- Tower this is Victor Hotel Oscar Mike Oscar on final approach. Requesting instructions for runway heading.
- Tower, Victor Hotel Oscar Mike, we have that as runway two niner. Descending to five thousand. We are as true as an arrow and are about to make our final descent.
- Tower this is Victor Hotel Oscar Mike Oscar congratulating ourselves on buttering the bread and we thank you for your assistance. We read Bravo three off the active and Bravo, Golf, Hotel, to Gate Seven. Victor Hotel Oscar Mike Oscar out.
Now that we've all returned to pretty much where we started a month ago, the question that I have as you have road tripped through my mind is, is it vastly different to yours? I think, without having played in yours, that the answer is so incredibly obvious that it is almost not worth asking the question.
I think that the landscape which makes up my mind, with large amounts of overly grandiose buildings and a perhaps daft sense of order, is more a product of nature rather than nurture. The raw materials which go together to make up a personality, I think are very much fixed before someone is born and to be perfectly frank, I do not think that I would have been vastly different had I been brought up in a different family.
I think that one of the unique hallmarks of life is its ability to think about itself. I have no doubt that my cats have their own ability to think about their own position in the world, though all evidence leads me to believe that they think that they are the most important things in it. Again we harken right back to the central problem of housing a mind within a brainbox within a bioelectromechanical meatbag.
We do not need to go through passport control with our luggage because for this whole entire trip, we have never left the country. When we step outside of the airport terminal there will not be that feeling of stepping out into a brave new world for me, as I already live here.
I am pretty used to living in the country of my mind. However, I suspect that many people who are in lockdown because of COVID-19 will find this awful. Just like the problem that whatever leaders a nation had before a crisis will be the ones who lead the nation into it, whatever challenges and issues that a person has before they go on holiday (including an enforced quarantine holiday) will be the ones they will take into it with them. That has very real and serious implications; especially surrounding domestic violence but also if that is not an issue, with the ongoing mental health of an individual.
Although I am hardly an authority on mental health issues, I will implore you that it is perfectly okay not to achieve very much at this time. It is perfectly acceptable to be sad and grieve the loss of a world which used to be. A mind which generates happiness from the trade of thoughts, ideas and companionship with other people which is suddenly starved of that, will naturally sense that something is wrong. I do not know how you can argue that that is not the case with the world at the moment. Not learning a skill, not getting loads of work done, and not being a hyper-productive dynamo, is acceptable and allowable. When uncertainty rains down, you are allowed to find shelter from the storm.
Be kind. Be silly. Be quiet. Be loud. Be sad. Be calm. Be worried. Be anxious. Be grateful Be all those things. Simply be.
Nobody else can own your response to this. To be fair, nobody else has the right to tell you that our response to all of this is wrong, either.
I'm going to leave after you've checked into the international terminal and flown off for some other country. Maybe you'd like to go for a road trip through your own mind, or perhaps through someone else's.
As for me, I get to back to work at the word wrangling ranch. These words ain't gonna wrangle themselves.
April 29, 2020
Horse 2703 - The Travel Blog: Day 29 (Flightplans and Checklists)
To fly back to where we started on this road trip would usually mean that we could book a flight and just go. Unfortunately, thanks to ongoing industrial action, the only way that we're going to be able to fly back, is if I fly the plane myself. Fortunately as this is my mind that we are going around inside, I get to make all of the rules and so after we've parked the car, we can just put our luggage on the plane ourselves.
You can sit up the back if you like but there won't be any cabin crew and it's more fun to sit up front anyway. The plane that we've been assigned is a De Havilland Rocket: registration VH-OMO¹.
Always walk around your aircraft to do a visual check to see if anything may be awry. Entire airliners full of hundreds of souls have been brought down by something as simple as protective tape left covering the pitot tubes; which has affected the instrument readings for things like airspeed and the altimeter.
Also kick each and every one of the tyres on the landing gear. Again, flying through the air at hundreds of knots might be perfectly fine but if the gear fails on the ground during landing, then you might get a faceplant and a meal service of dirt².
We'll go through the normal start up procedures and input the set of frequencies for radio and squawk that we've been given by ground control. The thing I like about aircraft and one of the reasons why I think that being a commercial airline pilot would be brilliant is that so much of the decision making process has been eliminated and checklists exist; which means that smarter people than I have thought about this kind of thing deeply. Of course, to get to that kind of precision and orchestrated order has cost many lives and who knows how many dollarpounds.
-Tower this is Victor Hotel Oscar Mike Oscar requesting advisory for pushback and taxi to the active.
The glamour jobs in an airport are the pilots who get to dress up in fancy uniforms. However it is the vast unseen army of people doing the unglamorous and at times awful jobs who really deserve the most credit and the highest honour.
When I think about all of the baggage handlers who have to send millions of pieces of luggage around the airport and match them up to the proper planes, it does my head in. There are front line staff like the people at Customs, Quarantine, Passport Control etc. who have to do a job which is both insanely important and yet utterly reviled by some people.
There are also the cleaners and the people who work in the cafés and shops who have to deal with the literal muck of the public. I think that it is borderline criminal that the people who have the most awful jobs are often in the most precarious employment circumstances while the people who work in management get paid many multiples that of the average worker. I wonder how long that the CEO of QANTAS would last if he had to clean up people's actual vomit and poop. That's why I find his comments at the moment, so very reprehensible.
- Tower, this is Victor Hotel Oscar Mike Oscar. Proceeding from gate two one, via Delta, then Alpha to Alpha one three. Hold short on Apron before entering active Runway one eight?
- Thank you Tower.
One of the things that even after reading through a list of procedures and looking at a radar instrument panel, is how Air Traffic Control makes sense of all of those aircraft at the same time.
The human brain while being a marvel, is still a relatively easily confused bit of kit. The most number of discreet packets of information that people can reliably handle at once is 23 on average. This relates exactly to the question of how many beans are in a pile and 23 appears to be the answer for most people that they cease to be individual beans and just become one pile. It also helps to explain why the optimal size for a classroom of children tends to top out at about 24 because beyond that, children cease to be individuals and begin to blur into a mob.
ATC has to deal with many aircraft at once and do their bit to ensure that they don't run anywhere near each other; both in the air and on the ground. I think that being Tower in ATC is perhaps simultaneously the most critical and the worst job in an entire airport.
- Tower this is Victor Hotel Oscar Mike Oscar, Depart runway one eight, climb to six thousand?
- Roger that. This is Victor Hotel Oscar Mike Oscar. Depart runway one eight, climb six thousand, on heading one seven four to checkpoint Zulu two, bank to heading two six three.
If I am on a plane and it happens to crash into the ocean, then my plan to deal with the situation is pretty much exactly the same as if I was on a ship on the high seas - drown.
Unless there is an obvious way that I can get to a lifeboat, then I know that I am done for. While that might sound incredibly defeatist, so far I have managed to be immortal. As I also have a pretty keen sense of self preservation, it also means that I am unlikely to go on a ship on the high seas and it also means that dying because of a catastrophic failure on an aircraft, is not out of the question. The interesting thing about the Destroying Angel, aka The Grim Reaper, aka Mister Death, is that he's also working through a list of procedures, checklists, and appointments. He doesn't particularly care what class ticket that you bought on the airline either³. O death, where is your victory? O death, where is your sting? Poor old Death has a mountain of paperwork that he has to work through and he also reports to the Big Boss. That's an awful job.
- Tower, this is Victor Hotel Oscar Mike Oscar. We have banked to heading two six three and will be leaving your airspace shortly. Thank you Tower. This is Victor Hotel Oscar Mike Oscar over and out.
¹Omo being the name of a popular brand of washing machine powder; which I quite like as the registration of an aircraft.
²It is still unknown to me why Tower always wants to know what the meal service on board any given aircraft is.
³Death usually flies economy class. Death also has an exemption to be able to carry offensive weapons on board - but not in overhead luggage.
You can sit up the back if you like but there won't be any cabin crew and it's more fun to sit up front anyway. The plane that we've been assigned is a De Havilland Rocket: registration VH-OMO¹.
Always walk around your aircraft to do a visual check to see if anything may be awry. Entire airliners full of hundreds of souls have been brought down by something as simple as protective tape left covering the pitot tubes; which has affected the instrument readings for things like airspeed and the altimeter.
Also kick each and every one of the tyres on the landing gear. Again, flying through the air at hundreds of knots might be perfectly fine but if the gear fails on the ground during landing, then you might get a faceplant and a meal service of dirt².
We'll go through the normal start up procedures and input the set of frequencies for radio and squawk that we've been given by ground control. The thing I like about aircraft and one of the reasons why I think that being a commercial airline pilot would be brilliant is that so much of the decision making process has been eliminated and checklists exist; which means that smarter people than I have thought about this kind of thing deeply. Of course, to get to that kind of precision and orchestrated order has cost many lives and who knows how many dollarpounds.
-Tower this is Victor Hotel Oscar Mike Oscar requesting advisory for pushback and taxi to the active.
The glamour jobs in an airport are the pilots who get to dress up in fancy uniforms. However it is the vast unseen army of people doing the unglamorous and at times awful jobs who really deserve the most credit and the highest honour.
When I think about all of the baggage handlers who have to send millions of pieces of luggage around the airport and match them up to the proper planes, it does my head in. There are front line staff like the people at Customs, Quarantine, Passport Control etc. who have to do a job which is both insanely important and yet utterly reviled by some people.
There are also the cleaners and the people who work in the cafés and shops who have to deal with the literal muck of the public. I think that it is borderline criminal that the people who have the most awful jobs are often in the most precarious employment circumstances while the people who work in management get paid many multiples that of the average worker. I wonder how long that the CEO of QANTAS would last if he had to clean up people's actual vomit and poop. That's why I find his comments at the moment, so very reprehensible.
- Tower, this is Victor Hotel Oscar Mike Oscar. Proceeding from gate two one, via Delta, then Alpha to Alpha one three. Hold short on Apron before entering active Runway one eight?
- Thank you Tower.
One of the things that even after reading through a list of procedures and looking at a radar instrument panel, is how Air Traffic Control makes sense of all of those aircraft at the same time.
The human brain while being a marvel, is still a relatively easily confused bit of kit. The most number of discreet packets of information that people can reliably handle at once is 23 on average. This relates exactly to the question of how many beans are in a pile and 23 appears to be the answer for most people that they cease to be individual beans and just become one pile. It also helps to explain why the optimal size for a classroom of children tends to top out at about 24 because beyond that, children cease to be individuals and begin to blur into a mob.
ATC has to deal with many aircraft at once and do their bit to ensure that they don't run anywhere near each other; both in the air and on the ground. I think that being Tower in ATC is perhaps simultaneously the most critical and the worst job in an entire airport.
- Tower this is Victor Hotel Oscar Mike Oscar, Depart runway one eight, climb to six thousand?
- Roger that. This is Victor Hotel Oscar Mike Oscar. Depart runway one eight, climb six thousand, on heading one seven four to checkpoint Zulu two, bank to heading two six three.
If I am on a plane and it happens to crash into the ocean, then my plan to deal with the situation is pretty much exactly the same as if I was on a ship on the high seas - drown.
Unless there is an obvious way that I can get to a lifeboat, then I know that I am done for. While that might sound incredibly defeatist, so far I have managed to be immortal. As I also have a pretty keen sense of self preservation, it also means that I am unlikely to go on a ship on the high seas and it also means that dying because of a catastrophic failure on an aircraft, is not out of the question. The interesting thing about the Destroying Angel, aka The Grim Reaper, aka Mister Death, is that he's also working through a list of procedures, checklists, and appointments. He doesn't particularly care what class ticket that you bought on the airline either³. O death, where is your victory? O death, where is your sting? Poor old Death has a mountain of paperwork that he has to work through and he also reports to the Big Boss. That's an awful job.
- Tower, this is Victor Hotel Oscar Mike Oscar. We have banked to heading two six three and will be leaving your airspace shortly. Thank you Tower. This is Victor Hotel Oscar Mike Oscar over and out.
¹Omo being the name of a popular brand of washing machine powder; which I quite like as the registration of an aircraft.
²It is still unknown to me why Tower always wants to know what the meal service on board any given aircraft is.
³Death usually flies economy class. Death also has an exemption to be able to carry offensive weapons on board - but not in overhead luggage.
April 28, 2020
Horse 2702 - The Travel Blog: Day 28 (Banana High School)
I suspect that many people will look back on school days with fondness and maybe a touch of whimsy. There are also others who couldn't wait to get out of the place, to reinvent themselves; after having been shaped by a set of experiences that were like living inside a forge. I think it not at all surprising that I fall into the latter category, after having lived inside my own mind for a while.
I left high school in 1996, which means that next year 2021, will be 25 years since I last left those doors; which presumably means that someone will be organising a class reunion. That may have been a thing before the invention of the internet but here in the twenty-first century, I do not think that it is necessary any more.
Today we are driving through the suburbs of Disraeli, through the classic wasteland of every house free standing on a quarter acre block, through a land where old people are insanely xenophobic and where the kids who play with other kids from every nation in the UN have found their own reasons for bullying.
We drive down Bramwell Avenue, where there is a Woolard's supermarket on the corner, a hardware store which is run by someone who was in 'the war' but which war it is exactly no-one has a clue, past a greengrocers', a newsagents' where the proprietor sells individual cigarettes to fourteen year old children on the sly in the alleyway out the back, and past a variety of mixed businesses which at some point in the future will all disappear thanks to Amazon.
We turn right into Hydrangea Road and crest two hills and then down the hill is Banana High School.
Banana High School is like most other high schools in that it is a model of society but played out in miniature. In six years the jocks, nerds, goths, preps, hippies, and the beautiful people, will form political alliances that are subject to change and according to rules that nobody really understands. Through this process and the overall aim of the education system to create citizens that are capable of surviving in the future through using the education tools of the past, the raw material of children's personalities and natural abilities are hammered and shaped into the things that they will eventually become (subject to another six years of final forming and polishing until about the age of 25.
Banana High School like any other high school has a vision statement, a motto, and half a dozen other lofty statements of managerial tat that consultants have invented, and that teachers who have to face the front line of teenagers generally ignore. I imagine that primary school teachers are on the whole happier than high school teachers because children's nastiness is far less pointed than teenage nastiness which is manufactured from the same root product but which also contains acid and bile.
I think that it is pretty obvious that I survived the experience of schooling and given that I still watch videos about maths on YouTube, and work as an accountant, it should also be obvious what I was reasonably good at. The question here and now is how would 40 year old me have survived? To that end, I still think not very well; except that I would have taken up extra units of English literature and History. The reason why though, is tied up in a far more interesting set of behavioural psychology.
I remember reading a psychology paper looking at people who were stuck in either cramped quarters or who were physically isolated from other people by distance and it noted that at roughly the ⅔ mark, people generally become their most irritable and will behave at their worst.
This had looked at people in places like the Mir space station, in prison, scientists who had been sent to Antarctica, and the common thing is that the ⅔ mark appears to be related to the duration of the mission.
That is really curious because it also equally applies to a sporting fixture where the whole thing is played out in a couple of hours. The ⅔ mark in a football match is at the hour; which explains why that is the best time to make a substitute. The ⅔ mark in an Australian Rules match is part way through the third quarter; which is when teams either lift or drop their heads.
Apply that same principle to schooling and the ⅔ mark happens in Year 8 of 12; and when you also supercharge those same people with a confusing soup of hormones and the onset of puberty, then the concoction means that 13 and 14 year old children are the vilest people on the planet.
I have no desire to go to Banana High School; even if it is some imaginary construct in my mind. I'd rather leave the car parked around the corner, stand outside for a bit and then drive on.
Since we're all on COVIDcation, then it is worth remembering that as the lockdown started on April 1st and doesn't end until June 30th, then that puts the ⅔ mark at May 30th; hence that day is when everyone should be expected to be at their most irritable. Towards the end of May, we should expect to see signs of lashing out and civil disobedience. Curiously, this is exactly what happened in 1919 and why governments in Australia succumbed to public pressure and lifted quarantine restrictions. It's also when we saw a second wave of influenza which was worse than the first.
We can look back over history in exactly the same way that we can look at high school and note that when you put a lot of stroppy selfish people into close quarters for extended periods of time, the results aren't pleasant.
The best response to this is also the one of personal expense; try practicing being kind to people, be patient with people, and try not to be overly critical of yourself if you feel terrible.
Just like high school, it gets better when you leave and the people who you actually manage to make some kind of connection with, are going to endure and continue being kind and patient.
I left high school in 1996, which means that next year 2021, will be 25 years since I last left those doors; which presumably means that someone will be organising a class reunion. That may have been a thing before the invention of the internet but here in the twenty-first century, I do not think that it is necessary any more.
Today we are driving through the suburbs of Disraeli, through the classic wasteland of every house free standing on a quarter acre block, through a land where old people are insanely xenophobic and where the kids who play with other kids from every nation in the UN have found their own reasons for bullying.
We drive down Bramwell Avenue, where there is a Woolard's supermarket on the corner, a hardware store which is run by someone who was in 'the war' but which war it is exactly no-one has a clue, past a greengrocers', a newsagents' where the proprietor sells individual cigarettes to fourteen year old children on the sly in the alleyway out the back, and past a variety of mixed businesses which at some point in the future will all disappear thanks to Amazon.
