Untitled AF

Just in case anyone was curious, I’ll Keep Coming by Low Roar is my personal anthem song (though Introdiction by Scroobius Pip, All Eyes On Me by Bo Burnham, Achilles Come Down by Gang of Youths and Mars by Yungblud are also up there, I sorta have a hard time choosing favourites haha).

The song saved my sanity once, in a hospital up North, along with the male nurse who let me keep the cord to my headphones despite them being a ‘choking hazard’.

It took 3,499 words to avoid having to go to court to get my freedom back. I had committed no crime. I cried reading the words in front of the shrink who was impressed that David Castle had been my psychiatrist in Melbourne. Not soon enough though to avoid being medicated against my will via injection. I cried then too. The nurse almost did also. They supplied no medication nor adequate support for the withdrawal. That was the second time I tried to kill myself. Waking up to a room full of projectile vomit is sh*thouse, I tell you. My throat burned raw and I hallucinated for days, alone. I couldn’t be fu*ked to clean the sheets so I tossed everything in the shower, left it there for over a week, and slept on the couch under the towels a couple mates had left days earlier when their car ran out of gas and they’d needed to stay the night at mine.

…another woman in hospital had woken up to her stalker sodomizing her. The doctors didn’t believe her, so she got committed. But from inside she was able to arrange the documentation from her regular Dr that provided evidence of the Co2 poisoning that he’d used to sedate her. Once she got out she found another of his victims and, last I heard, they were organizing a court case against him.

…anyway.

…It’s a great fu*king song.

Continue reading

On the Fear of Losing Faith

 

ArtaxI feel you, my love.

I feel your heartache beat, and your sorrow echo. I know your despair.

It feels so cold, so dark. The swamp is all around you, threatening to swallow you whole. You fear sinking into the depths too deep to ever again emerge. You fear losing the battle.

You fear that the beautiful things you so passionately love are dying all around you and no one but you is heeding their pained cries. You weep as the divine is trampled unseen by those too blind or callous to care about the damage their eager feet wreak, and you feel responsible for not being stronger, wiser, cleverer, more able to save the delicate beauty of gentle, valuable things. You are screaming at the sky, calling for aid, and the silence you are receiving in reply feels like the Universe deciding that what you love is not worth saving. And you mourn the impending death of all that which makes life worth living.

Please, my love, remember: Lights shine brightest in the darkness.

Be a light.

Continue reading

On Monsters

This is the incongruous dilemma of our current reality: we create laws and place restrictions on our fellow man because we believe others are immoral and that without these enforced restrictions society would descend into a hellish chaos. . .but the world is a hellish chaos due to the (largely unintended) repercussions of those very restrictions. 

Christian’s combat with Apollyon.

We tell ourselves and each other ‘There are monsters in the world and we must protect ourselves from them’. We say ‘Look at how people act when some freedom is given. Give an inch, they’ll steal a mile.’

But ‘some’ freedom is a half-hearted attempt at the full bodily autonomy that is the sacred birthright of all living, sentient beings. Not the freedom to do whatever we like without consequence, but the freedom to do as we like with ourselves and with those freely consenting to joint endeavours.

Because we develop within a world of limited freedom we become miserly assholes. When we obtain something that helps – to numb the pain, to protect against future lack – we fiercely desire to hold onto it. And we desire more – more finances particularly because in our current social structure wealth is all but equivalent to security, as it can be traded for most anything else.

So when someone else wants what we have (which of course anyone who perceives they’ve less than us naturally will) we brace against them. ‘No. Fuck you. This is mine. I fought for it. I need it.’ The idea of sliding back to a place from our past in which we had less is anxiety-inducing, yielding perhaps even rage.

But were we to grow within a system in which we believed we were free and safe to remain so, it follows that we would defend less fiercely. Without the learned trauma of subjugation, an egoistic altruism¹ naturally flourishes, because we are creatures of reason (at least in part) and the fact is solid that helping my fellow man just makes sense. Why? Because I would of course want him to help me in turn. No one wants to get fucked over. But the error we make en masse as a species is assuming most everyone else would take advantage of us, given the chance. Continue reading

Oh. . .Hai

aprox 20 min read

Hi. I haven’t written in over a year. I’m sorry about that.

There’s. . .a lot to catch up on. A . . .lot.

I’m well. For the first time in my life, I’m well. It took a lot. My last post had it right. It took me a year (to the day, synchronicity strikes again) to be able to really listen to my own words, but I’m well now.

. . .I hope. I think. I believe.

We’ll see.

It’s the best any of us can ever say.

A story caught my attention the other day and inspired a blog post but I felt that, before sharing, I should first write some sort of catch up post, as this blog has become, above all else (oddly, primarily, unintentionally) the place I write for the people from my present and past interested in doing so to catch up with where the fuck I am.

It’s a place you can always find me. It’s a place I post what is most important to me, at any given time, when – and only when – I feel like doing so.

Valuable that. This sacred space. This place I have complete control to add or ignore, with no schedule or obligation. It’s not remotely what I had planned for it. I love that it’s what it’s become.

So. Catching up:

I’m still in Melbourne. Continue reading

That One Time I Lost My Mind

(aprox 35 min read)

I’m still not entirely certain what happened. My mind snapped about a week ago but it was a long time coming. Almost 35 years long, to be honest.

There are still conversations I need to have with my lover (the only one who witnessed it happen as it occurred in the privacy of our home) to fill in the gaps, but one thing I do know is that what happened felt like some higher power was flicking the switch of my awareness/consciousness on and off at ever increasing intervals. I know I didn’t try to hurt myself and I didn’t try to hurt anyone else, but I must have been making less and less sense to Dags (the aforementioned lover) because it eventually got bad enough that he broke one of the only promises I ever made him make to me, which was that he would never call mental health services on me.

delirium-2

I realize now you cannot have ultimatums in a relationship, however well-intentioned. I’ve forgiven him for breaking his promise, and I hope he understands that.

