When Did Narcissism Become A Life Goal?

What’s the difference between these two statements.

I’d like you to listen to me.

You must listen to me.

Pretty obvious really, I’m sure you all picked it up. One is a request, the other a command. In the first the choice lies with the questionee, the power dynamic tilted a little in their favour. The second statement attempts to take the power from the questionee and give it all to the questioner. You must… are words used to gaslight people into thinking they have no choice. Keep that nuance in mind, it’ll help guide you through this rambling rant.

Take a few minutes to think about who really has the power in a consumer society. The consumer, right? If a company is crap, if the words customer service is a contradiction in terms, just go elsewhere. Surely a company that sucks will die a quick ignominious death. So, it begs the question, why don’t we feel like we have any power? The answer is simple and complex.

Simple answer is because we don’t act as one to send a united message to those companies and the politicians who enable them.

The complex answer will take a bit longer. Maybe read it over a cuppa.

I rarely watch commercial television. I’ve generally got better things to do with my time than watching fake people pushing fake crap. Working as a dog’s body for an advertising company in my teens and then later merchandising for a decade or so has made me quite cynical of advertisers and media. Particularly wording. The last time I was forced to watch a couple of hours of commercial television, I counted between 9-11 commercials in each break. That’s annoying for most but, just as studying film analysis can kill one’s love of cinema, I can’t watch a commercial without mentally noting every trick of language, each ambiguous promise. As I watched, dissecting each ad with a machine gun checklist from the Liar’s handbook. Every ad has its own agenda and uses one or more of the hundreds of little psychological hooks to catch your attention and make you part with the dollars. No matter how different the product, they all carry two common messages. You need this want. You can have a perfect life.

No friends? Download this app and never meet face to face. Exhausted? Drink this fizzy coffee substitute with growing medical warnings. Depressed? Drink that, take this and do that. Anxious? Rage issues? You’re not yourself without this chocolate sugar hit.

Never has the concept been more succinctly described than in the old graffito, “Consume. Be silent. Die.”

To the multi-millionaires and billionaires hoarding all the money, the perfect world is one where the workers, the poor, basically anyone with less cash, buys their shit, doesn’t complain or ask questions, and dies when enough cash and life has been wrung from them.

Mostly the BUY message is wrapped in palatable veneers, often perfect people in perfect places living the perfect worry free life. I wonder if people can tell the difference between wants and needs anymore? Perhaps the propaganda is working.

When did this brainwashing start? I’m pointing the finger squarely at the 80’s. Here’s my theoretical time line. Not sure if this is causation or correlation, maybe share your thoughts in the comments.
When I was in my preteens and teens, the worst insult you could say to someone was, “You really love yourself.” The nuance was a jab at their arrogance and self-centeredness. Selfishness was abhorrent back in the day. We’d reserve the insult for bullies, narcissists and sociopaths because back in the 70’s, such character flaws were considered just that. Flaws.

They’re still destructive today, but nowadays it’s considered a valuable characteristic. In a world where we are reduced to numbers and empathy is stripped from society, we lose the glue that holds communities together. For example: If you’re a narcissistic sociopath, with the self-absorbed mindset of a spoiled child, who divides and bullies people for material gain, they’ll make you President of the USA. Hell, half the USA will believe God sent you as a saviour.

So, How did we get here?

Concurrently, in the 70’s and early 80’s there was a new understanding of mental health and the need for some self care and so the meaning of the phrase, “Love yourself” became a mental health mantra with a very different meaning. So far, so good. The english language is robust enough that most people understood the differences context made of the words. Then in the mid to late 80’s we had the insightful movie, Wall Street. In a masterclass of irony, Gordon Gekko rants, “Greed is good!” and a new movement began, started by people with no grasp of that irony, where Greed and self engrandment became virtues, compassion, empathy, cooperation and equality were at best weaknesses and at worst sins in the Reformed Church of Mamon. Through the 90’s this new doctrine became reinforced over and over, every advertisement, every governmental policy, every electronic media assaulting our minds was geared towards one thing. Grab what you can and don’t let go. Most people still knew that community, empathy and cooperation were the glue holding together society. I mean, you’d have to have your head up your arse not to see the importance of real relationships, built on mutual respect and understanding. More and more people seemed not to care.

This is the point that Love Yourself gained its current interpretation. Look after number one, because everyone else is selfish. Look after number one and trample anyone in your way. People are commodities. Use them for financial and social benefit. and the big one, No one deserves your help.

