop music in earlier years.  I did recall the video to ABBA’s ‘Fernando’ closing Countdown for about upteen weeks in a row during 1976.  There were other songs that may have come through my brother’s radio that I’d taken some notice of – the one that went “…January, sick and tired you’ve been raining on me…” but that was it really.  No real interest in pop, and no demonstrable facility either. I enjoyed the Top 40.  Luckily, in late 1983 into 1984, Top 40 music was plentiful and – for a ...