On Christmas Island

Ok, I’ve just finished up at the work Christmas party, so I’m a little squiffy. Fair warning and all that.

Why the fuck does something always have to be somebody’s fault? Why, as soon as something goes wrong, do we as a country start screaming for the heads of those utter cunts who caused it? Do we seriously believe that if those in power were doing their jobs right, nothing bad would ever happen?

Here’s some news for you, idiots. Sometimes bad things happen. Awful things. Fucked up things that can knock the breath out of you from thousands of miles away. And sometimes, often, it just happens because somebody was in the wrong place at the wrong time.

Blame the weather that created the waves. Blame the rocks and the cliffs if you have to. Blame the fucking butterfly that flapped its wings in China if it makes you feel better. Or just hang your head for as minute, despair at the tragedy, shed a tear, and understand that sometimes, life sucks.

Our politicians are so fucking scared of what we think and of what we might do to them at the ballot box, that they are terrified of ever actually making a decision about anything. Because they know that they will get crucified for every little thing and and every big thing that goes wrong.

I want my leaders to be courageous. I want them to make the decision they know is right. And I want them to have the freedom to make the right decisions without having to worry so much about how we, led by the Andrew Bolt and the rest of the media vultures picking through the devastation looking for a quick buck, will bay for their blood when that fucking chinese butterfly makes a boat crash into the cliffs.

As the saying goes, we get the leaders we deserve. Let’s forget who’s on which team, and try and deserve better.

I have a problem

In the well-worn tradition of blogging, I’m writing these words below for me. I’m not trying to make them pretty for an audience, and at the moment I feel like it’s really important to ignore the fact that this is in the public domain so I don’t become self-conscious and try and fail to write to impress. I just need to be cruelly honest with myself for a few minutes, and at the moment this is my best avenue for doing so. Although no-one but me ever reads this, publishing it online means that I can’t take it back, I can’t delete it, and right now that’s really important.

Many people in the world have addiction issues, and in many cases it really fucks up their lives. Right now, I feel like I’m fucking up my life and I have to, just absolutely have to do something about it. It sounds trivial, even funny, but it’s not. I’m addicted to procrastination.

Now I’m not for a second comparing myself with the heroin addict who ends up dead at 24 after a decade in and out of prison. I know it sounds petty, and by comparison I have a pretty good life. I have a happy family. I have a reasonably well paid job. But I’ve lost count of the number of opportunities I’ve completely fucked up just by putting things off. I failed subjects and ultimately dropped out of university. I’ve been overlooked again and again for promotions at work, and continue to creep ever closer to the line where they start to question whether I should have a job here. I’ve made myself unpopular in the local neighbourhood by having the one yard that is still half-landscaped and messy ten years after the rest of the housing estate has made itself beautiful. I made myself unpopular around the sport I indulge in, by volunteering then fucking up a job that cost the group thousands of dollars. And then there are the goals I’ve frequently set and failed to achieve, in my sport, with writing, financially, the list goes on. Goals that largely define who am I, at least to myself, but that I repeatedly fail to even take the first step towards.

Worst of all, my kids are learning every day from my poor example.

I’m basically half way through my life now. I’m on the downhill slide – it’s a long slide, but I’m on it nevertheless. But I have no doubt that I can do something about this. For what it’s worth, my brain is supposed to be good, I’m very clever by the standards we use to classify these things. I know what I’m capable of, and I’m not too old yet to give up hope of realising my potential. I just have to find a way out of this fucking spiral before all the life gets sucked out of me.

Over the years, I’ve got sucked in to the thinking that this is really just a time management problem, or that some two hour pop psychology SMART goal training course will turn it all around. Obviously on an intellectual level this is all good advice, but it’s like putting the images of someone’s gangrenous foot on a packet of cigarettes. The addicted smoker knows that what they’re doing is unhealthy and will kill them. The images might add to the smoker’s desire to quit, but beyond that it doesn’t give them any of the tools to help them do so.

