On India I’m in India. Coughing my lungs out. I came down with something on the flight out of Melbourne and its been two days of searing headache, overheating body and gut-wracking coughs. Luckily we’re booked in to the second fanciest hotel in Cochin so I’ve spent the last 48 hours lying in the direct spray of the air-conditioner and ordering room service curry. On the first morning we call in a doctor from the local hospital. He arrives in a pair of plastic Crocs and a business shirt, accompanied by a moustachioed nurse in a neat blue one piece uniform who carries an oversize briefcase. The nurse puts the briefcase down on the bedside table and it pops open, spilling papers and medical implements across the floor. He picks a thermometer off the carpet, wipes it off on his sleeve and gestures for me to slip it into my armpit. The consultation is a comedy of misunderstandings. I’m new to India. New to the time-zone. New to the Indian head-wobble which answers every question. Are there any foods I should avoid? Wobble. Can I use the hotel pool? Wobble. Do I need any medicine? Wobble. Later I ask the hotel concierge what the head wobble means and he wobbles his head too. Mostly yes, sometimes maybe. The doctor writes down my weight as my age, then puzzles over how I can be seventy-one. We chuckle together when we realise the mistake, then I descend into a fit of coughing. The doctor prescribes me six different medications and I’m reminded of Yemeni childhood, where doctors visits are deemed successful based on how much medicine you take home and how impressive the medicine looks. Where I’d probably recover on my own with rest and fluid, it’s assumed that I’ve called the doctor because I want results and I’m left with paper bags full of legitimate horse-sized pills in florid colours: extract of ginseng and garlic plus antibiotics plus paracetamol plus a mysterious looking cough syrup that tastes lightly of tea and slides deliciously down my throat, coating everything in a viscosity that I cough up a couple minutes later. Along with the medicine I receive a stern list of instructions: no showers, no milk, no swimming, no cookies, no spicy foods, and an admonishment to only drink hot water for the next five days. The culmination of my treatment is when the nurse receives a phone call and disappears downstairs to reappear with a nebuliser – a smoking machine attached to a face mask that he straps to my face. Breathe deeper, he admonishes as I puff out small strands of smoke. We sit in a silent circle for twenty minutes until he appears satisfied and then puzzles the tangle of cables, medicines and papers back into his briefcase. … Getting to India itself was a comedy of sorts, from a wild sprints to the wrong gate at KL airport and an attempt to pull myself up straight and not cough as I show off my boarding pass. When I was seventeen I almost got detained in KL airport. It was a thirty-hour transit from Kenya to Australia as part of my final year of boarding school and I came down with the flu in the airport. I wandered into the in-airport medical centre to wrangle some Panadol and was seen by a kindly Malaysian nurse who told me if she referred me to the doctor I’d have to skip my next flight and stay in a hotel until I was well enough to fly. I backed out of the medical centre and disappeared into the throng of flyers browsing duty free. Indian immigration is a line of neatly coiffured moustachioed men seated in a row, making decrees on the plight of the foreigners before them. In a remarkably comfortable scenario each desk is fronted by a large lounge chair lifted straight from the 1970s and I laze back as my officer fills a stack of forms, questioning his colleague between every line. It’s a lackadaisical affair, made comical by the fact none of them seem to be working from the same playbook. Part of the process is scanning fingerprints and each officer approaches it differently. Mine accepts a thumbprint from each hand, while the guy next to me appears to be scanning both hands at once. A couple rows down the officer is standing up, leaning over the desk and physically pushing an old ladies’ fingers in to the machine, squishing them down with one hand and slapping his computer keyboard with the other. … An Indian man energetically taps my testicles with a metal detector. “Part of the job” he chuckles and stamps my boarding pass. He eyes me off as I step down from the wooden box all airport attendees are required to mount as they pass security clearance and then asks: “Australian?” I nod and he responds, “oh the fires, very sad, so many animals dead.” It’s a weird talking point, one that pops up constantly through this trip, from the hotel concierge to the taxi driver to the man who serves up steaming muttar paneer on our final dinner. At first I’m amazed: the news of the Australian bushfires is particularly current in India (cue giant billboards on the drive from Cochin airport depicting crying koalas and flaming trees), but it’s the loss of animal life that every conversation settles on. I wonder at the media landscape that pushes this part of the conversation to prominence. Maybe it’s the Hindu conception of the sacrality of life and the concept of losing millions of animal lives in one month of natural disaster seems to resonate. … Then its days of floating. Free from commitment. Free from worry. Free from the rigour and routine that flood my daily life. I can afford to float between an early lunch and a late dinner with no real plans. Everything is a brief taxi ride away and if you’re hungry on the way there’s delicious food adorning every street corner. There’s a beauty to the break in routine. There’s a beauty to the chaos of traffic where two lanes fit five streams of traffic. There’s a beauty to walking home each night to find the same white cow pulling rubbish from the same street side bin. There’s a beauty to the clamour and the brief moments of calm.
