It’s been four days since we left Melbourne and now one week since I held a writing workshop at Fino Books with eleven excellent people, where we first and foremost talked about the work of writing from a truth-based place in revolt against the cultural epidemic of censoring our human voices. We also talked about hundreds of other things, including how to approach road novels, how to break through writer’s block, how to know when you’re being raw VS grating, and how to tell the story you’re wanting to tell so that the reader really hears you.

Night one was an excellent ice breaker. The lights went out in North Fitzroy — streetlights, traffic lights, even the aisle lights in Piedemonte’s — which made for a spooky and rather delightful first few hours of workshopping. We worked by candlelight (bluetooth rechargeable lamp) as we considered the challenges of writing for now. What is real? What does remarkable writing feel like? What makes the human voice so human?

My printed workbooks included some writing exercises, so we used pen and paper for most of that first night, writing freely in response to varying prompts (beginning extremely restricted and opening up as we went along). Because there were all kinds of writer there — the brand new, the seasoned, the published, the closeted — there were all kinds of new edges to explore.

Night two consisted of a more undivided writing session, where students brought out their laptops and wrote on whatever took their fancy, in the presence of one another, breaking out occasionally to chat through a problem with me, or with each other. It was so great to sit in a beautiful environment with other people trying to express themselves through words, I myself did some unexpected writing that I liked, and have been thinking on the conversations and ideas ever since (even as I dozed on an Emirates flight between chicken and rice and listens of She’s the Best).

So over the last week or so I’ve been working to organise the next lot of workshops, because there are some lovely people (you?) on a waitlist and it seems an appetite for it. From doing that first lot, I feel like I know what needs to be tweaked now and what works. I’m very excited to take it on the road to Sydney (as we know, a city I adore) in October, and then back in Melbourne again in November. I’ll be making tickets for those available Thursday morning 10am AEST.

If you would like to jump on a waitlist for future updates, please do so here. Otherwise, peep my Instagram now and then and I’ll make sure there are reminders when workshops are about to be available.

Special thank you to everyone who came along to the first lot, and to Fino Books for being such excellent hosts (including letting us eat in the store, and selling us books at the end of the workshop when we were all greedy for inspiration).

Many times a day I’ll walk the length of the hall from my office down to the shared kitchen area, where I fetch carbonated water from a beer tap and use the microwaves like a creature from another planet because I do not own a microwave at home. And on this regular journey to the kitchen I pass hundreds of screens. Which is painful enough but has become all the more painful in recent months, as the rate of screens with an AI chat bot open has doubled then tripled and so on, so that now, a tab like ChatGPT or Gemini or Claude occupies most screens I pass, most times of the day. No matter the company, no matter the role, no matter anything.

There are ten thousand things one could say about why this is very bad news. Not least of all because the news of AI’s copious pitfalls are the hits that just keep coming. I recently learned from the Lincoln Institute of Land Policy that most mid-sized data centres use as much water as a small town does, high-powered ones consuming as much as 5 million gallons a day (what a city of 50,000 people goes through)1. A survey conducted by UNICEF, ECPAT and INTERPOL showed that last year 1.2 million children reported having had sexually explicit deepfakes made from pictures of them2. Experts warn that AI back-up diesel generators present severe respiratory and cardiovascular threats to people living near to them, because they emit insane amounts of Nitrogen Oxides and microscopic particles (small enough to bypass our bodies’ natural filtration and getting into our lungs and bloodstream)3. To add insult, research shows that facilities are disproportionately built in lower-income communities to keep costs low, worsening health issues, utility costs, air quality, water supply — you name it4. MIT studied groups of 18- to 39-year-olds as they attempted to write SATs and found that ChaptGPT users had the lowest brain engagement and “consistently underperformed at neural, linguistic and behavioural levels”, getting significantly worse across the months of the study5. And while AI threatens entire tiers, entire classes of employment the world around, 45 new billionaires were made in the last year thanks to the AI boom – together they’re worth more than $2.9 trillion6.

Though perhaps not as sticky and terrifying as the above facts, one could say (and many do) that a particularly concerning, less clean-cut, pitfall of AI is that it appears to have taken a mallet to the way we communicate. As if we needed another mallet. As we know, generative AI’s “tone of voice” is every little bit of internet sludge ever put through a wood chipper, so when it tries its darndest to ‘write’, it can only chop all that up and shoot platitudes, crutches and tropes out the other side. And if my office hallway is anything to go by, this soulless, pitiful — frankly, donked-on-the-head LOLcat-era — ‘voice’ is being used to communicate everything all the time everywhere you look. TV, billboards, emails, the signs sticky-taped around your doctor’s office. Which is having the most hideous effect on our intellect and ingenuity.

In my casual observations over the last decade working in or around writing, it seems that the technocracy has done a very good job of convincing us that communication is a waste of time if it is not first and foremost efficient. Not to mention referential, recognisable, sanitised, sterilised, unremarkable. And, now, outsourced. This is bad for everyone, of course, but lately I’ve been thinking in circles about what it means for writing or storytelling or any form of considered, written expression.

We’re losing good writers as it is, by the way. Because writing has become less and less lucrative, people who might once have been the voice of their – or a – generation have, instead, been pushed into roles in ‘copywriting’ (social media captions) and ‘journalism’ (branded editorial), requiring they spend hours becoming experts in things like clarity, productivity, client relations, search engine optimisation. Thirty years ago they might’ve been paid enough for their creative writing to be able to hone their skills in attempting to express or challenge the human condition — exploring their weirdness, trying dumb things, digging deep into the specificity of what it’s like to be a person. And it feels like such a particular shame to be losing those skills en masse in parallel with the world (because of such changes) being so especially grotesque and in need of describing. Tragic, tragic, tragic.

This is what I think is the essential task of people alive right now, in the face of all this: express yourself. In whatever way comes to you — to you, not the unrelenting noise telling you to ‘be generous to your audience’ and ‘hook them in under 3 seconds’. Do the opposite. Find whatever method, and begin expressing yourself in a big, weird, human, anti-chat-bot way. Be long-winded, humiliating, strange, indecipherable, disturbing, chaotic, desperate, whatever. Reach down into the sludge of what it feels like to be here and find a way to share that. I’m trying to, too. Because I fear that we’ll look back, 50 years from now, and wonder why we sat back sending each other Reels and let the loser robots describe everything.

