22 Dreams

A decade after Barry Long's death, his posthumous autobiography has finally been published.  The manuscript had purportedly been sitting for years in unpublished limbo.  I know that the foundation had asked for donations in recent years to keep its activities alive, and the publishing project would have been one of their key initiatives.  Barry himself never sought or asked for bequests or donations so it's a case of whenever is to be, is to be.  Ultimately, it's about 'I' in this body.  I bought the autobiography when it became available, reading it the time that was right in my life. For all of Barry's profundity of knowledge, Barry doesn't come across as a spiritual "type".  As the spirit started to enter his body around the age of thirty-something, Barry was climbing his way up the boozy, blokey, beery world of tabloid journalism.  He was talented enough, intelligent enough and gifted enough to become editor of a Sunday newspaper by his mid-t...

It seems to me the only real virtue of life or living or existence is to learn to be free from unhappiness. This does not imply learning to be happy, or becoming happy, but rather to be free of energetic , or substantive unhappiness. In the first instance, this 'substantive' unhappiness is the unpleasant, energetic entity that can be sensated within the body.  For me, this sensation sits around the stomach or solar plexus area.   Sometimes it's there, sometimes not. The energy seems to want to come up into the mind and think about past notions and happenings that reflect its own sense of pain.  That's where all the trouble starts; here comes the whirlpool of yucky stomach energy and the mind-fucking that goes with it, related to past hurts or disappointments, to current resentments or jealousies. It's all horrid and stupid, really.  Life is too short to be carrying around psycho-yuk baggage in the gut.  I realise that it's important to live my life, but...

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...