We turn right into Hydrangea Road and crest two hills and then down the hill is Banana High School.
Banana High School is like most other high schools in that it is a model of society but played out in miniature. In six years the jocks, nerds, goths, preps, hippies, and the beautiful people, will form political alliances that are subject to change and according to rules that nobody really understands. Through this process and the overall aim of the education system to create citizens that are capable of surviving in the future through using the education tools of the past, the raw material of children's personalities and natural abilities are hammered and shaped into the things that they will eventually become (subject to another six years of final forming and polishing until about the age of 25.
Banana High School like any other high school has a vision statement, a motto, and half a dozen other lofty statements of managerial tat that consultants have invented, and that teachers who have to face the front line of teenagers generally ignore. I imagine that primary school teachers are on the whole happier than high school teachers because children's nastiness is far less pointed than teenage nastiness which is manufactured from the same root product but which also contains acid and bile.
I think that it is pretty obvious that I survived the experience of schooling and given that I still watch videos about maths on YouTube, and work as an accountant, it should also be obvious what I was reasonably good at. The question here and now is how would 40 year old me have survived? To that end, I still think not very well; except that I would have taken up extra units of English literature and History. The reason why though, is tied up in a far more interesting set of behavioural psychology.
I remember reading a psychology paper looking at people who were stuck in either cramped quarters or who were physically isolated from other people by distance and it noted that at roughly the ⅔ mark, people generally become their most irritable and will behave at their worst.
This had looked at people in places like the Mir space station, in prison, scientists who had been sent to Antarctica, and the common thing is that the ⅔ mark appears to be related to the duration of the mission.
That is really curious because it also equally applies to a sporting fixture where the whole thing is played out in a couple of hours. The ⅔ mark in a football match is at the hour; which explains why that is the best time to make a substitute. The ⅔ mark in an Australian Rules match is part way through the third quarter; which is when teams either lift or drop their heads.
Apply that same principle to schooling and the ⅔ mark happens in Year 8 of 12; and when you also supercharge those same people with a confusing soup of hormones and the onset of puberty, then the concoction means that 13 and 14 year old children are the vilest people on the planet.
I have no desire to go to Banana High School; even if it is some imaginary construct in my mind. I'd rather leave the car parked around the corner, stand outside for a bit and then drive on.
Since we're all on COVIDcation, then it is worth remembering that as the lockdown started on April 1st and doesn't end until June 30th, then that puts the ⅔ mark at May 30th; hence that day is when everyone should be expected to be at their most irritable. Towards the end of May, we should expect to see signs of lashing out and civil disobedience. Curiously, this is exactly what happened in 1919 and why governments in Australia succumbed to public pressure and lifted quarantine restrictions. It's also when we saw a second wave of influenza which was worse than the first.
We can look back over history in exactly the same way that we can look at high school and note that when you put a lot of stroppy selfish people into close quarters for extended periods of time, the results aren't pleasant.
The best response to this is also the one of personal expense; try practicing being kind to people, be patient with people, and try not to be overly critical of yourself if you feel terrible.
Just like high school, it gets better when you leave and the people who you actually manage to make some kind of connection with, are going to endure and continue being kind and patient.
April 25, 2020
Horse 2701 - The Travel Blog: Day 25 (The War Memorial)
War! Huh! Yeah, what is it good for?
Filling up textbook in history classes. Say it again.
War! Huh! Yeah, what is it good for?
Spontaneously supercharging the push for new technologies.
Er...
The truth is that I don't like war. From a philosophical standpoint, all it is is the use of the apparatus of the state, to justify the murder of some other country's people; for some usually tenuous and dubious goal. In general, a war in principle is a complete failure of diplomacy, which some people get to decorate themselves with medals afterwards for taking part in it.
This is the 105th anniversary of the disastrous landing by ANZAC troops on the Gallipoli Peninsula in a campaign that would ultimately prove to be useless; in a war which was in all honesty completely pointless.
After four and a half years, millions of people lay dead in the fields of Europe; for what essentially was an argument between nine cousins that got way out of hand. If they'd been locked in a room in May of 1914 and had been told to sort out their differences, then no-one would have have had to show up, and it wouldn't have kicked off a second time a generation later.
The only difference at the end of all the fighting was that hundreds of millions of lives were ruined early. All of the princes, kings, clowns that caper in their sawdust rings, and ordinary people who are like you and me, ended up in the same place. There ain't no place like a hole in the ground!
I don't want to take anything away from the professionalism of military personnel, nor the bravery of people who fought on the battlefield, nor do I want to minimize the terrible losses and heartache paid by the families who suffer but I do not think that the vast majority of wars are remotely necessary.
The people who seem to get the most glory from wars are a similar class of people who would get rewards from the regular economy. There is more of a meritocracy in the military but the people who rise through the ranks and become generals majors, often get there because of patronage and connection.
When it comes to the waging of negotiations, or rather the lack thereof in a l of cases, that sends a nation's sons and daughters off to become bits of exploded meat on the fields of some far away place, it is not the people who have to do the work who make the decisions. The coin of the battlefield is the blood of the nation's sons and the people who get to spend that coin, often bear no consequence for doing so. It as if they feel that they have no responsibility to the nation whatsoever.
We should remember the sacrifice that people have paid but by the same token we should remain very very angry that men in offices many thousands of miles away, exacted that sacrifice. I don't even mean the toll exacted by the enemy because on both sides, it was shopkeepers and tradespeople, clerks, and academics, who otherwise would have had no reason for animosity at all; yet by the vissitudes of fate, they find themselves at either ends of rifles pointed at each other.
Just think about Gallipoli. Johnny Turk would have preferred to be at home reading the newspaper on Saturday and noodling around his back yard with his kids as much as Billy Brown from Sydney Town. A hundred years later, their grandkids might have grandkids of their own who want to play footy with each other. 105 years later, I want to go to Mo's place and have a barbeque.
To that end, what did the First World War actually achieve? From our point of view which is more than a century later and where literally nobody who fought in it is still alive? Nothing. It redrew some lines on a map which in the long run of things are all up for contest anyway, it made a lot of people dead, homeless, poor, and a very select few rich and famous. Oh wow. Big deal.
Filling up textbook in history classes. Say it again.
War! Huh! Yeah, what is it good for?
Spontaneously supercharging the push for new technologies.
Er...
The truth is that I don't like war. From a philosophical standpoint, all it is is the use of the apparatus of the state, to justify the murder of some other country's people; for some usually tenuous and dubious goal. In general, a war in principle is a complete failure of diplomacy, which some people get to decorate themselves with medals afterwards for taking part in it.
This is the 105th anniversary of the disastrous landing by ANZAC troops on the Gallipoli Peninsula in a campaign that would ultimately prove to be useless; in a war which was in all honesty completely pointless.
After four and a half years, millions of people lay dead in the fields of Europe; for what essentially was an argument between nine cousins that got way out of hand. If they'd been locked in a room in May of 1914 and had been told to sort out their differences, then no-one would have have had to show up, and it wouldn't have kicked off a second time a generation later.
The only difference at the end of all the fighting was that hundreds of millions of lives were ruined early. All of the princes, kings, clowns that caper in their sawdust rings, and ordinary people who are like you and me, ended up in the same place. There ain't no place like a hole in the ground!
I don't want to take anything away from the professionalism of military personnel, nor the bravery of people who fought on the battlefield, nor do I want to minimize the terrible losses and heartache paid by the families who suffer but I do not think that the vast majority of wars are remotely necessary.
The people who seem to get the most glory from wars are a similar class of people who would get rewards from the regular economy. There is more of a meritocracy in the military but the people who rise through the ranks and become generals majors, often get there because of patronage and connection.
When it comes to the waging of negotiations, or rather the lack thereof in a l of cases, that sends a nation's sons and daughters off to become bits of exploded meat on the fields of some far away place, it is not the people who have to do the work who make the decisions. The coin of the battlefield is the blood of the nation's sons and the people who get to spend that coin, often bear no consequence for doing so. It as if they feel that they have no responsibility to the nation whatsoever.
We should remember the sacrifice that people have paid but by the same token we should remain very very angry that men in offices many thousands of miles away, exacted that sacrifice. I don't even mean the toll exacted by the enemy because on both sides, it was shopkeepers and tradespeople, clerks, and academics, who otherwise would have had no reason for animosity at all; yet by the vissitudes of fate, they find themselves at either ends of rifles pointed at each other.
Just think about Gallipoli. Johnny Turk would have preferred to be at home reading the newspaper on Saturday and noodling around his back yard with his kids as much as Billy Brown from Sydney Town. A hundred years later, their grandkids might have grandkids of their own who want to play footy with each other. 105 years later, I want to go to Mo's place and have a barbeque.
To that end, what did the First World War actually achieve? From our point of view which is more than a century later and where literally nobody who fought in it is still alive? Nothing. It redrew some lines on a map which in the long run of things are all up for contest anyway, it made a lot of people dead, homeless, poor, and a very select few rich and famous. Oh wow. Big deal.
April 24, 2020
Horse 2700 - The Travel Blog: Day 24 (The Quiet Town)
Although the main road heads off to the northeast and a very big city, we're going to make a diversion through Bringachookalong, Kickastickalong, and up the Wy Development Road to the very small town of Wee Kepler.
Wee Kepler is one of those insanely small towns with a population of double digits on a busy day and which swells to more than a hundred thousand once a year, for the Wee Kepler sports day. Folks from all over the country converge on Wee Kepler for that one day in November when the Uppies and the Downies play in their annual Tommyball match.
In the morning is feté part of the day when at Wee Kepler Racecourse, there is a tat fair, the Wee Kepler Quarter Mile Cat Race, the Saucepan Head Jousting Tournament, an Oratory Competition, a Folk Meleé, as well as Axe Darts.
The Wee Kepler Tommyball Cup is the premier trophy that people come to see being played for and even though this is an amateur event, scouts from professional clubs have been known to pluck players from here and put them on the world stage.
The rules of Tommyball are so arcane and cryptic that the umpires need to hold a law degree just to be able to properly adjudicate the game. The game is traditionally played on a rhombus shaped field but the Wee Kepler Racecourse makes use of both the racetrack and the infield.
As with all Tommyball matches, there are fifteen players on a team; which includes two motorbike riders but unlike the professional game, the teams are allowed to allocate their weaponry credits across all fifteen players instead of just six. This had the unexpected result one year of the Uppies building an armored tank type thing out of their two motorbikes; which promptly fell over and remained on its back after firing a single shell. The Uppies lost 908-3 that year, which was unfortunate.
However since we have come on a Friday and in April instead of November, none of this is here. The only things which inhabit the town are the locals whose population is barely in double digits and of course the memories of Novembers past.
At this time of year, the place is so quiet that the only sounds that can be heard are the far off warbling of magpies and the gentle rustle of the wind in the trees.
There is a faint smell of decades of racing cat poop, and the long expired smells of grease and two stroke additive. There are faded adverts for things like Patriot brand cigarettes and Golden Fleece petrol and Homestead chicken and a bunch of other things that have faded slowly from people's memories and now exist only as faded detritus.
Over in the next town of MacDonald which is on the MacDonald River and named after some dude called MacDonald who presumably said "Wahay, A River! I'm going to name it after me because there's no way that the local people who already live here have discovered this before and have already given it a name", is a building that totally used to be a Pizza Hut. There are still a few 'used to be a Pizza Huts' around but they pale in comparison to the splendour of a 'used to be an IHOP' which are veritable cathedrals to pancakes.
"Ahhhhhh aahhhh aaah ah ahhhhhaaaah, Pancakes."
"This is a real estate agent now. Please get out of the premises."
"Okaaaaahhhhhhhaaaaaaay, Pancakes"
Small towns are full of memories of things that are not currently going on. For the people who make the annual pilgrimage out there, the whole journey has some kind of almost mythical feel about it. There is a sense of purpose when you have to go somewhere to do a special thing. For the people who live in small towns though, their sense of going somewhere for a special thing must by definition be in some other place that isn't there. The only place that I can think of where literally everyone shows up for a special thing in a town, is the town of Betoota in Queensland where the usual population of place is zero. That also explains the reason behind the name of the satirical online newspaper called the Betoota Advocate. The reportage of that newspaper is as imaginary as this road trip.
We can't actually stay in Wee Kepler because it is so small that it doesn't have a hotel. Admittedly I could just imagine up a hotel but that's a wee bit silly, isn't it?
Wee Kepler is one of those insanely small towns with a population of double digits on a busy day and which swells to more than a hundred thousand once a year, for the Wee Kepler sports day. Folks from all over the country converge on Wee Kepler for that one day in November when the Uppies and the Downies play in their annual Tommyball match.
In the morning is feté part of the day when at Wee Kepler Racecourse, there is a tat fair, the Wee Kepler Quarter Mile Cat Race, the Saucepan Head Jousting Tournament, an Oratory Competition, a Folk Meleé, as well as Axe Darts.
The Wee Kepler Tommyball Cup is the premier trophy that people come to see being played for and even though this is an amateur event, scouts from professional clubs have been known to pluck players from here and put them on the world stage.
The rules of Tommyball are so arcane and cryptic that the umpires need to hold a law degree just to be able to properly adjudicate the game. The game is traditionally played on a rhombus shaped field but the Wee Kepler Racecourse makes use of both the racetrack and the infield.
As with all Tommyball matches, there are fifteen players on a team; which includes two motorbike riders but unlike the professional game, the teams are allowed to allocate their weaponry credits across all fifteen players instead of just six. This had the unexpected result one year of the Uppies building an armored tank type thing out of their two motorbikes; which promptly fell over and remained on its back after firing a single shell. The Uppies lost 908-3 that year, which was unfortunate.
However since we have come on a Friday and in April instead of November, none of this is here. The only things which inhabit the town are the locals whose population is barely in double digits and of course the memories of Novembers past.
At this time of year, the place is so quiet that the only sounds that can be heard are the far off warbling of magpies and the gentle rustle of the wind in the trees.
There is a faint smell of decades of racing cat poop, and the long expired smells of grease and two stroke additive. There are faded adverts for things like Patriot brand cigarettes and Golden Fleece petrol and Homestead chicken and a bunch of other things that have faded slowly from people's memories and now exist only as faded detritus.
Over in the next town of MacDonald which is on the MacDonald River and named after some dude called MacDonald who presumably said "Wahay, A River! I'm going to name it after me because there's no way that the local people who already live here have discovered this before and have already given it a name", is a building that totally used to be a Pizza Hut. There are still a few 'used to be a Pizza Huts' around but they pale in comparison to the splendour of a 'used to be an IHOP' which are veritable cathedrals to pancakes.
"Ahhhhhh aahhhh aaah ah ahhhhhaaaah, Pancakes."
"This is a real estate agent now. Please get out of the premises."
"Okaaaaahhhhhhhaaaaaaay, Pancakes"
Small towns are full of memories of things that are not currently going on. For the people who make the annual pilgrimage out there, the whole journey has some kind of almost mythical feel about it. There is a sense of purpose when you have to go somewhere to do a special thing. For the people who live in small towns though, their sense of going somewhere for a special thing must by definition be in some other place that isn't there. The only place that I can think of where literally everyone shows up for a special thing in a town, is the town of Betoota in Queensland where the usual population of place is zero. That also explains the reason behind the name of the satirical online newspaper called the Betoota Advocate. The reportage of that newspaper is as imaginary as this road trip.
We can't actually stay in Wee Kepler because it is so small that it doesn't have a hotel. Admittedly I could just imagine up a hotel but that's a wee bit silly, isn't it?
April 23, 2020
Horse 2699 - The Travel Blog: Day 23 (The Quiet Lake)
We have arrived at a place called Lake Ennui and the most interesting thing of note about Lake Ennui is that the lake has been bone dry for a very very long time. The road which heads north along here, used to be a two lane road which was very bumpy but it is now a dual carriageway which has both grade separated intersections as well as ordinary box junctions (some with lights).
Along the road are small monuments to summers past and the occasional bout of sadness but you'll note that the last monument to ennui and plaque commemorating boredom are quite old. They're just not being made anymore.
One of the problems with living inside my own mind is that the machinery of industry is more or less constantly spinning. The factories demand a constant supply of ideas and other industries are always in the process of solving (and maybe creating) problems.
The thing about ennui is that it is kind of a listlessness or boredom which is usually caused by either a general sense of unease or a lack of immediate interest in things. The twenty-first century has given us lovely distraction devices; which means that a genuine sense of ennui might not even exist anymore. Hence the reason why the lake is empty.
It is important to state that ennui is different to doing nothing. I am happy doing nothing sometimes. There is a lot of joy to be found in faffing about. Lake Faff is at the other end of Tea Gardens Road; which also comes off of this road. However since we are driving along this road, maybe it is worth stopping at a lookout and looking out over a lake which once was.
There appears to be something like dried up sludge on the lake bed. When someone was boating across Lake Ennui, the sludge made progress difficult as it gets clogged in propellors and on oars. Nowadays I suppose that you could just drive across the lake bed, provided you had a four wheel drive.
While Lake Ennui is empty if we head just a little bit north we come to a hydroelectric scheme, which is powered by holding back the wild rivers of happiness behind a dam; which has created Lake Weltschmerz. It is full.
