Category: Journal

And we start this post with the traditional Morning-of-my-birthday-self-portrait-that-will-cause-my-parents-to-complain-about-the-things-I-put-up-on-the-internet (except I think I kind of broke them of that habit after six years of doing this).   This year is going to be pretty low-key, even given the relatively muted standards I use to celebrate my birthday. My plan, such as it is, consists of sleeping, hanging out with the Spokesbear, and collecting mail from my PO Box. At some point, I should go get groceries. And do the post-travel washing, so I don’t spend the rest of the week surrounded a travel-induced fugue.

I’ve been back on public transport this week, regularly catching trains into work for the first time in about nine months. Usually I’m pretty fond of trains. The buses and me, we’re never going to see eye to eye, but there’s something remarkably civilized about rail transport. Especially Brisbane rail transport, which recently embraced the idea of giving people free wi-fi while they’re in transit (which, is apparently, the future once the car-loving baby boomers no longer have control of government). On the other hand, the train can also be a remarkably frustrating way to travel. I read an article a couple of years back that pointed out the inhibitor for most people when it comes to public transport isn’t the duration of the journey, but how often the services leave. Apparently we’re eager to be in motion when we’re trying to get somewhere and we’re grumpy as hell when we’re left to sit around on the platform. I spend

  One of the most disorienting places I’ve ever been was this hotel in Adelaide I visited last year. It’s one of those places that had the kind of endless sameness you get in movies when they point a camera at a hotel corridor and make it seem like a subtly alien kind of place. I stepped out of the lift and looked down the hall and said whoa all Bill-and-Ted-like. Then I hit my room and my room was huge (I got upgraded) and my plans for the evening rapidly became lie around this here room and marvel at the craziness of it, cause you’ll never be in a hotel room this huge and weird again. And that’s what I did. I ducked out to grab some fast-food, ’cause eating fast-food in a room like that seemed like the kind of sacrilegious that needed to be performed, just as I may have busted out a whole bunch of punk songs just to see how out-of-place they

This is my set-up for the day: I will not leave the bed until I have finished some short stories and polished them up, all ready to submit. This shouldn’t be too hard – there’s at least a half-dozen story drafts on my hard drive that are finished and critiqued and basically waiting for me to give them the time to day, but for various reasons I haven’t been doing that and that’s gotta stop. I constantly try to fight it, but the bed is pretty much my natural working place. I like being horizontal when I work. I like having room to spread out. I like being able to snuggle under blankets during winter and find a nice breeze in summer, and I like being close to my books (the vast majority of which live in my bedroom and always have). Further, there’s something indolent about working from the bed. As if the work you do there isn’t really

So I’m not in Melbourne anymore and that makes me kinda sad. For the last four days I’ve been aimlessly wandering the city, catching up with friends I don’t get to see too often, eating good food and exercising my low-key superpower of being the only person in the world who goes to Melbourne and drinks bad coffee. I’ve returned to Brisbane fatter and happier than I left. Now I’m warming up for the pre-work writing shift and a day that’s looking…well, kind of crazy, to be honest. There’s going to be a lot packed into the next three days of day-jobbery, from opening the next iteration of GenreCon through to shepherding a complete redesign of the website I’m managing. More importantly, I shaved this morning. I don’t know what it is without me and Melbourne and not-shaving, but it always seems to happen and it never drives me crazy until I’m halfway home and sporting the kind of bum-fluff

It’s a bit wet in Brisbane right now. There are parts of the city where that’s proving to be a problem, prompting flood warnings and a twitter feed full of alerts notifying folks of their local sandbag locations. We’re still a bit twitchy about rain around these parts, given the big floods of a few years back, and I’ve had a couple of conversations with people from other states who were understandably concerned by the news. Fortunately, all is well. I’ve spent the better part of the weekend away from the computer, so I wasn’t really aware there was flooding going on until the text messages started coming through and I started logging onto twitter. In contrast to some other parts of the city, my weekend has been very idle. I’ve watched a bunch of movies and read a bunch of books and occasionally sat down at the computer and written things, be they fiction or non-fiction or the occasional

My weekend, lo, it’s been a lazy one. Today I try and redeem that a little, through the virtue of writing lots of things prior to 7:00 PM, when I shall gather with The Flatmate and the Downstairs Neighbor and we shall watch John Carter (which, it must be said, I didn’t see at the cinemas purely because I always want to add “Of Mars” to the end of the title). The Flatmate claims John Carter is a good, watchable movie. On one hand, he was entirely correct when he used that claim to lure me into watching Battleship last weekend, which is a perfectly watchable big dumb movie. On the other hand, he’s also the man who talked me into watching Starcrash, Zardoz, and Ice Planet, all of which are not perfectly watchable big, dumb movies. Either way, I’ll report back on the morrow. Before that happens, though, I’ve got an article to write and some page-proofs to finish and at some point I’m going

There’s this pub I drive past on the way to work that’s advertising motorized esky races to celebrate Australia Day. And you know, if I’m honest, I see that sign and my first thought is, seriously, what the fuck is wrong with this country. Except there’s nothing wrong with this country, not in the way I’m meaning it. It’s not that I dislike the idea of a motorized esky – there’s a pro-wrestler, James Storm, who used one for his ring entrance for the better part of a year, and I largely found it hilarious. I don’t like the idea of motorized esky races ’cause I don’t like the idea of the people who think that’s acceptable way to celebrate….well, anything. ‘Cause I’m a snob, in a lot of ways, and ’cause it’s easier to dislike people than it is to try and understand them. And ’cause the same pub, years ago, was a dingy little hole that used to have a Goth night