This change in definition coincided with World Wide Web’s arrival and the subsequent algorithms that are pitting us all against each other. I believe, in the history of mankind, there has never been such a powerful tool, that’s potential for good has been so corrupted. We have monetized the greatest communications revolution and reduced it to an arena where we fight each other, while the billionaires count their fat profits. The internet has become the temple to our greed as a species, filled with homemade shrines to narcissism, built to garner worshippers and disregard the needs of others.

Is there a cure for this contagious narcissism? Only community, empathy and hope. Without those, what’s really left to live for?

So, What next?

Hi folks, it’s been a while. So what’s been happening in your life? I’ve been busy, working hard towards my goals while surrounded by a field of entropy. It’s my curse, everything I touch breaks. The flip side of that is I’ve become skilled at fixing things, often without the need for duct tape. In between all this breaking and fixing, I’ve been doing my day job as a Disability Support Worker and finishing my book.

Yes, you heard that right, after a complete rewrite or two, and a crippling case of imposter syndrome, I managed to finish Harmony. It weighs in at about 125,000 words, and if you want hints to the story, I’ve said enough about the plot for now.

Since last I wrote, I’ve moved from VP to P, ie President of Vision Writers’ Group, here in Brisbane. I’ve been a member for nigh on 15 years and it has been the best thing to happen to my writing since I discovered the typewriter. If you’re writing and not consulting and talking with other writers you’re missing out on some deep dives into the craft.

Among the activities the group does is an annual writers’ retreat, whispered of in Brisbane writing circles with reverence generally reserved for urban legends. Organising it is great fun, and exhausting, and I suspect touches the sliver of Machiavelli in me.

Along with literary and employment adventures, my wife and I have travelled, most recently to New Zealand. The trip was everything and more than we hoped for, and I have more than a few stories of adventure and misadventure.

So 2024, where did that come from? I have thoughts. You’ll be hearing a lot more from me this year, I’ve things to say. You don’t have to read it, but maybe, just maybe it’ll be just what you need to hear.

Hope your world is beautiful,

Chris K

Dealing With Our History.

*Now I feel I should give a trigger warning. This post contains mention of a historical massacre. I like to use humour in my writing but this post isn’t humorous. Don’t expect funny asides or tongue in cheek facetiousness This isn’t funny. The subject isn’t a laughing matter. Things are going to get heavy in the next few paragraphs, and if it offends you, I’m not particularly sorry. No festering wound ever got healed by ignoring it.

A few memorials.

I do a fair bit of travelling around this country, and if you keep your eyes, heart and mind open, it doesn’t take long to get an inkling of what’s meant by the double edged phrase, “Australia has a black history”. I’ve seen quite a few monuments and memorials to our murderous history and the concerted effort that was made to eradicate the original inhabitants of this land I love. The emotions they elicit are mixed, to say the least. This side of our past wasn’t taught to me in school and the slow revelation of it over the years has been hard. It’s not easy to face the fact we weren’t always the historical heroes. Sometimes, we were the villains and we all still benefit from those evil acts. It’s no wonder so many white Aussies have a hard time facing it. It’s not pretty.

Recently, I was travelling through the town of Gin Gin. It, like so many places in Aus, has a troubled past. It has a good example of how the narrative presented around the country is unbalanced.

In Gin Gin is a place where you can park your caravan for a night and camp for free. It has toilets, a driver reviver and toilets. The park also has three monuments, set out in a triangle like a no frills Stonehenge, and it offers a particularly one sided history of the early interactions between settlers and the local indigenous peoples. The site says more by what’s missing than by the stone memorials themselves. As they say, history is written by the victors.

One, dedicated in 1959, says a lot about the attitudes of that time. The relevant bits read, “…and commemorates the pioneer settlers of this area William Forster and Gregory Blaxland… Gregory Blaxland was murdered by hostile blacks…” Another stone memorial, erected in 1992 is dedicate to two boys, John and Peter Pegg, aged 12 and 14 “…who were speared to death by aborigines near here on the 4th of June 1849, being the first white people to die in the Kolan Shire…” It hints that attitudes hadn’t changed a great deal in the 33 years between both memorials’ erections.

The fact that no monument joins the others telling the history of the settlers indiscriminate retaliation against the locals speaks volumes. There’s nothing to commemorate the atrocity that came next. Nothing memorialising what is now referred to as the Paddy Island Massacre. No one knows exactly how many were killed but it is estimated to be at least in the hundreds. Men, women and children. Nothing is there to represent the other side of the story. No stone cairn exists expressing the idea that maybe the locals didn’t like losing their ancestral home or being driven from the land that they had walked for thousands of years.

Perhaps a monument to the massacre should be added, for balance, you know. Just saying.

