then I saw myself
as if carried away,
as the river moved on.
Where have I gone?

– Mary Oliver,
A River Far Away and Long Ago

I realised recently that a lot of my recent work at The Advocate over the last year had been pretty introspective. Given I work as a news journalist and anything other than impartial reporting is usually frowned upon I wondered how I had been getting away with it for so long. 

In January I bought a lamp off Justin Heazlewood, the ARIA award winning comedian and musician otherwise known as The Bedroom Philosopher. I did not realise until I drove away from his house why I recognised him and his incredibly thick glasses. (During the subsequent interview he described himself as a boy with those glasses and a bowl cut as having the appearance of “an egg with windows”).
He had returned home to Burnie because he needed to look after his sick mum, and I bought a lamp off him because I needed to romanticise the lighting in the living room of my new house. The overhead ceiling lights were bright and white and if I had my time again I would have made different choices during the building phase.  
The lamp Justin sold me is brass and free-standing and now lights the area over the chair in my living room where I drink coffee in the morning and wine at night. The chair was my grandad’s, and my mum had it reupholstered for me as a housewarming gift. 
I wrote about Justin’s connection to the suburbs of Burnie where he roamed as a kid, and how he had returned in recent years with a curious and newfound fascination with the place.
He had experienced a huge gamut of success in Australia’s entertainment industry and returned home because home was familiar, home was comfortable. I wrote that familiarity breeds comfort and I felt so fucking clever, but in retrospect it was probably an attempt at manifestation. 

In March I spent a morning with Harry Badcock and Charlotte Grey, the organisers of the new Tasmanian music festival Good Gumnuts, and discussed why it was so important to them for the festival to cater to kids, too. Their baby boy gurgled and grizzled throughout the interview and between photographs I shook keys to get his attention and the article ended up being written predominantly about whatever he was doing.
I have never been great with children, something which I have struggled with greatly this year, but I delighted in being able to help entertain Freddy while interviewing his parents.
I also loved being able to tell the story of why hosting a festival that catered to families was so important to them, and why it could be important to readers of The Advocate. It helped that the festival was and is going to be held about a five minute drive from my new front door at Heybridge.
Like Justin, Harry and Charlotte had returned to Tasmania’s North-West for the comfort of home, though they also wanted to bring home a sense of what they had loved elsewhere, to ensure their lives continued to change and remain exciting here, as they would elsewhere.

And in July I spent some time in the home of photographer and teacher Lisa Garland, poking through her incredible collection of stuff and asking inane questions about everything I came across. She was generous with stories and insightful with observations about the things we collect and why the ways we store them in the spaces we inhabit are important.
Since she was a child herself, Lisa has taken photos of people in the spaces they inhabit and call home, documenting their connection to rooms and things and places as both art and anthropology. Her home is beautiful, but it was also overwhelming to me, as it has no blank spaces or unused areas, perhaps because I am yet to fill my home with the kinds of things that one collects over a lifetime of deeply loving the people I interact with.
I wrote about the details of her home, and where I knew them, the stories each detail told. I wrote about why there were two disco balls hanging over a stuffed pig on a skateboard in her studio, and how she had painted the walls of her living room pink when she had first bought the house 25 years prior.
I wrote about her connection to her home and the people she shared it with and in the weeks since I have realised that I was not just doing my job; interviewing someone with a story to tell.

I was asking for advice. I was seeking guidance. From Lisa, from Justin, from everyone I have ever interviewed, probably. Not explicitly, and rarely consciously. But there are things I want to know and I speak to these people because they appear to have a few of the answers. 

How do you create a life worth living and find people to share it with who are worth sharing it with? And how do you hold onto them? 
Are you shaped by the people you surround yourself with or do you surround yourself with people who affirm who you are? 
Does your home, be it a house or a town or a van down by the river, become the foundation of the person you want to become? 
Are you shaped by the space you inhabit or is the space you inhabit moulded by the choices you make? 

What if you make the wrong choice? 

What if I’ve made the wrong choices?

I fear that I live in constant fear of the choices I have made. I am, at once, confident that the things I have done are right for me while also terrified that I may one day learn I was wrong. I stand by the decisions I make and I am able to accept responsibility for the mistakes I make, though that does not replace regret. And every so often I make enough decisions in a row to add another layer of personality to this sense of self I’ve garnered, but all of that can be undone as we all live in constant fear of the choices that are made for us.

Just like everyone else, life changing decisions were made for me in early 2020, and I am still feeling the consequences of those choices now more than three years later. The results for me personally have been exhilarating, joyous, debilitating and devastating and I am sure my life would have now been drastically different were it not for the pandemic.
I think that prior to 2020 it was highly unlikely that I would have been able to, or would have wanted to, build a house in North-West Tasmania and plan my life around living there and writing for The Advocate for the foreseeable future. It is likely I would have become bored and used any money I had saved to leave, once again, as I have so many times before, for somewhere new and shiny and where I had not yet managed to create a strong enough sense of self to permanently tie to any particular place. And so I stayed and tried my best to navigate the pandemic with the tools I had at my disposal.

