Project Texture: Catching up on the week that passed too quickly

Night shift, day shift. Combinations of both resulting in approximately ten hours sleep over four days. Despite being tired and having stuff all time for myself, I've had a brilliant week. Playing with water cannons... Spending nine and a half hours on overtime rate doing absolutely stuff all... Who can ask for more?

Actually I can. More blog time would be fantastic. More time for music would be mind-boggling.

In the mean time, I have a photographic challenge to catch up on. Here's some of my thoughts for Project Texture:









That will be all. I'm off to have a life for a day.

Project Texture

Kat has come up with the challenge this time - to photograph texture. It seems like such a broad context, but to take it out of the realm of the obvious is proving quite a challenge to think about.

My starting point is at the local wetland centre - just around the corner from home. Bush, and plenty of interest in it. I've always liked the texture of barks from different trees. At the moment the scarring within the bark textures is captivating. Little bits of scars from the story of the life of that particular tree. A history in a sense. A little inner glimpse.

I guess this one could be like one of those psychologist dot pictures...



See in it what you will!

Now Playing:

I've finally got the shits with mainstream radio. It serves it's function at work - something that most people will put up with listening to, and a bonding factor because eventually all the people will know all the songs and sing along.

But why we know all the songs to sing along to them is the problem. We hear the same four new songs all day interspersed with pub rock classics. Even after a day of listening to this you've got a fair chance of knowing the choruses to anything they play.

I've swapped back to my old favourite station, where they play non-mainstream pieces and with a heavy emphasis on the Australian local content. The announcers tend to get into the backgrounds of the songs and bands, so there's more talk but it's informative rather than advertising bullshit.

So why am I talking about this? Swapping stations has brought me back into the mood for appreciation of new music. I've got hold of a bunch of albums that are out now and I've been systematically listening to them. What a breath of fresh air! It doesn't matter if I don't like them or not - doesn't matter much at all really. The fact that I am listening critically to what is going on in them has given my ears and my brain a new lease on life.

Now playing on the familiarisation list:

Sara Barielles - Little Voice
To me this is pop-oriented jazz. Joss Stone without so much in the ballsy voice department. However I love it. There's a big emphasis on piano in most of the songs, mainly as chordal rhythmic accompaniment. I like this style of piano accompaniment - punchy, heavy in the bass. I'm not much of a fan of flowing, arpeggiated piano accompaniments - and anyway that would not be fitting for this style.

The hit list for me on this album:
Track 1. Vegas
Despite there being too much emphasis on the single chord hits on the piano within the first verse (this could have been mixed with more importance given to the vocal lines) this song is a winner. The chorus and bridge more than make up for it. At times Sara Barielles lets loose, whereas for most of the songs on this album you can tell she's holding back, reigning it in. It's nice to hear the chains being let go on occasion.

Track 9. Many the Miles
Oh so soul. Vocal harmonies in the chorus, slow groove, a capella section. It's all there. In a way the song is commercial, but it's easy to identify with and I'm loving it. The last line should be an echo for my life at the moment:
There's too many things I haven't done yet/There's too may sunsets I haven't seen. This is the kind of song I would listen to twice in a row because it doesn't seem to last long enough for how much I like it.

Coming soon in the album review list:
Pink - Funhouse. - From first listening it will probably be a quite scathing review.
The Screaming Jets - Do Ya. - Classic Aussie rock returns. Similar enough to their old albums from way back when to still be The Screaming Jets, but different enough not to be accused of releasing the same old songs with different titles.
The Presets - Apocalypso. - I'm undecided on this ablum. Very mood-oriented, there's elements that impress... but are they aiming too low?
The Living End - White Noise. - The Aussie boys are back with a mixed-feelings album that has some absolutely brilliant moments.

All this keeps bringing to mind a line from a song by Aussie intelligent pisstake electronica group TISM (standing for This Is Serious Mum). The name of the song is Lose Your Delusion II. The song itself is taking a dig at switching away from the ideals of non-mainstream and returning to mainstream bum-fodder "like some inner technical hitch".

Don't change your life - Change your channel

So true, whichever way you go.

Whinge, Whine, Fricken Whinge.

It's a cloudy, windy day. Bugger.

