normal chaos pre overseas trip, usual suspects, everyone else. i'm good to go however legal peeps are on my tail, dept. bureaucrats need to pin me down, papers need signing, numbers need crunching, letters need shredding, posting, writing....
it's hopeless really, the endless things one has to juggle, the balls in the air, the hoops you are required to jump through, the money that you burn. part of me wants to be going to bali where i can just sit down read and relax, part of me wants to be on an empty beach with a girl living the good life as we drink out coconuts and watch the sunset. but instead i'm a frenzy, whirlpool of conflicting emotional tangents as people need their pieces of pie, jesus i'm doing my best not to get stressed out watching everyone else stress out. 
bags still not packed, money still not sorted, amenities still not settled, i will just leave it all in the air and deal with it later. it's pointless depending on people let alone the council, let alone....telstra, the evil corporation behind it all. 

looking forwards to seeing jakob, my dad, hanging out with martin in some bar, looking forwards to catching up with tez and jean in the south, looking forwards to seeing my crazy family, the aunts and uncles and cousins, looking forwards to sweden, the new language, the casual healthy stress of an alien culture, new environment, new faces. gotta be good for the soul right?

there's a strong wind blowing through the trees, the leaves swirl around in their currents and gather at my door yet i myself am blown along, various different currents fighting over my trajectory. work one's pull, social ones tug, responsible ones heave and selfish ones ho but all in all i have to take some responsibility and chart my own course. my sights are set on a city i have always wanted to visit, my strange mental landscape already made a home there long ago, in another lifetime when i was a scandinavian, a sailer, voyager, solider, slave, i don't know really, maybe i was never there but the longing always has been. i will know when i wander the streets of stockholm, certainty will enter my heart through my blood vessels and activate some memory junction. whatever is ahead, my course is true despite strong winds, despite squall and whirlpool, i am on target.

if i had a super power it would be to stop the bloody rain, just a break in this horrid weather as it begins to soak through into the world around me, the dampness in my bone, water logging my brain and thinking process. strange how the body reacts to it after a week. years of london weather should have made me resistant but it has made me very resentful towards the endless grey skies, the layers of clothing, the mud, the horrible effects of mould and wetness in walls and cars and socks. i don't like the rain because it always takes me backwards, whereas the sun offers blue skies and hope, there's always tomorrow in a sunny day.  

21st century blues, everyone has an opinion, people ram it down yer neck in social media irrespective of the fall out, the repercussions of hate. has it always been like this, social media becomes masterful at fine tuning one's own prejudices, it offers community to haters and various lost causes of conspiratorial agendas, speculators and cynics, propagators of ancient animosities. one day an alien race will trawl through the rubble of the internet and see all we really were capable of doing with it was digital graffiti. 
then occasionally you stumble across the connections that actually are like neurone networks across an ocean of synaptic impulses, creative pulses of energy, bending space and time, pulling together in hive mind some kind of synergy worth investing in, not just web sites and communities, individuals who have a love of other individuals without all the bullshit, without all the fucking pretence, intellectual wanking only gets you so far, it may even get you off but what comes next. 
who comes next?

i'm in tanyas bookshop.
now this is no ordinary secondhand space, it's run by a very attractive and intelligent lady and her equally impressive father. always interesting jazz flows out from old tin speakers, always books everywhere, and always an interesting conversation to be had. it's rare for me to have time for a long chat but i was fortunate a small window of chance presented itself...

so we are discussing the idea of redemption and are joined by a customer. we all have a story to tell and i lay down mine, 'there are three truths, my truth, your truth and then there's The Truth. but no one ever knows The Truth.'

it was a magistrate whom shared that with me, and i believe it so. 
my truth is this.

the conversation came to an end when i suggested compassion has limits, i really think this is true for everyone, unless you are buddha but remember even the ancient buddhists were cruel war mongers who tortured and killed thousands of chinese. now the chinese lord it over the buddhists and the poor falun gong people imprisoned, tortured and left dead as their organs are taken from their bodies and sold, yeah patterns repeat, the persecuted becomes the persecutor, history is just a cycle of patterns, like everything else in the universe. i wander through the day, doing whatever it is i do, my minds half here and half there, its always somewhere else.