I’d never stayed in a mental health institution before. (I was briefly and voluntarily enrolled in a program back in Newfoundland in my early twenties when I felt I was close to suicide but that just hooked me up with a psychiatrist and some meds that I only stayed on for a very brief time). I realize now it was always my greatest fear, largely because I didn’t believe in myself enough to have faith I could ever get out again once in. Happily, in that as well, I was wrong.  Continue reading

Why I Hate Your Hating

Different people come from different backgrounds. My life experience has been different from yours. This is a simple concept, but I feel the vital sub-points of it get missed all too frequently in common human interaction.

One vital sub-point being this: My entire belief system and moral compass have been shaped by the summation of my experiences; my actions and the world’s reactions to them, the people I have kept or found around me, my family, my education (or lack thereof) . . .the list goes on and on. Your beliefs and morality have been likewise shaped. So when you and I collide in the world, as people often do, and find ourselves with beliefs antithesis to one another, we have a choice: We can engage in conversation, and share the reasoning behind our beliefs. I can learn of yours and vice versa, and we can each test the stability of our convictions to see whether they hold up in the light of day.

Or we can call each other ass hats. Continue reading

Why Write?

Sometimes the psychology behind our compulsions is clear: We want to eat because we are hungry, or perhaps we link the idea of food to comfort, or freedom or simply the chemical satisfaction of a sugar rush, however short-lived.

We want a cold shower because we are over-heated or feel uncomfortably dirty, or because for us it marks the end of another day; it has become a mental cue that we can relax and enjoy the remainder of our evening.

We want to fuck because millions of years of procreating tells our crocodile brains this is how we continue for another million. And because society tells us, relentlessly, that we should all constantly want sex (then slaps our wrist and calls us a slut for having it. Dick move, society).

But there are other things we feel compelled to do, and it can take us a long damn time to sort out the root (heh. Root. It’s funny if you’re in Australia) of the drive, if ever we do.

I feel compelled to share stories from my travels in a public forum, and it’s taken me a long time to figure out why. It finally came to me upon returning to Mellish Park, the North Queensland cattle station on which I worked four months of last year.

Photo credit to Bridget Webber. I feel this photo rather successfully portrays exactly how entriely in the middle of absolutely nowhere I am right now. (Let’s ignore, for the moment, the sequence of events that led me back here and focus on the epiphany regarding my desire to blog.)

Photo credit to Bridget Webber. I feel this photo rather successfully portrays exactly how fully in the middle of absolutely nowhere I am right now. (Let’s ignore, for the moment, the sequence of events that led me back here and focus on the epiphany regarding my desire to blog.)

Continue reading

A Holiday Service Announcement From RTI:

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I do not celebrate Christmas.

This is not news to anyone that has known me for some time but, because I move around a lot, there are some people I’m currently close with who have not known me for some time. This message is for you.

I haven’t celebrated Xmas for a number of years now. I used to be quite (read: very) soap-boxy about my hatred of all things yuletide but throughout the years that fanaticism (like most of my fanaticism) has relaxed to more of a dulled disdain.

Or, in some instances, evolved into a disturbing embrace of holiday iconography. Embracing the holiday iconography perhaps more than peeps intended me to for an Xmas KitKat party in Köln.

There are facets of holiday celebration I’m more than happy to partake in; the parties and get-togethers and the like. I like spending time with people I like so, really, whatever the excuse – boom hells yeah lets go.

I will not decorate. I feel for the Earth, poor struggling whelp that she is. It does not bring me joy to string sparkly reminders of our diminishing rainforests from one corner of the room to the other.

I don’t do carols. They are terrible and make me want to kill myself. Or at least stab myself in the ears.

But above all else – I don’t do gifts. This is not exclusive to Xmas. I do not do gifts for any calendar occasion. I do do gifts, occasionally. . . just not when I’m supposed to.

This confuses a lot of people. Allow me to explain more fully: Continue reading

Lock Up Your Sons, Melbourne

Please allow me to introduce you to my friend, trouble.

Please allow me to introduce you to my friend, trouble.

So about 9 months back a mate of mine from Germany visited Melbourne (and Jess, this story is about to make your day). Near the end of her time we spent a day hanging out in Fitzroy – not my usual hood – and had one of those ‘ah, just one beer sure’ that turns into several pitchers kind of nights. It was one of those nights where the conversation comes easy, and one of the recurring topics was regarding a beautiful man that worked there, and the hilarious face Jess would pull whenever he walked by.

I can’t remember now whether we just left, and I later cursed not getting up the courage to go ‘aw, fuck it’ and ask if he was straight(ish)/single or if I WAS actually going to and then couldn’t find him. . .but the beautiful man with the eye-catching forearms went un-asked-out. And I promised Jess that, should I come back and see him again, I WOULD go through with it.

I didn’t even know the name of the bar we were drinking at. Continue reading

Hey There Victoria + Thoughts On Mental Excrement

One last ride: Saying bye to my boy ❤

In the end, I spent five months in Northern Queensland: four months working as a jillaroo for Mellish Park, and one month working as a ‘resort assistant’ (I had to come up with a title for ‘vagabond that lends a hand with the kitchen/housekeeping/meteorology stuff’ for my CV. That is what I went with) at Sweers fishing resort in the Gulf of Carpentaria. It has been six years and 30 countries since I first left Canada to ‘see the world’ and I would rate my time in Queensland among my richest travel (hell, life) experiences to date. I have learned more about myself these past five months than ever before. Continue reading