My Australia

"you've got mental problems", I said to my Dad, "because there is absolutely no system of measurement in the surfing world that calls that three foot". My dad has a tendency to do that, over judge the surf, and call it wrongly too. If it's smooth he'll say it's pumping. It might be one foot, but in his mind it's pumping, he's all about the conditions, and not the actual waves. And no matter how well I know this, I still get suckered in, like yesterday, it was "three foot and pumping", and I sprinted to the beach, stopped, and, sucking in air, saw that it was one foot, one foot but smooth, the conditions were good.

I know today. Its one foot, but it's coming in in beautiful little lines. There isn't a cloud in the sky and the wind is a cold South Wester. I know this day, I know these conditions. These conditions say to me that the swell is growing, that the wind will pick up, and by this afternoon there will be some waves. It's a typically Autumn day. Some days in winter, when the sou' wester blows and there are high cumilo nimbus clouds moving fast in the sky, it means that it is snowing eight hours away in the Australian Alps. We know the wind.

I guess this is what it means to me to be Australian. I've been thinking about this. I don't really buy into all of that Gallipoli shit, Australian values, mateship and all the rest. At the end of the day, every society, every peoples on earth value their friends, mateship, and as for a special 'Australian' way to fight military battles, well you show me a fighting force that doesn't give it their all. That's not a national trait, thats fight or die, that's a simple primordial instinct borne out of years of hunting, being food and fighting battles.

No, to me, to be Australian is my connection to the land. And that is also what it means to me to be from Copacabana. I know this place, I know the trees and the flowers and the grass. I know if its going to be hot or cold just by looking out of my bedroom window. And I know the winds. I ride them backwards, I see where they come from, I see what they are going to bring us. I travel the gusts and today I head south west, back along past sydney, out to the Blue Mountains, across the western plains, then i skim back across the Murray Darling basin, and swing seawards, my arc having reached its western most limit. Then I swing back towards the sea and i spin and spin and spin and i shoot back, over the sea, heading north west. And I push down on the waters surface, and my effort makes little bumps, and these little bumps join together and make bigger bumps, and now I go faster and faster and see that the bumps have formed swell and I rush forward and land back in Copacabana and im looking out to see. And I know that there will be swell coming, at some time today.

My Australia is an affintiy with the land. It's not a set of values. It's not borne out of violence. It's not noble men sacrificing their lives in the furtherance of an evil empire. Its the trees, its the birds, its the wind. We are slaves to the wind.

Brainfreeze, Brainfry and Thunder Thighs, Thunder Thighs?

Howdy, ha ha, hi there.

Oh its been a while and I haven't been far. I haven't strayed further than ten kilometres from my nest since I last pretended to speak through the application of my fingers onto the keyboard. Physically. Externally. But mentally, internally, well haven't I travelled far. Mental gymnastics we could call it, cerebral stretches, hummph, one two three, hwaagh, four five six. Where were we? Oh yeah, mental gymnastics.

I'm pretty quiet here during the week. I read and surf, eat food, sometimes work, but not often, watch movies. There is a new bar in Copacabana, the first one that we've had, ever. It's called the Fubah, which apparently is old Army parlance for, "Fucked Up Beyond All Hell", Fubah. On a Friday they put on a happy hour for the tradesmen, and with the slightly reduced beers we get meatballs and corn cobs and chips, little snacks to sweeten the deal. So we usually go there for a few beverages (pronounced Bev - er - ah - jez) and then onto whatever comes next. Lately there have been lots of different things coming next, but the common thread linking all of them together is alcohol and drugs. Lots of the latter and lots of the former.

Beer, wine, cocaine, champagne, ecstacy, tequila, LSD.

Someone I know had some acid and went up to the local shopping centre with their shirt tucked in, just to test their mental strength. He saw heaps of people that he knew and just barely held his shit together. Thats the most popular misconception with acid, its not this wonderous trip where you see brilliant snorlaxes and dance with great swans coloured in pink. You just lose your shit. This guy, who may or may not have been me, describes it as thus:
"Imagine running up the front of you, from pubis to sternum, is a corset. This corset is done up with shoelases. When you take acid the shoelases unravel, undo, and if they give way the corset busts open and your sanity rushes out like a big screaming banshee, waaaaaaaaaah, and the poor cosmic traveller is left sucking his thumb in the nude in the middle of the shops."
When the acid wears off you go back to normal, for the most part. That is, unless your one of the unlucky ones, who stay there. Well this guy in the shopping centre said that he was held on by one strand of the last shoelace, and there were moments when he wanted to just scream, run, pretend to be an airplane, eat kids. But he didn't, he held his shit together.

Cocaine. Cocaine's greatest effect is that it makes you want more cocaine. It also makes you want beer and cigarettes and to talk and screw and then fifteen minutes later it wears off and you feel pretty shit. All in all, totally overrated. That said, I don't know many people who are able to say no to a line offered to them. It's not good, but it tricks you into thinking that it's good. I've never bought cocaine.

Ecstacy is ok. Its biggest problem is that it will keep you awake, it will keep you wanting to be awake, and can be quite moorish. Most benders are fueled with ecstacy. If you're having a drink, you can have a half a pill and that will keep you going, without any really noticable side effects. You'll probably drink until four in the morning and pass out and wake up feeling pretty good. If you have two at once and then a few more throughout the night, you'll stay awake, make jokes, get weird, go to Kincumber pub as it opens, wake up on the kitchen floor as your brothers are getting ready for school on Monday morning. Then you'll come down while the surf is really good, and spend the next two days trying to explain to yourself, via the conduits of your younger brothers, what a bender is, why you do them, and why they shouldn't.