Now I should stress again, Gin Gin is not alone in the sin of omission. It’s merely the latest example I’ve come across. Think of it as an allegory. An example of something amiss in the culture of our nation. Strip away the “whataboutism” and excuses, and just accept we have a problem. To paraphrase an oft used verse from the bible, The truth will set you free.

Personally, I believe it’s only by facing the past, by confronting our troubled history, that any progress can be made in the lives of our indigenous peoples and our national identity. We can’t continue to pay lip service and avoid the fact our past contains brutal darkness. The evidence is everywhere, but you have to look for it. We can’t keep turning away from it, hoping the wrongs will just go away. If we don’t confront it, we run the risk of repeating the sins of our forebears. I believe the persistence of racism in Australia and rise of far right political parties and neo-nazi groups is a direct result of this historical obfuscation.

I also believe we can be so much better than this as a nation. It won’t be easy, but with empathy, with open hearts and minds and hands, we can heal this old wound.

I hold onto this dream and hope you can join me in sharing this vision of a brighter future.

So a funny thing happened on the way to the poop bin.

So a number of people have asked how I injured myself back in December 2020. I can give you the short answer or the long answer. your choice. Both the long rambling version and the Readers Digest versions are below. Skip to the end for the short version. Be warned though: Cute puppy pictures ahead.

The Long Version.

Each day my wife and I take our dogs for a walk. Zoe, our older girl, doesn’t like to stray too far from us. Lily, our 8mth old border collie, is a working breed, so she needs to drain the batteries or risk becoming like an ADHD preteen whose just guzzled a half a dozen energy drinks. She needs an off lead area with a fenced perimeter, the larger the better. Luckily, down the road are two sports fields and the lower field’s surround by a 90cm (3ft). fence. It’s quiet most of the time and we can release the dogs.

Zoe follows us around while Lily has the whole oval to run around and work off the energy before she hits psycho puppy critical mass. Even before we get to the oval, two lapwing plovers stalk the puppy, despite her being 200 metres from their nest. It appears they’ve decided chasing and swooping her is mandatory. Now at first this was alarming, but it’s been going on for a month now, so we currently have the plovers incorporated into her hectic exercise program. They never hurt her, getting to within a metre before swooping away, left or right, while Lily does a leap for them a second or two later. She tries but hasn’t got the proverbial “Hope In Hell” of catching one. She seems to enjoy the game as much as the wildlife.

• 

  We interrupt this story with some pictures of Lily as a puppy.

• 

  You may now return to your reading pleasure.

Now being responsible pet owners, we ensure the oval is left like we were never there, if you know what I mean. So, responsible pet owner that I am, I pick up the poops in a biodegradable bag and carry the biohazard to the nearest bin, which is over the fence and 40 metres from the oval.

On this particular day, Lily managed to do a simultaneous standing back flip with a half pike whilst in mid defecation, spreading poopy pellets like an offensive machinegun. She still managed to miss the plover by 3 metres, but the aerial gymnastics was a site to behold (Pop withstanding).

So all of this I witnessed from the far side of the oval, sitting comfortably in the shelter marked “SIN BIN”. I could have left it there, like an arsehole, but let’s face it. Who wants to be responsible for some kids scarred psyche if they end up faceplanting young Lily’s faeces while playing the sports next weekend? Nor as an old fart of a particular generation, can I make the wife retrieve the offending scats. Therefore, with dragging feet, I left the comfort of the aforementioned Sin Bin and made the long walk over to the scattered crap.

Now you may be wondering what goes through a Part Time Lunatic’s mind as he bags the malodorous pellets, but if not, maybe skip the next paragraph.

It’s the big weird nature of this universe that goes through my mind at times like this, and how I see metaphors everywhere. So with biodegradable bag as a glove, hunting flung pieces of shit from the grass, I was reminded of the “Find It” game we play to distract Lily, casting food into the grass so she can scavenge for it. There’s a strange symmetry to that. Something less like metaphysics and more like Neil from the Young Ones. “Throw the treats on grass. Dog eats treats. from grass. Dog poops on grass. I pick it up off the grass… Me. The dog. The grass. We’re are all there in some sort of shitty cosmic cycle. Whoa deep.”

Yeah, that’s pretty much how my brain works.

Anyway, having bagged and tagged the shitty evidence I headed for the bin, way over yonder. Standing between me and the responsible disposal of the doggy fallout, there lies the fence. The fence has a gate where we came in, but it’s about 60 metres away and walking to it adds two sides of a triangle and 100 metres onto the quest to cast the poop into the metaphorical Mt Doom. I also lack the ability to bend time and space, and bring the gate into line with the bin. So there’s really only one other option; follow a straight line, over the fence and onwards to the bin behind the clubhouse.