It is an incredible privilege to have been able to pay someone to build me a house to call a home, and I try to make sure to tell everyone who compliments me on it that it would not have been possible without a generous family and a pretty strange bit of federal government policy.
Others have worked harder than I and gained less, but I am not so naive as to think the world is a fair and just place. As a bartender in Canada I found the country’s tipping system wholly bizarre and unjust and a symptom of wider economic disparity, but I also took advantage of it and used it to fund multiple holidays and questionable purchases. I am not a martyr.

There is love within these four walls, and I am lucky to be able to indulge in that everyday. I will continue to fill this space with love, and stories, and things, and I will invite anyone who is interested to do the same.

I’m not sure what else I can do.

With a knowing wink, Barbie skewers society from which it profits

I have been looking forward to seeing Barbie for years.

Not because I played with dolls as a little boy; I was into trucks and bikes and rocks, but because from very early on it seemed like there were a few great filmmaking names in the mix.

If you’ve been paying attention to cinema in the last few years you would know the director, Greta Gerwig, as both films she has previously directed have earned her Academy Award nominations for Best Picture.

Her screenwriting partner for Barbie, Noah Baumbach, is also a known quantity in Hollywood, responsible for a style of highly successful, lower budget character studies distinct from what this project was expected to be.

But these two are obviously hugely overshadowed by the film’s leads, Margot Robbie and Ryan Gosling, and I’ve no shame in saying that my excitement for the movie has been high since seeing photos of them decked out in matching fluorescent spandex rollerblading along Venice Beach.

They are obviously both incredibly pleasing to look at, but also they’ve proven themselves highly talented comedic actors, obviously essential for a film that could only be successful if it was going to be a highly self-aware satire of everything that is Barbie in 2023.

Capitalism, unrealistic beauty standards, feminism, the patriarchy and gender roles, sexuality and minority representation in mainstream media and life are all fair game, and I cannot remember laughing so consistently during a movie for a long time.

There is a unique joy in watching someone as stereotypically beautiful as Ryan Gosling, wearing only a mink coat framing his glistening, freshly waxed abs, whinge about needing to have actual skills to be useful or interesting.

Similarly, seeing Margot Robbie attempt to shake off being branded a fascist by an angsty teenage girl for perpetuating stereotypes of beauty, success and independence in a patriarchal, capitalist society was darkly hilarious.

These scenes also clarified exactly why parts of the political right have attempted to lampoon it for being “too woke”, but they are just taking the bait that was clearly placed on a hook cast entirely in their direction.

And just as the audiences of those figures will lap up their absurd, sexist, racist rants, so too will the film’s target audience lap up the main messages of self-acceptance, individuality and kindness and huge wealth will be created on both sides and everyone will go home happy. 

Because, really, a film like this is first and foremost a profit making exercise, and you only need to see that every car in the film, including Barbie’s classic convertible, is a clearly marked Chevrolet, to know they are not really trying to overthrow capitalism.

But capitalism has given us a few good things over the years, and this film is certainly one of them.

This review was first published at The Advocate.

The rescue helicopter circles overhead, lapping the North-West Coast of Tasmania in search of a missing vessel and its three occupants. The helicopter is instantly recognisable, a bird of red and yellow framed against the bright blue eastern sky, reflecting the sun in the west. I have seen that helicopter and written about its movements dozens of times in the last three years while reporting for The Advocate.

This is the first time I’ve known the person it searched for.

By 9.30 Tuesday morning I had known for about two hours there was a marine search and rescue operation underway off Wynyard, but I knew no one with a boat in which to get lost. And perhaps I hadn’t yet really woken up after my long weekend. And then Tasmania Police named Bree in a media release I received via email during our office’s morning news conference and I yelped and ran out of the office to call her.

The call went straight to voicemail, and the Facebook messages I have sent to her remain on ‘sent’. Not delivered, not received and certainly, sadly, surreally not read. As I wrote that I went back and looked at my phone and was again saddened to see the indicator was a small circle with a tick inside. That message has gone out into the ether and is yet to find its intended recipient.

How many of those little undelivered ticks and texts there must be floating around in cyberspace right now for Bree and her two mates? How many times has her name been said today? How many people now know her name and what she looks like? How many now have hopes and expectations for this woman they had never before considered?

And how do I temper my grief and confusion against the many people who knew her better? And the many more who did not know her at all? I did not know her well, but a decade ago I knew her a little.

A few months ago her name popped up on the local North-West Tasmania Buy and Sell Facebook page, which was odd because that’s where I live and not where she lived. Or so I thought. Turns out she had recently moved to Burnie with her Mum, and she was just as amused and surprised to see me commenting on her post as I was to see her posting it. It had probably been ten years since we had last seen each other, likely partying and drinking together at a university bar on the Sunshine Coast.

And it had been a little over a year since I posted a birthday message on her wall for the year 2020.

“Oh man. Australia closed the bars on your birthday. That is brutal,” I wrote.
“Yah & I lost my job at one of said bars on the same day,” she responded, with a laughing emoji.

So for her name to appear on a Burnie buy and sell page of all places was, to put it mildly, a bit of a shock.

So we caught up over Messenger and made plans to grab a beer one night soon when our schedules lined up. And then we did the same thing again a few weeks later. And then I went back to Queensland. And we made the same plans again when I returned. And then she moved to Wynyard for a new job at a pub and I said I would stick my head in when I had the chance, when I was in Wynyard. And then in August she said let’s make a plan for September and actually stick to it, hey?