Thunder thighs? I was dating a girl with short legs. They weren't big legs, but because they were short they were a little thick. Anyway, I was with one friend at the Bowling Club and it was just the two of us, and we found ourselves both text messaging instead of engaging in conversation with eachother. I had a plan. Let me send his text and he could send my text, and neither person knew who it would be sent to, so keep it random, and we were allowed to write anything. I wrote a story about how someone at work kept on stealing my vegemite sandwiches and it was making me so mad, and I wish, just pray, that one day Tommo would get his own vegemite sandwiches, love Jeff. My friend wrote, "Hey Thunder Thighs, when am I going to get to smash your box again". Thunder Thighs. And I don't need to tell you who that was sent to.

Wherein is Recounted the Spectacularly Unpleasant Manner by which the Kookaburra Passed Into the Unknown

Like all tales this one will start with a preface. This may seem like a parable, but in fact is a tale recounted to me and a table of my contemporaries the Sunday just past. It is a simple story, but one with many profound ramifications, and if one was of the predilection to do so, one could ponder the story for the rest of their days and discover the true meaning of existence. One could, I couldn't. The story requires three actors - a pond, a large plastic bowl and a kookaburra.

So to reconstruct the story we must imagine a pond in a backyard. This could be your backyard, and this could be your pond, and you may imagine them as they are, despite the fact that they are not, they belong to Steve. Whether the pond is in a backyard or not is immaterial, I am merely trying to set a stage, paint a visual picture. What we require next for the story to progress is a large plastic bowl, in that smokey clear plastic, which is so big that you could quite easily sit it on your head and spin it around, maybe getting ten revolutions as easily as you like. Now place the bowl into the pond, floating so that any passers-by would be able to pass time by throwing pebbles into the bowl, that is, the bowl is facing up. There were no passers-by, but I merely want you to know how the bowl was laying - it's quite important to the story. Now the third player in this story is a kookaburra, quite young, who is hungry, as birds often are, and thristy, as they less often are. And that is all we need to make this story. Are you ready?

Ok, so the thirsty kookaburra is looking for something to drink. They can drink from many vessels, watering cans, tires laying on their sides, the bottom water catching part on terracotta pot plants, basically any container that has caught rain water. Or tap water, or bottled water (although this is a less likely scenario), or water where there are baby mosquitos (although this is a more dangerous scenario - given the dangers malaria poses to the developing world). This kookaburra needs not worry about any of things i've listed above, or the myriad of other water sources, as it has spotted a pond to drink from. Ponds are ideal as they contain more water, making them slightly less stagnant, which is better for the kookaburra's health, and he can avoid baby mosquitos, I guess not so much because malaria is a problem kookaburras have to deal with (kookaburras and malaria inhabit different continents), but because they'd be all gross and squirmy to swallow.

So the kookaburra spots the pond and flies down for a drink. He spots the bowl in the middle of the pond, decides that there is where he wants to land, and comes in feet first to take a much needed drink. He comes accross the top of the bowl, with the idea that he wants the fronts of his claws to face out of the bowl so that he can take a drink. He comes accross the bowl, lands on the rim, and as he does the bowl flips up and traps him underneath it. Because the bowl was so large, its rim was much wider than it's base, which was all that was floating on the water, because it was a little denser than normal because of the micro and macro summer plant growth, algae and weeds and the like. What happens next is one of two scenarios, both equally likely to me, as I'm no expert on kookaurras and their abilities in the water so i'll put forward the two possible scenarios I came up with:

1. The kookaburra gets flipped into the water and cannot swim all that well. The water is thick with algae, and, nevertheless, they aren't the best divers. He stays afloat for as long as he can, until his feathers get too heavy and he drowns.

2. The kookaburra stays afloat and sees a little sunlight through the opaque plastic. He deems that this be his best path to salvation, and flies frantically into the glow. He bashes himself to death on the tupperwear, which is such good quality plaastic no bird can get through it, not even a kookaburra.

My friend Steve saw the plastic container from his balcony when it was floating and assumed it was blown in from a neighbours balcony. By the time he got down there to retrieve it, minutes, hours, days, doesn't matter, he found it upside down and with a dead kookaburra inside. The kookaburra's death was no doubt a frantic one, like all animals kookaburras seek to preserve their own life for as long as they can, as it is nice being alive, and im sure it wanted to pass its little kookaburra genetic material onto some offspring. There is nothing noble in death. I killed a pig last year as a part of my rural France experiment and it squealed and kicked and tried to stay alive, even though a farm boy with a hair lip sneer had plunged a knife into it's neck. That experience made me physically ill, and i'll write about it later in piece called, "Death in the Afternoon", thank's Ernest.

So why have a chosen such a morbid tale to kick off this tale? Well, the realisation that death can be just waiting around the corner for you is one of the most liberating things you can ever realise. It is what started me on my global adventures, it's made me not want anything resembling a job, in fear that I might be wasting one of my precious minutes here on Earth. This blog is going to be about travel, about enjoying yourself, about living in the particular way I have chosen. It's the very rough, long, copy for a book I hope to write in the distant future, and the draft copies of my future university assignments. I hope you enjoy it.