On a Return to Live Music I took my worn down feelings away with me for a weekend, and carried them with me through a couple of days of tour life. I’d forgotten what the six am starts and four hour drives and three set gigs were like, somewhere in the midst of this last year of COVID. I’d forgotten what it felt like to be living on the edge of tiredness, eking out the mental energy to accomplish the task directly in front of you, while staving off the expansive future and its twists and turns. I spent the last year with a blessed amount of sleep, with mornings spent in bed till nine am, with evenings empty of follow-on tasks, so it’s a slightly rude awakening to realise suddenly life is back to normal and I didn’t get much say in it. This is the reality of life though isn’t it? As much as we cling to the things we can control, the iceberg of inevitability has this vast underwater mass that drags on the edges of what we can see and saps energy just when we feel we’ve started to gain some headway. Continue reading “On a Return to Live Music”
On The Future I write my way to the end of term, finishing off the year with a blaze of thoughts that burn themselves through the night, lodged deep in the tinder of my brain. They spark and spit through this week, crackling their way to an ultimatum: the same ultimatum I come to every time this year… what next? Most years I’ve planned out my summer six months in advance. I’ve scheduled in a summer tour, booked a couple of days at the beach, found some time in December to catch up with most of the people I’ve neglected all year. I roll through the summer and back in to work life balance in February without taking too much stock. I might pause briefly for New Years Eve, spend a day or two examining the year in retrospect, but for the most part I just keep rolling. Days stack on days and the weeks disappear and suddenly its 2019 when the last real thing I remember doing was back in 2010. Continue reading “On The Future”
On Normality (a re-interpretation) *photo above taken by Molly Mckew. With a flip and a flurry Melbourne turns its charm back on. It’s a little greyer than normal: we’ve lost the coloured edges in a year where eight months both flitted past in the blink of an eye and expanded to feel like some fifteen years of bored afternoons, evenings and weekends. But we’ve made it to other side and with a brief haircut and a pub meal booked in we can all feel like life is normal and we didn’t just spend 2020 crying into our curried pumpkin soup and crusty olive sourdough. With the return of ‘normality’, (and lets briefly assume that all is well and life is normal and we’re picking up where we left off, although as the scars of childhood trauma nip and harry their way through our adult years I can only assume this year of half-light stress will return to sink its fangs in to our psyches, long after we assume its done) re-arrives some of the aspects of a pre-COVID life that I’ve normalised for far too long. Continue reading “On Normality (a re-interpretation)”
On Waste (part 2) *Quick note: the pic above is from Glasgow, circa September 2014. How time flies! This was just after I’d bought that hat. I’ve worn that hat most days since. Great investment. OK, on with the show… … A kid at school questions why I’m constantly bringing half a banana in as my snack. I tell him this story: Imagine you had a beautiful chocolate cake. You spent ages mixing it, filling it with chocolate chips, baking it and it looks absolutely incredible. Well in the process of moving it from the oven to the bench you drop it, and it lands neatly on its side on the floor. What do you do? Do you throw the whole thing in the bin? Or do you cut it in half and discard the floor side, keeping the delicious non-floor side for your tummy? How close to the floor-side do you cut it? Are you happy to have a 95% non-floor cake? I think we can all agree that taking a kitchen sponge to the floor side of your cake to scrub off the little bits of ick is a step too far (or is it…?) So most people would happily eat most of the cake, as long as it hasn’t been in direct contact with the floor. Well at home I have a big bunch of bananas. The only problem is one end of each banana has started molding, just ever so slightly. Resourceful me cuts all the bananas in half, throws the moldy bits into the compost and brings the other halves to school for my lunch. Delicious. A seven year old’s perspective… that makes sense. Continue reading “On Waste (part 2)”
On Giving Up 2020 has become the year where I gave things up. It started back in March, with COVID and giving up on normalcy. In quick succession I gave up gigs, my music career, spending time with friends. It carried on with giving up special occasions: friends birthdays, overseas travel, eating out, my June school holidays. Over time it became more ascetic: I gave up meat for six months. I gave up booze for June and July. I gave up on days, Friday/Saturday/Sunday/Monday disappearing mysteriously into a muddled block of nothing. Without gigs and pubs and friends, the days that framed my work week became less ‘days with hours’ and more ‘formless vacuous space’. Continue reading “On Giving Up”