And now it is months later and I haven’t seen my friend in ten years and she is lost at sea and I fear I may never see her again.

Do I deserve this grief? And by that I mean, am I good enough for it? Were we close enough for me to have been so dazed and confused by seeing her name on that police press release? Should I leave the real grief to those who have more immediate memories of her and more tangible reasons to be unreservedly emotional? Should I be more stoic? I was never good at that. And I doubt I am going to start now.

But still I wrestle with this feeling of inadequacy and guilt. Guilt because I should have tried harder to see my old friend, although I know logically that would not have prevented her going out on a boat on Monday. And inadequacy because maybe I can’t offer anything more useful. Even my work as a journalist, which I often defend as an essential service during an emergency or tragedy of this magnitude, feels wholly inadequate in the context.

I labour under no delusion that I am writing this because I think it may help find her, but only in service to myself. I write for catharsis and perspective. To arrange my thoughts and, ideally, to understand them. I can’t remember exactly when but if you go back in my blog far enough I am sure you will find me saying the same thing in some other combination of words.

Recently I have been poorly managing a number of things which I may have understood and handled better had I written them down in this blog. But I did not, and I have regrets. And today has already been awash with regret. I do not want to add another layer of poor emotional wellbeing to that particular onion.

As I finish writing this it approaches 30 hours since the last confirmed contact with someone on board the missing boat. I do not know whether that contact was with Bree or one of her two mates. But the sun is still up on day two of the search and the rescue helicopter continues to circle above the Bass Strait, in view from the pub Bree should be working at tonight. Her colleagues embrace at the start of a shift and put on a brave face, ready to greet the patrons of what will apparently be an unusually busy Tuesday night.

Down at the wharf across the road from the pub Bree’s mum and the families of the two blokes continue to watch the Bass Strait, waiting for anything they may recognise to appear on the horizon.

I’ve not spoken to them and I won’t, not for personal nor professional reasons. Because I have sat here watching the water with them for the last few hours. Because I have now used over 1000 words attempting to understand these feelings and I could spend thousands more. Because I have spent the day hoping for a police media release to deliver us good news, and I have relived memories with Bree going back more than a decade.

Because they deserve to observe their optimism in peace and I still feel I am not good enough for this grief.

Do you sleep well?
Or do you wrestle with restlessness?
Do you lie there alone, thrashing in your sheets and wallowing in a depressing caresslessness?
Do your thoughts wander so far you find yourself rhyming with some absurd Dr Zeuss-like obsessiveness?
I don’t.
Not often at least. Tonight notwithstanding.
I eat well and exercise and I’m at peace with the world. Or at least I feel some form of peace as my head hits the pillow.
I drink tea and read interesting books like Dark Emu and Vilnius Poker and work hard to earn my seven or eight hours each night.
But I also drink whisky, masturbate and binge watch entire seasons of Archer on Netflix and it works equally well.
Fairly often, at least. Tonight notwithstanding.
Tonight it seems I have things to think about and my head won’t let me rest until I have thought them all out.
I lay down for an hour and racked up so many flips from stomach to back I began to wonder how I ever find comfort in my bed with so many ungainly limbs.
What do I usually do with my arms when I sleep?
They are just so uncomfortably there tonight. An oppressive weight on my chest while I lay on my back and an aggressively boney protuberance on top of or beneath my pillow when I flip to my front.
And are these absurd thoughts which just must be thunk always present in my head?
Do I really need to now dwell on just how many of the beautiful leaves of my yucca plant I managed to let wilt and die in recent weeks?
And are they even called leaves when they are so spiky and stiff or is there some word between leaf and branch I am yet to come across?
I should write more about the horticulture of Tasmania and interview all the horticulturalists and then surely I would know all the names for the various foliage appendages.
I should write more about growing things in general. After all the father of permaculture was from here and I should be so inspired to plant wonderful vegetables which I can grow and tend to and also eat and gloat about. I could feed my body and my ego.
But the father of permaculture died.
And I live in an apartment.
An apartment without a vegetable garden.
An apartment in which I currently cannot sleep because although I do not have a vegetable garden what I do have is a mind which is too busy thinking of all the interesting conversations I could be having about those ideas found within Dark Emu and Vilnius Poker to let me sleep.
But that is, really, not all that bad.
Because it has been a long time since I have written anything here and when I write things here I tend not to get too hung up on them again.
Unless I particularly enjoy them, which I often do.
But there is a catharsis to be found in writing the absurdities which I find in my mind on nights when I cannot sleep.
And I am really not all that worried about wrestling with my restlessness or obsessing over the depressing caresslessness.
Because these thoughts reminded me of a conversation I had once with a friend, also about busy brains and vegetables. 

“Do you sleep well, soundly?” she asked.
“Like, peacefully, every night?” I responded.
“Yeah. Do you have an uncucumbered mind?” 

And we laughed and laughed, and then slept well. 

When I was very young, my parents’ business flooded.
Queensland’s 1992 summer rains swelled the banks of the Noosa River to breaking point and beyond at Hilton Terrace where they owned the Noosa Veterinary Surgery.
Dad was the veterinarian and Mum was practice manager, and it was our livelihood as they raised my brother and I, five and two-and-a-half-years-old at the time.