What I have been doing, maybe unwisely, is writing, writing and re-writing a piece about everything that’s wrong with the world right now. Sounds nuts. Is nuts. But it’s been very relieving, too, to just get right into all the things that are terrorising my soul these days – climate disaster, the AI race to the bottom, One Nation’s popularity surge, NDIS cuts, price spiking, the colony machine, I could go on. Seeing it all laid out, figuring out what I think about things, speaking them into existence; feels maybe even essential to figuring out what to do next.

But that’s next month’s Substack. This month, I thought, let’s keep it light (because Doom Post isn’t ready). Or, instead of light, at least enjoyable to pull together. And in the interest of that, here’s: What I Think About Everything. A whole list of things I’ve encountered since we last spoke and what I think about them, complete with ratings out of 5 stars, a la The Paris End, because why not? Feels good.

So. Shall we?

Autumn ★★★★★

On the third day of winter, it feels only right to begin with an ode to the season just gone. Cornflakes is what my friend Lucia’s friend Ellen calls autumn leaves. Hearing about this two years ago and folding it into my lexicon instantly has improved my life beyond measure. A few weeks ago, when my friend Sunni and I were at our other friend Danny’s house for dinner, Sunni slapped her knees on the couch and said to me, by way of indicating it was time to leave: “Well! Shall we go and crunch some cornflakes?”

A Rug ★★★★☆

Hat tip to Georgia and Fran for throwing out a beautiful rug and letting me haul it away, for it to live under my couch and armchair, completely transforming the space and I mean that.

The Devil Wears Prada 2 ★☆☆☆☆

I have seen bad films. We’ve all seen bad films. My bad film isn’t your bad film but there’s not enough time in the world to get into that. I’m sorry if you enjoyed this film and my paragraph hurts you in some way. All I can say is, if you told me that film was written entirely by generative AI, I would not bat an eyelash. I’m not saying it was, in fact I’m certain it wasn’t, because the film’s PR rollout included a news story about how they hired a visual artist to create an AI-seeming image for the film as a rather limp but altogether appreciated commentary on the whole saga (which is set to destroy us but more on that next month), but it could have been. There was nought human, surprising, exciting or particular about it. Felt like the cinema could have shown a picture of the movie poster for two hours, played some fun music, and I would’ve been exactly as entertained. Enjoyed seeing it with friends and loved ones, though.

Letting Your 5 and 7-year-old Nieces Choose Dinner ★★★★☆

Not too long ago, I was graciously invited over to my brother’s place for a movie night with my sister-in-law and my two nieces. We met at Piedemontes where the girls ran rampant in the aisles picking the various food items that our dinner would consist of: strawberries, tomatoes, two kinds of Pringles, Curly Wurly ‘squirlies’ (?), dip, raspberry drops, cucumber, avocado, cookies and sushi (the sushi had been purchased previously, don’t email me about how Piedemontes doesn’t sell sushi). Gigi was inventing all kinds of cool new snack varietals, including an hors d’oeuvre she made and ate about six times over that went: Original Pringle, avocado, cashew, raspberry drop. An exceptional experience. I have deducted one star because, after getting my youngest niece to repeatedly deliver snacks to me as I lay down like a loaf, I felt rather ill.

Nina Simone, ‘Wild Is The Wind’ ★★★★★

What more can I say? It’s the most wonderful album, a perfect album for late-autumn, early-winter activities (smoking, pondering, cooking a stew, taking a bath, trying to ensnare a mouse you’ve seen under the fridge). While you’re at it, you might as well read Nina’s Wikipedia – including the tales of her affair with the Prime Minister of Barbados.

Getting Off Spotify (In Fact, Getting Off A Lot of Stuff) ★★★★★

Speaking of listening to music, I finally got off Spotify. I just ditched it in the last month, which is bad behaviour, I’m aware, but I did and now I am free. Obviously there are many wonderful pros to this kind of decision, but one that’s ringing, the one that’s most lucent in my everyday, is that I no longer let the algorithms choose my music. Every day I save more albums to my library, do more searching, do less music-in-my-ears-because-it’s-there. It’s making me listen to more radio, more records, and more world (no music, no headphones).

Nutri-Grain ★★★☆☆

My corporate workspace has vials of the stuff on tap, and I’m not sure how to feel about it (except like the mouse I’m trying to catch, holding tiny morsels of food between my two hands and nibbling at them…)

Advertising ☆☆☆☆☆

The worst thing Mad Men ever did was convince whole generations of people that advertising was a vocation for the chic and clever (no offence). Actually the worst thing Mad Men ever did was not bring Sal back in the later seasons, but anyway. My friend Eliza posted on her stories last week, and I quote, “there should be a maximum amount of advertising per 100 metres, anything more than 20% is psychological warfare & is an affront to our human rights.” This is something I think about all the time, and something I often find myself at odds with in a job that occasionally requires branding and such. The sky belongs to all of us! And, as such, we should get to decide if it’s filled with blaring ads for Monday.com and streaming services and UberEats. Leave us alone!

The First Bad Man by Miranda July ★★★★☆

“After a while the hypothesis fell away; her palms were rubbing my back, my hair, she held my face. I stroked her braids again and again, as if I had wanted to touch them for a million years and would never tire of it. After a long time, ten or fifteen minutes, the kissing slowed. There were a series of kisses, goodbye kisses, kisses placed like lids on boxes—then the lid would pop off and need to be replaced. There, this is the final kiss—no, this is the final kiss. This one is, it really is. And now I’m just kissing that kiss good night.”

Fandom Brain ★☆☆☆☆

Some poor soul recently tweeted that they were “close to quitting reading” because every author they liked turned out to be problematic. And, in true online style, they were mercilessly barbecued for the opinion. Sad as it is to see some probably-12-year-old stranger go viral for an underbaked thought, there was extreme comfort to be found in the sheer amount of users who are flying the flag of “this kind of self-coddling can only lead to more terrible things”. What a relief.

Butt Pimples ★★★☆☆

Not ideal but quite novel and certainly amusing. Three stars.

Sydney Harbour (Warrang) ★★★★★

If you follow me on Instagram (I’m not saying I recommend it. Do whatever you can to get off there, I say) you may have seen a bordering-on-obnoxious series of videos I took of this natural marvel at various times of day and night – little boats bobbing in the water, sun coming up, sun coming down, moon winking at everyone while hanging over the Bridge. That kind of thing. I personally think it’s one of the best things a person can look at.