On Sunsets It’s been a year of pretty sunsets, spread across a hundred different places. I’d love to say I make a habit of taking time to watch the sun set, pausing as it dips below the horizon, but the reality is that the only times I catch it in the act are when someone else points it out to me. Too often my attention is drawn towards the humdrum daily thoughts that flood my mind as I’m lost within the confines of human habitation. The sunsets that have stood out this year have been enjoyed in the company of others and have spanned the entire year, starting in late January performing on the South Island of New Zealand at Luminate Festival with Hello Tut Tut. The festival was a booze-free, meat-free affair, six whole days spent in luxurious presentness (mostly deep within a book if I have to be honest) and embracing heavy beats whilst meeting musicians from as far afield as Denmark, the US and Brunswick. I observed the sunset from a luxury yurt in the artist’s camp and then wandered to the site office to ask for a spare sleeping bag to weather the five degree night. By the third night I’d reconnoitred four spare sleeping bags and was sleeping in a veritable pile of duck down. These sunsets were spent on a vast plain in the midst of a state park, thousands of eyes turned North West to salute the sun as it disappears into the forest above the doof stage. I went to Wilson’s Prom in November with a group of ex-housemates who excitedly plan hiking trips a couple of times a year and then complain their way through the actual days of walking. The celebrations start when the trekking finishes and we line up at the pub for a hearty meal and a beer. Then we talk about how much we enjoy hiking and how we can’t wait to do it again. When hiking, the sunset signals the end of activity, for we rely on light to function and to fight our fears (on a side note, a wombat ate a hole in our tent this trip). We eat slimy packages of dehydrated food in the dusk-light as the bushland fades to peace and retire to bed by eight pm. I spent a particularly pretty sunset with my partner in Queenstown, New Zealand. It was the midst of winter and the towering mountains that surround the town caught the sun high up in the air as it set in giant shadows across the opposing mountainsides. It took several hours for the darkness to descend on the town and we wandered through the crisp clear air with a flurry of tourists and night shopping. The local ice-cream shop was a surprise hit, a trendy establishment with a line of almost a hundred patrons spiralling out the door and around the corner. A flock of ski-jacketed youngsters blow warm air into their gloves, waiting for scoops of rum and raisin while an enterprising busker attempts to pull the change from the wallets with pre-prepared dance moves against a pre-prepared beat. There was the sunset that I drove into for almost two hours on my journey home from my Spring tour. I’d made the dubious choice of leaving Yamba in NSW at eight am and attempting to drive as far as home as I could before stopping. I drove for fourteen hours and paused in Canberra for dinner, then decided to push on for the last six hours. By this point it was just past six o’clock and the sun was a hand-span above the horizon and I assumed it’d be gone soon. Instead it floated in my vision till almost eight, burning small glowing holes in my retinas and leaving a sunburnt strip between where my sunglasses end and my moustache begins. … My sixth grade science teacher told me that sunsets are more magnificent when the air is polluted, but of course it has to be some sort of sliding scale. Too much air pollution (ala Beijing, or Sydney circa December 2019) and the sun disappears completely, replaced by the orange wash of smog. Too little pollution and the sun is a perfect ball, slowly being lowered from its zenith to the encroaching horizon. Shades of The Cyrkle’s Red Rubber Ball abound, a song that had always felt wildly familiar, something about the cadence of the words just tickles a certain itch. Of course I found out recently it was written by Paul Simon, which makes total sense. … In some inane attempt to get in touch with my childhood I’ve been reading Wilfred Thesiger’s book ‘Arabian Sands’, a meandering memoir of his time spent exploring Rub Al Khali (The Empty Quarter, a massive desert that covers parts of Saudi Arabia, Oman, Yemen and The Emirates) in the 1940s. While many parts of the book feel problematic, I’m attempting to view it through a lens of the time period (remnants of European Colonialism, Capitalism and WWII conspire in an uneasy mix). One particular passage stood out: “When moved, Arabs break easily into poetry. I have heard a lad spontaneously describe in verse some grazing which he had just found: he was giving natural expression to his feelings. But while they are very sensible of the beauty of their language, they are curiously blind to natural beauty. The colour of the sands, a sunset, the moon reflected in the sea: such things leave them unmoved. They are not even noticed. When we returned from Mughshin the year before, and had come out from the void of the desert on to the crest of the Qarra range and looked again on green trees and grass and the loveliness of the mountains, I turned to one of them and said, ‘Isn’t that beautiful!’ He looked, and looked again, and then said uncomprehending, ‘no – it is rotten bad grazing.’ ” I wonder at this reality, for I feel I often do the same, albeit from a viewpoint of heedless distraction rather than a pragmatic sensibility. But isn’t that always the way? We live in the shadow of the moment, relying on occasionally being shaken out of comfort zone to notice the beauty that lies around us.