It was devastating for the young parents and first time business owners who had invested so much financially, physically and emotionally into the practice. But, they were able to rescue the animals convalescing in the cages and from the mess salvage the remains of the business, and rebuild.

Of course it was not the damage to the building itself that wrought the devastation, but the building itself was a symbol of what they had built and were building together. It contained memories and mementos of their aspirations and dreams and the faith they had in themselves and each other, and in the span of a few hours it was all but destroyed.

On a larger scale, the fire at Notre Dame represents many of the same things to a great many people.
As a lover of history, architecture and Disney films I can see the Notre Dame is an objectively important cultural icon.
And as a curious observer of Christianity (and religion in general) the symbolism of not only the building, but the relics and artefacts contained within those hallowed walls is wholly apparent. Watching that spire collapse as an atheist was as much an indication that the end of days are nigh as I could possibly invent, so I can only imagine how it looked to the devout.

I am not going to try and say the grief is misplaced, or that there are things of greater concern to concentrate our collective energies upon. We are a capable lot, humans.
We have been known to multitask and we can gather to grieve the destruction of a cultural icon, while also despairing a great many global injustices.

Whether or not you feel a part of the culture it represents does not make it any less significant.
But, by the same token we cannot be fooled into thinking this is a unifying cause for greater humanity – this is very much a white, Christian grief.
That does nothing to minimise the grief, aside from make me personally a little less sympathetic.

But I am cynical as to whether there would be such an outpouring of support and sympathy if something of significance to a less mainstream culture were to be destroyed. Would it continue to be Australian front page news days after the fact if part of Mecca was destroyed?
Would we be so concerned if companies wanted to put a pipeline through sacred native American land?
Would a billionaire offer a great fortune to protect 800 year old trees which are held sacred by the oldest continually surviving culture in the world?

We would not, and we are not.

There are things to which we should ascribe a similar level of concern.
Climate change is destroying our ability, and the ability of many other species, to exist on earth.
To an extent I can appreciate the ability to mourn the Notre Dame, to gather and sing Ave Maria, to share photos of visits to Paris in years gone by and feel somewhat connected.
Climate change is still an abstract concept to many; too nebulous in its presentation for its impacts to be felt.
But that is not to say the earth has not had its burning spire moment over, and over again in recent years.

Maybe if hymns had been written to the breathtaking beauty of the Great Barrier Reef, we would have been more inclined to protect it from bleaching.
If the polar ice caps had been a reference point for gothic architecture we may have tried to stop them from melting.
If we took the story of the Garden of Eden literally, we may have wanted to save this world from ourselves.

But I do not believe the believers of those stories anymore, and I have not for a long time. Because we do not act upon their lessons.
That is why we grieve harder for the destruction of a building than we do for our natural environment.
Because the world is not man made.
We can’t take credit for it, so we will not mourn it.
We aren’t actually mourning the Notre Dame, but the vestiges of our vanity.
We’re mourning a monument we built to ourselves but claimed was for the glory of a god. And as we do, we’re ignoring the ravages we wreak upon the world and failing to see the irony in our belief that a god created this world for us.
But we know how that story ends; we have eaten the apple, and our tenancy in this wondrous Eden has been revoked.

When I first moved to Hobart, I worked for a few weeks at a bar in Salamanca. The bar was advertised as a craft beer bar, though it often tapped kegs of domestic lager anyone worth their malt would know as commercial attempts to cash in on the trend. It was also one of the least busy bars on the busiest strip in the city. I would often be stood behind the empty bar, watching people walking from the Irish pub on our left to the nautically themed joint on our right, unsurprised when they walked on by as if our pub was located at 12, Grimmauld Place.
The bar was staffed entirely by girls in their late teens and early 20s who always looked as though they would rather be anywhere else, and managed by a married couple.
She was in her early 30s, blonde, bubbly, and in the time I worked there, pregnant. He was closer to 40, disinterested in knowing who I was or what I was doing in his bar, with a vicious coke habit and a presence which caused his wife to shrink into the shadows, becoming a shadow herself. His son seemed to be the only human presence which brought out a relatable human warmth; everything else was anger.
Anger that festered at the core of constant failure, anger that invaded a soul too weak to recognise itself as the sole constant in a string of regrettable decisions. Anger that manifested as distrust and arrogance. An anger that developed a fractious coke habit and with it a hatred for every pleasure he had once loved. And the last time I saw him, an anger that caused his voice to shake as he accused me of stealing, insulted me and called me arrogant.
It was 10am on a Friday morning and we were outside his bar in the middle of Hobart and people were beginning to stare.
His jaw was clenched and he ground his teeth as he wiped his nose and damn near popped a vessel in his eye as he threatened to knock me out. I stood my ground and stared. I wasn’t strung out like he was, and I was owed money. I had a little recklessness left in me; I would take a punch from this coked-out termite of a human just to see how far he would fall when I hit the ground. Not that I had any malevolence; just a little sense of karma and curiosity as to how far anger will go to protect pride. He was squaring up, a head taller than me and beginning to splutter, flecks of spit flying as he swore incredulously. I realised this wasn’t going to end well for either of us, but he was still seething as I turned and walked back to where my bike was locked up, and he followed me off the patio.
“Yeah, go on. Take your little fucking bike and get the fuck off my property!” he barked, choking on the sheer emotion of insulting someone for riding a bike around a city.
An older couple gasped and stumbled as they walked by.
I felt pity and confusion as to how someone became so broken and angry, but it probably looked to him like fear, as I glanced at him one last time and left without a word.
I let my frustration out on my old Malvern Star, and my thighs began to burn as I forced the single speed road bike up the steep hill of Montpelier Retreat.
Up past the fast food chicken store I had seen so many people drunkenly loving each other (and fried food) in those first few weekends I worked the bar scene in Hobart, and on by the cocktail bar I stopped in at on my way to my first shift at the job I had just left, and where the bartender, now a good friend, had warned me about my new boss. I should have just heeded his warning, cut a little deeper into my savings, and looked elsewhere for work.