Lake Weltschmerz is notable for being black most of the time and while Lake Ennui was a cool lake of boredom which might have been filled by weariness with the world, Lake Weltschmerz is vitally overflowing with the notion that there is an abundance of bad rather than good in the kosmos. As a natural pessimist who knows that the glass is half empty because that is how glasses work (only a dingbat would fill them half way), Lake Weltschmerz is full of tepid undrinkable water which is warmed by a rampant hot spring of annoyance that the kosmos isn't as it should be but the hope that it could be better.
I kind of wonder what would happen if Lake Weltschmerz was drained. I expect that whole schools of salmon of doubt and barracudas of inadequacy would be exposed but seeing as I can not swim, I am certainly definitely absolutely resolutely not going to get some scuba gear and go diving.
The really funny thing about Lake Ennui is that immediately to the north, there is a border bewteen states. In the olden days, before the road was made into a high speed dual carriageway, the border was just beyond an uphill right hand bend and then a sharp left. If you had been speeding along at the posted speed limit, then if you weren't careful you could have driven straight on and through the chevron signs. The border still exists between states but instead of a fancy stone monument which marks it, when the road was widened, it had to be demolished and has been replaced by a simple metal sign; which I guess itself serves as a monument to Thomas Wolfe's theory that 'you can't go home again'.
As we keep on heading north beyond Lake Ennui, the highway passes through a copse and then into a kind of rolling pasture country. We will be joined by a full on six lane motorway at some point but before we get there, I want to make a diversion to a wee town called Tollbooth.
There are loads of little towns which got bypassed by bypasses bypassing them but Tollbooth served no other purpose that I can tell, other than to collect tolls for use of the old highway.
The only important building to speak of in Tollbooth is the Tollbooth Post Office Hotel. There is a sign on the front of the hotel which reads:
"A Pint, A Pie, and Kindly Advice: ₱5"
Be warned: after you've had the pint and eaten the pie and asked for the kindly advice, the kindly advice will always be 'Don't eat the pie.'
April 22, 2020
Horse 2698 - The Travel Blog: Day 22 (The Mall)
Having turned off Highway 13 onto Highway 313 (being the third highway which turns off Highway 13 - isn't having a highway numbering system grand?) we should start seeing signs for the town of Carpet-On-The-Wold. Towns like this used to be on the highway but because everyone wants to make good time while not having a good time, these towns frequently complain about a past which never was, which is based on a form of nostalgia for a thing which never existed.
We however are not going to drive into Carpet-On-The-Wold partly because it is a boring town which only has a few houses and the usual Imperial, Commercial, and Royal Hotels, as well as the fake Irish pub, the Fisty McPunchup; which is an off the shelf flat pack Irish pub complete with flat packed tat. We are also not going to drive into Carpet-On-The-Wold partly because I have no idea what a wold is, nor why one would want to carpet over it.
Just off the turnoff for Carpet-On-The-Wold Road, is a generic shopping precinct which has both a Hammerbarn and Super J-Mart Hair Care and Tyre Centre; as well as an Eastfields with all of the usual supermarkets like Woolard's, and Try N Save, and the usual tat shops that used to occupy the high street of Carpet-On-The-Wold before they all moved far out of town and into the Eastfields in the name of 'convenience'. Locals love driving out of town to go to exactly the same shops that they used to visit in town.
I warn you that once we have parked the station wagon and gone inside, that this Eastfields will look like every other Eastfields in the world and its only concession to the country that it happens to be in will be a multicoloured swirly logo in the shape of an animal which used to live here before they plonked down the Eastfields.
We park the car in a car park which has coloured lights which tell you if there is a car in the spot or not; which you probably could have already been able to tell by looking to see if there is a car in the spot or not. We then take the escalator and enter into a wonderful land, filled with two hundred specialty shops which all specially sell things which you could have gotten at any other Eastfields. All of them are scientifically designed; with doof-doof music which isn't good enough to be playing in a nightclub but where the lyrics all seem to contain references to being in a nightclub; and where the music is just loud enough to drown out your own internal monologue, thus making you spend more money. Remember capitalist consumers, you can not be what you can not buy.
Although some of the floor space is devoted to the food court, some to the supermarkets and department stores¹, and some to the big variety stores, most of the rest of the shops will be for women's fashion or jewellery, and if you are lucky there will be one book store, three men's clothing shops, two shops for computer games, a toy shop, and Top Dollar, Hot Dollar, Silly Willy's Two Dollar Store, and a bank which will almost never have anyone who can help you with anything more complicated than normal transactions.
The obvious question is why I want to go here while on a road trip and the answer to that is that I am hungry. We could spend ₱25 at the O'Fools Burger Shack and get a Big Fool but why do that when you can get a muffin, a banana and a properly made coffee for less than a fiver.
I'll let you go and walk around for a bit; maybe get some breakfast.
...
What did you get? I got a spring roll, a muffin, a banana, a copy of The Federalist Papers and the Anti-Federalist Papers, a can of Mary Berry's Heart Exploder², and today's copy of The Globe newspaper.
Of particular note in every single Eastfields in the world, is the proliferation of teenage nerd herds, goth herds, jock herds, and prep herds. In general, most of these herds have no money to speak of and will roam around the Eastfields in a circular direction; occasionally coming across each other and having pitched yelling arguments using language that would make sailors blush and army veterans want to join monasteries and nunneries.
We will be back on our way up Highway 313. There's a road that goes to Lake Ennui which is a nice drive.
¹some department stores have a "bored husbands' corner"
²now with nine kinds of sugar, super extra caffeine, taurine, guarana, and tex-mex-hexadrine³.
³which is a name that I totally made up but have subsquently found out is an immunosuppressant.
We however are not going to drive into Carpet-On-The-Wold partly because it is a boring town which only has a few houses and the usual Imperial, Commercial, and Royal Hotels, as well as the fake Irish pub, the Fisty McPunchup; which is an off the shelf flat pack Irish pub complete with flat packed tat. We are also not going to drive into Carpet-On-The-Wold partly because I have no idea what a wold is, nor why one would want to carpet over it.
Just off the turnoff for Carpet-On-The-Wold Road, is a generic shopping precinct which has both a Hammerbarn and Super J-Mart Hair Care and Tyre Centre; as well as an Eastfields with all of the usual supermarkets like Woolard's, and Try N Save, and the usual tat shops that used to occupy the high street of Carpet-On-The-Wold before they all moved far out of town and into the Eastfields in the name of 'convenience'. Locals love driving out of town to go to exactly the same shops that they used to visit in town.
I warn you that once we have parked the station wagon and gone inside, that this Eastfields will look like every other Eastfields in the world and its only concession to the country that it happens to be in will be a multicoloured swirly logo in the shape of an animal which used to live here before they plonked down the Eastfields.
We park the car in a car park which has coloured lights which tell you if there is a car in the spot or not; which you probably could have already been able to tell by looking to see if there is a car in the spot or not. We then take the escalator and enter into a wonderful land, filled with two hundred specialty shops which all specially sell things which you could have gotten at any other Eastfields. All of them are scientifically designed; with doof-doof music which isn't good enough to be playing in a nightclub but where the lyrics all seem to contain references to being in a nightclub; and where the music is just loud enough to drown out your own internal monologue, thus making you spend more money. Remember capitalist consumers, you can not be what you can not buy.
Although some of the floor space is devoted to the food court, some to the supermarkets and department stores¹, and some to the big variety stores, most of the rest of the shops will be for women's fashion or jewellery, and if you are lucky there will be one book store, three men's clothing shops, two shops for computer games, a toy shop, and Top Dollar, Hot Dollar, Silly Willy's Two Dollar Store, and a bank which will almost never have anyone who can help you with anything more complicated than normal transactions.
The obvious question is why I want to go here while on a road trip and the answer to that is that I am hungry. We could spend ₱25 at the O'Fools Burger Shack and get a Big Fool but why do that when you can get a muffin, a banana and a properly made coffee for less than a fiver.
I'll let you go and walk around for a bit; maybe get some breakfast.
...
What did you get? I got a spring roll, a muffin, a banana, a copy of The Federalist Papers and the Anti-Federalist Papers, a can of Mary Berry's Heart Exploder², and today's copy of The Globe newspaper.
Of particular note in every single Eastfields in the world, is the proliferation of teenage nerd herds, goth herds, jock herds, and prep herds. In general, most of these herds have no money to speak of and will roam around the Eastfields in a circular direction; occasionally coming across each other and having pitched yelling arguments using language that would make sailors blush and army veterans want to join monasteries and nunneries.
We will be back on our way up Highway 313. There's a road that goes to Lake Ennui which is a nice drive.
¹some department stores have a "bored husbands' corner"
²now with nine kinds of sugar, super extra caffeine, taurine, guarana, and tex-mex-hexadrine³.
³which is a name that I totally made up but have subsquently found out is an immunosuppressant.
April 21, 2020
Horse 2697 - The Travel Blog: Day 21 (Highway 13)
I hope that you noticed while we were in the Citta d'Scarletti that the streets are not straight and that they tend to follow the contours of the land. As we drive out of here, we're going to pass through an intersection which is both insane and wonderful, before we head out to the north.
The rental car company didn't have a hatchback but they gave us a Tiger Diplomat SS wagon; which has a big rumbly V8 up front, chucking out more than 500 buff horses. Boom!
That does mean of course that getting through Citta d'Scarletti is going to be a little tight.
We pull out of the driveway and down the Paladin Hill, through the Alboretto Triumph Arch, and after heading through a nonsensical one-way circulatory system, we finally reach the Scarletti Piazza.
Standing out in the middle upon a glorified rain barrel is a policeman on point duty who has about as much control over the intersection as a symphony orchestra conductor has over a swarm of bees. The bees have an internal set of rules¹ and they know a bunch of dances but the amount of control that someone waving a stick around at them, is exactly nil.
I have little experience at working out how to pass through here, which you might think would be a distinct disadvantage but because everyone else knows how to do this, their own sense of self-preservation should make this really easy.
Basically, we sort of head in the direction that we want to go and the rest of the traffic will miraculously work itself out automatically.
A Ladybug 500 has just whizzed past of the left; doing 80km/h in the other direction. We can aim between those two buses and come out the other side in almost impunity. There are more silver Bromberg 1-Klasses than I care to mention and although you would think that there should be lots of exotic sports cars in here, this swirling motor tornado is mostly small hatchbacks, vans, and box trucks.
If you look way over to where that clock tower is, you will see a long line of cars and trucks trying to cross over into the next country. Although we know of the existence of other countries, we're not allowed to ever cross the border into someone else's mind. That is the border with the country of Evan which is a constitutional monarchy. They have very tough restrictions on the importation of wet goods because of their customs and border policies. Some say that it is easier for a needle to pass through the eye of a camel than for a fish van to enter the Kingdom of Evan.
In the meantime I have no idea exactly how we passed through the piazza without hitting anything at all.
I want to head north along Highway 13 for a bit and drive past what appears to be the burnt out ruins of businesses which may have been important once upon a time. A lot of these businesses made things like hopes, dreams, fears, and worries; they have been just left abandoned. Some of the infrastructure has been moved to other cities and is now employed elsewhere and maybe some of these might restart in the future but it's always kind of interesting to drive up highways like this and wonder about what used to be important but isn't now.
This highway also heads further north through the Forest Of Doubt which has a tendency to either make the road impassable or difficult to drive through. The road up here is always misty and it is unwise to go tearing through here with your foot nail to the floor, however there is a road to the west from here which takes you to the Bravado Theatre; which from time to time does put on some excellent shows and occasionally shows by the touring company Half Baked Ideas And Ill-Conceived Concepts Pty Ltd.
The real reason why we're heading up this road is because the road passes through the Swamp Of Despair. At the moment, the road is not flooded; so it is perfectly safe to drive through.
There is a sign which is on the other side of the swamp; which is worth reading and perhaps worth remembering if you ever need to pass through here.
It is unknown how long this highway is. Please exit now.
- City Of Light
One thing that I find striking about this sign is that it isn't actually within the city limits of the Citta d'Scarletti. It is on another road which heads towards the City Of Light. The thing is though, that when the red mists come down² and you are driving down Highway 13 through the Swamp Of Despair, it can be really hard to find the sign or perhaps remember that it is there.
This is where we turn off this road and start heading in another northerly direction. I know that it is tempting to drop a down a gear and lay some big №11s on the pavement but the roads might be slippery and we don't want to dent the rental car.
¹Not only do bees follow internal rules but they also all have barcode licence plates; which is why they are covered in stripes.
²They could also very well be green mists. I don't know. I can not tell the difference because I am red-green colourblind.
The rental car company didn't have a hatchback but they gave us a Tiger Diplomat SS wagon; which has a big rumbly V8 up front, chucking out more than 500 buff horses. Boom!
That does mean of course that getting through Citta d'Scarletti is going to be a little tight.
We pull out of the driveway and down the Paladin Hill, through the Alboretto Triumph Arch, and after heading through a nonsensical one-way circulatory system, we finally reach the Scarletti Piazza.
Standing out in the middle upon a glorified rain barrel is a policeman on point duty who has about as much control over the intersection as a symphony orchestra conductor has over a swarm of bees. The bees have an internal set of rules¹ and they know a bunch of dances but the amount of control that someone waving a stick around at them, is exactly nil.
I have little experience at working out how to pass through here, which you might think would be a distinct disadvantage but because everyone else knows how to do this, their own sense of self-preservation should make this really easy.
Basically, we sort of head in the direction that we want to go and the rest of the traffic will miraculously work itself out automatically.
A Ladybug 500 has just whizzed past of the left; doing 80km/h in the other direction. We can aim between those two buses and come out the other side in almost impunity. There are more silver Bromberg 1-Klasses than I care to mention and although you would think that there should be lots of exotic sports cars in here, this swirling motor tornado is mostly small hatchbacks, vans, and box trucks.
If you look way over to where that clock tower is, you will see a long line of cars and trucks trying to cross over into the next country. Although we know of the existence of other countries, we're not allowed to ever cross the border into someone else's mind. That is the border with the country of Evan which is a constitutional monarchy. They have very tough restrictions on the importation of wet goods because of their customs and border policies. Some say that it is easier for a needle to pass through the eye of a camel than for a fish van to enter the Kingdom of Evan.
In the meantime I have no idea exactly how we passed through the piazza without hitting anything at all.
I want to head north along Highway 13 for a bit and drive past what appears to be the burnt out ruins of businesses which may have been important once upon a time. A lot of these businesses made things like hopes, dreams, fears, and worries; they have been just left abandoned. Some of the infrastructure has been moved to other cities and is now employed elsewhere and maybe some of these might restart in the future but it's always kind of interesting to drive up highways like this and wonder about what used to be important but isn't now.
This highway also heads further north through the Forest Of Doubt which has a tendency to either make the road impassable or difficult to drive through. The road up here is always misty and it is unwise to go tearing through here with your foot nail to the floor, however there is a road to the west from here which takes you to the Bravado Theatre; which from time to time does put on some excellent shows and occasionally shows by the touring company Half Baked Ideas And Ill-Conceived Concepts Pty Ltd.
The real reason why we're heading up this road is because the road passes through the Swamp Of Despair. At the moment, the road is not flooded; so it is perfectly safe to drive through.
There is a sign which is on the other side of the swamp; which is worth reading and perhaps worth remembering if you ever need to pass through here.
NOTICE:
Stop. This road has never ever flooded for more than ten days. If there is anything that you have said or done, please remember that the immediate despair is only temporary. All underlying issues and problems should be dealt with rationally and only after you have stopped and left this highway.It is unknown how long this highway is. Please exit now.
- City Of Light
One thing that I find striking about this sign is that it isn't actually within the city limits of the Citta d'Scarletti. It is on another road which heads towards the City Of Light. The thing is though, that when the red mists come down² and you are driving down Highway 13 through the Swamp Of Despair, it can be really hard to find the sign or perhaps remember that it is there.
This is where we turn off this road and start heading in another northerly direction. I know that it is tempting to drop a down a gear and lay some big №11s on the pavement but the roads might be slippery and we don't want to dent the rental car.
¹Not only do bees follow internal rules but they also all have barcode licence plates; which is why they are covered in stripes.
²They could also very well be green mists. I don't know. I can not tell the difference because I am red-green colourblind.
April 19, 2020
Horse 2695 - The Travel Blog: Day 19 (The Green City Of Red)
The not very wonderful Wizard of Oz, said of the people of Oz that the 'people have been wearing green glasses on their eyes for so long that most of them think this really is an Emerald City.' That means to say that the actual colour of the Emerald City is not really green (and in fact Dorothy points that out) but that the perception that it is, is stronger than reality.
As this is an road trip through a world that I have constructed (poorly) in my mind, then your perception can only be determined by what I tell you. How real this world is, depends on my ability to communicate it to you. The underlying problem is that I think that I have the ability to communicate things that I can not physically perceive, or perhaps maybe used to be able to but now can not.
The Citta d'Scarletti is a city built almost entirely out of red brick; with red terracotta roof tiles and where the streets are paved not with cobble stones but large blonde bricks.
The streets are so narrow that vehicular traffic only flows in one way and while this might be annoying, this is more than compensated for by there being manicured grass courtyards at the middle of every single building. Rather than buildings where the apartments are built around the lift wells and corridors so that the citzens look outwards and away from each other, people's balconies look towards the centre of the courtyards and towards each other.
