Canisters of coffee tea and flour

There was a time when I had a job and houses were pretty cheap....

I didn't go for that.... Instead I spent my time riding round the country with scooter trash, that was fun.
Now I don't have "...a spare half a million."

But this song'll do! Thanks Courtney Barnett. 



My Grandparents lived in a California Bungalow in Coburg... I still remember those old tubs with tea sugar and flour written on them, I don't think anyone drank coffee back then.

Oh Lord!

There are no coincidences!

If a dog shits on your doorstep... and you stand in it, there's a chance you were destined to have shit on your shoe!

This morning as I wrote the final lines of a two paged diatribe rant, the submission to a committee reviewing a dumb ass decision made by educated, presumably competent theologically trained people, which completely contradicts the basic commitment their organization has made to the welfare of people the planet and the future of creation!

 (Damn! too many words for one sentence and I haven't finished yet! Take a breath damn it and read on!)

 ...I received a text from my wife... who by the way, had absolutely no knowledge of what I was currently doing... This is what it said.

“Thus have emperors throughout the ages sat on their bums, their wealth and their workers and hoped the future would never arrive. Thus Adam Smith’s ‘invisible hand’ of the marketplace reaches out to all corners of the globe, steals ideas, innovations and images, rips out large chunks of the planet’s surface, magicks it into money, monuments and munificence, holds the key to the chains that enslave thousands, snaps its fingers at suitors and beggars and raises its fist against any challenge.”

(David Nicholson-Lord 1947-2014)

This quote was David Nicholson-Lord's response to a failed attempt to convince oil company executives to generate money from re-afforestation. Sometimes only a combination of rage and despair can produces such clarity.

Monday 23rd February 2015 reading from the 'Prayer guide for the care of creation'.
Tomorrow this will be my offering to the staff newsletter!

Beauty out of focus

Peace out.

Zen and the art of footwear choices

Please excuse the cliche title and the following drivel I wasted the name on... Many things happen in my day to day life. A lot of it is either overwhelming or underwhelming and the whole experience usually ends with me stupefied by the end of the night desperate for a few moments alone but when my time finally arrives, I'm unable to do anything useful at all! I often end up sitting, numb, in front of the computer late at night, not creating anything, not writing just numb wanting to zone out. Unable to concentrate I'll fall into a mind numbing video game, or watch a movie or Youtube videos. Desperate to disengage and acting out like a teenage brat who's parents have finally left him alone!

Oddly when I finally have the energy to write on this blog, for some reason I never seem to want to write about the important stuff. It's all too confusing and fraught with complicated emotions that I can't really express anyway. I'd much rather write about my thongs!

Thongs: My apologies to the cobblers (for want of a better description) of quality rubber (Not actually rubber.. more a cocktail of chemicals) footwear. Over Christmas I visited my parents in Melbourne. As the gifts were passed around on Boxing Day I received a small flexible parcel of familiar weight and size. Ripped the paper off to discover a new pair of thongs… I had a $2 pair on at the time but kicked them off and tried on my new ones. They fit nicely.     

I don't know which shop they came from but it obviously wasn't the 'Throw away imports from China Store...' I’ve been wearing this pair of thongs for nearly two months, cycling every day and sometimes on bikes with those horrible bear trap peddles. I am pleased to say that the thongs have withstood all kinds of punishment and are still holding together nicely. Looking back on a previous post I realize, as I did when I wrote it that I was overgeneralizing about the poor quality of modern thong making material. OK it's not a subject that you'll hear discussed or debated seriously anywhere other than a pub or a sundowners session at a seasonal seaside caravan park, but since thongs are pretty much all I wear I figured it was a subject worthy of comment and consideration.
My comments about poor quality were obviously based on my personal spending habits which were guided entirely by my Scroogliness, which had temporarily overridden my usual sense of judgement when it came to quality of materials, workmanship etc... Ignoring the range of fine quality footwear available to those who bother to find them I chose to condemn the all aspects of modern thong production and focus my post on a bragging session about my skills of ‘walking in thongs’.
Oh… what a prideful of a braggart am I!  (I also failed to mention all the times I've stupidly stood on sharp objects which have penetrated my thongs and lodged themselves in the heel or ball of my feet! Which I'll never admit to!)

Well I just thought I ought to confess and admit that my comments about the generally poor quality of all thongs was incorrect, some thongs are better than others. Over the past year I'd allowed my miserliness to override my sense of value for money and sense of quality. I broke one of my golden rules of judging a bargain! Is this cheep thing I'm buying actually any good?
I'd contented myself to purchase the cheapest of crappy thongs from the supermarket, rather than venture out to one of the larger department stores or shoe shops to purchase my thongs. I elected to pay $4 rather than $10 or $15 which would have set me up with a quality set of 'flip flops'. In fact if I'd bothered I could actually have found a decent pair of thongs for under $10. The fact that I was too cheep to pay a couple of extra bucks for a much better quality of foot rubber is only testament to my stinginess.

So as an addendum to my previous post, the premise of which, when it comes to learning to walk, I'll stick to however I must concede that a decent quality thong will take the traveler much further than the cheep crap I'd worn through 3 sets of last year!
Lesson learned? In future… always buy the better quality thong… And walk in them like they are the soles of your feet. ;)

If you'd like to learn more about thongs from people who take them much more seriously than I, check out the Powerhouse Museum tribute to the 'Rubber thong' HERE, it's a pearler! 

Week of thoughts

"I've been contemplating...."
"What!?"
"You know... like thinking only... more deeply, possibly less strenuously but kind of making enough space in me for the bigger ideas to get in"
"Oh......"  "You always were full of shit!"
"Yeh"

OK don't ask what I've been contemplating, It doesn't matter. I think I'll write on my blog. Some of the ideas we've talked about like the Myth of Retirement or Needs vs Wants and why it seems so hard for people to tell the difference. Not that there's anything wrong with wanting but it can tend to lead to necessary excesses of what you Don't Need or in the end even want...

Maybe I'll just write some of the simple lines of thought we've been playing with and leave it at that. The conversations have entertained me enormously lately.

Like when we were discussing insatiable desire for more.... and how even so called spiritual leaders seem to require all the very best of modern comforts and consumables... and you said we don't 'NEED' Money!

We live our days in the Mary Poppins school of thought when it comes to having lots of cash.... We are occupied usefully and we get enough to do the things we like and as Mary Poppins said "Enough is as good as a feast..."
Hey and didn't Sheryl Crow sing "It's not have'n what you want, it's Wanting what you have..." Or something like that?
And right now we do. Hey that's right... we do.