Usually the aforementioned obstacle offers me the opportunity to leap over the metre high fence one handed, land lithely on the ground on the other side and prove to myself and the world that I’m not that old. While I’m no longer as agile as my 16 year old self who could leap it in a single bound, I am still as agile as my 25 year old self, surely!

The universe clearly decided it was time I put that delusion to bed.

I bent my knees and sprang. The launch was perfect, hand clutching rail and top of poop bag simultaneously, my feet sailed over the bar clearing it by a couple of inches. Now it may have been the combined fumes from the poo in the bag and the park’s adjacent, water and sewerage effluent settling ponds, or perhaps it was the ambiguous smell of fruit buns from the nearby factory, but whatever the cause, the effect was all muscle memory and regular memory of the need to bend the knees to cushion the landing was momentarily snatched away. The amnesia lasted just long enough for the awkward impact. There was no bending…There was no cushioning…

On touchdown, the full force of gravity exerted itself on my good self, the force travelling up from the ground and focusing itself right where the lower bones of my left leg, (fibula and tibia to be exact) meet the upper leg bone and shouted, quite audibly, “YOU’RE NOT BLOODY 25 ANYMORE. ACT YOUR #@©£¡&Ñß AGE.”

I bounced.

Just once.

But I swear I bounced.

I bounced like a deflated basketball, with a pitiful plffffoing, before falling flaccidly face first to ground, sprawled with a bag of foetid poop in one hand and a handful of turf in the other, my youth illusions and dignity shredded.

To add to the indignity a red meat-ant decided to latch onto my elbow while the pain of my knee fought its way upstream against the shock and humiliation to reach my brain. My lovely wife, Julie, offered me more sympathy than the maladroit fiasco deserved and took the poop bag like some shitty relay, to do the responsible disposal thing for me.

In the mean time I hobbled over to a nearby rock and sat dejectedly down to ruminate on the possible nature of the injury. ACL? Cartilage? Torn muscles? I didn’t think broken bones because I’ve never properly broken a bone before, (chipped an elbow once), so it couldn’t be that. Could it? Apparently yes, it could be exactly that.

While Julie walked home to get the car, I sat on my rock of depression, holding the dogs’ leads with two confused dogs, (Why aren’t we going anywhere?) and contemplated my life choices, facing the reality that I’m not in my 20s (or30s or 40s) anymore.

So that’s the long version.

The Short Version

I fell down and went crack.

Conclusion.

So, turns out I had two fractures, effectively rendering me immobile for a couple of months. Thanks 2020 for nothing. Don’t let the door hit you on the arse on the way out.

2020 was the worst year for pretty much everyone except those corrupt arseholes who’ve enjoyed making sterling profits off the misery of the world. I’m not going to look back on 2020 fondly, (except for the Tassie bit at the beginning.) I’m not going to look back in anger. But mostly I don’t want to look back in case it’s following me into 2021.

What mud?

The Epidemic Of Stupidity…from the Weekend Australian.

Just had someone in my Fakebook timeline, praising an article in the Weekend Australian titled “Paying for an epidemic of stupidity”,* that was so full of assumptions, misinformation and misdirection as to be incredibly dangerous.

In it, the author, Journalist Steve Waterson writes as though handling the Covid pandemic is easy. He postulates that even if the rate of infections was a thousand new cases each day it would take 17 years to infect everyone in Victoria. He points out that the population is growing by that number anyway.

Putting aside his obvious attitude that people are expendable and replaceable, and ignoring the other inaccuracies, it shows a fundamental misunderstanding of the maths, let alone a clear avoidance of the real time example of the dangers underestimating Covid19’s impact has that’s unfolding in the USA and Brazil. The numbers don’t stay static, Steve, they rise.

So since he’s going to play with the numbers, I think I will too.

He’s clearly never heard of geometric progression, which is much closer to how a virus like this spreads. Here’s a quick lesson in maths for anyone tempted to believe this drivel. Let’s make it simple for this idiot.

This is how the maths of geometric progression works if you just let it run wild.

Let’s say 1 person infects 2 people day 1, two infect four day 2, 4 becomes 8, 8-16, 16-32-64-128 that’s week 1

128-256-512-1024-2048-4096-8192 and that’s week 2.

16384-32768-65536-131072-262144-524288-1048576 and that’s week 3.

2097152-4194304-8388608-16777216- and on the 5th day of week 4 we exceed the population of Australia.

In this worst case scenario taking the lowest percentage of death to cases of about 1.5% that means at least 382498 Aussies dead. This doesn’t take into account the long term and permanently disabled people who recover with major organ damage, (Lungs, heart and brain damage especially), which is a much higher percentage.