The Celebrity Traitors ★★☆☆☆

I am very behind with this, okay? I’m on episode 3 or 4. (Also taking immense pride on how behind the culture I am at the moment, save Summer House and Real Housewives of Rhode Island which I am twiddling my thumbs, biting my nails, pulling my hair out in anticipation of each week). Three stars demerited (!!!) for sending Porsha Williams, who is Reality TV MSG, home first. Two stars for giving me Michael Rappaport, the most emotionally volatile and endearingly moronic oaf to ever grace my screen.

Tony Tullathimutte ★★★★☆

Watching him talk at The Wheeler Centre and reading Rejection reminded me that writing is not always about digging deep inside for the ‘truth’ of things, it is – in fact, should often be – the work of looking at the world and going ‘that is insane and that is funny and somebody has to be a point of record about it’. In the words of Mandy Patinkin: Oh, how thrilling!

Udon Noodles ★★★★☆

If, like me, you are pinching pennies, do like I do and stock your fridge with udon noodles and a bottle of concentrated dashi stock sauce, and everything will be okay.

Girlies Trying to Sell Things to Me on Instagram ☆☆☆☆☆

Zero stars!!! Not to be confused with selling me something you actually made or worked on or a nice old jacket you’re trying to find a home for. This rant is reserved for the hordes of girlies – known to me and unknown to me – who make money from crowding around in my phone and telling me how good this tooth whitening thing is or how incredibly this plumping tinting moisturiser goes on and I am sick to death of it. Blocked!!

Dreaming About Another Life ★★★★★

And if, like me, it is becoming increasingly difficult to withstand the features and defining factors of current life (I listed just a few of them in my intro), then I suggest you begin carving out a different type of life for yourself in your mind’s eye. This can materialise into a plan in good time, and into small and big actions whenever you feel like it, but in the meantime it can serve as a small, private, cosy wafer of comfort in this wild, fucking freaky world.

And yet! And yet! Whenever long weekends come around, I do tend to feel a bit listless. That is unless I have ten separate plans all squished up against each other so that I’m sufficiently honouring the free time I’ve been lavishly granted, drinking it up, slurping it up, as one should, because it’s not often you get this much time to yourself.

In a random and glorious turn of events, this long weekend rolled around and I had about three plans total and most of them were on Thursday night and so when yesterday began, I found myself in the apartment sort of going from room to room, sitting down on the couch then standing up, fighting the urge to message friends or give myself a task outside of the house (go down the street, go to the Op Shop, take things to the dry cleaner) – just trying to not feel like a loser with zero going on.

You may do this same thing. It’s the thing where, if ever there’s the possibility of a full day of nothing (again, the kind of thing I am constantly apparently asking for), I really struggle to allow myself to do nothing. Which, by the way, is not exactly nothing, even though a day of actual nothing would be a wonderful thing to experience and I should actually be in pursuit of it. But no, yesterday I did the average modern person’s version of ‘nothing’, which means I caught up on an important TV show episode, had a very long shower, trimmed my pubic hair, gave myself a bit of a facial, washed the dishes, read some terrible news, watered the plants, and played online billiards. In 1620 that would’ve been a certified jamboree. Probably would have sent the day-haver to their bed for a week.

Anyway. I flopped around the apartment all day. Which was initially met with quite a lot of resistance. In the morning I had a lingering sort of anxious energy, and throughout the day, continued catching myself trying to scold me about how little I was doing with the day. I didn’t stop doing it until after the facial, around maybe 4pm, when I’d settled into the reality that I wasn’t going to make anything happen – not even take some coats down the dry cleaner, or change the bed sheets, or call someone and accidentally end up being wildly, spontaneously social.

Those of you with kids likely want to throttle me right now. And rightfully so. I do apologise. I imagine your version of this is having one hour to yourself, and for that I salute you in solidarity but also in horror and awe.

I am not like this naturally; resistant to doing nothing. My mother – who turned 70 this week, by the way, happy birthday, Mim – would be the first to testify on the stand, if it comes to such things which it may well do, that I am one of the laziest people that has ever walked this Earth. Happier than most living things to roll around on the couch or bed or lay in the grass doing next to nothing and that has been true for most of my life. In my twenties, I’d do just two things with my days off from uni and working at the pub around the corner from my house: order a pizza and watch between two and four movies. I’m not even suggesting this is a bad quality. It’s probably quite annoying in a teenager you’re trying to drag along with you to various events and routine commitments, but all in all I think it’s kind of vintage and chic to be so laissez-faire about doing things. I think back to that bedroom I had in Collingwood, where I could spend a whole day laying on the bed getting up only to pee and shower, and I think: that’s pretty much what life is about sometimes. And it doesn’t need to be about anything more than that.

Something has unfortunately happened to me (maybe all of us?) in recent years. Poor friends and family members of mine get no shortage of dull messages like sorry, work has been pummelling me and work is crazy this week. My use of the word ‘busy’ has skyrocketed about 5,000% (great for Busy stocks). It’s such an annoying modern affliction, being busy, or perhaps insisting that you are, or perhaps enjoying that you are, enjoying saying that you are while loudly bemoaning it, even though you could easily do something about it, or at the very least you could shut up about it so not everyone had to be involved.

The real, actual matter at hand is that I have never been this busy (sorry). Even when I worked at [redacted Canadian punk rock media outlet] and worked ten, twelve hour days, I wasn’t ever actually concerned about the volume of tasks at hand. I wasn’t ever fully drinking the Kool Aid about having to get things done. In fact, I mostly filed my stories and gossiped at my desk, and, once or twice, stayed late at the office with the girlies, drinking the promotional light-up magnum bottle of Belvedere and soon after acquiring a concussion.

I have never been this busy (sorry) and whether it’s because I’m dumber now or because I really am being asked to do a lot in order to earn a paycheck, it’s done something to my understanding of my own time. And what my time’s worth. And what I’m allowed to do with it. And what is productive. It doesn’t help that I have an unfinished novel and an unfinished script sitting on the proverbial shelf begging to be picked up and toiled with.

This is all annoying stuff to say, too, especially with innumerable crises at the door, and innumerable reasons to fuck all of this rhetoric and thinking off for good. I won’t go into it all now because that’s a different post (which is nearly finished), but this idea I’ve succumbed to lately about being productive and too-busy-to-[any word here], is inextricably linked to patriarchy and imperialism and conversations about AI (the promise of being unburdened by some new capitalistic invention, only to have it free up more of your time which then get taken up by some other, more menial, less human tasks). All of this reminds me of Jenny Odell’s second book, about time, which talked so persuasively about time having, over centuries, become talked about more and more as a luxury, something we are ‘allowed’ by others, and about how time poverty is so closely linked to money poverty (time is money), because the richer you are, the more able you are to buy your time back (hire nannies, cleaners, go on holidays, take time off).