A couple of articles I’ve read online this morning have really made it clear to me – my eureka moment if you like. Procrastination absolutely is an addiction, and needs to be treated as such. I’ve always known that I have a very addictive personality, but I’ve also had success in overcoming it. After innumerable attempts, eight years, one month and 28 days ago I gave up smoking. Now that I’ve linked it all together in my head, the feelings I get now when I procrastinate are exactly the same guilty rush that smoking gave me. I know I shouldn’t, I know it’s doing long term damage, but when I’m in the moment, when those synapses start firing, I just don’t care. Gimme, gimme, gimme more. Sitting here right now, writing this, I’m even feeling the same sort of withdrawal symptoms, real, physical reactions that I used to feel it I went without a cigarette for more than a few minutes. It’s like my body knows that I’m talking about quitting, and is building the defences, ready to fight. The tightness in the throat, the tingling fingers, the fuzzy brain, it’s all the same.

It really surprises me how difficult it was to write that last bit.

When I gave up smoking I used nicotine patches for a while, but found they made little difference. It really just came down to stopping. Taking one minute at a time until the minutes became hours, then one hour at a time until the hours became days. Weeks. Months. Even years. Knowing through bitter experience that going back even once would take me right back to where I started. It’s only in the last year or two that I’ve stopped dreaming about smoking and waking with a displaced feeling of guilt.

Does the same process apply to procrastination? Is it something that can be stopped in the same way? It’s more insidious than smoking – at least you are mostly aware of what you are doing when you put a cigarette in your mouth and light it up. But procrastination is something that you may not even notice you’re doing until you’ve been at it for a while.

I really am fucking up my life. I’m not writing this to catalogue the ways in which I am doing so, but I am, in more significant ways than I have room and time to type. That’s not an avoidance mechanism though – I just know it very well and don’t need to spell it out for my sake. I do need to work out how to overcome this problem though. Cold turkey worked (in the end) for smoking, but it doesn’t seem as good a fit with procrastination. But what is the right fit? What is the answer?

Like I said at the start, I didn’t write this for anyone else’s sake, but if you happen to stumble across this and read it this far, I would really appreciate you sharing your insights.

The quest for mediocrity

My writing really sucks.

I’m sure it wasn’t always this way. I think I used to be able to do this, kind of. I’ve always thought of myself as a bit of a writer and assumed that one day my extraordinary talent would burst out of me and splatter itself on the page in a vaguely commercially viable way.

Yes. Yet another fucking wannabe writer.

I blame twenty four years of employment by state government departments and their ilk. I became an overwriter. Seemingly, I delight in using too many words and unnecessarily complicated, probably grammatically incorrect sentence structures that I fill with way too many, commas.  I don’t know if I ever had any sense of comedy, but if I did I misplaced it somewhere in my late twenties.

The result is turgid to say the least. Don’t you agree?

Hence this blog. I need to get in shape, to do some training. I’m the literary equivalent of that fat, middle aged, heart-attack-waiting-to-happen bloke who has finally put the beer down and struggled off the couch, ready to stagger around the block in a half-arsed attempt to reclaim some vestige of youth. And we all know how those stories end. Let’s not dwell.

Who knows what will end up here. Words, that’s about all I can promise. Maybe a review of some book I’m reading. Maybe a bit of descriptive prose, just for its own sake. Maybe a whinge about the tragic life of a forty year old bloke surrounded by too many vaginas.

It’ll definitely all be crap though. So if you happen to find this and waste your time reading it, well what can I say? More fool you.

Politics schmolitics

I am an idiot.

I must be.

Only an idiot could reach forty years of age and still hope that one day, the people of Australia will elect a government that has the political courage to stare down the rabid zealots and deliver reasoned, rational, compassionate policy outcomes.

Only an idiot could believe that there could ever be an end to the weasel word infested sound bites that pass for political discourse.

Only an idiot would believe that idealism and realism can co-exist in the face of seemingly universal cynicism and negativity.

Yes, I’m an idiot, so please humour me for a moment and explain it all again. Why the fuck are issues like climate change and asylum seekers even up for discussion?

I love you, internet.

The internet is cool.

It tells me what I want to know. It helps me communicate with others. It comforts me in my times of need. It allows me to make a barely adequate living. it never judges.

It’s my best friend.

lovely internet / for you i write this haiku / yes, i am ashamed