Now you might think that I have conveyed the impression that I can imagine a quaint little Italian style city which is various shades of crimson but the truth is that I do not know if I can imagine crimson or even if I ever could.
I am old enough to remember having a black and white television in our house. If you are watching through an achromatic screen, then there are no such things as colours. It makes watching an Australian Rules football match between Hawthorn and Collingwood very difficult as they both play in dark and light stripes. It also makes watching Liverpool versus Everton difficult but at least there, Liverpool's all red kit is in partial contrast to Everton's blue kit with white shorts. Both of them look grey on a black and white television.
There is a further complication in that I am red-green colorblind and as best as I can describe it, I think that the world looks to me as it would to you watching a PAL broadcast on an NTSC 4.33 television. Reds are brown? I literally have no idea what you can see. The irony here is that I am a Liverpool fan; so I can not see the same red as you.
I didn't know that I was colourblind at all until my mid 20s and by chance one of our clients who was a medical officer at a naval base, just happened to be carrying one of those books with the coloured dot pictures in it. Naturally as someone who is colourblind, I could see a 9 instead of a 47, or a picture of a house instead of a horse, and so I found out then that I was in fact colourblind.
All of this leads me to an interesting question. Am I better or worse off for knowing that I am colourblind, considering that if I didn't know then I also wouldn't have known to know that there is a difference? Alternatively, how does one describe any colour to someone who is completely blind and therefore has no perception of any of them?
It is a bit like waking up on a Tuesday and saying that 'it feels like a Wednesday'. What then does Wednesday feel like? How do you ascribe a feeling to an entirely arbitrary concept like Wednesday?
We are walking around the Citta d'Scarletti, not because it is necessarily anything special (though it does reveal that I like the idea of really small and cramped cities) but rather because it is a red city, I don't know if I can actually imagine what colour it is, even though I can kind of play the trick if describing roofs that are the colour of strawberries, fire engines, cinnamon bread, and the Pink Panther.
I think that I would be like the people of the Emerald City in the merry old land of Oz and I wouldn't even need to be wearing green tinted glasses all of the time.
We shall be staying at the Piazza d'Aqua Minerale and the Alessandro Nannini Hotel.
As this is an road trip through a world that I have constructed (poorly) in my mind, then your perception can only be determined by what I tell you. How real this world is, depends on my ability to communicate it to you. The underlying problem is that I think that I have the ability to communicate things that I can not physically perceive, or perhaps maybe used to be able to but now can not.
The Citta d'Scarletti is a city built almost entirely out of red brick; with red terracotta roof tiles and where the streets are paved not with cobble stones but large blonde bricks.
The streets are so narrow that vehicular traffic only flows in one way and while this might be annoying, this is more than compensated for by there being manicured grass courtyards at the middle of every single building. Rather than buildings where the apartments are built around the lift wells and corridors so that the citzens look outwards and away from each other, people's balconies look towards the centre of the courtyards and towards each other.
Now you might think that I have conveyed the impression that I can imagine a quaint little Italian style city which is various shades of crimson but the truth is that I do not know if I can imagine crimson or even if I ever could.
I am old enough to remember having a black and white television in our house. If you are watching through an achromatic screen, then there are no such things as colours. It makes watching an Australian Rules football match between Hawthorn and Collingwood very difficult as they both play in dark and light stripes. It also makes watching Liverpool versus Everton difficult but at least there, Liverpool's all red kit is in partial contrast to Everton's blue kit with white shorts. Both of them look grey on a black and white television.
There is a further complication in that I am red-green colorblind and as best as I can describe it, I think that the world looks to me as it would to you watching a PAL broadcast on an NTSC 4.33 television. Reds are brown? I literally have no idea what you can see. The irony here is that I am a Liverpool fan; so I can not see the same red as you.
I didn't know that I was colourblind at all until my mid 20s and by chance one of our clients who was a medical officer at a naval base, just happened to be carrying one of those books with the coloured dot pictures in it. Naturally as someone who is colourblind, I could see a 9 instead of a 47, or a picture of a house instead of a horse, and so I found out then that I was in fact colourblind.
All of this leads me to an interesting question. Am I better or worse off for knowing that I am colourblind, considering that if I didn't know then I also wouldn't have known to know that there is a difference? Alternatively, how does one describe any colour to someone who is completely blind and therefore has no perception of any of them?
It is a bit like waking up on a Tuesday and saying that 'it feels like a Wednesday'. What then does Wednesday feel like? How do you ascribe a feeling to an entirely arbitrary concept like Wednesday?
We are walking around the Citta d'Scarletti, not because it is necessarily anything special (though it does reveal that I like the idea of really small and cramped cities) but rather because it is a red city, I don't know if I can actually imagine what colour it is, even though I can kind of play the trick if describing roofs that are the colour of strawberries, fire engines, cinnamon bread, and the Pink Panther.
I think that I would be like the people of the Emerald City in the merry old land of Oz and I wouldn't even need to be wearing green tinted glasses all of the time.
We shall be staying at the Piazza d'Aqua Minerale and the Alessandro Nannini Hotel.
April 18, 2020
Horse 2694 - The Travel Blog: Day 18 (The Bus Replacement Rail Service)
Those two blasts from the train's horn means that it is close by and we need to flag it down. There used to be a road up here but because it rains so much, buses would frequently slide off of the road. Thus, instead of a rail replacement bus service, we have a permanent bus replacement rail service.
There is only one car of the train and because this place is so barren, we will be the only passengers on board.
I like the smell of clattery diesels. Diesel engines remind me of school trips and the sensation that you are going somewhere (which by the way always exceeds expectations). or perhaps more importantly that the trip that you have just been on has ended and you are going home.
I can think of several occasions where either because of motion sickness, humiliation in one instance, or perhaps due to the unkindness of others, that going home on the bus was the best thing in the world at that moment.
Of course as a commuter who now rides a bus regularly, I really appreciate that someone else is doing the driving for me. Some of the people who drive on Sydney's roads are dead set nutters, who will even pull out and into the braking space of a bus heading downhill at 80km/h. The bus drivers who have to deal with this on a regular basis, are legendary.
However diesel trains are a different matter. Diesel trains are either usually high speed bullets that eat up the miles, or on single tracks that traverse across bleak landscapes. This train trip is of the latter kind.
Going across grey hills where fields, rocks, hills and plains end at cliff faces is always a pleasant experience even if the weather is awful. The contrast of the sea which is unforgiving and hills that have been there longer than memory is wonderful. It makes you remember how small we are in both size as well as in significance. Both the sea and the hills will continue to roll on long after the last person who remembers you has died.
The sea which can not be tamed but which humans can still hurt by throwing our refuse into, cares not for the worries and struggles of people. The hills who have no memory at all, certainly neither care about who was previously there, who is currently there, nor who will occupy the space in the future.
I find great comfort in knowing that because I will be lucky to occupy only about four score and seven years at the most, that the world of 2120 will have no idea that I was ever here.
I might be here for a little while, like a patch of paspalum which has sprung up but eventually the lawnmower of time will come along and I will be like the grass clippings blown about in the wind. Gone; along with every place and everyone I ever knew remembering me not.
Although that sounds incredibly nihilistic, it means that I need to remember that the most unlikely thing that could ever happen has happened in the meantime. I mattered to someone.
History generally remembers the great people who led armies and conquered lands, and in some cases it remembers them in infamy. Some people become like monuments in history, some like the warning signs that warn you of nuclear waste, some people are like the signposts and trailblazers on roads which help the ones that follow find their way but in the end, all of the princes and kings, the clowns that caper and all of the captains of industry, are all just like me. They all become like grass clippings and sawdust, blown about by the winds of history and after they have gone, they matter only as names to the future.
and the place thereof shall know it no more.
History though is not the mere recording of signs and monuments. The princes and kings and clowns and captains don't actually exist without a great host of ordinary people. History might record the speeches of Sir Winston Churchill but he wasn't on the beaches of Normandy and he didn't personally liberate France. History is mostly made up of loads of ordinary people who are like the grass clippings. We all do our very small bit and we are the grass that makes fields, well... fields.
We are on this train at the moment and are passing through a certain point in history at a particular moment in time. I think that most people would describe both time and history as flowing forwards because that's how our perception operates but I suspect that all of history is a thing and that we just happen to be passing through it like this train on the tracks. It has already determined where we should go but we still are responsible for the decisions that we have. I know that I have very much moved into a whole Free Will versus Predeterminism argument but I think that both are completely true; so just deal with it.
This particular train journey ends by going into a tunnel and into the side of a hill. Eventually we will come out in yet another walled city; this time it will be Citta Del Scarletti.
There is only one car of the train and because this place is so barren, we will be the only passengers on board.
I like the smell of clattery diesels. Diesel engines remind me of school trips and the sensation that you are going somewhere (which by the way always exceeds expectations). or perhaps more importantly that the trip that you have just been on has ended and you are going home.
I can think of several occasions where either because of motion sickness, humiliation in one instance, or perhaps due to the unkindness of others, that going home on the bus was the best thing in the world at that moment.
Of course as a commuter who now rides a bus regularly, I really appreciate that someone else is doing the driving for me. Some of the people who drive on Sydney's roads are dead set nutters, who will even pull out and into the braking space of a bus heading downhill at 80km/h. The bus drivers who have to deal with this on a regular basis, are legendary.
However diesel trains are a different matter. Diesel trains are either usually high speed bullets that eat up the miles, or on single tracks that traverse across bleak landscapes. This train trip is of the latter kind.
Going across grey hills where fields, rocks, hills and plains end at cliff faces is always a pleasant experience even if the weather is awful. The contrast of the sea which is unforgiving and hills that have been there longer than memory is wonderful. It makes you remember how small we are in both size as well as in significance. Both the sea and the hills will continue to roll on long after the last person who remembers you has died.
The sea which can not be tamed but which humans can still hurt by throwing our refuse into, cares not for the worries and struggles of people. The hills who have no memory at all, certainly neither care about who was previously there, who is currently there, nor who will occupy the space in the future.
I find great comfort in knowing that because I will be lucky to occupy only about four score and seven years at the most, that the world of 2120 will have no idea that I was ever here.
I might be here for a little while, like a patch of paspalum which has sprung up but eventually the lawnmower of time will come along and I will be like the grass clippings blown about in the wind. Gone; along with every place and everyone I ever knew remembering me not.
Although that sounds incredibly nihilistic, it means that I need to remember that the most unlikely thing that could ever happen has happened in the meantime. I mattered to someone.
History generally remembers the great people who led armies and conquered lands, and in some cases it remembers them in infamy. Some people become like monuments in history, some like the warning signs that warn you of nuclear waste, some people are like the signposts and trailblazers on roads which help the ones that follow find their way but in the end, all of the princes and kings, the clowns that caper and all of the captains of industry, are all just like me. They all become like grass clippings and sawdust, blown about by the winds of history and after they have gone, they matter only as names to the future.
and the place thereof shall know it no more.
History though is not the mere recording of signs and monuments. The princes and kings and clowns and captains don't actually exist without a great host of ordinary people. History might record the speeches of Sir Winston Churchill but he wasn't on the beaches of Normandy and he didn't personally liberate France. History is mostly made up of loads of ordinary people who are like the grass clippings. We all do our very small bit and we are the grass that makes fields, well... fields.
We are on this train at the moment and are passing through a certain point in history at a particular moment in time. I think that most people would describe both time and history as flowing forwards because that's how our perception operates but I suspect that all of history is a thing and that we just happen to be passing through it like this train on the tracks. It has already determined where we should go but we still are responsible for the decisions that we have. I know that I have very much moved into a whole Free Will versus Predeterminism argument but I think that both are completely true; so just deal with it.
This particular train journey ends by going into a tunnel and into the side of a hill. Eventually we will come out in yet another walled city; this time it will be Citta Del Scarletti.
April 17, 2020
Horse 2693 - The Travel Blog: Day 17 (The Escalator To Nowhere)
As we start out today, you will need to pack your luggage into that kind of hopper thing there. Goods get their own railway but we get to take the escalator.
This is a journey which isn't designed to go anywhere necessarily but to demonstrate the utter pointlessness of the vast majority of my working day.
Unlike people out there who do genuine work in the world and to whom all y'all should be exceptionally thankful for and kind to at the moment (as indeed you should do normally), I wrangle numbers for a living and send out correspondence based upon the alignment and processing of those numbers into elaborate grids that we call tax returns and financial reports.
If I am in the middle of doing something, I will admit to being completely useless at multi tasking. I can do one thing at a time and put things on hold, while they sit inside a list of priorities while I might be doing something else. All of that works reasonably well up to the point where I have to wait upon someone else to do their bit before I can move on.
So much of my working life is spent waiting for email replys after I have requested more information, or alternatively waiting for electronic filing of documents to governmental organisations such as the Australian Taxation Office, the Australian Securities and Investments Commission, or the NSW Office of State Revenue.
The process of electronic filing usually involves logging in to systems via a virtual private network or other secure connection and then waiting as the spinning donuts of doom rotate and grind the gears of my mind, before I get a confirmation document and then start scanning things.
However, when there are meatbag operators on the other end of a system who just as incompetent, capricious, eejititious, and daft as I am, then to get the next step of some arcane process started, usually means that whatever it is gets escalated.
On today's journey, we are on what I imagine that those escalations happen to be. Just like an elevator ride where you have innocuous music playing so as to distract from the white noise of the elevator, escalations come with their own kind of music; which is almost always the same as the last time that you were either on hold for extended periods of time. I know the on hold music almost note for note for the ATO, ASIC, Telstra, the NSW Office of State Revenue, as well as MyGov and the Australian Business Register.
Once you have been on hold for a sufficiently long enough period of time, and you can no longer see the entrance to the escalator well that you walked into, then it becomes really difficult to work out if the escalator is moving upwards or the rest of the world is slowly sinking at an equal but opposite rate.
While you are on a real escalator you can hear the sounds of clunking as the steps pass underneath the combs at either end and as they change direction from top to bottom and bottom to top. While you are on an escalator where someone else has to do some kind of work for you, then the only sounds that you are likely to hear are the sounds of your own brain clunking as you wonder why nothing appears to be moving at all. In the absolute worst example of a thing that I had to have escalated, due to the fact that the original person who was working on the case had been let go in a series of government cut backs, the eventual process of escalation involved someone looking at the pile of files that had been left behind and actually moving them around. All of the paperwork had been in order for months but because there was no one to sign off on it, nothing happened until my escalations had reached the point of being livid.
In the world of legal proceedings, you can threaten someone with the vague stick of the ombudsman. Again, there's little that an ombudsman will actually do unless that's also escalated but I think that just the suggestion that you intend to escalate something in response to their escalation, heightens everyone's sense of tension despite nothing concrete happening.
The escalator that we're on is unlike the ones in Hong Kong which are more like a commuter train service between the various levels of the city in that there are no fancy windows to look and no sense that we're going anywhere.
I think that a lot of escalation of anxiety that we do in our minds is like this as it doesn't really help very much at all. The best cure for the anxiety of escalation is just to get off and stop worrying; though that is easier said than done and you can not just tell people to do this. Someone who is in the middle of an internal escalation already knows that they are and telling someone to calm down is the height of stupidity.
Fortunately for us, at the top of today's journey up the imaginary escalator there is a train station. There are no porters to help us with our luggage on this train and worse, this train is just as frustrating as the escalator.
The train station at the top of these sheer cliff faces, is a grimy little platform which only has an 'Authority To Travel' machine; which means that we shan't be getting a ticket until we're on board. It is also as windy as all get out and so we may have to shelter by hiding behind a rubbish bin as a wind break.
This is a journey which isn't designed to go anywhere necessarily but to demonstrate the utter pointlessness of the vast majority of my working day.
Unlike people out there who do genuine work in the world and to whom all y'all should be exceptionally thankful for and kind to at the moment (as indeed you should do normally), I wrangle numbers for a living and send out correspondence based upon the alignment and processing of those numbers into elaborate grids that we call tax returns and financial reports.
If I am in the middle of doing something, I will admit to being completely useless at multi tasking. I can do one thing at a time and put things on hold, while they sit inside a list of priorities while I might be doing something else. All of that works reasonably well up to the point where I have to wait upon someone else to do their bit before I can move on.
So much of my working life is spent waiting for email replys after I have requested more information, or alternatively waiting for electronic filing of documents to governmental organisations such as the Australian Taxation Office, the Australian Securities and Investments Commission, or the NSW Office of State Revenue.
The process of electronic filing usually involves logging in to systems via a virtual private network or other secure connection and then waiting as the spinning donuts of doom rotate and grind the gears of my mind, before I get a confirmation document and then start scanning things.
However, when there are meatbag operators on the other end of a system who just as incompetent, capricious, eejititious, and daft as I am, then to get the next step of some arcane process started, usually means that whatever it is gets escalated.
On today's journey, we are on what I imagine that those escalations happen to be. Just like an elevator ride where you have innocuous music playing so as to distract from the white noise of the elevator, escalations come with their own kind of music; which is almost always the same as the last time that you were either on hold for extended periods of time. I know the on hold music almost note for note for the ATO, ASIC, Telstra, the NSW Office of State Revenue, as well as MyGov and the Australian Business Register.