The article laments the money spent by Government and the inevitable economic impact the goes on to basically espouse this as an opportunity missed for mass euthanasia, because, and I kid you not, it would have been a better use of the money spent.

“Is it callous to suggest that’s too high a price to prolong what in some cases were lives of no great joy? What good might we have done with just a fraction of that $220bn, artfully applied? Would it not have been far better to spend a smaller, but still significant, sum on protecting and caring for the vulnerable and elderly to the very best of our abilities, and then, crucially, offering them the choice whether to accept that care?”

Now fair’s fair, he does try to present some reasonable arguments, which all sound great, as long as you consider the economics as the main justification for every decision and disregard the unprecedented nature of the crisis. In hindsight, mistakes have been made, but if hindsight was foresight, we’d never screw up.

On top of all this I’d just like to point out the “expertise” of the author, Steve Waterson: “Steve Waterson is commercial editor of The Australian. He studied Spanish and French at Oxford University, where he obtained a BA (Hons) and MA, before beginning his journalism career.” Math’s credentials, nil. Virology credentials, nil. Dickhead credentials, well established.Don’t buy into this crap.

I’m no expert, that’s a given, but I do understand enough to know that viruses don’t follow neat limits in transmission. I also know that if money is your greatest reason and justification for how you live your life, then you’re not a very nice human being.

Now while I have obviously used a bit of hyperbole, ( as the pandemic spread exponentially, you’d reach a point where it would slow as the only people the infected would be contacting would be other infected people,) the progression is still a damn sight closer to that kind of growth than to some magical, unicorn chasing status quo of exactly the same numbers every day for 17 years.

So before you start spreading this kind of article, please think, and show a little empathy, ’cause God knows, we need it now more than ever.

The Downside of Averting an Apocalypse.

I have a concern.

That concern I have is about what comes after this Covid-19 pandemic is finally over.

Sure, like most people I dream of when the lock-downs, social distancing and scent of hand sanitiser are no longer ubiquitous. I like social interaction in the real world as much as anyone, in small doses, and I want to choose the time, place and person. But desperate times etc, etc.

Photo by Korhan Erdol on Pexels.com

 

So Let’s don our face-masks and get into my fears.

Look, let’s assume that we all know this shit-storm could go either way.

1. Either we are going to do enough to stop a repeat of the Spanish flu in the early 20th century,

2. or we’re not going to do enough, this thing explodes and we all get hit by the social and economic debris.

If we take option two, and let this thing run riot, be prepared.

The consequences of our actions will bear fruit on the other side of this, for better or worse.

If you think people lost their shit over toilet paper and pasta sauce, how do you think people will respond to a the inevitable rationing that would have to follow the incapacitation or death of a large slice of society. We haven’t seen rationing on that scale for 80 years. Most of the people who remember wartime rationing will have died. In this particular plague, they are Death’s target demographic.

Photo by Mitja Juraja on Pexels.com

My concern is also for what will inevitably happen after this current blight passes if we do the right thing, head this apocalypse off at the pass. Will we quickly forget the current unfolding horror when we look back?

If experience and Midnight Oil have taught me anything, we’ve got a short memory.

When this is over, we can’t go back to business as usual. We’ve already lost 150,000 people and that number’s going to grow. We must remember right now, this moment. You’ve finally got the time to stop and think. How can you make the world a little better?

When this is passed, I can guarantee the tin foil hat brigade will arrive, supporting Trump regardless, and giving us all another 4 years watching the decline and fall of the USA into the bargain. Whichever way it goes, I can’t see it working out well for the US. Make America Great Again?

Take a look at every great civilisation in history and note what they all have in common. That’s right, they’re all history. What remains of those great civilisations are people. It’s the people that are the only thing that keeps the spark of societal evolution alive.

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Government shouldn’t be about helping yourself. Government should be about serving the people and improving their lives. Instead,they’ve been lining their pockets and making their rich mates even richer. If ever there was a time for empathy in government it’s now. Government should be a tool for the people, not a bunch of tools screwing the people.

We got selfish, here in Australia, the US, pretty much everywhere defined as “The West”, and we’ve got the leaders we deserve.

A nod here to Jacinda Arden, New Zealand’s PM,who is exactly the kind of leader the world needs. My message to the leaders of the world is, be like New Zealand.

In Australia, the LNP and #ScottyFromMarketing fall somewhere between NZ and the US of A in their response to the current crisis.

Credit where credit is due, the LNP may have come a little late to the party but they have brought some supplies. Hopefully they won’t try and leave before helping with the clean-up.

So now, we’ve got this chance, to avoid the Murdochracy, check for real facts, you know, backed by peer reviewed research, and for god’s sake,  don’t listen to Trump.