On Life Balance The year pulls into its last couple of stops with a screech and a scream of brakes. I’ve felt a build up of pressure, beginning somewhere around March and building building building non-stop till now. It’s been a frantic year of juggling a million commitments and a billion other things that I’ve wanted to do instead. The balance has been totally off, I’ve neglected most of the important things in favour of whatever has wandered into my vision and I’m excited to now finally have the space and time and energy to put towards the things that need it. I’ve been dwelling on the idea of ‘holding space’. The term has been popping up a lot recently, first in a therapy context where one person commits their full attention/energy/consciousness to another’s needs. It has also popped up around various hippie festivals and, more recently, jazz gigs. I’ve been examining the idea of holding space for yourself and wondering what that looks like to me on a daily basis. An interesting aspect of growing older is slowly getting more in touch with myself, recognising both aspects of my own psyche that I’ve probably always known but never physically acknowledged and things that I haven’t realised about myself that are slowly bubbling to the surface. I recognise that I’m highly driven, very self-motivated and excited about being included in other people’s projects, and that this means I often over commit. So to hold space for myself I need to first create space in my life and then attempt to inhabit it. This is good in theory but so so hard in practice as the loudest parts of my personality are firing “go go go, got to be involved, got to be acknowledged”, whilst somewhere in the background the introvert me is whispering “hey, why don’t you take a year off and disappear into a book”. The healthiest option is obviously to combine these two aspects and live a fulfilling life of moderation but instead I veer wildly between the two. Every year around this time I disappear into a ‘book coma’, where I pull about twenty books off the bookshelf and lie in bed for a week, refusing to engage with the world. Notable book comas in my life include my teenage years where I read all seven Harry Potter books in seven days and last year where I read three notoriously dark books (Eggshell Skull, Normal People and No Friend But The Mountain) in a yurt on the South Island of New Zealand and then collapsed in a heap of despair. This all ties back into my childhood where I used to practice a form of escapism by reading and re-reading three of Enid Blyton’s kids mystery thrillers and imagine rolling green hills and doorsteps of bread covered in lashings of butter while peering out the window at the warm dusty streets of Yemen. Suffice it to say, once I start reading a book I find it very hard to stop until the book is complete and I compensate by speed reading and neglecting the outside world. If I allow myself to read when something important is occurring in life, the important thing gets ignored. But if I don’t let myself read I get sucked into an introvert’s nightmare of constant outward attention and no introspection. Turns out the human existence is complex hey? My most recent idea is to replace social media with book reading, so every time I think about checking Facebook or Instagram I instead read a page of Wilfred Thesiger’s Arabian Sands (which I got to via Eric Hansen’s Motoring with Mohammed, the next book I’m interested in is Lawrence of Arabia’s Seven Pillars of Wisdom. I’m slowly making my way back through a particular examination of the world’s largest expanse of sand, Rub’ Al Khali from the white European point of view). The idea is good in practice but I tend to check social media first thing in the morning and this week I skipped both breakfast and my morning shower and was almost late to the last day of school because I was attempting to finish David Byrne’s brilliant book ‘How Music Works’. Not sure if the balance is right yet. Luckily, after tonight’s gig I have zero commitments until the end of Jan (other than a couple of thousand emails), so I can feel a book coma coming on, and it’s going to be a big one! I’ll tackle the life balance thing later.
On Tour Stories It’s day three of this two week solo tour and everything starts to gain clarity. It’s been a hectic start to the tour with three shows and around fifteen hours of driving. I’m feeling great emotionally, just tired and its starting to show in my daily routine, where every activity includes a little time for a power nap. So far I’ve napped before every show, napped roughly every three hours on the freeway, napped post-lunch, napped outside the library in Wagga (where I fell asleep in shade from the hot sun and woke to find bucketing hail). I’m getting remarkably good at closing my eyes, ticking off ten minutes and waking to a sense of peace. Think meditation but with a deeper dive than originally expected and occasional surfacing to find kids staring through the windows as I dribble down the steering wheel. I wonder if this insistent napping is a sign of something below the surface, maybe a general life exhaustion borne not from burning the candle at both ends but from tossing the entire thing into the bonfire of running a small business and playing music and teaching part-time and also trying to be a creative being. But no, that couldn’t be it and introspection is for introverts, and I’m touring solo so I push all introspective tendencies to the background. In normal life I don’t normally nap, although I often feel the urge. Tour life just allows me the freedom to succumb to it. Throw this into the mix of being an adult I guess. … I’ve come to realise that there’s a lot about touring that I love. Playing music is the main joy. Spreading music and practicing my live craft and experimenting with my songs in front of people. Sometimes it works and sometimes it fails, but even on the worst gigs I’m generally getting joy from it, even if it’s a post-show wry chuckle at what went wrong. Other touring loves include: exploring new places, eating out most nights of the week, delving into Australia’s thriving craft beer subculture (I’ve been tempted for a long time to do a ‘beers I’ve tasted’ list), listening to endless streams of driving music, and finding park benches to devour books and nap. But more than anything, it’s the people that I enjoy. I’ve got a small but growing network of people I have itinerant relationships with. People whose lives I dip into, borrow some anecdotes and important facts from and then disappear into the night. Over time these chance encounters re-emerge, the ‘emotional neural pathways’ (yes, I’ve been reading ‘Incognito’) get revisited and the bonds get stronger. There are people who I met ten years ago in some band that no longer exists who see I’m coming to town and shoot me a message to catch up. There are people who hang around after the gig and offer me a place to stay and music recommendations. There are people who send me messages weeks after I’ve been to town to carry on conversations we never completed. There are many people who I meet in once off encounters and may never see again, but the stories stick with me. Here’s a couple of anecdotes, borrowed from the ether. I’ve changed some details to save some reputations and possible make the stories more compelling, but at the heart of each is a kernel of truth spurred by a late night conversation. … “My parents only had me cause they didn’t want my sister to grow up alone.” A