One of the weird things about living in the twenty-first century is having these incredibly powerful, multi-purpose microcomputers in our pockets that don’t necessarily turn off the way you expect. Ergo, you occasionally find weird photographs on your feed: blurred images snapped as the phone gets slid into the pocket; or snapshots taken while trying to set up the phone to navigate with GPS. I like to think they’re glimpses of another universe, one that makes less sense than our own, trying to get out.

I’ve been watching a motorized scooter helmet migrate around the neighbourhood for the last few weeks. It started out in the neighbour’s yard, moved to a spot behind another neighbour’s rubbish bins, and now exists in the liminal space beside the trainline that the public can’t access. My guess is that it will stay there until the next round of track work, or somebody needs it bad enough to jump the high fence and recover it. The days are long and hot here in Australia. Two states are basically on fire courtesy of the Summer bushfires. Our government has largely shirked the issue, as treating bushfires like this as serious seems to suggest that they may be wrong on issues of climate change. I keep thinking of a quote from a recent news article over on the ABC: “If anything, this Government is more ideologically driven than Abbott. They want to win the culture wars they see in education, in

When my dad passed away in March, he left behind a whole bunch of post-its. Parkinsons disease tends to affect levels of dopamine in the brain, which in turn generates various impulsive and compulsive behaviors as to ease anxiety. Having enough post-its was a big thing for Dad, to the point where he accumulated more than he’d ever actually need at the late stage of his life. Mum passed them on to me, on the logic that I’d be most likely to need them over the day-to-day course of life. Reader, I now have a metric buttload of Post-Its. In fact, it’s possible I’m set for the next decade of my life. And it turns out I don’t use them anywhere near as often as I thought.

Everything on my reminder board focuses on dates back in November, and even then I lost track of half the things I needed reminding of in the back half of the month. It’s been four and a half weeks since I last worked on fiction projects. My brain is inciting a rebellion against this focus on one project until it’s finished approach I’ve been trialing.