It’s Tuesday, and my RSS is filled with Game of Thrones recaps. Every website seems to have one, even the websites that have previously shown no interest in the show. Even those that have shown no interest in TV. Game of Thrones is everywhere. It’s Tuesday, and the first sign of the election being in full swing is a mailbox full of flyers from the local representative of the god-awful-stupid-fucking-racist-cocks party, who is determined to inform me about the wave of Islamic radicalisation that’s sweeping Australia and how he and his god-awful fuckwit cronies are going to stop it. It’s Tuesday, and I am angry. I am repeating the word motherfucker over and over. I am pacing the length of the apartment. I am brooding over my morning coffee. I am fighting the urge to be angry on the internet, and obviously I am failing. Motherfucker. Motherfucker. Motherfucker. It’s Tuesday, and at least there are things to look forward to

Two years ago, I bought an apartment. It was an oddly terrifying prospect then, and it’s an oddly terrifying prospect now. I did not live the kind of life where property ownership was a possibility, and yet here I am. Occasionally I put Once in a Lifetime on the stereo and it feels horribly appropriate. I earn about thirty grand a year, on a good year. I shouldn’t own anything as large as an apartment. I should barely own the number of books that do. So I largely achieved home ownership by doing exactly what our current prime minister suggested when it comes to buying into the property market: I burrowed money from my parents. Technically, they offered the money. And then we fought for about a month over whether that was a viable thing, and how I’d pay it back, and whether I wanted to live the kind of life where I was tied to a particular piece of property,

I haven’t finished a short story in years. It’s a thing I’ll bust out in conversations about writing, even though the evidence of its untruth is out there. I have written stories. Some were published. Many were not. This is probably for the best, since they were mostly fiction written in the grip of the apnea fugue, and it’s hard to really understand what I intended beyond insert words on blank page so I can tick the writing box and pretend nothing is wrong. This is not a good way to write. Especially when you realise there’s a problem, get it treated, and discover that checking the box doesn’t actually mean much. And so, in my head, I stopped writing short fiction, despite the evidence to the contrary. When I did write it, I failed to finish it. The things I finished, by and large, were because people asked me to write things and the terror of letting said people down hurt

It’s easy to forget that Brisbane can be beautiful. Hit the streets of the city and you’ll see the legacy of the seventies and eighties architecture, serviceable high-rises built out of grey concrete that wiped out large chunks of our history. It’s a very functional aesthetic, unconcerned with outwards appearances. History, for Brisbane, is something that happens in the suburbs, where you can still find old homes with wide decks and corrugated iron rooftops, or workers cottages that sit in the heart of giant yards. Or it’s a thing that grows in cracks, like a weed someone forget to refurbish, renovate, or renew when the concrete washed over everything. The facades of old buildings left in place, or actual old buildings that have survived by being stubborn. Brisbane doesn’t give up its history easily, unless you know what to look for. And if you know what to look for, the history gets pretty ugly. But still, for all that, the

It’s cold and grey in Brisbane this morning. My alarm just went off, alerting me that it’s time to get up, which would be awesome but for the fact that I have been awake for two and half hours now. There are very few things I miss about having undiagnosed and untreated sleep apnea, but the ability to wake up early, realise that it’s bullshit o’clock, and go back to sleep is definitely one of them. These days, if I wake up at bullshit o’clock, I get up at bullshit o’clock. On the plus side, I get some writing done. Words on the story draft. Words on the novella re-write. Words here, which tend to be the third priority in a day, and thus becomes the thing that suffers when my priorities undergo tectonic shifts. It is cold and grey out there this morning. Perfect writing weather. I kinda wish I could fuck off work for the day, sit here

Right. It’s morning and I haven’t yet coffee yet. When that situation arises, you get what you get, know what I’m saying? Being on the internet without coffee seems like an incredibly bad idea, but there it is. No coffee. I am here. Writing this post. Badly. (I have coffee now. It hasn’t helped. I forgot to add the sugar.) It’s ANZAC day here in Australia and the world is oddly silent. No trains. No traffic. None of the bustle that generally comes with weekends, with people out there in the world, getting chores done and taking the kids to work This morning there’s a handful of birds cawing to one another. The occasional sound of a train rolling past. Me, with the keyboard tapping and music streaming through the TV. Pretending it’s not fucking eerie out there. We don’t often shut down, these days, as a culture. The days of stillness are always unsettling, a reminder of something bad that has