Once I reached the crest of the hill anger began to take me over, and my elbows shook as I gripped the bars of my bike, freewheeling back down Sandy Bay Road and into Queen Street.
I have had one panic attack in my life before and this felt similar. My breath began to grow short and my palms were sweaty. It wouldn’t be a stretch to say my knees were weak, and my arms were heavy. I got home, dropped my bike in the yard and collapsed in a chair in the sun on the back deck. I tried to breathe deeply while the hammers of a nearby construction site became a rhythm to which I could align myself. My eyes closed and my mind drifted, and as I so often do, I found myself thinking about nothing but visualising a scene from my memory.
In my mind I was back in Canada in mid 2017, watching my housemate roll a spliff to share before breakfast. Maybe this was my happy place, somewhere similar to that of Fight Club’s Narrator, but with fewer anthropomorphised penguins and a more positive view of humanity.
Mikey’s hands are steady and his chat entertaining as he crushes a nugget of weed into the grinder; he’s giggling about a girl from work who won’t stop texting him. Although I don’t smoke much, I’ve often admired the methodical nature of rolling joints and cigarettes, and I’ve watched him and countless others do it through all states of inebriation. On hikes, at parties or, like now, simply as a ritual before a meal. There’s a sociability and a generosity to it; an act of kindness for those around who will share in it, and though it is not expected, likely return the favour for it.
The dangers of smoking were always rammed down my throat throughout my childhood; at home and at school. But Harold the Giraffe never taught us that smokers could be such decent people.The earliest memory I have of questioning whether smokers were terrible people was when I was 17, working for a mining company in Western Australia. The head geologist for the nickel exploration project I was working on was a young guy named Rupert, and he rolled his own cigarettes. I had never seen anyone roll their own cigarettes, and didn’t really know anyone who smoked more than socially.
He told me the repetitive motion of rolling and smoking the cigarette allowed him time to think; to mull over issues with the drilling site or simply as a brief reprieve from the harsh Western Australian desert sun.He didn’t give a shit about anyone’s opinion of his smoking; he smoked because he enjoyed it. He wasn’t a teenager trying to impress anyone, and he reasoned that it’s an innately human trait to do things that will harm and probably kill us. He wasn’t hurting anyone else.Despite his influence, as one of the supervisors of my first full time job, I still despised the smell of cigarettes and swore to never smoke myself. And therefore could certainly never be attracted to anyone who smoked.
Well, the following year I started university and that resolution didn’t last long. An 18-year-old kid living on campus has to make a few sacrifices for his education, you know. I even bought a pack of smokes for a girl in one of my first year classes because she hadn’t turned 18 yet. I’d like to say I’m better at sticking to my virtues now than I used to be, but I’d probably be lying.
Still, I was outspoken in my criticism of the smokers around me – it wasn’t just the smell, it was so bloody expensive!
How could the people around me afford to smoke?
We were students; we always had plenty of week left at the end of our money. Though I was making sure to afford at least a case of beer per Centrelink cycle, and the irony of that was definitely lost on me. I told them they shouldn’t smoke, I criticised the music they listened to, I wondered out loud how they could live on the Sunshine Coast and not want to surf every morning.
I made all these grand declarations of who I was and how I would live my life and I promptly forgot them all within the next year. But I’m sure I thought I was on the right track at the time. Maybe that’s the only thing I’ve really learnt in the intervening decade since I watched Rupert roll his cigarettes on the tray of the LandCruiser: I’m not as idealistic as I’d like to be. But I also feel I’ve learnt tolerance for what’s worth fighting for. And, maybe more importantly, what isn’t.

