i've lost all ability to tell what day it is

 journal  2 Responses »
Sep 292010
 

Well, it's been over a week now, and there have been no more naked men strutting around the driveway. I share this news because people have been sending me text messages: encountered any nude or rude people today? insanity factor check? nekkid loon count, update!

In fact, I have not seen Mr Balloons at all, clothed or otherwise, since That Morning, otherwise known as the day the world went so crazy1 I began to wonder if I had any secrets worth the effort of inceptioning. Given I don't normally run into him particularly often, it's hard to tell whether this means he's back to his normal routine, or whether he's now enjoying a restful holiday tucked up in the locked ward of the closest psychiatric unit.

Instead I have been entertaining myself comparing the phone plans available through different providers.

They're universally crap. Dear Australian telcos: kindly get over yourself. I'm not actually sure which of you I loathe the most.

i'm pretty sure this bridge has greater structural integrity than any of the phone plans available to me

  1. There were quite a few decidedly crazy things that day, not least of which was Mr Balloons. And the tram delivering me from home to work, during peak hour, including sitting at one set of traffic lights while it cycled through red and green several times, in only 30 minutes, a time I have never matched even in non-peak hour. [↩]

because certainty is a false prize

 journal  Comments Off
Sep 242010
 
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Last weekend I took a leap of faith.

It's been eating at me all week long, and I've only just realised that the reason I'm edgy, and angry, and wanting to lash out, is because I've been feeling vulnerable and stupid.

There was something I was waiting to do — waiting for the right time, the right moment. There were good reasons to wait, every reason to wait and none not to, and I'd promised myself I would do just that.

But last weekend, on the spur of the moment, I changed my mind.

I've decided I refuse to regret this.

Do things without always knowing how they'll turn out. Because certainty is a false goal.

then posh spice got on my tram

 journal  Comments Off
Sep 202010
 

Internets, let me tell you about my morning. Because do you know what happened this morning? The world got its crazy on, that's what happened.

Hands up who remembers Mr LOOK! BALLOONS!?

I've seen him around a couple of times since that apparently alarmingly magical morning. He's never been quite so enthused since, and I've always been busy, so mostly we've just wandered past each other with an acknowledging nod or smile. Personally, I've been quietly of the opinion that he's a habitual drug user and gets mildly, amusingly, loopy in the process.

Um … yeah, maybe not quite.

This morning I walked out my front door — shaking my head and wondering what all the commotion was about, who was energetic enough to be making a fuss at 8am? — to find Mr Balloons standing at the mouth of the driveway.

STARK NAKED.

Another neighbour was trying to coax him into going back inside, and waved urgently at me to indicate I should go back inside or get away NOW. I scampered back inside (since I clearly wasn't getting past him for a bit), and as I did so I could hear the lady in #1 on the phone. "Yes, he's just outside. Yes, he says he's fine, but he obviously needs to go to a psychiatric institution. Yes, naked. His mood changes are quite abrupt."

I decided to stake out my balcony as a proper vantage point while I waited for an opportune moment to hunt down a tram. Which is how I managed a birds-eye view of Mr Balloons chasing two young girls pell-mell down the street. I don't know whether he was running after them simply because they ran, or for other more alarming reasons, but he was certainly intent on the chase and the neighbour who'd previously been trying to talk him into going inside was alarmed enough to drop his groceries in the middle of the street and dash off on an intercepting course. Two minutes later (I presume the girls had reached their house, or otherwise vanished from view) he was placidly enjoying the feel of the grass underfoot and asking ingenuously if he could go and talk to that person over there?

I now think Mr Balloons' loopiness is caused, not by self-medicating, but rather by stopping his legal meds.

not since the holocene

 journal  4 Responses »
Sep 122010
 
did i mention it was steep?

I may or may not have contracted some form of con lurgy despite barely managing an attendance. (Turns out a con in your home town? Surprisingly inconvenient. The dayjob expects you to earn your keep, instead of swanning around pretending you're a real grown-up writer.)1

So instead of actual, you know, content, on the producing of which my brain cannot focus because it keeps whispering that whisky would surely help our current circumstances, I give you photographic evidence of the Mongolian volcano what broke me, and bit me on the way down for good measure:

the volcano (long extinct)

The black shadow covering the lower third to half of the slopes is made up of fist- to head-sized rocks of black pumice, packed ankle to mid-shin deep. Initially I was concerned about the steepness of the slope winding me and making me too slow. The steepness wasn't a tenth of the problem that the lack of secure footing turned out to be.

did i mention it was steep?

I made it about a third of the way up, by which point I'd fallen quite a way behind all my surer-footed companions — and fallen so many times my dodgy ankle was considering how best it might club me unconscious and drag me back down to less challenging terrain. That was the point I realised that getting back down was always more difficult than climbing up in the first place, and if my ankle twisted itself one more time I was going to have to come down riding on someone's back. Or scooting on my backside the whole way.

the view from one-third the way up

So I turned back. And I was right: coming down was much, much harder. I should totally have commandeered a piggyback, because as it happened I ended up falling, slipping, sliding, riding a wave of tumbling pumice, and, yes, scooting down on my backside a good portion of the way. I'm counting myself lucky that my only real injury was a mildly-aching ankle and a palm gashed open by a toothy chunk of pumice.

  1. Probably just as well. Not sure I could've pulled off that sort of pretence for more than half a day anyway. [↩]

if you launch it, they will come

 journal, shadow bound  8 Responses »
Sep 062010
 
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Did you know, that if you announce a launch of your book, and invite people to said launch, they'll actually attend?

Normal people will find my amazement at this fact the astonishing part of the above statement, but I'm pretty sure it's been documented several somewheres that writers are, in point of fact, just a smidge nuts at the best of times, so go with me on this.

I was expecting a modest handful of the usual suspects, including the drop-ins lured by Tessa's and my smuggling in of cupcakes in defiance of Melbourne Convention Centre's food dictatorship. Lovely Little Cupcakes cupcakes, each of them with a small golem-shaped man1 on their luscious (decidedly lethal) frosting.

I don't know if word of those cupcakes tore through the convention centre or what, but there were more than just the usual suspects in attendance. There were even people I didn't actually know in the audience. Now that just broke my brain. (In a good way.) This was truly excellent, though, as it meant the two free copies of Shadow Bound went to people who hadn't already bought a copy on account of having known me for at least a decade.

There was also a Mysterious Box of Mystery, donated courtesy of the mighty Tess:

which contained an alarming quantity of a special golem-shaped edition of vanilla snap cookies:

otherwise known as a butter singularity

I believe I may have actually inflicted death by butter on a significant member of the international writing community. Um…oops?

  1. well, normal people would have called him gingerbread man-shaped — but gingerbread man, golem, what's the difference, really? [↩]