Once you have been on hold for a sufficiently long enough period of time, and you can no longer see the entrance to the escalator well that you walked into, then it becomes really difficult to work out if the escalator is moving upwards or the rest of the world is slowly sinking at an equal but opposite rate.
While you are on a real escalator you can hear the sounds of clunking as the steps pass underneath the combs at either end and as they change direction from top to bottom and bottom to top. While you are on an escalator where someone else has to do some kind of work for you, then the only sounds that you are likely to hear are the sounds of your own brain clunking as you wonder why nothing appears to be moving at all. In the absolute worst example of a thing that I had to have escalated, due to the fact that the original person who was working on the case had been let go in a series of government cut backs, the eventual process of escalation involved someone looking at the pile of files that had been left behind and actually moving them around. All of the paperwork had been in order for months but because there was no one to sign off on it, nothing happened until my escalations had reached the point of being livid.
In the world of legal proceedings, you can threaten someone with the vague stick of the ombudsman. Again, there's little that an ombudsman will actually do unless that's also escalated but I think that just the suggestion that you intend to escalate something in response to their escalation, heightens everyone's sense of tension despite nothing concrete happening.
The escalator that we're on is unlike the ones in Hong Kong which are more like a commuter train service between the various levels of the city in that there are no fancy windows to look and no sense that we're going anywhere.
I think that a lot of escalation of anxiety that we do in our minds is like this as it doesn't really help very much at all. The best cure for the anxiety of escalation is just to get off and stop worrying; though that is easier said than done and you can not just tell people to do this. Someone who is in the middle of an internal escalation already knows that they are and telling someone to calm down is the height of stupidity.
Fortunately for us, at the top of today's journey up the imaginary escalator there is a train station. There are no porters to help us with our luggage on this train and worse, this train is just as frustrating as the escalator.
The train station at the top of these sheer cliff faces, is a grimy little platform which only has an 'Authority To Travel' machine; which means that we shan't be getting a ticket until we're on board. It is also as windy as all get out and so we may have to shelter by hiding behind a rubbish bin as a wind break.
April 16, 2020
Horse 2692 - The Travel Blog: Day 16 (The Slotway By The Sea)
If we get back on the train and head back to the mainland, we should notice that there is only one track on this viaduct. The train is a shuttle service which heads forth and back; so we will end up back where we were before we came to the island.
We're going to pick up a new rental car to head north with but it has a feature which is practically unique - a guidepin. The reason for this will become Immediately obvious once we have left the suburbs of Mornington.
Again we pass through suburbs with terrace houses that all look the same but take careful note that none of these houses have either a back nor a front yard. They are all built on a ledge which gets narrower the further we get north, to the point where the houses eventually have their front doors open directly into the street with no sidewalk and the last building is the Jazz Triangle¹ Hotel.
Here, we stop.
I have to pull a lever under the hood of the car which lowers the guidepin and as we tentatively move forward, the slotway that the guidepin fits into will come into view.
Driving slowly forward, we should hear a clunk as the guidepin trips a switch and opens the gates in the slot, so that we can head north. That switch will also trip a set of traffic lights at either end, which will stop people coming south at the same time. The last thing that we want is to see what we think is a light at the end of a tunnel; only to discover that it is another car coming at us.
There are no speed limits on this road. The reason for this is that you do not need speed limits if on one side is a sheer cliff face which stretches into the sky and on the other side is another sheer cliff face which stretches downwards into the sea. If you fall off the road in either direction, then certain death awaits and it will have been your fault.
Life presents us with a bunch of roads like this. We all know some people who have driven lonely roads like this who have made dumb decisions and either dented their car or in worst case scenarios have fallen off the road entirely and need serious help. If the guidepin is in place, then you can move on quite efficiently but sometimes, the rental company gives you a car with no guidepin and you just have to drive along carefully.
You're here for this ride as we move along slowly (albeit a bit boring) and while I can see storms off in the distance, I am thankful that they have not yet arrived.
There are various roadhouses along roads like this where you meet travellers, some of whom are heading in similar directions and some going in quite another. It is very tempting to suggest that the damage that they have incurred while driving along these roads is entirely their fault but that quite frankly ignores that they may have been trying to do the best job that they could with the equipment provided. It is also immensely hypocritical to point out the damage on someone else's car, while at the same time you have damage of your own.
The solution here is to stop occasionally and to allow yourself time to do nothing for a bit before you take off on yet another stressful leg of the journey or perhaps even more critically to do something which many people have pointed out exists in the owner's manual and that is use radical kindness.
Some people, especially those people who have a degree of power, who are either cruel or unkind need to be told as much; in some cases in really terse terms. However the people who you merely disagree with, have probably formed their opinions through some kind of rational set of information and viewpoint formation experience. There are even things that you might have a religious disagreement about but that still doesn't necessarily warrant unkindness on your part.
I have had interesting discussions with people who I disagree with by accepting that their opinion is rationally thought out (even when it isn't).
Sometimes though, one of the biggest acts of kindness that you can do, is what we're about to do here. That sign with the three dashes means that we come to the end of this particular slotway in three hundred yards. If you look way up the road, there is a van thing which appears to be towing a trailer behind. Now I know that we could get to the next section of slotway before they do but if they have children on board, or medical supplies, or are just really tired and or irritable² then they might need to go through before we do. It's often kinder to people to let them ahead of you because the world doesn't really need everyone making a rush all of the time. If you prefer someone else's needs, they will more than likely ignore yours but that's a better outcome than actively irritating people.
See, that wasn't so hard.
At the end of this road is the pokey little town of Ridge End. The only two ways to go are by sea and upwards by escalator. We will be riding the escalator and I hope that you will be prepared because it is a long ride but that's tommorow.
¹Famed Jazz Triangle player 'One Eyed' Keith McBongo was the best jazz triangle player³ of them all.
²which my tablet wants to autocorrect to 'Italian'
³mostly because he is the only jazz triangle player and partly because I have just made him up.
We're going to pick up a new rental car to head north with but it has a feature which is practically unique - a guidepin. The reason for this will become Immediately obvious once we have left the suburbs of Mornington.
Again we pass through suburbs with terrace houses that all look the same but take careful note that none of these houses have either a back nor a front yard. They are all built on a ledge which gets narrower the further we get north, to the point where the houses eventually have their front doors open directly into the street with no sidewalk and the last building is the Jazz Triangle¹ Hotel.
Here, we stop.
I have to pull a lever under the hood of the car which lowers the guidepin and as we tentatively move forward, the slotway that the guidepin fits into will come into view.
Driving slowly forward, we should hear a clunk as the guidepin trips a switch and opens the gates in the slot, so that we can head north. That switch will also trip a set of traffic lights at either end, which will stop people coming south at the same time. The last thing that we want is to see what we think is a light at the end of a tunnel; only to discover that it is another car coming at us.
There are no speed limits on this road. The reason for this is that you do not need speed limits if on one side is a sheer cliff face which stretches into the sky and on the other side is another sheer cliff face which stretches downwards into the sea. If you fall off the road in either direction, then certain death awaits and it will have been your fault.
Life presents us with a bunch of roads like this. We all know some people who have driven lonely roads like this who have made dumb decisions and either dented their car or in worst case scenarios have fallen off the road entirely and need serious help. If the guidepin is in place, then you can move on quite efficiently but sometimes, the rental company gives you a car with no guidepin and you just have to drive along carefully.
You're here for this ride as we move along slowly (albeit a bit boring) and while I can see storms off in the distance, I am thankful that they have not yet arrived.
There are various roadhouses along roads like this where you meet travellers, some of whom are heading in similar directions and some going in quite another. It is very tempting to suggest that the damage that they have incurred while driving along these roads is entirely their fault but that quite frankly ignores that they may have been trying to do the best job that they could with the equipment provided. It is also immensely hypocritical to point out the damage on someone else's car, while at the same time you have damage of your own.
The solution here is to stop occasionally and to allow yourself time to do nothing for a bit before you take off on yet another stressful leg of the journey or perhaps even more critically to do something which many people have pointed out exists in the owner's manual and that is use radical kindness.
Some people, especially those people who have a degree of power, who are either cruel or unkind need to be told as much; in some cases in really terse terms. However the people who you merely disagree with, have probably formed their opinions through some kind of rational set of information and viewpoint formation experience. There are even things that you might have a religious disagreement about but that still doesn't necessarily warrant unkindness on your part.
I have had interesting discussions with people who I disagree with by accepting that their opinion is rationally thought out (even when it isn't).
Sometimes though, one of the biggest acts of kindness that you can do, is what we're about to do here. That sign with the three dashes means that we come to the end of this particular slotway in three hundred yards. If you look way up the road, there is a van thing which appears to be towing a trailer behind. Now I know that we could get to the next section of slotway before they do but if they have children on board, or medical supplies, or are just really tired and or irritable² then they might need to go through before we do. It's often kinder to people to let them ahead of you because the world doesn't really need everyone making a rush all of the time. If you prefer someone else's needs, they will more than likely ignore yours but that's a better outcome than actively irritating people.
See, that wasn't so hard.
At the end of this road is the pokey little town of Ridge End. The only two ways to go are by sea and upwards by escalator. We will be riding the escalator and I hope that you will be prepared because it is a long ride but that's tommorow.
¹Famed Jazz Triangle player 'One Eyed' Keith McBongo was the best jazz triangle player³ of them all.
²which my tablet wants to autocorrect to 'Italian'
³mostly because he is the only jazz triangle player and partly because I have just made him up.
April 15, 2020
Horse 2691 - The Travel Blog: Day 15 (The Office Overlooking The Sea)
I know that we've come back here to the Theatre Of The Mind but if we pass through and down the stairs to an unassuming looking door, we step out into a corridor which on side is the undressed rock of the island and on the other, a wall and a set of quadruple glazed windows. If we turn to our left and head down the corridor, we'll pass through another set of doors and into a building of sorta which has also been cut into the side of the island.
We're looking for Room 2219.
Shutting the door behind us, I now want you to take note of what you can hear. Do you hear that? What is it? You can't hear anything? Do you know why you can't hear anything? Because there are no sounds to be heard.
If you look out of the window (which as a quadruple glazed window is always closed), then the only thing that you can see from here is the grey sea and a slightly different blue-grey sky. Occasionally there will be heavy rains which lash the window and maybe there will be storms which brew somewhere out there but from here, it is impossible to see very much of anything, ever.
The reason why I have brought you to this room, which is only furnished with a bookshelf of commonplace books, a desk, a notepad, and a radio which is only ever set to AM 1737kHz, is to do with the nature of my internal monologue.
The radio can not ever be turned off; nor can it be ever set to another station. It might occasionally play static, or perhaps the memory of some music from oh so long ago, but it is always my own voice.
I work in this office alone, with the door closed often. There are sounds which float down the corridor and naturally there can be tension from the world which is outside but the point is that everything happens out there somewhere. I can not definitively know what lies outside or even if it exists but I trust that it does.
I know that this sounds probably trite but I think that I have experienced enough of life to say that even though storms might come, I think that I have enough of a rock fortress that unless there is complete and utter catastrophic calamity, I will not be shaken.
I have seen people die. I have been pushed beyond the point of sensibility by employers and have worked beyond midnight. I have been held to answer for other people's actions before a panel. I have seen the inside of court rooms. I have been physically injured. I have been stuck on the other side of the world wondering why I hadn't been paid and with less than £10 in my pocket. I have been teased mercilessly, been punched, have walked out of a national park after falling down a cliff and landing in a river, and have been left behind in a national park by people who should have been looking out for me.
Apart from death, I do not know what else life can throw at me.
At the moment, the view from the office of the island fortress looks uncertain but not ridiculous.
If anything, Covid-19 rather than making me either alarmed or fearful (though being prudent and alert is wise), has made me bored. There is almost no point watching the news anymore because there is no news. The Coronavirus has infected all of the news and because there's no sport, there's also no light relief either. My alarms and fears are invested in watching and looking out for what happens to other people and more importantly, making sure that I continue to look outward from the fortress of my mind, upon storms over the ocean.
Now that we've seen this office, I think it worthwhile that we walk back through the theatre and back up and into the City of Sealand.
On the Northside side of the island is a power station which is powered by hopes, a small amount of insanity, quite a lot of quiet contemplation, ideas which are shipped in, and the workforce is fortified with cups of tea and black coffee.
There is very little in the world which is not improved by a cup of tea. Boring meetings, the end of church services, sport that takes hours, reading through documents, reading novels, or simply a pleasant afternoon - all are improved with the addition of a cup of tea. I am convinced that the best empires in history (namely the various Chinese, Mongolian, Japanese, British, and Indian etc.) see all able to extend their limits wider still and wider because of the ability to have tea. The modem British Army is the best army in the world because every tank has what's known as a Boiling Vessel (BV) on board which enables every crew of a British tank to have a cup of tea wherever they are. I think that every decent fortress of the mind should have access to cups of tea - they function better.
We're looking for Room 2219.
Shutting the door behind us, I now want you to take note of what you can hear. Do you hear that? What is it? You can't hear anything? Do you know why you can't hear anything? Because there are no sounds to be heard.
If you look out of the window (which as a quadruple glazed window is always closed), then the only thing that you can see from here is the grey sea and a slightly different blue-grey sky. Occasionally there will be heavy rains which lash the window and maybe there will be storms which brew somewhere out there but from here, it is impossible to see very much of anything, ever.
The reason why I have brought you to this room, which is only furnished with a bookshelf of commonplace books, a desk, a notepad, and a radio which is only ever set to AM 1737kHz, is to do with the nature of my internal monologue.
The radio can not ever be turned off; nor can it be ever set to another station. It might occasionally play static, or perhaps the memory of some music from oh so long ago, but it is always my own voice.
I work in this office alone, with the door closed often. There are sounds which float down the corridor and naturally there can be tension from the world which is outside but the point is that everything happens out there somewhere. I can not definitively know what lies outside or even if it exists but I trust that it does.
I know that this sounds probably trite but I think that I have experienced enough of life to say that even though storms might come, I think that I have enough of a rock fortress that unless there is complete and utter catastrophic calamity, I will not be shaken.
I have seen people die. I have been pushed beyond the point of sensibility by employers and have worked beyond midnight. I have been held to answer for other people's actions before a panel. I have seen the inside of court rooms. I have been physically injured. I have been stuck on the other side of the world wondering why I hadn't been paid and with less than £10 in my pocket. I have been teased mercilessly, been punched, have walked out of a national park after falling down a cliff and landing in a river, and have been left behind in a national park by people who should have been looking out for me.
Apart from death, I do not know what else life can throw at me.
At the moment, the view from the office of the island fortress looks uncertain but not ridiculous.
If anything, Covid-19 rather than making me either alarmed or fearful (though being prudent and alert is wise), has made me bored. There is almost no point watching the news anymore because there is no news. The Coronavirus has infected all of the news and because there's no sport, there's also no light relief either. My alarms and fears are invested in watching and looking out for what happens to other people and more importantly, making sure that I continue to look outward from the fortress of my mind, upon storms over the ocean.
Now that we've seen this office, I think it worthwhile that we walk back through the theatre and back up and into the City of Sealand.
On the Northside side of the island is a power station which is powered by hopes, a small amount of insanity, quite a lot of quiet contemplation, ideas which are shipped in, and the workforce is fortified with cups of tea and black coffee.
There is very little in the world which is not improved by a cup of tea. Boring meetings, the end of church services, sport that takes hours, reading through documents, reading novels, or simply a pleasant afternoon - all are improved with the addition of a cup of tea. I am convinced that the best empires in history (namely the various Chinese, Mongolian, Japanese, British, and Indian etc.) see all able to extend their limits wider still and wider because of the ability to have tea. The modem British Army is the best army in the world because every tank has what's known as a Boiling Vessel (BV) on board which enables every crew of a British tank to have a cup of tea wherever they are. I think that every decent fortress of the mind should have access to cups of tea - they function better.
April 14, 2020
Horse 2690 - The Travel Blog: Day 14 (The Fortress City)
Day 14
In the City of Sealand which is built atop an island fortress which nature has built for herself off the east coast, would have in times of old been an impregnable castle. Nowadays not only is it accessible by boat but the east coast mainland railway has a spur line which ends right inside the core of the island.
There are no cars on the island and everything is transported either by people power or by motorbike. As we wander around the city, you might like to look upwards to see metal beams with chains and pulleys; for all furniture if it isn't flat packed, has to be hauled up and then brought inside through the windows. It might sound daft but there are some narrow houses where the entire front wall is on hinges and can open up like a door, expressly for this purpose.
The island which also boasts its own underground railway, albeit one with only four stops and one train and only goes around anticlockwise, has been the site of conflict; but not necessarily one with weapons of timber and steel.
No man is an island or an isthmus. Some come from Bermuda and some believe in Christmas. On an island fortress which essentially has no resources of its own, the only viable industries are services and entertainment.
Sealand is known for its grand shopping arcades; which as someone who basically doesn't really have all that much which might interest me that I can buy, are completely pointless. I do like walking through steel arched spaces and I do like the Tiffany Lamp effect of the coloured panels in the ceiling but as with most arcades, there really isn't anything for me here.