Let’s use this time wisely, people to think, to focus on what you can do to make a better world and then do the right thing.

Here’s some pictures to help you imagine a better world.

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As always, comment below, start an argument, whatever floats your boat, but know that I’m all out of tin foil.

Like, Share, Tell me I’m not alone in my concerns.

Bill

 

Let me tell you about Bill.

Bill was a genius. I met him soon after I was born. I don’t remember it, but my mum assures me I was there when the meeting took place. No-one took minutes, so I don’t know what was said. He was my brother.

I have a much loved sister Vikki, in between us in age, making me the unplanned number three.  I owe Bill so much, for so many things, including my name. Bill was 5 & 1/2 years old when he named me. My parents couldn’t agree on a name until he came home from school and said he’d told all his friends about his new baby brother, Christopher. And so, I was christened.

Bill is responsible for more than just my name, also moulding my sense of humour, my love of irony, feeding his little brother a steady diet of the Goon Show, Monty Python and Hitch Hikers Guide to the Galaxy. He introduced me to 2JJ, ABC’s new youth radio station, that became 2JJJ. Music by the Animals, Skyhooks, Tangerine Dream. I stole his tape of War of the Worlds, and played it until it died. He also taught me how to blow shit up, though I taught him a thing or two, I suspect. I gave him the formula for a highly unstable rocket fuel that I learned from a friend named Stephan Elliot, (Yes that Stephan Elliot). He and my step brother were mixing it on an old dishwasher my mother had hoped to sell as we were broke. The subsequent explosion destroyed the resale value of the appliance. The boys pleaded to mum, “Chris gave us the formula.”

Her reply sticks with me, “Well if you two are silly enough to listen to what your 11 year old brother tells you, you deserve what you get.”

Thing’s were tough at that time, and by Christmas we left my childhood home and my childhood behind.

He was 15 when my father (Bill senior) left, and the anger and bitterness hit my brother hard, as he knew of the abuse that our mum endured.

He’d spent my first 10 years, along with my mother and sister, protecting me from the awful things going on behind closed doors. My brother bore the burden and he bore it well.

He would prank me, from the first time I could understand April Fools, to trying to convince me bananas grow straight, but in Queensland, they have a machine that bends them, “And that’s why we call Queenslanders, Banana Benders.” Even now, his disinformation campaign bears fruit, as facts he gave me are disproven.

By age 18, he’d cut dad off completely, and my father, in-turn cut us off soon after. When I was 12, Bill senior sent us back home with an angry rant about things I didn’t understand. I still don’t.

It’s 6 month’s later when I next heard his voice, over the the phone. Mum had enough of his absent father shit and said, “Don’t you want to wish your son a happy birthday?” Restraint was in her voice. I believed it was a phone call for my birthday, protected from the hard truth again. He’d really rung to plead with mum for money. His new wife had left him, he was bankrupt, drunk and full of empty promises.

For the brief time we spoke he ticked the boxes, Happy Birthday, talk soon, get together later, bullshit, bullshit. See you soon was the last thing he said to me. It was the best thing he ever did.

Living with mum, sister and future Father inlaw in a unit in Artarmon, brother Bill and I shared a room. He put up with my somnambulism and I got to absorb his interests. We did science, abseiling and bushwalking together, though on hikes he would say sternly, “Keep up or get left behind.” Along the way he introduced me to the wonder of nature, as a rock hound and a lover of the Australian landscape he taught me a lot, some of it true. In every sense he was the father figure in my life, even after my mum remarried.

Did I mention Bill was a genius. After blitzing high school, he went to the Australian National University to study computer sciences, proudly declaring “I’m an ANUS (Australian National University Student)“. It sounded all very exciting, the stories he shared of Bush Week in Canberra and the pranks the students did, . There was a quiet, thoughtful rebellion in the things he said and did. His humour was shaped by the great British absurdists, and semester breaks, he would share them with me, his annoying little brother. I remember him bringing home Hitchhikers Guide To The Galaxy on cassettes, the original radio play, each episode stolen from the radio. We listened to the whole thing in the dark of our shared room, he on the top bunk, me on the bottom, both of us laughing at Douglas Adams’ genius.

The humour took a darker turn in the summer of 1976-1977. Having done so well in his first year, Bill was offered a bursary from the Commonwealth Bank, who saw the potential of his gift for programming. All he had to do was pass a medical and his uni costs would be covered for the next 3 years.

They took an X-ray. They found a shadow.

What did that even mean? To my 13 year old brain, shadows were the stuff nightmares were made of, but he reassured me with stories of x-ray errors. It was probably just something in his pocket. It’d all be okay.

