“Do stuff. be clenched, curious. Not waiting for inspiration’s shove or society’s kiss on your forehead. Pay attention. It’s all about paying attention. attention is vitality. It connects you with others. It makes you eager. stay eager.”
Susan Sontag
Thursday
Is it possible the two day week is more exhausting than the four day week?
Two weeks until we are in Europe.
Not that I am counting.
There is a strange tension ay work. Things ned to be done, an underlying anxiety, yet everything is done. It is as if I should be overwhelmed with all that there is left to do, but I have nothing to do.
“It is not enough to be busy; so are the ants. The question is: What are we busy about?”
Henry David Thoreau
Friday
“The greatest obstacle to living is expectancy, which hangs upon tomorrow and loses today.”
Seneca
Gym. Always.
But first, Niam’s birthday. His actual birthday, he has many days which are his birthday.
It is hard to describe the love I have for my little brother. I won’t try.
“The key is to keep company only with people who uplift you.”
Epictetus
I still have my old Nikon D3100. It has a brilliant f1.8 35mm fixed lens.
There was a time when I would carry it everywhere. Set on manual, shooting RAW, I was proud of my amateur photographs. I still have the camera. It is sitting in storage in Kuala Lumpur.
Shell upgraded our camera when we started our bicycle trip. A Sony a6600 with an f4 18-105mm lens.
It all seems too complicated. The best I have managed is some shots on auto and playing around with them on Lightroom.
I have decided to learn how to use it.
As much as reading nourishes the brain, these days inside when the temperature is too hot to go outside demand some kind of productive effort.
“Have no fear of perfection – you’ll never reach it.”
Salvador Dali
I spend the day reading with the camera sitting next to me.
Feels like a Saturday undertaking.
I gave up on Darwin’s Dangerous Idea. Dennett fatigue or McMurtry mentioning Sontag, either way, I am now reading Against Interpretation and I can’t put it down. I will come back to Dennett another time.
“The ideal or the dream would be to arrive at a language that heals as much as it separates.”
Susan Sontag
I start messing about with the camera and soon realise there is nothing to photograph. Pot plants? Books?
Rachelle has declared herself off limits.
Witness my genius.
These are terrible. But they were taken on manual and RAW. ISO2000 – 1/60 – f4.0.
It is a start.
Maybe I need to go on Amazon and find a new lens now I have spent three minutes practicing.
“Idleness is fatal only to the mediocre.”
Albert Camus
Maybe I will just read some more.
Saturday
“The world says: “You have needs — satisfy them.”
Fyodor Dostoyevsky
After months of effort to reach a normal weight, I am rewarding my success with binge eating.
Pasta for dinner on Thursday, three bowls. Full bowls.
Pasta for dinner on Friday, two bowls. Full bowls.
Off to the gym. If two thousand calorie dinners can’t motivate, what can?
“It would have been so pointless to kill himself that, even if he had wanted to, the pointlessness would have made him unable.”
Franz Kafka
We head out to do the groceries. Shell spends a few minutes photographing my park so she has a pictorial record of just how bad a job I did.
“And suddenly I realised that I was no longer driving the car consciously. I was driving it by a kind of instinct, only I was in a different dimension.”
Ayrton Senna
We spend the afternoon reading.
Shell has a catch up with an old friend and we decide that a bottle of wine would be a good idea, but drinking last weekend took its toll.
We decide on the unthinkable.
Alcohol free wine.
“How but in custom and in ceremony
W.B. Yeats
Are innocence and beauty born?
Ceremony’s a name for the rich horn,
And custom for the spreading laurel tree.”
There is something about the ritual of opening a bottle and sharing a glass of wine. I can’t pretend that this wine is anything special, nor does it send that relaxing calmness through the body that alcohol so wonderfully does. There is certainly something ceremonial around the opening of the bottle, the pouring, and the conversation that ensues.
“Not all poisonous juices are burning or bitter nor is everything which is burning and bitter poisonous.”
Claude Levi-Strauss
Tonight’s ‘wine’ –
2022 Natuero Muscato (Catalans, Spain)
Sweet and not alcoholic. It is what it is.
Read and bed.
Sunday
“I’ll have plenty of time to rest when I die, but this eventuality is not yet part of my plans.”
Gabriel García Márquez
I am restless to train today, even though it is my rest day. It is all the over eating that is motivating me.
Shell reminds me how quickly I burn out when I train seven days a week. Injury. Illness.
I can’t afford to be sick two weeks before we head to Europe.
I could just eat less. That would also work.
You can’t out-train a bad diet.
“Nature is not a place to visit. It is home.”
Gary Snyder
I rarely miss Australia.
I do miss my family and friends, though I don’t have many. It is not a longing of absence, but the occasional sense that it would be nice to talk to them in person, or say nothing and be in their presence.
What I long for is the Australian bush. Its smell, its vastness. The quiet beauty.
The Australian bush in winter involves a stillness. There is a sense of ancient timelessness that calms everything. You feel small and temporary, yet it holds you and reminds your soul that you exist, for now.
Grace is hiking and she is sending my pictures. I am reminded of what I do not have here.
Nature.
“We are, after all, an animal that was brought into being on this biosphere by these processes of sun and water and lead. And if we depart too far from them, we’re departing too far from the mother, from our heritage.”
Gary Snyder
It is 46 degrees here, even if I braved the temperature there is sand. And where there is not sand, there is the city. A city built on oil by slaves from Africa and the Asia subcontinent. What nature provides for the spirit, the city drains like a vampire. It sucks you dry.
“Not long ago the forests were our depth, a sun-dappled underworld, an inexhaustible timeless source. Now they are vanishing.”
Gary Snyder
If there is a poet that captures nature for me, it is Gary Snyder.
I first encountered Snyder in Jack Kerouac’s novel, The Dharma Bums. He is idealised as the character Japhy.
And another weekend is done.
Work tomorrow.
Two weeks until we leave for Europe.
One more year in the desert.
“And the danger is that in this move toward new horizons and far directions, that I may lose what I have now, and not find anything except loneliness.”
Sylvia Plath