And also this quote from it:

“Who buys whose time? Whose time is worth how much? Whose schedule is expected to conform to whose, and whose time is considered disposable? These are not individual questions, but cultural, historical ones, and there are few ways to liberate your time or anyone else's without considering them.”

Which also reminds me that I, although I am busier (sorry), I am not so busy that I can’t celebrate my mum’s birthday, spend a weekend in Fairhaven, go to my niece’s dance thingy, cook a green curry, watch Housewives with Sunni, know exactly what’s going on with West and Amanda, go to a comedy show, wander down to the bookstore in my lunch break, play pool with Todd, do some gardening, watch Funny Girl and eat Vietnamese food with Chessy. You get the idea. I’m fine. We’re fine. The work is internal and it’s about carving out my own life. Or anyone and everyone doing that. Because one day I’ll be two minutes away from carking it and I’ll think “wish I had five more minutes to watch birds”.

So today I did nothing again. Well, I drove to Baker’s Delight for some hot cross buns. Which I don’t recommend, by the way. Too porous so that they dry out in the toaster, and not enough fruit inside. Anyway, I drove to fetch them and some coffee and since then have done next to nothing and it’s now feeling really not bad.

I am sitting in Dylan’s backyard in Northcote and he’s learning ‘Waters of March’ inside on the piano and there are lorikeets pecking at the fruit on the apple tree next door, they’re fighting (I’m pretending a group of them are forcing one of them to come out), and there are wattlebirds jumping around the bush growing on the fence, licking whatever sweet nectar it is that they’re into from its bright orange flowers. And the sun is going behind a tree once and for all today – which is a relief, because I’ve been shifting my garden chair every thirty minutes chasing the shade. And there are clovers all around my feet. And there are children squealing in backyards up and down the street, probably beserk from too much chocolate. And all I’m saying is that doing nothing is a sublime and vital skill.

Going to try and get better at it.

PS. As I typed that last sentence, one of the wattlebirds started doing in loops into the gorgeous afternoon sun in front of me, catching little bugs in mid air. It was fantastic.

I don’t often know what to do with This Day. For the first few years it was a day I would spend six months dreading and six months recovering from. (Are you picturing Colin from The Secret Garden? You can.) Not even because of the grief itself. More because of the performance I decided was required from it which, of course, is pervasive throughout the days of my life regardless but felt and still does feel particularly severe on This Day.

If you’ve read other posts of mine you’ll be aware by now that I can be a little neurotic about appearances and – sad, weird little life this is – grieving my beautiful dad is no exception to that habit. And I’ve done a lot of toiling away in here over the years, convincing myself that This Day requires such precision, such a song and dance, that I hardly feel as though as grieving has occurred at all. Usually, it would involve wishing it was not happening, fearing as though (because I was wishing it wasn’t happening) I might look cold and dead inside about it, worrying that (looking cold and dead inside about it) might invite concern and query, so feigning a delicate act of appropriately sad but not can’t-get-out-of-bed sad, then spending the remaining hours of the day in a genuine panic about real feelings being dug up by performing fake feelings, and imagining a sort of catastrophic, nuclear-level disaster of falling to pieces in front of everyone I love. I have only recently caught on to this clever little act, by the way.

There is plenty of armchair psychology I could do about the above but I’ll keep it short for all our sakes. Simply put, I don’t think it’s a coincidence that me fussing about the optics of my grief over the years has gotten in the way of me actually experiencing it. I think it’s probably a cool thing my brain came up with that meant I didn’t have to really feel the thing. And it’s worked fabulously. Eight years in, I can honestly say – sad as it is – that I’m probably no more at peace with, or in step with, the idea that my dad passed away in the first place or that he passed away the way that he did. Sorry if we’re friends and I’ve told you otherwise. Sorry if you read my book and this comes as a shock. (If you ask me, the book was a pretty clever red herring, too.)

I do a lot of policing of myself (and others, it’s my worst trait) but the policing of my feelings about my dad and this behaviour’s most chronic manifestation. It has, I think, led to all kinds of health issues, all kinds of not good patterns of behaviour, and has, worst of all, meant that I haven’t loved, sat with, talked to, or honoured the memory of my dad in the way I’d like to be able to say I have. Not to take it there but this is the part that hurts the most.

Listen: I do talk about him. His urn does sit – almost belligerently – displayed on the mantle in my one bedroom apartment. But for the last eight years, there has been a thick slab of glass between me and the whole thing and the feelings it probably should invoke, if I don’t want to be a completely repressed, unreachable person.

Anyway; I wouldn’t be able to share any of the above if this year hadn’t been different. I knew it was going to be, and it might not surprise you either if you’ve been reading Psychic Slump posts, because I have been very vocal about my recent cracking open. Or ‘unzipping’ as Dylan likes to call it. I could feel in the weeks leading up to This Day that I was, in fact, having feelings. Feelings! I’m no stranger to them normally but these ones are rather foreign. Was sort of like I was approaching the actual day all over again. Which, while awful, really did feel like the right way to be feeling. It took until the night before This Day for me to tell some people I dearly love that this was happening – that I had cried until I couldn’t breathe, that I couldn’t seem to calm myself down, etc. One of them came over and we lay on the couch and talked about it (really talked about it, instead of intellectualising it or analysing it from a safe distance). And the other two picked me up in a car at 7pm on a forty-something degree day, drove us out to a soft and woolly part of Warrandyte where we swam in the cold river under the sky at dusk, until we were under the moon.

Something I would maybe have been unwilling to admit here or to anyone, but which now feels essential to be upfront about, is that I have spent more time in my life cultivating an image of myself than asking myself what I am. It’s why I got into writing in the first place, and it’s what’s made me successful at it, too, I think. Not that any of this is like, special. Doesn’t make me Not Like Other Girls. I think a lot of us are doing this stuff, and for plenty of good reasons, too. But there definitely comes a time (and maybe it’s age thirty-seven) when the thick skin you think you’ve developed, or the distrusting eye, or whatever, does nothing other than put glass between you and other living people. Or you and other people not living.