mumble from the bar amidst a literal pile of beer glasses. It’s closing time and the bar staff have piled all the empties in one long sopping line along the edge of the bar in an attempt to make him see that they want to close and go home, but he sits with a well-nursed pint clasped between both hands and eyes off the couple of stragglers who totter out the front door as I roll the last of my cables and throw them into my Bunnings bag. I hesitate to dive headfirst into a conversation which I assume will be a) laborious at this time of night when all I want to do is pack up, drive five minutes out of town and have a deep sleep in the nearby caravan park and b) rambling as his tongue is well greased by the copious beer I’ve seen him consuming throughout the night. But I’m a glutton for punishment and it’s been a quiet night and I haven’t talked to anyone beside bar staff and service station attendants in almost three days. So I pull up a bar stool, armed with the knowledge I can call the bar staff to attention if I want to bail on the conversation. You develop conversation deflection tools when you spend your life amidst people who either don’t take social cues or are just so excited by new conversational fodder that they’ll chew the ear off anything. It’s worse than I expect, a winding backroad ramble through some sixty years of life experience, beginning somewhere in the early 90s with a dubious career as a festival promoter (“I brought Nirvana to Australia man, that first Big Day Out was all my idea”) then wandering backwards to birth in Malta and a long boat ride at age three to Australia. Everything is tinged with a vague sense of sadness, and I wonder if it’s retrospect that’s making him sad or if he’s carried self-worth issues through from an early age. His opening comments make me suspect deep-seated worries inflicted upon him by external forces, and I understand it because worries bloom in the fertile fields of man’s mind. Without the capacity to pull the electric pulses from another’s brain and turn them into language, we rely entirely on what the other tells us through word and body language to determine what they think. It’s a flawed system, for who truly says what they’re thinking? Surely every thought is encircled in a ring of protective language, the edges sanded down and smoothed out before it is thrown into the world and allowed to take root in the soil of someone else’s expectations. At best, we almost express what we honestly believe and then rely on the person to take it at face value. At worst we obfuscate our thoughts, and the recipient confuses them again in their interpretation and we disappear into an ontological blackhole where all participants nod in agreement and walk away confused. We never actually discussed his relationship with his parents and his sister, but I start to see my ‘on tour’ role as less of an entertainer and more as an itinerant therapist (sure I’ll take your emotional baggage) and handyman (sure I’ll help you move the living room table). … She is an olive farmer. An award-winning olive farmer. I ask her, tongue in cheek, if she eats olives for every meal, and it turns out that yes, yes she does, and her recipe for Mediterranean scrambled eggs (think fluffy eggs interspersed with creamy fetta, halved cherry tomatoes and garlic olives on a floating bed of olive sourdough) is a neighbourhood hit. Her farm produces some six hundred thousand jars of olives a year and I imagine some modern day ‘Plain of Jars’ scenario where down a back road in rural Victoria there exists vast fields covered in glass jars and the local village kids run barefoot, slipping in streams of olive oil and sneaking handfuls of puckered, salted olives into their mouths between replenishing the nation’s stock of stone fruit. The reality is much more sanitary, an in-house bottling plant where all surface are sanitised multiple times a day and most of the process is automated. Imagine conveyor belts and hissing steam and vast quantities of freshly washed olives floating down stream to the olive pipping machine that gently punches each olive in the gut once, flicking the stone into an alternate life path where it leaves its fleshy covering to be soaked in brine and devoured amongst its own kind. The olive stones disappear into bins and are then crushed and tilled back into the earth to create fodder for the next generation, but recently new experiments with olive stones abound, from potential use as car fuel, a replacement material for plastic and as a cleansing agent amongst industrial machines. Man’s ingenuity abounds and where once we discarded piled olive pits we now delight in second use cases, waste reduction and further chances to monetize our industries. … “I put Don Burrows in a mine” he claims proudly, assuming we have a knowledge of who Don Burrows is, and why we’d want him underground. At first I assume it’s some word play on ‘burrow’ and ‘mine’ and underground semantics and maybe he’s functioning at some level of understanding much deeper than my own. But it turns out that Don Burrows is actually a renowned Australian jazz musician, and the mine was the Mt Lyell Mining and Railway Company. As part of the mine’s centenary celebrations back in 1994, Don Burrows and his band Moment’s Notice (assumably named after the Coltrane album) were dropped two kilometers down a mine shaft to perform a show. The show was turned into a subsequent live concert which can be ordered via your local library’s VHS rental service. Unfortunately all this information came to light months later via some internet sleuthing. In this current conversation he proclaims disbelief that we don’t know who Don Burrows is, and that we don’t know why he thought to put him down the mine in the first place. “How can you be an Australian musician and not know who Don Burrows is? If you don’t know your history how can you look to the future?” Relevant questions, but I’m a folk musician, and examining the careers of Australia’s mid-90s jazz clarinetists is not a current concern. Standing on the shoulders of giants, yes. Attempting to balance atop a revolving cast of the millions of musicians who have come before, not so much. He storms off in a huff, muttering about youngsters who don’t know their heritage and I’m touched by the depth of human existence. For this man, one of the cornerstones of his life’s achievement is that time he put a jazz band down a coal mine, and I get it. It’s a beautiful concept. It’s newsworthy. It’s a memory that a select group of people will carry throughout their entire lives. It’s the kind of ludicrous idea that I’d probably put together myself and I imagine myself, fifty years in the future, beleaguering the next generation of young musicians who don’t understand their history and don’t appreciate the ludicrousity that is man’s imagination. … I gather these stories like blind mice gather grain. Haphazardly. Unplannedly. Totally-without-meaningfully. Some days the pickings are slim and some days I’m hickory dickory docking my way into fertile food stores and delighting in the flood of stories that I coat my body and mind in. I’ve started to journal the stories I’m told on the road for while the human imagination is a wild and wonderful thing, the human memory is remarkably suspect and I tend to forget more beautiful anecdotes than I remember. I use these stories to springboard my own creativity: as song fodder, or anecdotal evidence, or even just as creative gristle to mentally chew over as I drive.