At the same time as I was trying to figure out how I could rationalise working for the kind of person whose anger could be fuelled by the presence of a bicycle, and who more than likely beat his wife, I spent a couple of nights with a girl I’m going to call Molly. The first conversation I had with Molly was punctuated with apologies for rolling cigarettes, and for accidentally blowing smoke in my face.
I didn’t mind at all because Molly, with her fringe and leather jacket, was cute as hell and seemed to enjoy my shit jokes.
The week after we met she took off interstate for a music festival, and then a camping trip on Tasmania’s East Coast when she returned. I wanted her in my life.
It took another week or so, but we found a night that suited both of us (mostly her, I would have made any night work) and decided on a bar to meet at. Neither of us knew Hobart particularly well so we ended up at a shitty bar near my place, and then went off to a worse one for a game of pool she didn’t expect to lose as badly as she did. We shared a guilty pleasure of early 2000s punk, drank dark beer and whisky and kissed in the rain at the end of the night because we thought it would be cute. She tasted of smoke and lipgloss, and I never saw her again.
In the bad 90s movie version of my life, I could have conversations with 15-year-old me and he would tell me that the girl who smokes and won’t return my texts for days at a time is bad news.
And each time, 28-year-old me would laugh off his advice, and let him know that his idealistic nature is admirable, but if I attribute my pain to other people’s decisions, I will find myself in more pain more often, having learnt nothing along the way.
Some of the happiest people I know are vessels of consistently poor choices, and some of the smartest haven’t known peace in years. I have made choices based purely in pleasure which lead only to sorrow, and I have stumbled upon happiness in the darkest of times. I have fallen in love with smokers and I have grown to detest people whose values I could hold up as a mirror against my own.
Four years ago I left Australia to travel and wrote on this blog and on Facebook that if I returned and began writing for newspapers again that somebody should take my credit card and put me on another flight overseas.
November 5, 2018 was the start date for a job at a newspaper with the same company I swore then that I would not return to. And that’s not a cry for sympathy; it’s just a statement of fact and perhaps an illumination of my point.
You can’t know who you will be in the future. Or where, or why.
For three years I prioritised my happiness in-the-moment over career progression or white-picket-fence type aspiration, and I learnt that many of the things I once thought intolerable are actually simulacra of pleasure. And now I have no trouble saying I am fragile and flawed and prone to poor choices, because these are traits I can recognise in some of the greatest people I have met, and who I aspire to be.
Hopefully, not so flawed as to find myself in my 40s, divesting my anger at the world on to an employee out the front of my bar on a Friday morning.
Though if I do open my own bar it will be called ‘Pour Decisions’, and I still won’t smoke much, unless, you know, I can watch you roll one for me.

It was one of those rare mornings where the sound of the alarm hits you like a defibrillator.
A morning where the first rays of light sneaking through the curtains are as welcome a lover’s waking and wandering hands.
You’re gripped by an enthusiasm you haven’t felt in weeks.
At least, not since Tasmania’s notorious winter began to bed down with a severity you expected to be able to weather.
You were misguided. Goddamn, you were so misguided.
You’ve been sleeping in until 10 far too often, and only riding your bike when the mercury climbs above 10 degrees celsius – cursing yourself throughout for how soft you’ve become.
But this morning was different – this morning your body yearned for the innumerable pedal strokes; for the freezing Hobartian air to constrict your airways and for the climb up the Kunanyi road which would seize your thighs for days to come.
You bounded out of bed, dreaming of a morning in the saddle which would deliver a 1200 metre adjustment in altitude and a glimpse into the mind of the masochist.

The feeling is familiar to any keen cyclist – I just wanted to ride my bike somewhere I had not yet ridden it.
Not groundbreaking in terms of things worth writing about, or places ridden. And, to be honest, the route is probably one of southern Australia’s most traversed cycling routes.
Starting before the sun in Sandy Bay, I planned to ride up Huon Road to where it meets Pinnacle Road and then follow that up to the Springs parking lot.
From there, I would decide whether to carry on toward the Kunanyi summit, or try and find a trail in Hobart’s downhill oeuvre I hadn’t yet exhausted.
At the intersection of Huon and Pinnacle, at around 8am, the sign indicating road closures told me there was no vehicle access beyond the Springs due to ice and your average punter’s inability to operate a vehicle – especially when the road is icy.
This was made clear to everyone involved when a motorcyclist attempted a u-turn at the closure, at less than five km per hour, and ditched his bike under the front bumper of a car parked adjacent.
Fortunately only his ego was damaged, and it served as a cogent demonstration to all those looking on as to why they should be allowed to drive no further.
I was standing there, with a bucket of excellent Lost Freight flat white, laughing at both the motorcyclist who couldn’t turn on ice, and my own plans to continue onwards and upwards.
When surrounded by idiots, it turns out it surprisingly comforting to go with the flow and act like an idiot.

So I checked with the traffic controllers, who confirmed the road wasn’t closed to bicycles, and made like Icarus and continued upward and east – directly into the sun.
Gods, I was rewarded! A road which is normally congested with a cavalcade of incompetent drivers and professional tourists was deserted, save for a few hikers and one National Parks vehicle.
I continued the pedal up in the sunshine and the silence, which was broken only by the crunch of ice and snow under my (surprisingly grippy) tyres.
I’m riding a 2017 Specialized Enduro (whatever they call the bottom of the range alloy model), with a 2.6 inch Specialized Butcher on the front and a 2.5 inch Maxxis on the back; neither of which have seen snow since a very light dusting on Mt Mackenzie in Revelstoke, Canada, around October last year.
Although I wouldn’t even test the (frozen) waters of trying to send them downhill on the Mt Wellington road, uphill they were remarkably capable of holding me in line as I granny gear’d it toward the summit.
Despite the recent inspiration of the Tour de France, I’ll never claim to be fast up a hill.
Especially not on a bike.
I’ll be bitching and grunting and muttering “I think I can, I know I can” just like Mum taught me when I was a fat eight-year-old trying to run three kilometres around the neighbourhood because I’d been promised a Nintendo 64 if I could do so without stopping.
But I’ll get there, and usually, I’d be smiling because I knew I could start going downhill again soon. Not today though; today I came to what I expected to be the start of the descent and was greeted with a four kilometre hike-a-bike mission through ankle to knee-deep snow.
Not that I wasn’t smiling – it was over a year since I had played in the snow at that point and even a poxy Tasmanian iteration of coverage was enough to get me grinning like an idiot.
But I was alone, and I was leading the bootpack, and there was no one racing to get first tracks on this wintry ski run.
There was no rush.
Back-to-back winters in recent years have instilled in me a desire to always be the first to destroy a beautifully pristine snowpack – shralp and destroy, regardless of what I rode in on. So although I had the opportunity to do this on a bluebird day on one of the southernmost peaks in Australia, there was no rush.