So here I am. Making a scene of missing him, as I should, I think. Because (can I just say?) that despite all of the above, expressing it, whether out loud to people or online somewhere, doesn’t just feel difficult on a sort of spiritual, soul level. It also just feels goofy. Words, advice, phones, screens, clicking buttons – this way we live and sometimes connect – feels speck-like in comparison to what I feel about my dad and all the things I keep to myself about it. Instagram’s a grain of sand on the beach I’m walking on on This Day – and not even one of the good ones. Maybe this is why the only time I think I’ve been able to accurately speak to it and not want to die is when I insisted on using more than fifty thousand words and a couple of years to do it. (Me to me: “you could write about it, make money from it, use it for your own gain, and you can’t take one day of the year to think of your ol’ dad in earnest?”)

So here I am, defenseless. Holding it all inside here, beneath the wall of muscle and skin, can make a person feel crazy at times. When you’re the only one in it, your version of it, for years at a time, it can begin to feel not real. While we’re on that, can I say that on days like This Day – or any day where I’m floored and changed drastically by the weight of missing him or thinking about it – I am more aware than ever of how much the body contains. Not in a big T trauma kind of way, but like: how much life and feeling and living fits inside this shape! That for most days of most years my main, most regular feelings about this thing – heavy, weary, stuck, ugly, empty, furious, yearning – are contained within such small confines and are, for the most part, invisible and inaudible. How is this possible? It should exist as a shriek that follows you around everywhere you go, maybe. Or instead the energy it generates should be syphoned and used to power a small village.

Whenever I think about being public about this I’m also struck by how many of us are out here tolerating and living with this type of thing, and how many people don’t broadcast their thing because of reasons above or different reasons and sometimes I make that about myself; if they’re not doing it, why should I take up that space? I already wrote a book about it, isn’t that enough? I guess, after years of asking myself that question somewhere in the subconscious, and after years of getting different answers, the most recent and truest answer is: no. It isn’t enough. There’s no such thing as enough. John Green as it sounds. It’s just true, god damn it. And it’s my own fault that the way I’ve chosen to express myself best in this life is with writing things down – and sometimes sharing them. It’s just inherently embarrassing and a bit insistent on attention and empathy. And I’m becoming less precious about pretending that’s not the case, or maybe: I’m deciding to write in spite of how self-centred and needy it may be or look. Because it’s okay to be a loser about certain things in this life. Right?

Well, that’s about all we have time for. I suppose I might leave you (whoever you are. Love you x) with our song. Mine and my dad’s, that is. We didn’t pretend the lyrics were about us or anything, we just thought it was a perfect, beautiful, ridiculous, wonderful song. We would sit around listening to it, sun folding in his living room windows, whether I was eleven or twenty-eight. It is the singular most triggering song on this earth to me, in excellent and awful ways. Mostly, though, it fills me with such ecstasy and elation and it feels to me like magic is real and anything is possible. And it’s a wonderful song to imagine him now to; has extreme afterlife energy, no?

What might he be doing? What might he be feeling? What does he see, what does he know? Is he a bird now, or a gust of wind? The earth on the soles of my shoes? (Hope so!) All of the above? Since he died I’ve avoided The Most Beautiful Girl in the World more than most songs but about a week ago I listened to it probably 40 times in one day and I think that’s probably a sign of where I’m at with things.

Your body is away from me
but there is a window open
from my heart to yours.

From this window, like the moon
I keep sending news secretly.

The Window, Rumi

I have never prided myself on being honest because I wasn’t born honest and have had to figure out what it is and how to be it all my life. I lied profusely as a child, a lot as a teenager, a bit in my twenties and then occasionally ever since (mostly to myself and every now and then to the world). And I know. I do know. Being lied to is awful. It is a complete betrayal; a strange, sad, bitter-taste of an experience and by all means we should not ever have to endure it. But to lie? To be the liar? Pretty remarkable stuff. Anything you want is true for a moment! Pretend things aren’t bad! Temporarily put off feelings like shame, guilt, envy, doubt, despair! Wonderful idea and it has, at times, served me well. Unfortunately, like all good and working shortcuts, lying does have its drawbacks. Including (and not in the least bit limited to) becoming entirely untethered with reality and the people you love. I have managed to find both the utility and the joy in telling the truth over the years, but this year has made its necessity clearer than ever before. I have cried and cried and cried, uncovering corners of the self I did a very good job living beside but not speaking with and I think – although it occasionally feels utterly torturous – it’s ultimately the most precious thing that’s ever happened. Apparently people can take the truth if you tell them (!), even you can (!), and whatever you happen to have been born as, born into, or turned into by this world, it’s okay about 97% of the time, as long as you figure out a way to be honest about it (<3).

2. True Love

It’s been driving audiences wild for billions of years now (what? You think crocodiles don’t experience True Love?) and it shows no signs of slowing down. True Love in its most famous form is between two-ish people who have stars in their eyes and giggle and kiss and play piano for each other and go nuts whenever the other texts, but it’s been known to befall all kinds of living and non-living things: a child and their birthday present, a drunk person and their kebab – among other famous pairings. The point is: aren’t we lucky? I’d have been happy with just ‘crush’ or ‘good chemistry’ or ‘infatuation’. But True Love? Goodness me. Gorgeous, gorgeous, gorgeous.

3. Looking Up

After the dismal event of 2024 in which I accrued my worst ever weekly screen time average (9.5 hours, if you want to feel deathly ill), it was clear to me and all involved that my phone addiction was very real and sending me to an early grave. Spiritually at least. This year, while I’ve accrued other not great scores, I have improved and continue to improve and am feeling less interested in phone deep-down all the time. Absolutely, I’m still pleased and indulged by the lights and colours and sounds (not unlike a baby with a dangling set of keys) but something has shifted within and I feel me and the phone’s time together coming to an end. I am not long for it. And that is a wonderful thing.

4. KimChi Asian Grocer

The supermarket I love is closing down. Or the building is for sale and the cashier at KimChi says it’s only a matter of time. I have known this for months and so the back half of the year has entailed a sort of imagined farewell tour of the establishment for me – trotting down there somewhat wistfully, tracing the aisles and scratching the shop dog’s ears like it’s the last time when it isn’t quite yet. It really is the greatest little place and it’s been there for decades so if you live in Fitzroy or near I highly suggest making use of it while it’s there. Get your Pocari Sweat, your frozen dumplings, your Thai basil and your Chilli Crisp. There are only so many shops like it in the area now, businesses that feel personal and unpolished and earned, that provide a service we need. I will miss it desperately. And let me just say if it’s replaced with a Coles ‘Local’ I’ll be lobbing a brick through the window on night one. (Print it! I don’t care!)