This helps to illustrate why I probably am not as bothered by the Coronacrisis as everyone else. I don't exactly miss not going out to go shopping or going to restaurants because it's not like I did a whole heap of that before the lockdown. I think that I might have done these sorts of things maybe once a quarter at most; so a lockdown of ninety days is perhaps not as punishing for me. It is not the absence of excitement as much as the absence of quiet rolling community that I find annoying.
I already recoil in horror whenever I have to pay double digits for a meal and I find the idea that people pay more than twenty dollars a week to get coffee, maddening. Already my usual journey to work takes me past cafés with sandwich boards where prices for two bits of toast and coffee might cost $12.
No, the reason that we have come to this fortress in the sea is not because of the shopping or the restaurants but rather the theatre which is on the eastern side of the island (I am reliably informed that there is no western side of the island).
Once we pass through the alley where luthiers hawk guitars, banjos, violins, and octobasses, we step through the doors of a velveted foyer and into a completely blackened theatre. I assure you that this is absolutely normal and that there is no need to see the stage at all.
This is The Theatre Of The Mind, which has several touring companies which have been provided by BBC Radio 4, NPR; as well as other organisations. I also note that it has been sponsored by several companies such as:
- Footo: the wonder boot exploder
- Patriot brand cigarettes
- Workjuice Coffee
- Half A Glass Of Water
- Luigi's Pizza: pay for it with snakes
- One long sort of a bent thing with a lump on the end
- Existential Dread
and many others.
In the Theatre Of The Mind I have heard crime dramas, surreal comedies, detective stories, tales of adventure, live sport, drama, tragedies, historical pieces, and loads of lectures on everything from science, religion, philosophy, architecture, the arts etc.
I think that most people can remember where they were when such and such happened. I have heard loads of audio which happened long before I was a thing to have anything happening to. One of the most vivid nights that I ever remember, was when I was asked to keep watch over a toilet block to make sure that people didn't run amok¹ and being in the heat of a summer night in Sydney, I heard the featured game on the BBC World Service where Liverpool came from 1-nil down to 2-1 up against Sheffield Wednesday (Barnes 42' McManaman 60')
More than watching television, it is the sounds of radio, which I hold dearer. Various summers have their own soundtracks where a song might be heard over and over but hearing Glenn McGrath score 61 only happens once.
You could watch a production of Anna Karenina on television but because the radio version does not have to worry about costume design, set design and location, the money can be better spent to make it better. How would you overcome the staging limitations of putting on a production of Peer Gynt? The eponymous Rita in 'Educating Rita' is far more correct with her answer of "Do it on the radio" than she will ever know.
What has been playing recently in the theatre? BBC Radio 4 has been running a series called '13 Minutes To The Moon'² and it is well worth a listen.
The Theatre Of The Mind is probably one of the most cherished places in all of the land but if that's essentially someone else's voice in here, then what do I think of my own? That's the subject of another day's journey.
¹this is a long story for another time.
²link: https://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/w13xttx2/episodes/downloads
In the City of Sealand which is built atop an island fortress which nature has built for herself off the east coast, would have in times of old been an impregnable castle. Nowadays not only is it accessible by boat but the east coast mainland railway has a spur line which ends right inside the core of the island.
There are no cars on the island and everything is transported either by people power or by motorbike. As we wander around the city, you might like to look upwards to see metal beams with chains and pulleys; for all furniture if it isn't flat packed, has to be hauled up and then brought inside through the windows. It might sound daft but there are some narrow houses where the entire front wall is on hinges and can open up like a door, expressly for this purpose.
The island which also boasts its own underground railway, albeit one with only four stops and one train and only goes around anticlockwise, has been the site of conflict; but not necessarily one with weapons of timber and steel.
No man is an island or an isthmus. Some come from Bermuda and some believe in Christmas. On an island fortress which essentially has no resources of its own, the only viable industries are services and entertainment.
Sealand is known for its grand shopping arcades; which as someone who basically doesn't really have all that much which might interest me that I can buy, are completely pointless. I do like walking through steel arched spaces and I do like the Tiffany Lamp effect of the coloured panels in the ceiling but as with most arcades, there really isn't anything for me here.
This helps to illustrate why I probably am not as bothered by the Coronacrisis as everyone else. I don't exactly miss not going out to go shopping or going to restaurants because it's not like I did a whole heap of that before the lockdown. I think that I might have done these sorts of things maybe once a quarter at most; so a lockdown of ninety days is perhaps not as punishing for me. It is not the absence of excitement as much as the absence of quiet rolling community that I find annoying.
I already recoil in horror whenever I have to pay double digits for a meal and I find the idea that people pay more than twenty dollars a week to get coffee, maddening. Already my usual journey to work takes me past cafés with sandwich boards where prices for two bits of toast and coffee might cost $12.
No, the reason that we have come to this fortress in the sea is not because of the shopping or the restaurants but rather the theatre which is on the eastern side of the island (I am reliably informed that there is no western side of the island).
Once we pass through the alley where luthiers hawk guitars, banjos, violins, and octobasses, we step through the doors of a velveted foyer and into a completely blackened theatre. I assure you that this is absolutely normal and that there is no need to see the stage at all.
This is The Theatre Of The Mind, which has several touring companies which have been provided by BBC Radio 4, NPR; as well as other organisations. I also note that it has been sponsored by several companies such as:
- Footo: the wonder boot exploder
- Patriot brand cigarettes
- Workjuice Coffee
- Half A Glass Of Water
- Luigi's Pizza: pay for it with snakes
- One long sort of a bent thing with a lump on the end
- Existential Dread
and many others.
In the Theatre Of The Mind I have heard crime dramas, surreal comedies, detective stories, tales of adventure, live sport, drama, tragedies, historical pieces, and loads of lectures on everything from science, religion, philosophy, architecture, the arts etc.
I think that most people can remember where they were when such and such happened. I have heard loads of audio which happened long before I was a thing to have anything happening to. One of the most vivid nights that I ever remember, was when I was asked to keep watch over a toilet block to make sure that people didn't run amok¹ and being in the heat of a summer night in Sydney, I heard the featured game on the BBC World Service where Liverpool came from 1-nil down to 2-1 up against Sheffield Wednesday (Barnes 42' McManaman 60')
More than watching television, it is the sounds of radio, which I hold dearer. Various summers have their own soundtracks where a song might be heard over and over but hearing Glenn McGrath score 61 only happens once.
You could watch a production of Anna Karenina on television but because the radio version does not have to worry about costume design, set design and location, the money can be better spent to make it better. How would you overcome the staging limitations of putting on a production of Peer Gynt? The eponymous Rita in 'Educating Rita' is far more correct with her answer of "Do it on the radio" than she will ever know.
What has been playing recently in the theatre? BBC Radio 4 has been running a series called '13 Minutes To The Moon'² and it is well worth a listen.
The Theatre Of The Mind is probably one of the most cherished places in all of the land but if that's essentially someone else's voice in here, then what do I think of my own? That's the subject of another day's journey.
¹this is a long story for another time.
²link: https://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/w13xttx2/episodes/downloads
April 11, 2020
Horse 2687 - The Travel Blog: Day 11 (The Motor Racing Circuit)
Day 11
On the other side of the mountains is the city of Chiltern. Surrounded by cattle farms, Chiltern is not a particularly impressive city; though it has a cathedral and a court house; which kind of affords it city status. Founded in the 1840s, Chiltern swelled in size during the 1880s when gold was discovered but after the gold ran out, a lot of the city became and still remains empty. That is, except for one weekend in June when a new kind of gold rush happens – albeit a rush at 300km/h and for a gold cup. I am talking about the Chiltern 500; which is a motor race. E
rnest Hemmingway once wrote that “There are only three sports: bullfighting, motor racing, and mountaineering; all the rest are merely games.” I think that bullfighting is barbaric and I have no idea how one wins at mountaineering; which leaves motor racing as the pinnacle of sport. Sport by its very nature is interently pointless and motor racing, which is the pitting of machinery against machinery to see who can go the fastest, surely ranks as the most pointless sport of all.
Just like going to the moon; which also served no real interent purpose, neither does motor racing. Maggots, Becketts, La Source, Eau Rouge, The Rascasse, Casino, the Rettifilo, Arnage, Hunaudières... these are not just the names of corners, they are the names where helmeted gladiators in charge of many hundreds of mechanical horses pull them up and change direction.
Had I been charged with spending some vast fortune like Montgomery Brewster was in the 1902 novel “Brewster's Millions” by George Barr McCutcheon¹, then I probably would have come up with the idea of renting a sports car and going motor racing. I don’t particularly like the idea of having some loud motor car to go blasting through the neighbourhood in, I just want raw unadulterated speed for no good reason; the best place to get that is on a racetrack.
Thanks to video games, I have been on many virtual circuits many times. I can tell you for instance that there is a red house at La Caixa at Circuit de Barcelona-Catalunya that you want to aim for; or that if you are stuck behind someone at Ste Devote you had better plan to find a way around at Mirabeau. I secretly resent being dealt the cards that I have been given with regards when I was born because all of the coolest cars ever built, had all been and gone.
At least in video games and in my mind's eye, I have been around many motor racing circuits. If you'd asked me what I wanted to be when I grew up, as a small child I would have said 'a race car driver'; the truth is that I have been on more than forty circuits of the sun and if you ask me that same question, somewhere in the back of my mind, the answer is the same. Obviously I will never do it professionally but if someone wants to put me in a seat, even in a LeMons car worth a thousand bucks, I am more than willing.
¹of which there have been at least 13 movie adaptations.
On the other side of the mountains is the city of Chiltern. Surrounded by cattle farms, Chiltern is not a particularly impressive city; though it has a cathedral and a court house; which kind of affords it city status. Founded in the 1840s, Chiltern swelled in size during the 1880s when gold was discovered but after the gold ran out, a lot of the city became and still remains empty. That is, except for one weekend in June when a new kind of gold rush happens – albeit a rush at 300km/h and for a gold cup. I am talking about the Chiltern 500; which is a motor race. E
rnest Hemmingway once wrote that “There are only three sports: bullfighting, motor racing, and mountaineering; all the rest are merely games.” I think that bullfighting is barbaric and I have no idea how one wins at mountaineering; which leaves motor racing as the pinnacle of sport. Sport by its very nature is interently pointless and motor racing, which is the pitting of machinery against machinery to see who can go the fastest, surely ranks as the most pointless sport of all.
Just like going to the moon; which also served no real interent purpose, neither does motor racing. Maggots, Becketts, La Source, Eau Rouge, The Rascasse, Casino, the Rettifilo, Arnage, Hunaudières... these are not just the names of corners, they are the names where helmeted gladiators in charge of many hundreds of mechanical horses pull them up and change direction.
Had I been charged with spending some vast fortune like Montgomery Brewster was in the 1902 novel “Brewster's Millions” by George Barr McCutcheon¹, then I probably would have come up with the idea of renting a sports car and going motor racing. I don’t particularly like the idea of having some loud motor car to go blasting through the neighbourhood in, I just want raw unadulterated speed for no good reason; the best place to get that is on a racetrack.
Thanks to video games, I have been on many virtual circuits many times. I can tell you for instance that there is a red house at La Caixa at Circuit de Barcelona-Catalunya that you want to aim for; or that if you are stuck behind someone at Ste Devote you had better plan to find a way around at Mirabeau. I secretly resent being dealt the cards that I have been given with regards when I was born because all of the coolest cars ever built, had all been and gone.
At least in video games and in my mind's eye, I have been around many motor racing circuits. If you'd asked me what I wanted to be when I grew up, as a small child I would have said 'a race car driver'; the truth is that I have been on more than forty circuits of the sun and if you ask me that same question, somewhere in the back of my mind, the answer is the same. Obviously I will never do it professionally but if someone wants to put me in a seat, even in a LeMons car worth a thousand bucks, I am more than willing.
¹of which there have been at least 13 movie adaptations.
April 10, 2020
Horse 2686 - The Travel Blog: Day 10 (The Mountains)
Day 10
Good Friday: Why on Earth would God do that? Moreover, why would God be on Earth?
Probably most people who read this will wonder why I as a semi rational person believe in the two thousand year old story of a Jewish carpenter and part time rackenteur magic man. My question this Good Friday is why as semi rational people, would you believe in a world which is clearly broken, busted, which we're actively destroying with our stupidity and collective greed, and where powerful people put the monetary value of human lives at less than the price of a small car?
Today we're heading to the north east on a road through the mountains. Some of the roads which head off pass through the snow and still others head back through passes that we're not concerned about at this current moment in time. We shall leave those roads for another day.
One of the things that you notice as you travel through life is that some people come along for some parts and then go off and do their own thing. The analogy of life being a journey where everyone has to find their own roads is a good one, since ultimately we all can't go down the same roads all the time in a world which is hideously complex. Sometimes we might meet old friends at different junctions though, as they have travelled through life differently.
Today, we're going to be driving through the Mountains Of Hope; which sound loftier than they are. The truth is that due to the ravages of time and circumstance, some roads remain permanently closed.
I can look on at the mountains of material happiness which might include home ownership of fancy cars and know that is simply unrealistic to drive up those roads. Actually, given the current storms which surround Cyclone Covid, the mountain of job security is also not exactly motorable.
Given that there are mountains which I will simply never visit, you then have to ask about what sights can be visited. If there are storms everywhere, then what kind of hopes and happiness can you find?
The Stoic Philosopher, Epicurus, once wrote to a disciple, asking for him to “send me a small pot of cheese, so that I may be able to indulge myself whenever I wish.” To be honest, a pot of cheese doesn't exactly sound like someone who is trying to maximise their happiness and it hardly sounds very 'rock-and-roll' but it does demonstrate that someone had worked out that an uncomplicated life sounds like a better road to happiness than one which burns abnormally brightly and leads to self destruction.
Epicurus' complete list of things required for happiness was a pot of cheese, some wine, and six friends. I think that it is an entirely reasonable list.
I would argue that the things which most people need for happiness are far more basic than that. I would include a place to stay, a job, and adequate food. Maslow's Hierarchy Of Needs places these things at the bottom of the pyramid and to be fair, I can't really think of much else that people actually need to be happy; though I would add that the next level up the pyramid which includes family, friends and community is also pretty important.
I would also imagine that Christians and Epicurans would get along rather well together; when you consider that Paul wrote to Timothy to pray for those in authority so that they could lead quiet and peaceable lives.
I do not necessarily think that Epicurans and Christians share the same viewpoint concerning what happens to people after they die nor about one's connection or responsibility to God or other people but they would definitely agree that living a relatively uncomplicated life which is free from disturbances and a state of calm contentment where you are not stirred up by the difficulties of the world, is desirable.
We can look over those peaks off in the distance and continue to meander over the roads through the mountains. Storms might be raging overhead but at this exact moment in time, the roads aren't slippery and provided we are careful, then we might as well enjoy this period of calm.
Good Friday: Why on Earth would God do that? Moreover, why would God be on Earth?
Probably most people who read this will wonder why I as a semi rational person believe in the two thousand year old story of a Jewish carpenter and part time rackenteur magic man. My question this Good Friday is why as semi rational people, would you believe in a world which is clearly broken, busted, which we're actively destroying with our stupidity and collective greed, and where powerful people put the monetary value of human lives at less than the price of a small car?
Today we're heading to the north east on a road through the mountains. Some of the roads which head off pass through the snow and still others head back through passes that we're not concerned about at this current moment in time. We shall leave those roads for another day.
One of the things that you notice as you travel through life is that some people come along for some parts and then go off and do their own thing. The analogy of life being a journey where everyone has to find their own roads is a good one, since ultimately we all can't go down the same roads all the time in a world which is hideously complex. Sometimes we might meet old friends at different junctions though, as they have travelled through life differently.
Today, we're going to be driving through the Mountains Of Hope; which sound loftier than they are. The truth is that due to the ravages of time and circumstance, some roads remain permanently closed.
I can look on at the mountains of material happiness which might include home ownership of fancy cars and know that is simply unrealistic to drive up those roads. Actually, given the current storms which surround Cyclone Covid, the mountain of job security is also not exactly motorable.
Given that there are mountains which I will simply never visit, you then have to ask about what sights can be visited. If there are storms everywhere, then what kind of hopes and happiness can you find?
The Stoic Philosopher, Epicurus, once wrote to a disciple, asking for him to “send me a small pot of cheese, so that I may be able to indulge myself whenever I wish.” To be honest, a pot of cheese doesn't exactly sound like someone who is trying to maximise their happiness and it hardly sounds very 'rock-and-roll' but it does demonstrate that someone had worked out that an uncomplicated life sounds like a better road to happiness than one which burns abnormally brightly and leads to self destruction.
Epicurus' complete list of things required for happiness was a pot of cheese, some wine, and six friends. I think that it is an entirely reasonable list.
I would argue that the things which most people need for happiness are far more basic than that. I would include a place to stay, a job, and adequate food. Maslow's Hierarchy Of Needs places these things at the bottom of the pyramid and to be fair, I can't really think of much else that people actually need to be happy; though I would add that the next level up the pyramid which includes family, friends and community is also pretty important.
I would also imagine that Christians and Epicurans would get along rather well together; when you consider that Paul wrote to Timothy to pray for those in authority so that they could lead quiet and peaceable lives.
I do not necessarily think that Epicurans and Christians share the same viewpoint concerning what happens to people after they die nor about one's connection or responsibility to God or other people but they would definitely agree that living a relatively uncomplicated life which is free from disturbances and a state of calm contentment where you are not stirred up by the difficulties of the world, is desirable.