I approached my own personal summit with all the pace and grace of a curious wombat – which, truthfully, I was looking out for.
But to no avail, as hose furry bastards had only appeared to me as meaty boulders crushed on the roads of Australia’s south-east during my road trip from the Sunshine Coast to Tasmania earlier in the year.
But a mountain bike in the snow is not a stealthy vehicle, and any wildlife had had the sense to move on by the time I passed by – if it had been there at all.
By mountain biking standards, the fire trail which traverses the north-eastern face of Kunanyi is not exciting. Maybe a little more so when covered in snow, but it is wide and only occasionally steep.
Like many of Kunanyi’s official mountain biking trails, it is simply a four-wheel-drive track which has been repurposed to keep the hikers and bikers separate. Anyone that has been on either side of high speed collision or near-collision while biking or hiking knows there is no winner in that fight.
But for reasons purely adventurous in nature, the trail was everything I needed from a Saturday morning in July.
I set out with only a vague idea of where I was going, how I would get there and what I would find along the way.
And I think this is the point I’d normally turn a story into an allegory about my life; but I think I’ve just about exhausted my desire to turn my poor choices into morality lessons.
There may be a greater existential reasoning for the things I do, but for the moment I’m done trying to make that stone bleed.

Over the years, I’ve given and received my share of broken hearts.

But in 2017 I broke my dick for the first time so that made the year one to remember.

(A few other things happened too, but they’ve all been fairly well documented on my Instagram so feel free to go there if you want to keep a wholesome image of me intact.)

It took a few minutes of swearing and agony but I managed to stem the flow of blood, destroying bed sheets and a bath towel in the process, long enough to placate the girl I was with.

After all, she was at least partly to blame for the ordeal.

She was a ghostly shade of pale, in shock from having so violently learnt that the penis was something that could be broken in such a fashion.

Fortunately for me, a couple friends had been through the same experience in recent years and had been more than happy to relive the story for anyone in the bar who would listen.

I wasn’t sure of the mechanics of how they had done it, but when I did it myself a few missing pieces quickly snapped into place. Or out.

So I had snapped my banjo string; which is a hilarious euphemism for a horrible experience.

After a bit of googling, I found out that in medical circles the banjo string is known as a frenulum, and armed with that information I hobbled into the doctor’s office with an icepack on my crotch.

What I didn’t find out is that ‘frenulum’ is a common term for various pieces of tissue in the human body, such as the one that holds your tongue to the floor of your mouth.

This led to a considerable amount of confusion as I told the doctor I had broken my frenulum, he asked to see it, I took off my pants and he just stared at me for a moment.  

“Oh! That frenulum? Shit. I thought you meant the one in your mouth!” Dr Deliverance said.

“I told you I broke it during sex?” I laughed, standing there half naked.

“Yeah I thought you meant during oral sex,” he responded, leaving me to question whether he thought I was gay or if I have been performing oral sex on girls very wrong for a long time.

And so I learnt there is a quiet affirmation in going through an experience which is not at all life threatening, but which can still be uniquely tragic.

Out of the woodwork came a host of blokes who would nod and grimace in a knowing fashion when I told the story, laughing at all the right moments both in solidarity and sympathy.

Not unlike a broken rib, to heal the banjo string little can be done save to rest a few weeks and try your best to not become aroused.

Oh, how cruel the games of fate.

But, as the last three years of my life had essentially dedicated to the pursuit of pleasure, it was somewhat fitting that towards the end of my time living in Canada my ability to indulge in such earthly delights would be so violently denied.

And maybe it was fitting, as a fear of sex allowed me to focus on properly saying farewell to the excellent town of Revelstoke and its population of kind hearted thrill seekers.

Oh, I reached a level of piety Christians can only dream of. Praise be.

Theology aside, leaving Revelstoke to return to Noosa is a continuation of unintentional three year cycles I have been following since I started at the University of the Sunshine Coast in 2008.

I left there for Western Australia with a bachelor’s degree in hand in 2011 to conquer the illustrious world of regional newspapers, and I left there in 2014 to travel the Americas and find myself a home in the mountains.

Now my three years in North America has passed and my wanderlust has, curiously, led me home.

Home to family and old friends.

Home to the setting of my childhood, of where I began to form a worldview.

Home to where I learned to ride a bike and, more importantly, fall off a bike.

Home to a tourist town I have had people the world over congratulate me on being from like I had a choice.

Home to afternoon thunderstorms and humidity that sticks your skin to timber and leather furniture and your ideas of how good you’re going to look today.