On Mist I wake to an early morning mist. It’s Melbourne winter, and the mist is within my bedroom, rising from my lungs and dissipating in a cloud across the room. A house that has stood for sixty years lives with its foibles, and these particular foibles are finger-width cracks around the window frames, plywood walls that flap when the wind blows, and a gaping hole where someone leant a little too hard and the plywood cracked and disappeared in chunks into the wall itself. Combine these to find a house that holds no warmth and hides no sound, allowing the outside to permeate the deepest depths of its interior. We combat the cold with a massive gas-heater, the central point of the house. The house is built around the remnants of an actual wood oven, but this was removed in the 70s and replaced with a gas heater that still blows bright. It takes ten minutes to cough to life and then burns burns burns, turning imperceptible gas into invisible warmth. You lean against the heater at the beginning, a cup of tea grasped in hands to help the heat sink in, but after a couple of minutes you pull a chair a meter out to soak up the heat. Another twenty minutes finds the entire household gathered in the farthest extremities of the room, fighting against the searing warmth. That’s the perks of a gas heater designed with no temperature gauge but only a simple on and off switch. Unfortunately, the cold still subdues the rest of the house and we brave bed only when we’ve exhausted the ability to maintain conversation. My twenties were a round of cold sharehouses, bundling into three jumpers and a beanie to practice drums in gaping garages. My thirties ease the trend: moving to a centrally heated house, an almost airtight shed that quickly warms with the glow of a space heater that warps the wrap on my vintage drum shell and sizzles moisture against the windows. I step out from an early afternoon practice session to find fingers of mist flaking in the backyard before the house. … I have a love of mist, and today it hits me that this love is hardwired, tied somewhere into my genetic makeup as a remnant from my ancestry. Two generations back was Northern Ireland and I delve into my own wistful remembrances of visiting the Cliffs of Moher (not Northern Ireland, but my closest experience). Scattered groups of tourists clicking their way through the fog, trying to get an iconic photo of sea swept shorelines between the mist and the crowds. Buses crowd the anteroom road that skirts the cliff-face and I stand rosy-faced and raincoat-clad amidst a place I’ve never identified with, but which clearly identifies me in language and skin colour and woolen jumper heritage. I missed the chance to talk through childhood with my Grandpa but the romantic in me ties history into fantasy and Belfast sticks in my memory as a place to live and love and leave. I follow the fault lines back farther through supposed Celtic history and tribes who scattered through rain soaked hills and eked out a living amidst the peat. All of human history has been pushing for new horizons from the earliest of man, and my particular tribe has done its share of chasing new vistas (interesting how the word ‘tribe’ has re-emerged amongst the 21st century internet zeitgeist). This mist has permeated all of my memories. … I feel an ache when the mists roll in, driving me to walk home from the bar down the road. In summer this walk is languid, slow steps unslurried by a desire to arrive home, for the thirty degree Australian summer turns this sixty-year-old house into a heat-box. Why is it that the one time our homes trap the heat is when we sweat and stir beneath sticky sheets and long for sleep? But this is winter, and the mist cloaks the street in both directions. We walk briskly, bundled against the cold, clutching each other for warmth and stability. Little did she realise my late night plans included a twenty minute walk, so she wore the cute heels that buoy her body to an almost tenable height but are completely unsuited to carrying her from one place to another. … I’ve stumbled home amidst the mist in countries all across the world. The mist of Yemen’s highlands, sweeping in across terraced coffee plantations. This is the purest coffee in the world, built from hardy plants that relish the cold mountain air. Farmers who have lived generation by generation in the same little village in the same little tribe for the last two thousand years, have farmed the same coffee plants on the same terraces built by their great great great grandparents. The idea of ‘eking’ out a living in its purest form resides here amongst these people. We set-up camp along one of the larger terraces, a group of scattered white expats in pitied plastic tents while the locals live in stone houses built in Roman times and maintained by hand ever since. Late night downpours emanate from above and we flee the tents to shelter in a stone-circled goat shed among the local livestock. The mist of Kenya’s Rift Valley where the year’s two seasons (wet and dry) alternate with frightening regularity. Over night the shift comes and you wake to torrential rain: weeks and weeks of torrential rain where the red soil slips and slides and swells into a red river that slowly washes down stream. Everything is caked in the mud of my youth, and we return to the dorm to find nineteen pairs of shoes under the porch overhang. This is the time of year to play rugby (the grass grows better in the wet), and the Junior team traipse out to the bus twice a week, riding to other towns to foe other teams of boys who fight dirty. They arrive home with black eyes and stomach scratches and talk of fields turned into swimming pools, and holes near goal lines where one boy was held under water for almost a minute by members of the rival scrum. When the rains finally stop, the