5. ‘Being Alive’ the YouTube Video

When Dylan showed me this video of Dean Jones singing ‘Being Alive’ for the cast album of the Sondheim musical Company (from the 1970 documentary about the making of the album), I covered my face for too long afterwards which made him think I hated it. Completely understandable because showing someone a YouTube video is a desperately vulnerable thing to do and having the showee immediately cover their face for ages would make you think you’d made a huge mistake. But my face was covered because I was crying. And I was crying because I loved it so much that my whole life was coming up out my eyes. I don’t know if it will happen to you but it happened to me and it was great.

6. Cameron Winter

I completely understand if you’re rolling your eyes. I do. It can be exhausting to hear incessantly about one surly white boy from Brooklyn, particularly when all of music journalism and the Pitchfork peanut gallery are practically rabid for him. And while I’m sometimes the first to go “Oh, give it a rest” about things reaching a certain decibel in the zeitgeist, this time I’ve put my snarky little comments away in their cupboard because the fact of the matter is he’s remarkable. And also this is as good a time as any to become cognisant of the weird, awful way we treat things: we adore them, we make them wildly popular, force them to perform their thing over and over, gorge on it until we’ve made ourselves sick, then boo them because we’re bored. Or maybe that’s just me…? Anyway. I adore Cameron, very taken by him and his record and his whole band. Watch this when you’re sad.

7. Reading Plays

In 2025, some friends and I decided to print off famous plays and sit around reading them on weeknights here are there and it has done wonders for me personally, for our friendship collectively, for our ambition, for our understanding of art and the world and each other, and not least of all it felt totally transformative to do something for hours each week that did not involve a screen. Also, my friends and I might be fabulous actors randomly?

8. Pop Music

I’ve got an addiction to it and this year was an exceptional year for the game –– Addison, Gaga, Twigs, Sabrina. I loved it all; I have two ears and a heart. But perhaps you have a life. Perhaps you didn’t have the time nor the insatiable appetite to spend hours & hours listening to unvetted pop ‘til your ears ached. So if you’re into that type of thing, here are my favourites: ‘Folded’, ‘Shooting Star’, ‘2 hands’, ‘Dear god’, ‘Yamaha’, ‘Sweet Spot’, ‘Dopamine’, ‘blade bird’, ‘Don’t Smile’ (not new but very important), ‘Tonight’ and ‘Die Happy’. Please send me your favourite pop songs via IG or something.

9. Enjoying My Job

Easier said than done, isn’t it? But I would say, until we figure out a way to do away with jobs altogether (for those of us who dream of laying by a lake for all eternity, spotting birds and lizards and such), it’s the best we can do. And it is, I think, a crucial endeavour. 2025 was all the more nourishing, electrifying and easy because I was mentally engaged at my desk each day. Got to think in cool, strange ways, meet new ideas, discover lots about the way the world and our cities work, and often left the office feeling like I had done something worth doing. I also learned that there are people everywhere doing unbelievably inventive and good-hearted things to improve our lives and combat the plutocracy, and that made it all the more possible not to slip into despondency (the primary task of modern life). So I don’t know if anyone needs to hear it, but if you can, get someone to pay you for doing things that aren’t painful. Or if you’ve been thinking about leaving your job for a long time, do it.

10. A Lot of Things People Said to Me

Not just useful for inventory, writing down the things people you love say to you or around you is also an excellent form of training yourself to love your life and your people more. They’re so funny! Here are some of my favourite things people said to me this year (that I wrote down):

• “If I was in a zombie apocalypse I would check in with myself.”

• “When did I stop looking like someone in a band?”

• “My dad’s like really sort of dead. In kind of a permanent way.”

• “I’ll never forget the smell of those apples.”

• “We’re fighting in the dojo of the space between our agreement.”

• “As soon as you’ve slept with a man, you can boss ‘em around.”

• “There used to be a dear old horse out the back, too, called Dolly. We used to feed her our crusts.”

• “I bought your kid nunchucks. Is that OK?”

• “It would appear that… I have never dated a decent man.”

• “He’s the Golden Rule; leave a party within one hour of him arriving.”

• “No one makes themself.”

• “Let’s not do something we might regret…” (to a bartender trying to clear an unfinished drink)

11. Quick Fire Pool (Also Known in My House as “The Digi Balls”)

Ever wanted to shoot pool without leaving the couch? Now you can! (As of 20 years ago when they made this game that I just learned about.) See here. And apologies in advance for your life going down the toilet. I support it for what it’s worth.

12. Salads I Made at Home

Do I sound boring? Do I sound like a person who doesn’t have a life? I don’t care. I love making little salads. Tuna salad salad (where you make American-style tuna salad mixing tuna, onion, capers, chopped pickles, some herbs and mayo and mustard and then dump it on crunchy iceberg or cos leaves), lazy Greek salad (tomato and onions and parsley), lazy caesar salad (poached chicken on cucumber, crunchy leaves, herbs, and a ranchy dressing) – I could go all day! I love making salads.

13. Possum TV

This is what I call watching the possums outside my windows. Brings me great joy. Would bring me even more joy to see them survive in the midst of various invasive predators but hey. The world’s the world. (Keep your cat inside at night okay? Love you.)

14. The Rehearsal

Speaking of television. The final episode of The Rehearsal nearly killed me. Blew my wig clean off and despite it being adjacent to the sort of Cameron Winter crowd of Things White People Liked Last Year, it aggressively earned its spot on this list with me. I think almost never have I sat so agape in front of a TV or screen of any kind, so unsure of what I’m watching, if it’s real, what it means, how it was possible, and what led us here even. So much fun, and such a great use of TV studio money. On a related note, great year for white boys doing crazy shit and not failing miserably (Weapons, One Battle After Another, Friendship, The Chair Company).

15. Piña Coladas

This is kind of more future-forward thinking (as they say in annoying circles) because I only actually had about three piñas total in 2025 (pitiful) but I wanted to have way more than that. They are in my top 10 things to drink ever – which is why I put respect on their name with the tilde – and I plan to drink a lot of them in the near future. Want to have one together? (Also, it’s occurring to me right now that a lot of the items on this list begin with the letter P? Plays, possums, pool, pop music, piñas… What does it all mean… What is the universe trying to tell me… Something to think about. Something for all of us to think about.)