Home to all that Aussie sentiment John Williamson sung about and which I don’t want to try to replicate.

Ah, sentiment.

How many shitty pensive social media posts you’ve been responsible for.  

With its lingering sides of regret served up as tantalising amuse bouches from which to ignite my memories and inhabit my soul.

Oh, for fuck’s sake, just give me a bottle of Margaret River cab sauv I need something to wash this down with.

Sentiment is to regret as a trigger is to a bullet; one inevitably leads to the other.

Unless you’re firing blanks.

Which I could be since, you know, I broke my dick.

Here’s cheers to you, 2018!

The parking attendant was in his late 30s, heavyset, with a greying goatee.
Under his high visibility vest he wore an old Atlanta Braves Jersey and his cap bore the American flag.
“How you doin’ man?”
“Bien amigo, y tu?” I responded reflexively, barely realising he had spoken to me in English.
“I’m good man, I’m doin’ good,” he said as he waved a new Hilux into the dusty lot.
His position appeared wholly unnecessary, as the lot was half empty and the restaurant it serviced full.
“Where are you from, brother?” I said, subconsciously adopting his Latin American accent.
“Atlanta, Georgia man. Lived there for 25 years.”
“But you were born around here?” I asked, curious if an American citizen would choose to work as a parking attendant at a highway comedor in El Salvador.
“Yeah man, I was born here,” he said, looking at me as if no one had asked him anything personal in years. “Parents took me to the US when I was a kid.”
He attempted to conceal a grimace with a smile as he waved to the passenger of a taxi leaving the lot.
A stray dog lay in the shade under the tree in front of the comedor, and a collared dog leashed to its owner’s table lay a few metres away staring at the stray.
The restaurant served buffet style meals from a bain marie or made pupusas to order. $4US got me a glass bottle of coke, a pile of chicken, rice and vegetables and a couple of tortillas to wrap it all in.
It was the first thing I’d eaten since my post surf double latte and Nutella crepe in El Tunco seven hours earlier.
I should have known it wouldn’t be enough.
“Good food here eh?” I said to the attendant in a lame attempt to change the direction of the conversation.
“Yeah man. You liked it? I’m glad, man.”
“Good feed man. Real good feed. You think the coke is better down here man?”
He cocked an eyebrow at me.
I needed to clarify.
“The coca cola. It’s sweeter here than in the US I think.”
“Oh, yeah man. It’s made with real cane sugar down here. They use that high fructose corn syrup in the US.”
“Man I can taste that!” I laughed. I only drink the stuff in Latin America, I fucking hate it back home. Not just the taste, it’s just a trash drink.”
He laughed, too.
“I’ll take that high fructose trash and a home in America, amigo.”
His current life was apparently not one he had chosen.
“You didn’t leave because you wanted to, hey?”
“I was deported, man. They caught me selling coke and deported me for ten years.”
“They deported a citizen? How the fuck are they allowed to deport a citizen?”
“I’ve stopped asking those questions, man. End of the day I fucked up. I know that.”
“Did they offer you jail time in the US as an alternative?”
“Nah man. They didn’t give me any choices.”
I don’t doubt his story.
A parking attendant with an American accent in El Salvador has less cause to lie than the US Justice System has ability to not follow its own laws.
Or so my pessimism would lead me to believe.
“I’ve been here six years. It’s nice man, it’s quiet. It’s a beautiful country.”
“So you can go back in four years?”
“Maybe. If they want to let me back in. With the president we’ve got there at the moment it’s not looking so good, man.”
That Trump would be elected for a second term, let alone even completing his first, is a horrifying concept for most.
For the attendant it is more personal than political.
“Vamos amigos!” came the call from the bus driver, and I turned back to shake the attendant’s hand.
I get a low-five and a fist bump instead.
“My name’s Roberto, man.”
“Mucho gusto, Roberto.”
I fold myself back into the back of the Mercedes Sprinter van, as comfortable as you could ask to be for a $35, fifteen hour bus journey from El Salvador to Nicaragua.
The next morning, after getting home from his second job as a security guard at a local mall, Roberto might call his parents and lie to them about his life in El Salvador.
From his squalid one room concrete bungalow he would Facebook video call his parents and the cellular data charges would run him a full day’s wage.
When he speaks to his parents he would apologise again for squandering the opportunity they gave him by moving him to the USA as a kid, but he was now working towards owning his own restaurant in Santa Rosa De Lima.
He would console his mother through her tears and continue to speak in rounds over the deafening silence of his father.
He would go back to work at the restaurant after three hours sleep when it opened for the day’s lunch trade.
Another bus of gringos would be groggily unloaded for a cheap feed en-route to Nicaragua, and they would regard Roberto with as much interest as the stray dog lying in the shade.
In Atlanta, his state appointed attorney would compose an email to Roberto about federal legislation changes regarding felony drug charges and the negative consequences for him.
At LAX, a young Italian traveller would be caught with a trace amount of marijuana in her luggage, have her ESTA revoked and be put on a plane back to Mexico, where she flew in from.
And in a hostel in Leon, I would watch an american traveller use his credit card to crush legally acquired Xanax pills into lines on his phone, chasing the promise of an easy high.
Nothing changes, nothing stays the same.
But fortunately, none of it means anything you don’t want it to mean.