I cannot draw it, though I tried -
cross-hatches and lines and smudges and hard-scrawled score,
looking no more than what they are -
but the mirror-green of the broken surf
behind the near-black of the bodies climbing
in and out of a shorebreak
providing a sound track of bright white noise

scrambled eggs and smoked fish
on toasted homemade bread,
with Worcestershire sauce,
Tabasco, and
soaked capers.
Apt, perhaps.

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Onshore breeze on sharp-bright sand,
his and hers jeans, fashionable and inappropriate,
pass by bared white-to-red-to-brown skin.

Blinks into the winter’s summer-sun,
answered by the blink
of a passing light plane’s running shadow

answered by shadows and shimmers in the green swell,
answered by a bird tilting, dropping, folding itself at speed
down into the waves, under the water, for sustenance,
like me.

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Okay, so I’ve just created another blog. Seeing as this one I’m posting to now is just flooded with my outpourings, naturally I needed something else to catch the over-spill. It’s only in the development stage at the moment, and is meant to serve a specific purpose (which thus far has been to keep me spending hours deciding on just the right overall colour-tone, and picking font and font-hover colours of such sublety that my colour-blind eyes are screaming at me, “IT’S BLUE, FARKYA! CAN’T YOU SEE IT’S BLUE?! WADDAYA MEAN, “TURQUOISE”?! IT’S FARKIN’ BLUE!!!”, mostly all done by editing the style sheet in a somewhat “Ahh, so that’s how that works” manner while picking six-alphanumeric codes off a little colour-picker application), and so the new blog’s current random content will soon (hah!) be expurgated…well, except for maybe the “theremin” bit, because you can never have too many theremins, is what I always say.

The point being, I’m still here. Hi! [waves hand like contestants on Numberwang]

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It’s gonna be a bright sun-shiny day:

Rainbows…no-one hates rainbows. They’re like meteorological puppies.

Categories: Noosa, Weather
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…but not today.

Today is cold, cold, cold, windy, windy, windy and wet, wet, wet.

I don’t mind though. Sure, I expect the local Sunshine Coast Regional Council to make better efforts with the money I give them to ensure that that they live up to their nominative promise, but, hey, it is July, and it’s days like these that encourage languor and warmth (in the form of a 38 degree Celcius balcony spa! Mmmmmm) and the consumption of comfort foods…like miso soup, and scrambled eggs and smoked tuna on toast with Worcestershire and Tabasco Sauce. No chance for use of the upstairs balcony (and no view of Cooroy at the moment either):

Everything glistens in the rain. Though our big white shoebox of a house tends to also go green, the green of everything else goes rich and shimmery.

What’s not to like?

Also, July is the month of my birthday (38 now) so it’s important to look up, even if it’s otherwise supposed to be the second dryest month of the year on average. I got some nifty toys (an iPod Touch 32Gb and some Bose speakers for my new-ish iMac), but I also got a very pleasant surprise in the form of my Mum. She turned up with my brother and his partner, who were expected. Shh, don’t tell anyone (because not even the Loved One knows) but I got a bit teary when Mum came up the stairs. I’ve no idea why. Spontaneous feeling, I guess (quite a shock, as it wasn’t on my emotional schedule for the day).

Anyway, apart from her usual silly presents (Simpsons stuff - I think it’s a passive aggressive reminder from her to mute the telly when she rings), she gave me my late Dad’s two fountain pens (a Parker 17 and a Parker VP for those who fetishise about such things). I had been about to buy a couple of Lamy Safari pens the previous day, so this, with all the lovely emotional adornment attached to them, was just wonderful. I have been intending to start a paper diary (I’ve bought some large Moleskin Cahiers) and now, with the pens, to give me focus and direction, I will address each entry to Dad. Sure, it sounds a bit dribbly, but, hey, it’s my diary!

Tomorrow a friend comes for the weekend. I do look forward to it, though I am also looking forward to having a free run in front of me, with no visitors expected until October. It won’t last, as someone will “book” some time here, and that’s okay, but just having no expectations and freedom of time is still good. As Bob Marley sang:

I can see clearly now, the rain is gone,
I can see all obstacles in my way
Gone are the dark clouds that had me blind
It’s gonna be a bright (bright), bright (bright)
Sun-Shiny day

Right about now, I’m going to have those scrambled eggs on toast for dinner, and then nude-up for the spa.