mist settles in and with it comes hordes of flying termites. Tiny ant-sized bodies with four long wings, they flap and flutter their way in through the window my room-mate left open and we arrive home to find several thousand infesting the hallway. A simple solution from a boy born here, he pulls tennis rackets from beneath his bed and we spend a half hour smacking the termites out of the air to ground below. When hit, the wings come dislodged and fall featherlike, while the termite scurries for a shady crack in the wall. The joy continues, as the same boy sweeps handfuls of crawling termites into a dustpan and runs them to the kitchen at the end of the hall. He pours them into a frying pan coated in ghee and they sizzle and snap and taste a little like crispy chunks of bacon. The mist of Tasmania’s Forth, a town of four hundred people. We leave the pub and wander, mandolin in hand, towards the top of the hill. Ahead is darkest forest, behind are scattered street lights, so we turn and eye off what should be a beautiful view of Tasmania’s old growth, but is instead a sea of white. Walk in step through town looking for some entertainment, and finally stumble head-long into the misty lights of a hotel and realise it’s the same pub we’ve been playing at for the last three hours. And other mists remembered: Years spent living in Sunbury’s abandoned Insane Asylum. Early morning city mist in Yemen where the city sits eerily silent and government workers spray clouds of chemicals into the mist in an effort to defeat an oncoming scourge of mosquitoes. Glasgow mists and couch-surfing with uni students who take me to the fish and chip shop to sample a deep-fried Mars Bar. … sonder, noun: “the realization that each random passerby is living a life as vivid and complex as your own.”
On Worry Two nights ago I woke at 2 am. It’s a fairly regular occurrence, and normally I toss and turn for a couple minutes then drift back to sleep. Sometimes I get up and wander the house before returning to bed. Occasionally I dip into my latest book for half an hour until sleep slides through the back of mind and tugs my eyelids downwards. We have a new couch in our spare room, liberated from a lady in Preston who ‘wanted it to go to a good home rather than land fill’. It’s not particularly new (it came replete with stains reminiscent of a well-loved life, the wrinkles we gather through a life well lived), its not particularly comfortable (‘hard as a rock’ was one quote), but it was free and we’re saving the planet, one uncomfortable stained couch at a time. It also creaks slightly when you shift your weight. So imagine me: sleepless, wrapped in a sleeping bag, sideways on a slightly creaking couch, reading a book on copyright reform. After mindlessly flipping the same three pages for twenty minutes, I close my book and allow my mind to drift. I’ve become aware over the last several weeks that there are some issues I keep coming back to, and rather than resolving them, I’ve pushed them down into that back part of my mind, the part that only works when I’m incredibly bored or asleep. I’ll admit that I don’t think I’ve been bored since around 2008 (symptoms of a busy life, and the smart phone revolution), so my mind doesn’t get much time to work through the issues I choose to ignore. It’s somewhat similar to the computer at my old workplace that no-one turned off for seven years (actually), and when someone accidently plugged the toaster in to the same power socket as a hair dyer, the building’s fuse flipped. When we flipped it back on, the computer attempted to restart itself, but being four versions of an operating system out of date, and having never had a security update it attempted to download 600 gigabytes of data to a 100 gig hard drive. We left it chugging away for two weeks and finally put it out of its misery, sending it to the repair guy who gutted it and put a brand new computer into the old metal box. Same old body, brand new mind, some slight foibles. The main negative was we lost some seven years worth of scanned documents (it was ostensibly my job to re-scan all these documents, but I quit shortly after to begin a career as a jazz drummer). … So what am I dwelling on, and how do I protect myself from allowing it to overload me? Where’s the reset button for the human mind? Are there effective ways to regain healthy sleep patterns? I find my biggest sense of solace in a little diary that sits by my bedside. I’ve perfected the art of picking it up, scrambling for the pen that always finds its way to the floor below and shuffling in darkness out the door and down the hall to the spare room in silence. Flip the lights and begin to write. It takes pages of fluff to get to the crux of the issue. And the issue is never the same. But as I flip in daylight through my night-time journal I find the same issues re-appearing, re-creating themselves in different guises, sliding themselves from the hidden cracks in the back of my mind and through my head to my eyelids where they force themselves into consciousness and force my eyelids open and force my awareness to engage with them. Writing them down helps. My conscious mind knows I can engage with them later if they physically exist in the world. Writing them down also gives me scope to scoff at past Nathan’s worries. Like the worry I had in 2011 that I’d pissed off a friend who wasn’t returning my calls (turns out he’d dropped his phone into a toilet and spent two weeks living on vegemite sandwiches to save up the $200 needed to buy a third hand iPhone 3). Or the worry that I can’t play drums (turns out that I can play drums, but comparing yourself to others is a quick trip to an unsatisfied destination). Or years of worry that I might occasionally suffer from insomnia. You know, just casual stuff. Drinking wine with friends