We can look over those peaks off in the distance and continue to meander over the roads through the mountains. Storms might be raging overhead but at this exact moment in time, the roads aren't slippery and provided we are careful, then we might as well enjoy this period of calm.
April 09, 2020
Horse 2685 - The Travel Blog: Day 9 (The Forest)
Day 9
We're going to make a short trip today and then come back to the hotel. To be honest, going to places like the Phobos And Deimos Forest is unpleasant but I am sure that it is not a scary place as it used to be. Governments of long ago installed fire breaks and trail markers and another kingdom sends observers occasionally.
We drive through southern suburbia and past factories and cinemas which are now disused and in an unassuming looking street is the turnoff for a road that heads off into the Valley Of The Shadow Of Death. I have been down that road and it is also unpleasant but the lookout and the views on the other side, are stunning.
We're going to head further down the road and head past The Salmon Of Doubt restaurant, Anxiety Manufacturing Ltd. as well as Half Baked Ideas And Ill-Conceived Concepts Pty Ltd, before we drive through a set of gates which are supposed to be locked but never are, and over a grid which is supposed to keep nasty beasts inside but which is ignored by them.
As we drive into the Phobos And Deimos Forest I would like to point out that hter are no black dogs in the forest. I think that might surprise some people but I am one of the fortunate ones for whom the black dog does not visit. I personally think that it is because of all of the clown masks which have been left around.
We can't drive very far into the Phobos And Deimos Forest because as a state forest, it has been marked as an area which is mostly off limits.
It should be obvious by now that I have no profound fear of loneliness and am perfectly happy spending hours noodling around in the vast open spaces of my mind. The Phobos And Deimos Forest therefore is not a place where I am afraid to be alone in. What it is mainly full of, are trees of incompetence and briars and thickets of mistrust.
To say that I am mistrustful of other people is wild understatement. In general, I know that my place in the world is to useful to other people but that has the downside that very few people want to care about what I think. I am suspicious that people see me as being useful for an end and once I have served that purpose, I am good for no other. Not that that bothers me a lot because as a reasonably internally unified character with very strong majors and atrophied minors, it's not like I suffer from self-esteem issues; quite the opposite. I have been accused of straying into arrogance.
The things that I am most afraid of mostly stem from not being in control of something. Whether that be other people or perhaps drowning, I am sure that the underlying issue is probably identical. Re that latter thing, I am extremely respectful of the sea.
Despite valiant attempts by a public school system that tried to get me to swim, I still can not. I was pushed out of a boat on a school camp when I was 13 and I am sure that it was great sport for the other kids but that does have a profound effect on you. I fell out of an inner tube on a theme park ride and while it was exactly of zero consequence to anyone else, I wasn't particularly happy at all.
Blake Lake which lies on one of the trails inside the Phobos And Deimos Forest has no bottom as far as I can make out and the water is so opaque that the light never gets below the lake's surface.
I have some sense of self preservation but have still managed to have nose broken, a toe broken, and an ACL broken while playing sport. Physical injury doesn't necessarily scare me but I know that because I am a weedy chap, I need to outthink my opponents rather than use brute force, or suffer being thrown around like a rag doll. I would be lying if I said that I enjoy pain (because I doubt whether any sane person does) but physical pain is not something that I necessarily fear.
There are also the species of poisonous existential trees, brambles of shame, thorns of stupidity, a quagmire of laziness, as well as a bunch of different kinds of fruit trees of dread.
There is a theory that is often put forward in media that you should face your fears. I think that is patently stupid. Sometimes your fears are useful because they are products of danger and it is entirely appropriate to get out of there. Sometimes though, it might be rational to take stock of the various species and maybe take them back to laboratories for further investigation.
What is always useful to remember if you are here is that if you keep on moving, there are roads out. It might take a while to find them but space and time and here and now are only this bit of your mind. Fear not, keep on walking. If you find a wall, keep walking. It's plain to see, your brain is very small if you think walking will be knocking down the wall but maybe you can find a bugle or something to let someone else help you. If there is no voice willing to speak for you, then you had best learn to yell. Someone might be listening.
We're going to make a short trip today and then come back to the hotel. To be honest, going to places like the Phobos And Deimos Forest is unpleasant but I am sure that it is not a scary place as it used to be. Governments of long ago installed fire breaks and trail markers and another kingdom sends observers occasionally.
We drive through southern suburbia and past factories and cinemas which are now disused and in an unassuming looking street is the turnoff for a road that heads off into the Valley Of The Shadow Of Death. I have been down that road and it is also unpleasant but the lookout and the views on the other side, are stunning.
We're going to head further down the road and head past The Salmon Of Doubt restaurant, Anxiety Manufacturing Ltd. as well as Half Baked Ideas And Ill-Conceived Concepts Pty Ltd, before we drive through a set of gates which are supposed to be locked but never are, and over a grid which is supposed to keep nasty beasts inside but which is ignored by them.
As we drive into the Phobos And Deimos Forest I would like to point out that hter are no black dogs in the forest. I think that might surprise some people but I am one of the fortunate ones for whom the black dog does not visit. I personally think that it is because of all of the clown masks which have been left around.
We can't drive very far into the Phobos And Deimos Forest because as a state forest, it has been marked as an area which is mostly off limits.
It should be obvious by now that I have no profound fear of loneliness and am perfectly happy spending hours noodling around in the vast open spaces of my mind. The Phobos And Deimos Forest therefore is not a place where I am afraid to be alone in. What it is mainly full of, are trees of incompetence and briars and thickets of mistrust.
To say that I am mistrustful of other people is wild understatement. In general, I know that my place in the world is to useful to other people but that has the downside that very few people want to care about what I think. I am suspicious that people see me as being useful for an end and once I have served that purpose, I am good for no other. Not that that bothers me a lot because as a reasonably internally unified character with very strong majors and atrophied minors, it's not like I suffer from self-esteem issues; quite the opposite. I have been accused of straying into arrogance.
The things that I am most afraid of mostly stem from not being in control of something. Whether that be other people or perhaps drowning, I am sure that the underlying issue is probably identical. Re that latter thing, I am extremely respectful of the sea.
Despite valiant attempts by a public school system that tried to get me to swim, I still can not. I was pushed out of a boat on a school camp when I was 13 and I am sure that it was great sport for the other kids but that does have a profound effect on you. I fell out of an inner tube on a theme park ride and while it was exactly of zero consequence to anyone else, I wasn't particularly happy at all.
Blake Lake which lies on one of the trails inside the Phobos And Deimos Forest has no bottom as far as I can make out and the water is so opaque that the light never gets below the lake's surface.
I have some sense of self preservation but have still managed to have nose broken, a toe broken, and an ACL broken while playing sport. Physical injury doesn't necessarily scare me but I know that because I am a weedy chap, I need to outthink my opponents rather than use brute force, or suffer being thrown around like a rag doll. I would be lying if I said that I enjoy pain (because I doubt whether any sane person does) but physical pain is not something that I necessarily fear.
There are also the species of poisonous existential trees, brambles of shame, thorns of stupidity, a quagmire of laziness, as well as a bunch of different kinds of fruit trees of dread.
There is a theory that is often put forward in media that you should face your fears. I think that is patently stupid. Sometimes your fears are useful because they are products of danger and it is entirely appropriate to get out of there. Sometimes though, it might be rational to take stock of the various species and maybe take them back to laboratories for further investigation.
What is always useful to remember if you are here is that if you keep on moving, there are roads out. It might take a while to find them but space and time and here and now are only this bit of your mind. Fear not, keep on walking. If you find a wall, keep walking. It's plain to see, your brain is very small if you think walking will be knocking down the wall but maybe you can find a bugle or something to let someone else help you. If there is no voice willing to speak for you, then you had best learn to yell. Someone might be listening.
April 08, 2020
Horse 2684 - The Travel Blog: Day 8 (The Vast Desert)
Day 8
Last night as we were driving away from the sun and into out our shadows, we saw just how quickly the night can fall if there is no vegetation or other context. Gold became red became black and suddenly we found that we were driving on a silvery ribbon over a deeply uninteresting non-reflective land. Those green highway signs with town names and the occasional cross roads that seemingly go from nowhere to nowhere else, are just about all that this part of the world was prepared to give us. Believe me when I say that it's not markedly different during the daytime.
Another night; another unfamiliar ceiling and I don't know about you but I got another air conditioner that wasn't working and another ceiling fan of Damocles that I daren't switch on. I do not know who James and Louise are but I am sure that they will take their argument along with them as they also travel along the highway.
This morning I made something that purported to be coffee but mysteriously managed to taste like exactly nothing in particular. I do not know if that is better or worse than everyone's favourite brand of instant disappointment: International Roast.
I note that our wee little Bellini Tiger GTi looks ready and raring to go but given that it is literally a machine that always looks exactly the same, that can purely be put down to the fact that we have a need to anthropomorphise everything; including objects. As we pack our luggage in the trunk and speed off into a new morning, I'd like to pause and think about our wee little Tiger GTi and the effort that we are demanding of it, or rather, the effort that we demand of it and our relationship to it.
Humans have a remarkable desire to name everything. The very first job given to Adam in the book of Genesis is to name all of the animals but I think that that goes for just about everything and not just animals. We give ships and trains individual names for identification purposes and while things might have brands and model names to tell you what a thing is, some of us have individual names for individual objects.
King Arthur's sword was called 'Excalibur', the fastest steam train ever was called 'Mallard', 18 of the 19 space capsules that went around the moon had names with the first one to land called 'Eagle', and the first nuclear bomb which was dropped on other people was called 'Mighty Boy' and was dropped by 'Enola Gay'.
We tend to name objects which we are heavily invested in and which transcend being just appliances. I for instance have owned cars called Mustard, Mintie, Rosallini, Big Blue, Chiko Roll, Stich, and Vanellope. I do not think that our Bellini Tiger GTi which is now hurtling across the desert on a ribbon of black at 144km/h will get a unique name but it is worth considering that we give names to cars and trucks but not microwave ovens.
I imagine that you, there is a great contrast between the grey green tufts of scrub that we are whizzing past and the red dust that extends everywhere as far as our minds' eye can see. You know that you are in a place where there isn't very much of note when place names are called things like Breakfast Creek or Wednesday Camp.
I know that this is probably going to sound ridiculous, given that the landscape hasn't changed in hours but coming up ahead of us, is the border between West and East Rollania. This isn't to say that I have entire political entities within my mind but I am cognizant of the fact that different lands are very much demarcated by seemingly incomprehensible borders, which have been put there by both time and circumstance. In this case the border crossing is so arbitrary that we may wonder at all why it is even there.
The same could be said for a bunch of border crossings in the world. Perhaps one of the greatest causes of conflict yet invented in the history of the world, has been the drawing of borders on maps without the slightest regard for the inhabitants who actually live in the nations concerned. One only needs to look at the former Union of India or the criss-crossing of lines across the Middle East to appreciate the destruction which results.
We are currently on this road trip through my mind because of an imposed border between a past which we used to know and an uncertain future which none of us really know what it's going to look like, except that whatever happens, capital will reorganise itself to take what it can from the people who do real work for a living, as it always has done. The future will not look broadly different from the past, even though at the moment with uncertainty before the face of a common and unseen enemy, we have for a time relearned how to be a bit kinder.
Here we are at the border finally and I have to say that it is something of a disappointment. This is just two white signs that say 'Welcome To East (or West) Rollania' and a half hearted attempt at a very small fence on either side of the road. This border seems really arbitrary because it is.
Point 895, Point 898, Thursday Gully, Four Stone Ridge, Point 896, Gregory's Pack... Fulchester Road (which probably goes to Fulchester Station), Point 927...
A tree... five kangaroos... they are definitely loose in the large paddock... probably Patterson's Curse...
M400... M350... M300... Point 976...
We have come to a point in the road where there are a bunch of raised painted lines. There is a shuddering through the car and a big red sign that says 'Slow Down' for seemingly no apparent reason. We pass a sign with a picture of a former arrow, telling us that Highway 9 heads north and Highway 1 heads southeast.
Out here, given that the landscape hasn't changed, a three way forked box junction is really exciting. As we come to a stop, the only sounds are the quiet murmur of the Tiger GTi and the ticking of the turn indicator. We turn right.
M195.. M190... M185... the little mileposts are now coming at 5km intervals. I think that the word milepost is a sensible skeuomorph of the language when you consider that kilometerage sounds plain daft.
Eventually, scrub turns back into fields, which turns back into fields with trees, and with the fall of night, we see a set of buffers and a tram parked in the middle of the road.
There are houses now.
There are more houses now.
A lawnmower shop, a car yard, more houses, a Woolard's supermarket, the illuminated sign for the Ship O'Fools pirate burger chain, actual traffic, a lorry.
We can practically drive into the centre of town at Marshfield. For a city of imagined millions, it is like a very big country town that got out of hand. I've booked us into the Linton Hotel which is just on the outskirts of the central business district; so when we get there, you can take our luggage inside and I'll go and find a car park.
You're free to run around the city at night but I'm going to get some kip. Will I dream? That's a wild thought - thinking about dreaming while asleep in a world which we've imagined and which only exists in my mind for the purposes of an imaginary road trip. The nature of reality is pure subjective fantasy.
Last night as we were driving away from the sun and into out our shadows, we saw just how quickly the night can fall if there is no vegetation or other context. Gold became red became black and suddenly we found that we were driving on a silvery ribbon over a deeply uninteresting non-reflective land. Those green highway signs with town names and the occasional cross roads that seemingly go from nowhere to nowhere else, are just about all that this part of the world was prepared to give us. Believe me when I say that it's not markedly different during the daytime.
Another night; another unfamiliar ceiling and I don't know about you but I got another air conditioner that wasn't working and another ceiling fan of Damocles that I daren't switch on. I do not know who James and Louise are but I am sure that they will take their argument along with them as they also travel along the highway.
This morning I made something that purported to be coffee but mysteriously managed to taste like exactly nothing in particular. I do not know if that is better or worse than everyone's favourite brand of instant disappointment: International Roast.
I note that our wee little Bellini Tiger GTi looks ready and raring to go but given that it is literally a machine that always looks exactly the same, that can purely be put down to the fact that we have a need to anthropomorphise everything; including objects. As we pack our luggage in the trunk and speed off into a new morning, I'd like to pause and think about our wee little Tiger GTi and the effort that we are demanding of it, or rather, the effort that we demand of it and our relationship to it.
Humans have a remarkable desire to name everything. The very first job given to Adam in the book of Genesis is to name all of the animals but I think that that goes for just about everything and not just animals. We give ships and trains individual names for identification purposes and while things might have brands and model names to tell you what a thing is, some of us have individual names for individual objects.
King Arthur's sword was called 'Excalibur', the fastest steam train ever was called 'Mallard', 18 of the 19 space capsules that went around the moon had names with the first one to land called 'Eagle', and the first nuclear bomb which was dropped on other people was called 'Mighty Boy' and was dropped by 'Enola Gay'.
We tend to name objects which we are heavily invested in and which transcend being just appliances. I for instance have owned cars called Mustard, Mintie, Rosallini, Big Blue, Chiko Roll, Stich, and Vanellope. I do not think that our Bellini Tiger GTi which is now hurtling across the desert on a ribbon of black at 144km/h will get a unique name but it is worth considering that we give names to cars and trucks but not microwave ovens.
I imagine that you, there is a great contrast between the grey green tufts of scrub that we are whizzing past and the red dust that extends everywhere as far as our minds' eye can see. You know that you are in a place where there isn't very much of note when place names are called things like Breakfast Creek or Wednesday Camp.
I know that this is probably going to sound ridiculous, given that the landscape hasn't changed in hours but coming up ahead of us, is the border between West and East Rollania. This isn't to say that I have entire political entities within my mind but I am cognizant of the fact that different lands are very much demarcated by seemingly incomprehensible borders, which have been put there by both time and circumstance. In this case the border crossing is so arbitrary that we may wonder at all why it is even there.
The same could be said for a bunch of border crossings in the world. Perhaps one of the greatest causes of conflict yet invented in the history of the world, has been the drawing of borders on maps without the slightest regard for the inhabitants who actually live in the nations concerned. One only needs to look at the former Union of India or the criss-crossing of lines across the Middle East to appreciate the destruction which results.
We are currently on this road trip through my mind because of an imposed border between a past which we used to know and an uncertain future which none of us really know what it's going to look like, except that whatever happens, capital will reorganise itself to take what it can from the people who do real work for a living, as it always has done. The future will not look broadly different from the past, even though at the moment with uncertainty before the face of a common and unseen enemy, we have for a time relearned how to be a bit kinder.
Here we are at the border finally and I have to say that it is something of a disappointment. This is just two white signs that say 'Welcome To East (or West) Rollania' and a half hearted attempt at a very small fence on either side of the road. This border seems really arbitrary because it is.
Point 895, Point 898, Thursday Gully, Four Stone Ridge, Point 896, Gregory's Pack... Fulchester Road (which probably goes to Fulchester Station), Point 927...
A tree... five kangaroos... they are definitely loose in the large paddock... probably Patterson's Curse...
M400... M350... M300... Point 976...