Categories: Noosa, Rambling, Weather
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Oh, foul and vile un-black swill that teases the throat and tortures the mind with its sick imitation of the holy elixir of the sunrise. Where is your dark heart, shot through with the blistering heat of happiness and pouring out its ecstatic extraction into this humble, empty vessel? No, it is not there. You, like a blow-up temptress, give no real satiation, but merely leave a dull and empty ache - the slow, painful shift of a now freeze-dried brain. You pollute the Name with your fakery.

Fuck me, I really need to figure out how the coffee machine works. This instant stuff is killing me.

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This morning the Loved One left for his quarterly jaunt to Sydney, and he won’t be back until tomorrow night.

There are consequences:

• I will be forced to ring him up tomorrow morning to ask him how the coffee machine works. Of course, I will make absolutely sure that there are numerous distractions around, so that the instructions are held transiently enough that on Saturday morning things return to normal and I will be woken by a nice, warm latte in bed (well, not the latte in bed, me in the bed, with a handfull of latte…in a cup).

• My visit to the supermarket this morning means that the leftover moussaka will not get eaten, and that I munch into the kinds of food that reinforce and insulate my circulatory system with a strong, thick and creamery layer of lipids, and ensure that I have the energy for another active day in front of the laptop (Fruit Loops: containing 750% of your daily requirement of sugar, Tartrazine, Erythrosine and Allura Red - to Colour Your World With Rainbows Every Day)

• I shall dance like no-one’s watching (which is just well, since I dance like an arthritic deck chair having arrhythmic spasms while in the embrace of an angry giraffe), and listen to all the music that the Loved One would rather corkscrew his middle ear bones into strawberry jam than listen to. I believe a night of Robbie Williams, George Michael, and Paul Simon may be on the cards (unless I’m in a “mood”, in which case it will be The The’s Infected, Pink Floyd’s The Wall and Meatloaf’s Bat Out Of Hell).

• the dogs will pine in their usual passive ways, by sitting at the top of the balcony stairs for a few hours, or lying in the sun at the front gate or looking at me with their Tim Tam eyes and getting another biccie each (no Tim Tams though, no matter how hard they look).

• Did I mention icecream? Well, I suppose that’s a given

• The scrub turkeys will play Freddie Krueger by scraping their claws across the tin roof, and generally just looking not quite as attractive as Freddie, and I will sleep with the door to the bedroom locked.

Anyway, this afternoon I will be out on the balcony and having a nice, warm spa in the rudey-nude. If only I had some Parfait Armour for a nice tall glass of Zany Carter Deluxe…

Categories: Rambling
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I know, folks keep saying it, and I say it myself: it’s just the internet; it’s not real life.

I wish I could separate myself so, and not let passion and emotion vomit forth from my mind’s gibbon-zone and into the forebrain, but I guess I’m not built that way. Chronic insecurity, repression and emotional defeat coupled with cynicism, despair and a total lack of faith set up those two competing zones with a twelve-lane commuter-dream autobahn between them. It’s just that in front of my forebrain there is a wall of protective introversion, so the sudden super-highspeed commutes are met with a hundred-car pile-up, coincidentally right in the middle of that crushing pain behind my eyes.

It shames me to say that I react badly and in a paranoid way to broad, un-named criticism. I am prone to act defensive, despite the lack of naming, and thus become perceived (or perceive myself becoming perceived - you see how this works?) as being the subject of the criticism. I take the insult deeply, and my chest tightens like a bear trap while my stomach flips over like a greasy fried egg about to break its yolk all over the place.

It can hurt so bad.

Sure, I know, some blokes-and-babes out there will use the current phrase-de-rigueur and tell me to “Man up!”, which apparently means that the appropriate way to for a male to emote to a painful situation is to unzip, whip his googly bits out, and wave them around in the air like he just don’t care, while simultaneously shouting “BOOBIES!” to every passing fancy…but, you know, history has proved that tack to be considerably unconvincing of, and unrewarding to, me.

So, instead, I get angry and frustrated and upset and (let’s say, just for example, hey) post some wordy and volatile rhetoric in a forum before near-immediately retracting it with an “Edit” that expresses the defeated apathy of “What’s the point?”.

I like my gibbon-brain, and it, before rationality and logic and principle, has at least been the most reliable (even when reliably bad) and certainly the most entertaining in its Foolishness. All the other leftbrain stuff has long-betrayed me apparently (a segue to a long whine about my being “let go” last year by my employer after twelve years service would fit here, but you don’t want to hear that), and so I trust it little while also knowing that it’s the ground, the thin ice, on which I stand.