I actually have a bit of a knack of being a canary in the coal mine like this (for example: not one, not two, but three of my workplaces has shuttered within two years of hiring me… make of that what you will).

It’s 27 degrees today, which means everything is completely fine and nothing was ever even wrong actually. I’m sitting on my balcony in my ‘reading’ chair, where my plants look like they need a drink even though they’ve had one (attention seeking), and where some kids are sitting in a parked Flexicar doing balloon nangs. They’re close but not so close that they can see me and talk to me, which they often are and do. And I’m worried about their brains but the show, also known as minding my business, must go on. Anyway, there’s a light wind and the sky is grey and shiny and all is well here.

Thank you to everyone who followed and subscribed (!) since my first post. It’s both touching and daunting, but 70%/30% so we’re okay.

I experienced quite a nice little buzz from that first post the other week. A good friend reminded me that the last time I did that — published anything — was when I wrote a book three and a half years ago, a realisation that nearly made my head fall off. This means it’s been over three years since I experienced the feeling of writing something and letting it go. Which is different (I can see this now) to writing something and holding onto it so tight and so relentlessly that it can only suffocate, wither and die. Which, yeah… has been the situation in the years since Sunbathing. Sorry, but that’s what it’s been like over here. I’d sugarcoat it for you but I don’t think we have time.

So I experienced a buzz, absolutely I did. The other thing that happened is that I instantly picked a fight with my lovely boyfriend. About the very next thing he said out loud after I’d pressed publish, despite what he said being a completely normal and harmless thing to say. And then we were sort of forced to talk about how I might be feeeeling (exposed, confused, embarrassed and very angry).

I am off to a great start! Not being sarcastic! The whole point of posting here was and is to loosen up; shake off the dust, practise vulnerability, relinquish control & mystery, be honest, connect, try, think I’ve failed, worry less about it, heal, heal, keep going. And, surprise: that’s what’s happening! In that exact order, even. Only thing is, it’s quite the paradoxical loop to experience. See below:

1. Fear breeds perfectionism

2. Perfectionism breeds endless tinkering

3. Blogging combats perfectionism and control

4. Blogging creates vulnerability hangover

5. Repeat

Right after publishing I considered deleting no less than 240 times. Also considered making my next post about how awful the first post was, just so everyone would know I could do better (1. Not the point and 2. Not sure that I even can). In order to soften my relationship with writing, it seems I’ve gotta go into the darkest, freakiest part of my wound about it all. I’ve gotta really feel the growing pains of doing things differently. The little angel on my shoulder says that could spawn some really cool things, though, and I like that about her.

Here’s something else I learned about myself this week: I apparently believe there’s a finite amount of good writing in me. Also after publishing — and after I pushed the big red SELF DESTRUCT button then yelled at my boyfriend — I read my first post back and saw sentences I really liked. Can you believe? I mean, of course I also saw sentences I thought were so bad I should be jeered at naked in the streets like the lady from the show, but that’s neither here nor there. I read sentences I really liked and I thought why didn’t I save that for the book?, as if there’s a pile of sentences on my kitchen table and each time I take one there’s fewer left for me to use later. I had no idea I’d been thinking like that — and I think I’ve been doing it for a while.

I think maybe I’ve become so precious and anxious about writing and my being good at it that I’ve stopped trusting I’ll have more ideas I like in future. Which is a bit of a sad thing. Here’s what I plan to believe instead, as soon as possible: ideas are endless, they are stifled by screen time, they come less if you give up on them all the time, and they get better and more interesting the more you practice having them. More ideas make way for more ideas. They’re like the dollar that doubles every day!

Earlier this year I read the article ‘Jeff Bridges is Digging It’, where Amanda Petrusich interviewed Jeff about the gorgeous little jam album he recently released, ‘Slow Magic, 1977-1978’, which he made with his friends when they were in their 20s. The article hit me hard when it came out because it holds a bunch of beautiful and compelling musings about becoming and about being in the arts — not least of all Jeff wistfully remembering first realising he loved his wife, and discussing the ‘get out of your own way’ idea, and comparing people and their creative choices to the behaviour of a murmuration of birds. I re-read it last week in a moment of desperation, thinking his advice about “letting the art do you” might be a lamppost to cling to in the snowstorm of being vulnerable online, but I was actually struck by a different, incidental, section this time:

Often you’ll have an album that’s a success, and then maybe a year or two later they’ll have the “making of” album, where you hear all the rough stuff. This is kind of like doing that in reverse. This is letting all the rough stuff out, and if I or anybody else wants to polish ’em up that’s something else.

I’m doing a sort of “making of” in reverse! (Wait, do I make everything about me?) Because I’m very tempted to think about this Substack as the blogging equivalent of one of those Reels where a guy shoves a big stick into a drain and pushes all the rubbish and sediment and gunk out, so that clear, clean water can rush through. And in part, it’s true. But also, the gunk is the thing. The gunk is self-expression and the gunk is the truth (and the truth is art, by the way).

Anyway. It’s December and it’s been a good couple of weeks. There’s been a lot on so I haven’t done as much kissing as I’d like but I’ve enjoyed this strange, back-and-forth weather and I’ve pottered around with my plants on the balcony. And I’ve watched some really wonderful, fun, cool things; The Exorcist (until I fell asleep at the most crucial point), The Chair Company, Celebrity UK Traitors, Body Heat with Kathleen Turner and William Hurt which has stayed with me ever since and I am now in the market for some wind chimes, and The Remains of the Day which really had me thinking (maybe because I’m stupid these days, but maybe because Ishiguro really just is a wonderful writer that makes you think, think, think). I kept thinking about different interpretations for ‘the remains of the day’ as an idea; the consequences of your actions, the later years in life, the quiet or under-the-cloak-of-darkness evening hours, the lonely weird items you’re left with when you’re by yourself again and the sort of implied sad ‘every person is an island’ thing that comes with all of that. Now to read the book.

We also drove down to Fairhaven where we looked at green and got rained on and had the wind in our faces. And I hung out with my nieces who on Saturday coined the term ‘drunk to pieces’ which I think has the potential to really catch on. (Let me know if your friendship group enjoys it.) Then I bought this really beautiful hardcover copy of Sylvia Plath’s Ariel at the bookshop there, which I have been picking up and getting decimated by. Also got The Mushroom Tapes which is really fun to carry around because it’s so sexy — and is another example of unprecious art-making.