We have come to a point in the road where there are a bunch of raised painted lines. There is a shuddering through the car and a big red sign that says 'Slow Down' for seemingly no apparent reason. We pass a sign with a picture of a former arrow, telling us that Highway 9 heads north and Highway 1 heads southeast.
Out here, given that the landscape hasn't changed, a three way forked box junction is really exciting. As we come to a stop, the only sounds are the quiet murmur of the Tiger GTi and the ticking of the turn indicator. We turn right.
M195.. M190... M185... the little mileposts are now coming at 5km intervals. I think that the word milepost is a sensible skeuomorph of the language when you consider that kilometerage sounds plain daft.
Eventually, scrub turns back into fields, which turns back into fields with trees, and with the fall of night, we see a set of buffers and a tram parked in the middle of the road.
There are houses now.
There are more houses now.
A lawnmower shop, a car yard, more houses, a Woolard's supermarket, the illuminated sign for the Ship O'Fools pirate burger chain, actual traffic, a lorry.
We can practically drive into the centre of town at Marshfield. For a city of imagined millions, it is like a very big country town that got out of hand. I've booked us into the Linton Hotel which is just on the outskirts of the central business district; so when we get there, you can take our luggage inside and I'll go and find a car park.
You're free to run around the city at night but I'm going to get some kip. Will I dream? That's a wild thought - thinking about dreaming while asleep in a world which we've imagined and which only exists in my mind for the purposes of an imaginary road trip. The nature of reality is pure subjective fantasy.
April 07, 2020
Horse 2683 - The Travel Blog: Day 7 (The Beautiful Isolation)
Day 7
It is really weird waking up before the sun rises out here. My room didn't have a working air conditioning unit and so I had Damocles' ceiling fan spinning all night. If you didn't sleep well last night then you might be able to while we're on the road today because today's journey is the destination and to be honest, it's actually quite a lot mind numbing.
We have to traverse 2117 kilometers today. At the posted speed limit of 130km/h, that's more than 16 hours where it will be just the two of us, in a metal box, surrounded by nothing of interest in all directions, and always with death driving along behind. The Grim Reaper is an agricultural worker (you can tell that from his sctyhe) who drives along in a farm truck (which is probably a Toyota Hilux) with his best mate The Destroying Angel. I haven't personally met either of them¹ but I can tell where they've been and done the job that they were assigned.
In the great tradition of giving things obviously obvious names, the road which we a driving along is called the Eastern Highway. Well over 5500 km away lies the Silver City but I don't know if we'll make it that far this month.
You can drive for a while. We've got probably 20 hours of travelling to do today; so it's not like I'm all that bothered about making good time.
It very quickly becomes apparent if you are confined in a small space for a long time, that on a long journey by yourself, you are either going to be your own best friend or your own worst enemy. When you combine those elements of cosmic loneliness and being the centre of the observable universe, then it is self-evident that what exists within the boundaries of your mind, contains all of the resources that you have to play with. I think that it is a truism that you only ever deal with the next challenge in life, as the person you were at the end of the previous one.
In the midst of a journey like this, everything that you packed before you set out, is all that you have. If you have packed snacks, then that was sensible and if you packed something more substantial like sandwiches, then that's even more sensible. At least on today's journey, there are no places to stay and the only places that we can stop, are the occasional petrol stations.
That also goes for all of the games that you can play because you're bound to get bored at some point and for all of the entertainment and distractions that you bought along because we will be so far between cities that radio reception will be non existent.
Our Bellini Tiger GTi is a comfortable enough car. It will sit at 150km/h all day long if you ask it to; though even out here in the woop-woop, there's still the possibility that the police might get you for breaking the law.
There is a sense after a while, after you've observed the Blaupunkt radio, the turn dial to select where the air goes, the 12 volt slot that everyone used to call a cigarette lighter hole but which they no longer provide a cigarette lighter, and the amusing yet redundant badge on the dashboard telling us that this car has Airbags and Radial Tuned Suspension, that we are traveling without moving. The scenery is being pushed past the windows at an alarming rate although it all looks exactly the same for hours at a go, the numbers on the signs are getting smaller and that lead digit will change from a 2 to a 1 and then disappear before ticking over with three digits more rapidly, but everything in here remains virtually static.
I don't mind this sense of isolation inside my own mind because I have been here before and let's be honest, it is massive in here. I have loads of space to run around inside of. I even kind of enjoy the idea that I might be bored from time to time; though to be fair, in an age of perpetual stimulation, I can't really remember the last time that I was genuinely bored.
Adults like to scold children for having imaginary friends or building worlds inside their minds to play in; yet isn't it weird how in an age of complete lockdown, everyone is now retreating to the world's that other people have built in their minds. I am willing to bet that the friends and places that used to exist in your imaginings, are still there somewhere. Maybe they've grown up, maybe they've bought houses and built imaginary companies, maybe they are exactly the same and are still waiting for you to come and play.
Perhaps you might like to drive around inside your own mind and visit the places that you used to. Are they still the same or has someone demolished them or boarded them up?
As we stop at the Golden Fleece and pick up a Pizza Meat Pie² and a can of Mello Yello, I am kind of proud of the dust that has accumulated on the side of the car. Those shiny SUVs in the city might look pretty but they don't go on journeys and their owners tend not to have a lot of imagination. Especially out here on the imaginary roads, it is the people with dents, with grime, and people who have learned how to spin their own spanners and have made modifications to their mind vehicles that are interesting.
There is one thing neat about being alone for hours on a journey like this; nobody is going to be around while you sing, nobody is going to be around while you swear obscenities at the universe, nobody is going to be around to judge you. It is a perfect opportunity to go away and rebuild the fortresses in your mind; to built cathedrals from paragraphs, to restock and resupply the resources that you have to play with in your mind; so that when deal with the next challenge in life, you will not be the same person who is dealing with this one.
¹for if I had, I wouldn't be here
²Pizza Meat Pie is not as you might think a meat pie with pizza inside the pie but rather a meat pie with pizza for the lid.
It is really weird waking up before the sun rises out here. My room didn't have a working air conditioning unit and so I had Damocles' ceiling fan spinning all night. If you didn't sleep well last night then you might be able to while we're on the road today because today's journey is the destination and to be honest, it's actually quite a lot mind numbing.
We have to traverse 2117 kilometers today. At the posted speed limit of 130km/h, that's more than 16 hours where it will be just the two of us, in a metal box, surrounded by nothing of interest in all directions, and always with death driving along behind. The Grim Reaper is an agricultural worker (you can tell that from his sctyhe) who drives along in a farm truck (which is probably a Toyota Hilux) with his best mate The Destroying Angel. I haven't personally met either of them¹ but I can tell where they've been and done the job that they were assigned.
In the great tradition of giving things obviously obvious names, the road which we a driving along is called the Eastern Highway. Well over 5500 km away lies the Silver City but I don't know if we'll make it that far this month.
You can drive for a while. We've got probably 20 hours of travelling to do today; so it's not like I'm all that bothered about making good time.
It very quickly becomes apparent if you are confined in a small space for a long time, that on a long journey by yourself, you are either going to be your own best friend or your own worst enemy. When you combine those elements of cosmic loneliness and being the centre of the observable universe, then it is self-evident that what exists within the boundaries of your mind, contains all of the resources that you have to play with. I think that it is a truism that you only ever deal with the next challenge in life, as the person you were at the end of the previous one.
In the midst of a journey like this, everything that you packed before you set out, is all that you have. If you have packed snacks, then that was sensible and if you packed something more substantial like sandwiches, then that's even more sensible. At least on today's journey, there are no places to stay and the only places that we can stop, are the occasional petrol stations.
That also goes for all of the games that you can play because you're bound to get bored at some point and for all of the entertainment and distractions that you bought along because we will be so far between cities that radio reception will be non existent.
Our Bellini Tiger GTi is a comfortable enough car. It will sit at 150km/h all day long if you ask it to; though even out here in the woop-woop, there's still the possibility that the police might get you for breaking the law.
There is a sense after a while, after you've observed the Blaupunkt radio, the turn dial to select where the air goes, the 12 volt slot that everyone used to call a cigarette lighter hole but which they no longer provide a cigarette lighter, and the amusing yet redundant badge on the dashboard telling us that this car has Airbags and Radial Tuned Suspension, that we are traveling without moving. The scenery is being pushed past the windows at an alarming rate although it all looks exactly the same for hours at a go, the numbers on the signs are getting smaller and that lead digit will change from a 2 to a 1 and then disappear before ticking over with three digits more rapidly, but everything in here remains virtually static.
I don't mind this sense of isolation inside my own mind because I have been here before and let's be honest, it is massive in here. I have loads of space to run around inside of. I even kind of enjoy the idea that I might be bored from time to time; though to be fair, in an age of perpetual stimulation, I can't really remember the last time that I was genuinely bored.
Adults like to scold children for having imaginary friends or building worlds inside their minds to play in; yet isn't it weird how in an age of complete lockdown, everyone is now retreating to the world's that other people have built in their minds. I am willing to bet that the friends and places that used to exist in your imaginings, are still there somewhere. Maybe they've grown up, maybe they've bought houses and built imaginary companies, maybe they are exactly the same and are still waiting for you to come and play.
Perhaps you might like to drive around inside your own mind and visit the places that you used to. Are they still the same or has someone demolished them or boarded them up?
As we stop at the Golden Fleece and pick up a Pizza Meat Pie² and a can of Mello Yello, I am kind of proud of the dust that has accumulated on the side of the car. Those shiny SUVs in the city might look pretty but they don't go on journeys and their owners tend not to have a lot of imagination. Especially out here on the imaginary roads, it is the people with dents, with grime, and people who have learned how to spin their own spanners and have made modifications to their mind vehicles that are interesting.
There is one thing neat about being alone for hours on a journey like this; nobody is going to be around while you sing, nobody is going to be around while you swear obscenities at the universe, nobody is going to be around to judge you. It is a perfect opportunity to go away and rebuild the fortresses in your mind; to built cathedrals from paragraphs, to restock and resupply the resources that you have to play with in your mind; so that when deal with the next challenge in life, you will not be the same person who is dealing with this one.
¹for if I had, I wouldn't be here
²Pizza Meat Pie is not as you might think a meat pie with pizza inside the pie but rather a meat pie with pizza for the lid.
April 06, 2020
Horse 2682 - The Travel Blog: Day 6 (Beyond The City)
Day 6
I have picked up the hire car from the rental place. They didn't have a car in the category which I booked; so they have upgraded us to a Bellini Tiger GTi.
If anyone buys an SUV because it is 'sporty' then I have to advise them that they are delusional. In the olden days they used to be called estate cars or station wagons because that's what they are. Nobody in their right mind would put an SUV in a motor race and so they're not sporty; the actual net utility of one those things is less than it otherwise would be because the boot opening is higher from the ground and there is usually more space taken up by the intrusion of the suspension towers into the cargo space. Having eliminated both S and U, all that leaves is V but that's just a statement of the obvious.
The hatchback that we've been given is the same as the regular Bellini Tiger except that they've managed to extract another hundred horsepower out of the engine. 251 horses in a front wheel drive hatchback is more than adequate.
As we drive east out of Plovdiv, you will note the rows and rows of abandoned factories and then the small houses. There is a Kentucky Fried Chicken coming up on the right-hand side of the road with its bucket sign slowly rotating and a BP coming up on the left with the old shield. I do not understand why companies feel like the need to wildly rebrand themselves. Coca-Cola have played with their logo a lot and even they have returned to the simplicity of the logo that everyone knows, which is simply the script of their name.
Houses give way to small farms and then just fields with miles of barbed wire and post fencing, occasional parliaments of cows and sheep standing around in those fields and then the further east we go, miles upon miles of scrub.
Some say that this part of the world is as flat as a pancake but if you were to actually measure all of the divots and craters on a pancake, you might be surprised to learn that a pancake is ridiculously hilly compared with this.
Those little foxtail weeds that line the sides of the blacktop, spring up in an instant after the rains and then as they suck up all of the moisture they grow, turn brown, die, and their seeds are spread further along the road by cars like us who venture out here. Farmers don't really graze their cattle out here because the native weeds are thorny things and the cows hate it.
It doesn't take very long before we start to see fields of some nondescript crop. It is obvious that I have no idea about what they are; all I know is that whatever it is, it is a kind of golden grey and there are acres of blankets of the stuff.
I find that the further out that we go from the cities, the worse the radio reception. Digital radio gives up, FM radio gets full of hiss; which leaves the only stations that you can pick up out here, those from the ABC. If you are really far away from the city, then the sounds of the ABC or a retransmission of the BBC or DW, is both strange and ephemeral. It is possible on this side of the world, to hear The Shipping Forecast from the BBC which is broadcast on Radio 4 and the World Service at 0048 hours Greenwich Mean Time. If you can imagine hearing it at 0948 and in the desert, instead of being tucked up in your nice warm bed, then the cultural disconnect is amazing.
Yet there is something still amazing about listening to The Shipping Forecast or the Football Results from England as you pelt down a two-lane road at a triple digit speed, eating up the miles and leaving a rooster tail of dust in your wake. A disembodied voice from what once was the centre of empire, or from what is being described as a rainy city where footy players are sloshing about in the mud, when outside is scrub which is no higher than your knees and which extend in all directions into infinity, is a reminder that humanity is out there... somewhere.
As the miles spin past and the odometer slowly winds on tens, hundreds and eventually thousands, it can feel a bit like you are the only person in the world. Functionally, the further you get out of a city, the truer that is.
Philosophically the centre of the universe is actually the point from which it is being observed. On average, that is 24mm from the front of your cornea; which means to say that as far as you are concerned, you are the centre of the universe. Our problem as social creatures, is that we need others to share in the observation and continue on the journey.
It might be a good idea, since we’re not going to be doing much else for a while, to give someone a phone call while the reception is still good. There will come a time, when that is not the case.
I have picked up the hire car from the rental place. They didn't have a car in the category which I booked; so they have upgraded us to a Bellini Tiger GTi.
If anyone buys an SUV because it is 'sporty' then I have to advise them that they are delusional. In the olden days they used to be called estate cars or station wagons because that's what they are. Nobody in their right mind would put an SUV in a motor race and so they're not sporty; the actual net utility of one those things is less than it otherwise would be because the boot opening is higher from the ground and there is usually more space taken up by the intrusion of the suspension towers into the cargo space. Having eliminated both S and U, all that leaves is V but that's just a statement of the obvious.
The hatchback that we've been given is the same as the regular Bellini Tiger except that they've managed to extract another hundred horsepower out of the engine. 251 horses in a front wheel drive hatchback is more than adequate.
As we drive east out of Plovdiv, you will note the rows and rows of abandoned factories and then the small houses. There is a Kentucky Fried Chicken coming up on the right-hand side of the road with its bucket sign slowly rotating and a BP coming up on the left with the old shield. I do not understand why companies feel like the need to wildly rebrand themselves. Coca-Cola have played with their logo a lot and even they have returned to the simplicity of the logo that everyone knows, which is simply the script of their name.
Houses give way to small farms and then just fields with miles of barbed wire and post fencing, occasional parliaments of cows and sheep standing around in those fields and then the further east we go, miles upon miles of scrub.
Some say that this part of the world is as flat as a pancake but if you were to actually measure all of the divots and craters on a pancake, you might be surprised to learn that a pancake is ridiculously hilly compared with this.
Those little foxtail weeds that line the sides of the blacktop, spring up in an instant after the rains and then as they suck up all of the moisture they grow, turn brown, die, and their seeds are spread further along the road by cars like us who venture out here. Farmers don't really graze their cattle out here because the native weeds are thorny things and the cows hate it.
It doesn't take very long before we start to see fields of some nondescript crop. It is obvious that I have no idea about what they are; all I know is that whatever it is, it is a kind of golden grey and there are acres of blankets of the stuff.
I find that the further out that we go from the cities, the worse the radio reception. Digital radio gives up, FM radio gets full of hiss; which leaves the only stations that you can pick up out here, those from the ABC. If you are really far away from the city, then the sounds of the ABC or a retransmission of the BBC or DW, is both strange and ephemeral. It is possible on this side of the world, to hear The Shipping Forecast from the BBC which is broadcast on Radio 4 and the World Service at 0048 hours Greenwich Mean Time. If you can imagine hearing it at 0948 and in the desert, instead of being tucked up in your nice warm bed, then the cultural disconnect is amazing.
Yet there is something still amazing about listening to The Shipping Forecast or the Football Results from England as you pelt down a two-lane road at a triple digit speed, eating up the miles and leaving a rooster tail of dust in your wake. A disembodied voice from what once was the centre of empire, or from what is being described as a rainy city where footy players are sloshing about in the mud, when outside is scrub which is no higher than your knees and which extend in all directions into infinity, is a reminder that humanity is out there... somewhere.
As the miles spin past and the odometer slowly winds on tens, hundreds and eventually thousands, it can feel a bit like you are the only person in the world. Functionally, the further you get out of a city, the truer that is.
Philosophically the centre of the universe is actually the point from which it is being observed. On average, that is 24mm from the front of your cornea; which means to say that as far as you are concerned, you are the centre of the universe. Our problem as social creatures, is that we need others to share in the observation and continue on the journey.
It might be a good idea, since we’re not going to be doing much else for a while, to give someone a phone call while the reception is still good. There will come a time, when that is not the case.
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