Now, I know, this is a lot of guff interspersed with random metaphor (sorry, I’ve a penchant for stupid metaphors), but - and this is the point; the point up to which I am gibbon-brained - up to this point I love the gibbon. He’s my entertainer and my invisible if inadvertently violent friend in most waking hours. In the end though, he and I’ve just been flinging faeces at the screen. Past this point is the cold light of day and the thin ice ahead, and gibbons aren’t good out of the trees, and worse at guiding you through the icefield.

The point, past this point, is that the above means nothing, and the real events associated with the above that caused such angst, slip-slide into the past, signifying nothing.

It would be nice to know how to move forward, but with every way looking the same - plain, brittle white, just waiting for footprints - does direction become arbitrary?

What should I do now?

Perhaps, in the meantime, I should do the Funky Gibbon noooow.

Categories: Rambling
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On Monday of this week, the predicted “extreme weather conditions” hit the Sunshine Coast with a sort-of half-hearted snort, about halfway between a whimper and a bang. Noosa Main Beach, however, is soft enough that even a snort can set its teeth on edge and have it cringe to the boardwalk, and, in fact, that’s what happened.

This is nearing high tide on Monday evening, but, if you consider the impression of a broad beach from my previous (and first) post, you’ll see what a day’s storm swell from the ENE can do.

What it also can do is bring out the surfers and boogie boarders, who don’t have to just jockey for position on the points but can now actually surf the break offshore, or, as the case may be for some of the boogie boarders, catch the backwash off the rocks into an approaching wave for the “fun” of being tossed into the air by the inevitable bingle.

I daresay a jolly good time was had by all, at least going from the number of participants trading fun for fading light.

We spent some time down there, with the dogs, mostly waiting on the boardwalk for the incoming tide (”I’m not leaving until I get wet”), and watching to see if one of the shorebreak kids would get his body Tetrised into an unsuitable gap in the rocks. However, the light was dim, and the movie mode on my camera not great, and the kids were either too smart or just plain lucky, so no “Australia’s Funniest Childhood Concussion Video” incident occurred.

Okay, so aside from the erosion damage, and the flooding, the house-leaks and the no-doubt several injuries most likely to and caused by people who obtained their driver’s licenses through an innate ability to pass tests rather than any aptitude for making appropriate decisions while controlling a couple of tonnes of speeding metal (No, I’m afraid that just because your vehicle says “4WD” it does not mean it is amphibious), it was…pleasant. Like any time nature decides to roll on through our ongoing social experiment like a hoard of zombies through a crèche, the requisite eye-opening awe and existentialist relaxation it engenders is nice to watch and ponder.

Also, photos…

Categories: Noosa, Weather
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Care to try again?

I probably should get rid of that default error message by making my first “real” blog post, as opposed to the previous placeholder (the above will make no sense once I post this). So, here goes…

Of course, I don’t need to tell you anything about myself, because you can always click on the “About” link for that…except that it is filled with nonsense and a photo that perhaps suggests toe-webbing and mad skills with the banjo, neither of which I have. That might have to change. In the meantime I am left with a good way to fill my first blog post.

My name is Marc - the marc in “parknmeter” - and I am a retired IT Project Manager (No, wait! Please stay! I get better, honest!) formerly of Sydney, but now of beautiful Noosa Heads, Queensland, Australia.

After an adult working life thus far spent in IT (I’m nearing 38), this “retirement” and geographical relocation constitutes a “seachange” for me. Frankly, I don’t know what the hell I’m going to do, but since the first half of my life has been spent working my left-brain into a healthy over-steroided logic-muscle fit to burst through multiple orifices in my head (to no reasonable purpose - in the end, I was “let go” from my previous job with an implicit “can’t come back”), it is time to nurture, and fertilise liberally with Essence-of-Bull, my shrivelled right-brain.

Thus, perhaps just as an exercise regime, this blog. Sure, some people will say that a personal blog is just an excuse to lay out your dirty laundry in public, airing your inconsequential grievances, troubles in love, daily diet diaries, meaningless events and over-opinionated “reviews” of music, movies and materialist merchandise no-one really cares about amongst the plague-proportion profusion of same amongst blog-space, but those people are welcome to toddle off and give themselves a pepper-spray enema.

I am writing because I suspect I need to, because of a search for validation (I am not naive about the wants of my ego), and, well, because, let’s face it, everyone’s doing it and I’m a lemming.

In summary, I’m 38, sort-of retired, living in paradise, learning to write, and I love reading, photography, my dogs, Massimo’s Icecream, and the Peter in “parknmeter”.

The bit in the “About” section about being a Fool is accurate (more of your Tragic Fool than your slapstick, though I’m not averse to pratfalls).

G’day.

Categories: Rambling
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