And I put up my Christmas tree this week. Which is not so much a Christmas tree as a ludicrous collection of branches with crap hanging off them — made lovely by Hattie’s Ixia vase. Which of course also means it’s time to listen to A Charlie Brown Christmas over and over.

I’ve been thinking I might do a sort of ‘Best Of’ end of year post for the next one I do, which should be next week or the week after. Like Best Albums or Best Movies list but for all kinds of things I loved this year — books, films, songs, sentences, smells, meals, whatever. I don’t know if that’s something anybody wants to read but this is supposed to be about the doing and not the showing, and I know it would be fun to do. And fun to look back on, too. So there.

But because I’ve been visited by the ghoul they deem ‘writer’s block’ for over a year now, I butchered that sentence within an inch of its sad little life, then killed it, and gave up. (Only by a miracle of my agonising corkscrew thinking has it lived to see the light of day…)

Unsure if I can even call what I’ve got writer’s block; the blockage is not by any means limited to writing (wish it was). And it’s really only a symptom of a bigger, rather more concerning, problem, which is that I’m just not that good at thinking at the moment. As the primary owner and user of this brain, I’m officially reporting a noticeable decline in its performance. And so you know I’m serious, it took me probably three minutes of googling to find the word ‘performance’ just now, because I could not think of it myself.

It’s a sticky, frustrating state of mind if I find myself in, this psychic slump. (Not unlike, I imagine, the feeling one might get from having a big wooden box labelled ACME dropped on one’s head from a great height.) Some of the suspected culprits I’ve fingered (not like that) are: the dreaded virus, the computer, the state of things, phone (generally), infinite scroll (specifically), the skulking side effects of omnipresent Wi-Fi and Bluetooth, or perhaps the hundreds of hours I’ve spent watching the women of Real Housewives of Salt Lake City talk themselves, each other and (frankly) me into a state of almost irreparable mania. And, yes, of course, the unlikely possibility of a golf ball-sized growth does also occasionally make the list.

Anyway, it’s all a bit of a mystery. One I’m in pursuit of answers to but in the meantime, I’ve also gotta persist. I have to use this brain, try and trick it to be good again (I’m doing a lot of puzzles, a lot of being in the world, a lot of being off the phone). I persist against all odds to try finishing a second book though I fear very much that it is futile and perhaps crap. Same, too, with the spec script I’ve been “working on”. And with whatever spare quiet time I end up with, I make sure to bully myself relentlessly about all creative shortcomings I can think of.

Can I speak freely? Despite my whining, I do love writing. If we’ve spoken lately you may be surprised to hear this. That is because I have a terrible habit of playing down my relationship to writing whenever I can these days, distancing myself from it either directly or circumspectly. This is for two reasons: one, because I feel uncomfortable and caught out when associating with the vocation of it (writing is something self-important people do, I do not wish to be seen as self-important, due to my fragile sense of self-importance – you see my dilemma, I’m sure) and two, because it is hard to admit both to myself and to others (due to that same pesky self-importance grr) that I am not a good writing factory. Or, worse, that I actually have been a good writing factory at least once in my life but the fact is that I am currently not.

But writing can be wonderful. If you’re really into it, and when it works, it can be the most miraculous thing. A cosmically satisfying method of untangling and sorting the ol’ consciousness caper, of pulling at threads that appear wrapped around old boots and ship wreckages and various other things crowding the ocean floor, and doing everyone the service of bringing them up into the light. It’s a great feeling.

It can also be very painful as we all know, and as I’ve made tediously clear here. The process itself can be painful – choosing the wrong words or ideas and hating them, but you can’t argue with that part. That’s just the way it is. The part I think you can argue with – the part I am attempting to argue with, with the invention of this Substack – is the productivity story we tell ourselves.

I confuse writing for other things, I always have. Except for maybe during the fan fiction teenage years. Otherwise I think I have always believed that writing is nothing if it is not very visible and very quote unquote productive. I think writing is finishing things, showing them to people, getting them published, getting paid, getting the world’s approval, feeling functional and accomplished, yada, yada, yada. Which, I think, goes back to when I was a child… only kidding. But none of that is writing, is it? Nor is it painting or sculpture or music or dance. ‘The work’, if we dare to call it that, is the doing. As up-its-own-arse as that is, it’s the truth, girls. It’s not the thing you show everyone, it’s the thing that happens to you and the world around you as you dig at the work and attempt to uncover it. Whether that be your innermost hurt or like, ‘what is the loudest sound I can make?’. And, after digging and uncovering, if you make it make enough sense for other people to get it and be moved by it (whether they kiss your feet or throw tomatoes), that’s your reward for the digging and the doing. And that’s all.

The realisation I’m stumbling upon at the moment is that I don’t believe I have ever been dropped into the process of making. I’ve always had my eye on the horizon, whether because of deadlines or because of the uncomfortable twinge that comes with looking within, and have always feverishly rushed the making in order to reach the showing. It’s important for me to say this out loud, or write it, because it’s all part of trying to undo the tightly-wound screws within me.

I did think recently: what if in the meantime there was an outlet for all of this half-arsed thinking and feeling? One that – in a perfect world – topples this preoccupation with being ‘good’ or approved of, and instead loosens the screws. One that could maybe then assuage the psychic blockage or relieve elements of it. And, I mean, in lieu of any of that, could simply serve as proof of life: Yes, I am alive, yes I am making stuff, no, I have not completely succumbed to the temptations of watching one-minute videos on the couch until I pass away.

Would be nice too if this was a place to challenge my relationship with internet media (media seems a laughably deficient word for what I’m describing… Eternal sludge? Insatiable parasite? Pocket inferno?). Because as it stands I’m more or less terrified of, and obsessed with, the optics of posting and not posting. Like when to talk, when to be hot, when to be mysterious, when to be vulnerable, when to shout, when to shut up and so on and so on. And I’m sick to death of it.

Some of my favourite recent cultural totems (Ben Pentreath’s blog, ‘Getting Killed’, Amanda Petrusich profiles, Shaad Magazine) make me feel the way they do because of a common quality: an approach to sharing and creating that reminds me of early internet outputs and a freedom I think we’ve lost (or certainly I’ve lost) in this current posting ecology. There’s a bit more humanity, a bit more happy mess. Which inspires me to use this blog as a gym of sorts; a place to make gains. Humility gains.

So if you’re interested please feel free to follow along. And if you’re not, I’m not sure how you landed here but save travels wherever you go now.

Talk soon.