helps. There’s a beautiful space, generally one or two wines in where you gain the ability to download your worries on to other people. Sort of like the Matrix, without the technology or karate. Heck, you can probably do it without the wine at all, it’s the friends bit that’s truly effective, but man is good at making tools to suit every occasion, and wine suits this scenario. Exercise absolutely helps. It’s probably the most effective method of dealing with worries, but hardest of all to implement, because it requires putting on running shoes and that’s often a bridge too far. If only putting on shoes was as easy as opening a new Google Chrome tab to watch Youtube. … In the end I wrote down three big ideas that had been worrying me for the last couple of weeks. I woke up today and one of them had silently resolved itself. No input from me, it just untangled its knots and appeared in my inbox. Not sure if there’s a lesson here. … And heeeere’s some Bjork. Ps. If anyone needs a couch to crash on, we have one. 😉
On How To Fill a Life I see the same small group of elderly Italian men every time I go to the shops. They gather mid-morning at the terrible café in the heart of Northcote plaza and sit, clustered around a wobbly table with laughably small cups of coffee. I’m unsure whether the size of the cup is an attempt to squeeze more orders out of them, or whether the coffee is so remarkably strong that one thimble sized shot is enough to keep the conversation rolling. One of the men is noticeably older than the others. Happily tucked into a wheelchair, he slumps back, head rolling as people pass. The other men do little to include him in the conversation, but he is there every day, so someone must be making the daily effort to roll him out of bed, slip him into an oversize jacket and wheel him into the middle of Northcote plaza. Some days I see two of these men, walking the street out the front of my house. They stroll nonchalantly, hands clasped behind their backs, beginning at the final house on the block, where I often find one of the men sitting on the trampoline nestled in the front yard. They step step step down the street, no conversation, just small steps beside each other. They reach the end of the street and turn and walk back. I stand by the letterbox, sorting a pile of glossy junk mail, election pamphlets and letters addressed to previous tenants. The elderly men stride pass in silence with a brief nod. Is this what old age has to offer? … I’m in a lull. A little period in between when I was last very busy (last week) and will again be very busy (July). It’s an odd experience. I’ve been frantically pushing pushing pushing for what feels like the last fifteen years of my life. There’s been periods of intense ardour, Sisyphusian struggle up-hill against a million rocks of my own making, and there’s been slightly less intense times: days where the need to achieve rumbles quietly in the background as I attempt to laze away with re-runs of Seinfeld and an over-percolated strong black. I find it so hard to give myself down time. Even on my down days I write a to-do list, the little note-book on my desk leers over me with scrawled reminders of things I thought important when I woke (washing, email, invoice, gtr) and things I failed to achieve yesterday. My to-do list becomes predictable, the same set of five to seven things appearing every day, so I mark them into columns and switch the orders daily, convincing myself that putting ‘reading’ below ‘drumming’ will bring order to my day. Invariably it all falls in a heap and I binge watch Seinfeld while half-heartedly reading a book on copyright reform. The next six weeks are remarkably quiet. I generally book myself out three months in advance (as I write this I’m planning my August-September tour), so for me to have some down-time means I slacked off three months ago and didn’t book any shows. But that’s ok. I generally schedule my down time around my up time, and a ‘day off to read a book’ usually means I’m catching a flight interstate for a show and I can’t actually achieve anything in the air. The fact that I’ve got two whole weekends coming up with no actual plans is remarkable. Somewhere in the vicinity of man discovering the earth revolves around the sun. So what do I do with down time? How do I fill the precious remnants of my time on earth? … When I was at uni I obsessed over music. I had an expanding selection of CDs, bought new from JB, bought second-hand from eBay, borrowed from friends, inherited from ex-housemates. I could listen to jazz and identify modern drummers based on drum sound (Bill Stewart’s ride cymbal click from the way he chokes his thumb high up on the stick, Jorge Rossy’s laziness, more straight quarters than a ding-a-ding feel, Antonio Sanchez’s swing eighths that border on straight, presumably borrowed from a love of latin music). I’ve successfully extinguished at least two romantic relationships due to extended hours spent in the practice room. … When it was last week I obsessed over politics. I had tabs saved across multiple devices. Opinion pieces harking to a sure left wing. Stats and opinion polls pointing to the amount of money the far right spent on scare campaigns, and indeed an open tab dedicated to the bookies and their thoughts on the upcoming election. Every conversation in the near past verged on political and it plied its sneaky ways into my world through advertising slogans, shareable online content and oversized yellow billboards placed surreptitiously in green heartland. … Today I went for a walk around the block. … Final thought from Geneen Roth via Anne Lamott’s beautiful book ‘Bird by Bird’: “Awareness is learning to keep yourself company. And then learn to be more compassionate company, as if you were somebody you are fond of and wish to encourage.”
