Journal

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 this evening. People to see, places to go, conversations to have with interesting peeps. I can look forward to that.

But still, goddammit, Tuesday. You were supposed to be better than this.

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, and how much I disliked the idea of needing a steady pay-cheque instead of wanting one as a change of pace after years of sessional and freelance work.

They won. I went looking at apartments.

It’s still weird. I still resent the necessity of a steady pay-cheque, from time to time.

But it doesn’t change the fact that I am emblematic of the Prime Ministers preferred method of getting around the generational problems of entering the housing market.

The difference is this: I recognise that I am an enormously privileged fucker.

Suggesting this approach as the baseline assumption for people under the age of forty owning property makes me lose my shit. It makes me happy we’re six weeks away from an election, here in Australia. And that we may actually get a chance to see the election fought over actual policies rather than personalities and taking pot-shots at the internal party politics that defined the last two elections.

I care who wins this election. More than I have cared about politics in a long time, and I fucking care about politics. I just care about politics a lot more when the plans behind policies are clearly articulated and the vision the government is heading towards is clear and in-synch.

Bring it on, motherfuckers. Convince me you’re worthy of the job.

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 more than struggling through the fugue.

And those stories? They rarely felt like they were mine.

The last time I actually felt like a short-story writer was 2013.

I am not disappointed in the things I’ve written since then, but I do kinda miss the regular hit of finishing things and sending them out. Getting stories out there, into the world, that I remember writing and feel a sense of connection too.

I am thinking about this a lot today.

You know, while sitting here at the computer. Trying to remember how the short story thing goes, so I can finish this particular draft.