It wasn’t.

Non Hodgkin’s Lymphoma. The words may as well have been Latin for me, and I can only imagine what went through Bill’s head. The choices were radiotherapy, which was a hard no, a school mate with Hodgkin’s Disease got leukaemia from radiotherapy and died from that. Option two was experimental. Chemotherapy. Jungle juice, he used to call it, owing to it’s lurid colour.

All through the ordeal he maintained his wit, sharpening it to a razors edge. When a surgeon accidentally pierced Bill’s lungs 3 times during minor exploratory surgery, a semi conscious Bill said, “Why don’t you get someone really qualified in here, like the janitor.”

For two years he endured being the guinea pig for the cancer researchers and he did go into remission for a while, but at a terrible cost to his health.  Come 1980, he had a relapse and when they suggested radiation again he told them to take their isotopes and the chemo and shove it as far as they could into their orifice of choice, (or words to that effect.) The specialist gave him 2 weeks to live. The prognosis was dire.

The prognosis was wrong.

During the hell of chemo, he married his fiancee, changed his diet and continued his degree, this time in Sydney. In that time he built a computer from scratch, wrote a lunar lander game for me and developed really interesting AI software working with a linguist for voice recognition.

Even through the shit storm that hit his life, he kept going and kept laughing. Even when smoke would rise from his fingertips as he soldered a circuit, the chemo having killed the nerves in his fingers, he’d joke about it.

He also knew how to cut to the core. He spoke the truth when the truth needed to be said. After I left home, in 1983, I was not looking after myself, smoking, drinking, smoking, sleeping around, sex and drugs and rock and roll. One day he said to me, “I don’t get it. I’m fighting to stay alive and you’re trying to kill yourself.” Those words stick with me to this day.

I learnt so much from him, at least 40 percent of it bullshit, but he never misled me in malice. If there was one phrase he beat me over the head with, whenever I would ask some stupid question he would say, “Look it up.” I spent hours with my head buried in an encyclopaedia, learning to learn for myself. Still, his lies come back to bite me, as I state a factoid and my eldest shoots it down. Thanks Bill, apples don’t get picked early and then get dyed red,

By the late 80’s Bill’s health began to deteriorate again, not from the lymphoma, but from the damage the chemo had done to his lungs. By then, I was living my own life, deep in a religious sect and afraid for his mortal soul. He was dying, and I wanted to preach to him. It did not go over well. “I don’t let atheists preach to me either,” he said.

The last time I saw him, he was seated on the lounge with an oxygen mask, exchanging quips and political opinion with our step father K. To watch the two of them debate was a thing of beauty, both masters of words and able to take on an argument from any side. Sometimes, you would listen and realise that they had swapped sides, now arguing for the opposition. His mind was sharp to the end and whilst he allowed his GP to track the decline, he refused all attempts by the cancer specialist to get anywhere near him. He’d survived ten years without them, 9 years and 50 weeks longer than they gave him credit for.

In 6th January 1990, William Kenneth Kneipp died of respiratory failure. He went out on his terms and when he was ready. He left an indelible mark on my life and I like to think, the way computer code is copied and replicated, that out there, in a million voice recognition apps, is a little piece of his code. Like graffiti scrawled on the virtual world for as long as we have computers.

He haunts me in so many ways. I see him in my eldest, in my nephew, and in myself. His life ripples on through others and I take comfort in that.

Sometimes, I dream he is alive, from time to time. We talk, discuss things going on in my life, things in the world, stories.

It’s been 30 years.

I miss him.

 

 

 

 

Goodbye Melbourne, Hello Bar, or Across the Strait and Down a Hole.

Over on Travels With An Old Fart, the journey to Tasmania continues. Will we survive Friday the thirteen after the disastrous days before?

via Goodbye Melbourne, Hello Bar, or Across the Strait and Down a Hole.

How to Write, and Fight a Black Dog at the Same Time.

Or How Did I Get HereDepression is a funny thing. (Funny weird, not funny haha.) It hits you at the weirdest times, coming and going when it can do the most damage. This post is kind of a continuation of several conversations I’ve had about  the old Black Dog, depression, on this blog.

I’ve been struggling with bouts of depression since I was ten, which anyone who knows me will recognise correlates to the first major emotional crisis in my life. Before that, my life was pretty much sunshine and rainbows, with the occasional Night Terrors to keep things interesting. Standard upper middle class nobody living in Sydney. There was a lot of shit going on in the background that my tender little heart was shielded from. My mum was that battered shield.