On Waking Up The sun snakes its way through the zipper of the tent. I lie on a camping bed, some sort of daft hammock-type situation. Arms tucked down my sides, wedged to my sweating torso by the heft of my own body weight. Tendrils of dust float through the sunlight, buoyed back and forth by the slight breeze that flaps the tent walls. Its seven am, and already Illawarra Folk Festival is in full swing. It starts with the cry of crows, back and forth they scream across the camp-site, short guttural screams, three or four little punches and then one long cry that starts high and descends in pitch. The menacing cries feel like they come from within my tent itself, so close these crows come, but everyone in the festival swears the crows were situated directly above their tent, so its either a single solitary crow cry carrying in the morning air or a murder of crows infesting the entire festival psyche. With the crows comes an influx of visitors. The food trucks roar to life, cars rumble into the single round-about that marks the entrance of this thousand person festival. A man yells instructions to the best of his ability but a line of cars waits to enter the roundabout and someone up the back beeps impatiently while the cars in front pause in the middle of the roundabout itself, unsure of where to go. I hear car doors slam. I hear tent zippers, sliding up and down in this identical tent city that houses the festival’s artists. I hear a violin spring to life, and somewhere else I hear someone else cursing them out. It is still seven am after all. … I’ve spent years of my life sleeping in close proximity to other people. At a young age it was with my brother, dual beds in numerous countries until my parents succumbed to renting houses with a room for each of us. Through high school I bunked up with three, then two, then one of my best friends. Memories flood back, waking to find gangly blonde Joe leant over my bunk. My Swedish Year 12 roommate brushed his teeth every morning to Coldplay. He swore his dentist told him the song ‘Fix You’ was the perfect length of time to maintain adequate dental hygiene. Waking another night to find Joe sawing a hole through the window’s security bars with a hacksaw blade he ‘borrowed’ from the school workshop (the reasons behind his sawing: we had a nine pm curfew at boarding school and it was of utmost importance that some twenty-three boys leave the dorm that night to pull pranks on another dorm). Waking to early morning yells and thumps down the hallway, the dorm set up with an odd hot water system that preferenced the upper floor to the lower floors. Anyone showering in the lowest shower would risk uncontrollable water stoppages. The water wouldn’t slow to a trickle, it would physically stop flowing at all. The boys on the lowest floor developed a ‘rain-dance’ to let the upper floors know their plight, stomping and stamping and yelling and tapping the roof with a couple of well-placed broom handles. Invariably the upper floor boys didn’t care so there were constant trails of suds and water leading down the fifty-metre hallway, up thirty stairs and into the next shower room. Another odd facet of dorm room showers was the lack of privacy. I spent four years showering in a large room with three shower-heads jutting from the wall. A metre separated them, nothing else. No shower curtain, no walls, just boys trying to maintain their pubescent modesty. We eventually gave up our modesty and found a park bench from one of the school grounds and snuck it into the shower under cover of darkness. Just long enough to fit three seated boys under three shower heads, you’d wander into the shower in the morning to find half the dorm waiting for a spot while the earliest risers carried on casual conversation under the steam. … Waking on tour to find a well-drunken band member tumbling through the door in an attempt to locate their bed. Not realising it was the wrong room they cosied up on the floor and I, in a rare fit of empathy, threw them a pillow and a towel to use as a blanket and sizzled back to sleep. Waking at nine am to missed phone calls. We’d left the gig straight after playing the night before but one member had kicked on with the intent to arrive home later that night. Six am rolls around and they arrive but can’t find the key we’d left out for them. Door knocks and phone calls to no avail, the band slumbers on. We wander out to find him happily snoozing against a pile of dirt in the backyard, head propped on a sack of gravel he procured from the garden shed. Not sleeping on one particular tour as a six-piece band lay in a row on a friends floor. Six yoga mats, five complaining backs, one sleep-apnea affected member keeping the rest tossing and turning to loud snorts. … We’ve slept a lot this tour. Not in the conventional sense. No solid eight hours a night. No bedtime curfew and early morning rise for work. No routine at all, so the sleep invades all other areas of band life. Some members sleep in the car on the long drives down the East Coast. Some members sleep in the green room, stealing a sneaky fifteen minutes between sound-check and dinner. Some members disappear post-gig to nab the best section of floor. Some days the entire band falls asleep in the park, worn out from a day of beach and beers. One un-named member even manages to fall asleep at a gig, propped up in the back row, feet on the floor and facing the stage, soaking in Balkan strains as a raucous lullaby. … Back here I find myself. Waking to the sounds of the festival. No room for sleep in a packed day of seeing great live music, diving into vegan curry, running to the beach for some bonding band exercise, attempting band admin with a laptop in a tent and a shaky mobile hotspot, and of course playing, the main reason I wake at all. Time to get this day started. … Ps. One thing that has helped me sleep for many years in many countries over most of my life is Brian Eno’s Music for Airports. PPS. I’ve started a mailing list. If you want to get very occasional updates (mainly writings such as this, new music, show dates etc), please click here to sign up.