I just found this email I sent out to my extended family about a month before moving to WA two years ago. I wrote it before I knew I would be moving, or that I even had a reason to move there. I know I was in a pretty bad place mentally at the time, so it was interesting to see the change in perspective. Also, considering my previous post here was about rambling incoherently and Splendour in the Grass, it seems fitting that I was doing the exact same thing two years ago. The email’s subject was Don’t let my surroundings influence your opinion of me.

I’ve often heard that Starbucks restaurants in LA are crowded with young creatives hooked on to the life support of their wireless devices, waxing lyrical the merit of their new manuscripts, the ones that will make them.
The town dictates the territory traversed by the young patrons before they end up in Starbucks, or in my case, McDonalds, looking for a feed and some solitary socialising.
I’m sitting in the corner of this old Scottish franchise while some auto-tuned monstrosity invades every pore; I’m covered in salt from a hard morning tucking into glassy barrels at Sunshine Beach and I think that if I was able to get such good waves each day I’d probably be a lot more relaxed about this here existence.
I’ve taken this year as it has come, and expected at each bend something more than what has occurred.
But I guess what has come is a realisation, or at least a reality of something I already knew, that life isn’t simply going to happen. Or at least something similar just slightly less trite and cliched. But while I’ve still got a job, as Dad said, keeping the wolf from the door – and an extended family with whom I can share these experiences, from the mighty to the mundane, I should have little to complain about.
I guess that if I just do find myself with some time and some good feelings after a morning in the ocean, I should use this time as best I can.
On Wednesday I booked flights to Perth for the whole of December, to see Will graduate and become registered under the AVA, and also to hopefully scout out some of my own options.
Fight or flight.
In the mean time here are some rad photos my mate Flip took last weekend at Woodford’s Splendour in the Grass music festival. And here’s hoping that if I do come across as a pretentious young wank looking over proud of himself in a public place, that at least I might sometime soon have something real to tout.
Cheers!
Sandy. xo