When the darkness hits, writing becomes like swimming through molasses and it’s a chore just to make it through the day’s necessities, let alone drag the words, kicking and screaming from my head. Not that I don’t write all the time, mostly poetry, lyrics and scribbles in one of the many notebooks I have on the go at any given time. These include dialog, scene ideas and mind-maps, all of which become useful once the Black Dog gets his teeth out of my arse.

Photo by Lisa Fotios on Pexels.com

My advice to writers who struggle with the deep dark blues is don’t edit your work when you’re down there. Editing whilst suffering depression is dangerous and you’re just as likely to burn every copy in existence. Been there, done that. Back in the 8o’s, I destroyed every copy of Parallel, 125,000 words worth, burning the paper copies and literally blowing up the floppy disks with fireworks. (Yes I’m that old!)

Photo by Eugene Shelestov on Pexels.com

Luckily, I couldn’t destroy the copy in my head. Memories are more persistent than a digital format and more than twenty years later I rewrote it.  (It’s in rewrites at the moment.)

More than a decade after burning the novel, I began to write again. The first thing I wrote was a rock musical called Tug Of War, all about the inner voices that pull us from side to side. The words seemed to flow, bursting from my heart and splashing onto the pages, the melodies filling my head, though I have precisely zero musical ability, the tunes still rattle around in my skull today. Whatever it is that drives my passion to create pictures with words, it was in full flight. Songs of love and loss, doubt and guilt, it all appeared effortlessly, perfectly expressing all I wanted to say about the redemption of reaching out to each other, and the tragedy of isolation.

At the time I was part of a church and the script had a strong Christian theme, however the deeper theme was depression and struggle against those accusing voices in your head “Useless, hopeless, different”. 

Soon after completing the script, the church imploded and Tug Of War, the musical, was shelved. Depressing as this was, it paled in the face of the existential crisis that followed. The upheaval which followed the theological micro-wars saw myself and my family ignored by both factions, at a time where I was having a nervous breakdown and my wife was having to live with me.

Of both factions it can be said, “You can tell a tree by its fruit.” I’ve struggled to find a church ever since. It taught me to take every person at face value, once I dealt with the initial separation anxiety. I saw that everyone had their own shit to deal with and when push came to shove, most people are doing the best that they can with the equipment life’s given them. I don’t judge people. I’ve learned that the road in life everyone takes is dependant on a million little things and thousands of big things that teach us all how to survive in the world we know.

After that, I rediscovered my love of the Australian bush, and it was during this time I began to grow up.

So another decade goes by and while struggling with the usual demons, I fight back the depression and begin writing Parallel again. Twenty something years on and I still remember the whole thing. I finish the first, very rough draft in three years while working a day job and learning to re-enter society as a productive member. I joined a writers’ group, Vision Writers. I submitted the first couple of chapters to what is now affectionately referred to as, The Bitter Sweet Table of Judgement. They didn’t hate it, the 8 other authors giving advice and corrections, pages came back covered in red marks and comments. In that moment I learned more than I had in the decades of writing before.

So now, more than ten years after joining Vision, 45 years since I banged out my first story on my sister’s toy typewriter, where am I on the whole epic 55 year journey in this meat chariot.

Well, the writing’s improved, though the crippling fear of rejection is still a constant struggle. Over the years I’ve managed to hide it’s more inconvenient effects, more or less. This would, of course, not be possible without my wife and partner of 30 years, Julie who has seen me at my very worst and yet miraculously still says I love you.

I’ve written a sci-fi novel and nearly completed the 5 novella rewrite of the whole Parallel series, (about 270,000 words). I’m having fun writing a travel blog called Travels With An Old Fart, where I get to practise the lost Australian art of Telling A Yarn. I write of my adventures and misadventures, travelling around Australia with my patient wife and caravan in tow. I’m mostly happy, in between wrestling with the old black dog, and I’m getting help with training the bitch.

So as for those writers, or anyone struggling with depression, my advice boils down to this. Let people in. Find your person. They’re out there.

For everyone else, look out for each other and treat strangers as though one day, you might be friends.

Black Dog Institute has lots of resources if you want to know more.

Lastly, if you can’t cope or just need a chance to vent, contact someone like

·         Lifeline 13 11 14

·         Suicide Call Back Service 1300 659 467

·         Kids Helpline 1800 55 1800

·         MensLine 1300 78 99 78

and talk.

Alternatively, or additionally, find you’re people.

I did.

My main person ❤

My peeps

Another of my people. The bloke, not the goanna.

Also, if you feel like this might help someone else, why not share it on one of the links, below.

 

Saving a Penguin from Disaster, or Murphy’s Law Bites

via Saving a Penguin from Disaster, or Murphy’s Law Bites