This kind of day just seems to take the life out of me. I can't go to the beach, because it will be cold and the sand will be blowing around enough to remove a few layers from any exposed skin areas. Exfoliation, yes. Painful and annoying, more so. If I ditch the plans of spending the weekend exploring outdoors and instead attend to the indoor challenge of conquering Mount Washing, I will end up being bashed about the head by sheets and towels as I hang them on a wildly swing Hills Hoist clothesline. Since I have a tenuous relationship with the clothesline at the best of times, it's better to avoid that idea too.

It seems that sunshine and fresh air are a requirement for my happiness. I like my job because a large portion of it is outside work, and in a very changing environment. In my current state of mind [ie. muddled, medicated, working on getting better] I couldn't imagine being inside in a little box all day, the same little box all day, to earn a living. Honestly I would not cope.

I'll add to that - sunshine, fresh air, new experiences. I feel happy when my eyes are opened to new things. Often on days like this I will spend a fair amount of time on the internet. At the end of the day it might look like I've accomplished nothing, but I will have been on a linkfest that takes me through hundreds of different perspectives, reading about whatever may fleetingly take my interest. I will have given myself brain fodder at least.

Speaking of brain fodder I need a new challenge. Kat and I have kind of run out of steam on the stripes photography challenge, so I have thrown the ball to her for the next choice. Who knows what it will be!

Even the doga are going nuts in this weather. They're whinging, all of them. Joey the turdlet will not stop barking until he is let inside. The other two join in just because they hear him barking and whining, and they're probably sick of it too. I have no idea how to shut them up and it's frustrating to say the least. Thank god I don't have children - it would be worse.

Anyway, I'm off to find something somewhat positive to spend my day on.

This has been a public service does of whinge.
Tell me to shut up and get over it anytime.

The Stripe Project: Backlog

I went on a stripe-hunt the other day. My plan was to get a backlog of images that I could post one of per day when I got busy during the week. Well, that was one of the plans anyway.

The other plan was to get serious with my little Fuji camera and start shooting in RAW mode.

Brilliant. The files that come out of the thing are HUGE in comparison, take a hundred percent more time to download and presumably have a shitload more data trapped in them. That is, if I can open them.

The programs provided by Fuji with the camera are shithouse to say the least. They seem to be aimed at first-time users who just want to see the pretty things they snapped in a window only slightly larger than the LCD display, and then print them to palm off on to all their admiring friends. I installed them, I tried them, I deleted them.

Photoshop... My dear pirate copy of CS3 that runs in some european language other than my own wouldn't go near my raw images. The english version of Photoshop 7 wouldn't touch them either. I tried, just in case the europeans were fucking it up for me.

So... delete.

I'm now running GIMP. It's free. It seems to work. In fact it seems just like Photoshop without the price tag or piracy. Getting my raw images to open is still a bitchy little hassle, but eventually I'll get a workflow again.

So here's three shots I took the other day, that I've finally got through veiwing and editing.







Methinks I could avoid all the hassle by upgrading the camera rather than the software...

The Stripe Project: Day 5

No standing? I came to a full-on halt yesterday.

What do I do when I find out I've been shafted by somebody? Usually, I drink it all out and forget it in the aftermath of the hangover. The drinking lets it become not much of a problem. And the hangover... Well, let's see? ... That reminds me that health is far more important than getting annoyed at some idiot.

Oh, the joys of working with a hangover. Luckily, we had to get off the machine we were working for about an hour today, so that some other crew could work on it. Ideal time for a hung over sleep session. On the rocky, dusty ground I lay underneath the work truck, stretched out like a starfish, with a bag of rags under my head for a pillow. At the time not even a fluffy doona on a king size bed with a mountain of pillows could have matched the relief of the sleep I had today under that truck.

Hung over? Yes. It's not the drink that makes you get over something. It's the hangover that reminds you that life can be far better.

The Stripe Project: Day 4

The Stripe Project: Day 3

We live just around the corner from a Wetland Centre. I've been there a couple of times but have not actually paid the couple of dollars required to get through the turnstiles and into the main attraction. Instead I've spent time in the lobby area, looking at the displays and cruising the information pamphlets about the local naturist activities.

That's where I met this guy.
Let's call him Big Daddy, though for all I know currently, he could be female.



In the tank with [him] were two others, Medium Size and Little Dude. They were swimming around, active as all hell and very uncooperative. They resisted my attempts to lure them over to the other side of the tank into more favourable light. They would not show me their cool little stripey undersides for long enough to focus on them.

I will return for them later, on another lobby adventure.

So I concentrated on Big Daddy, who was content to be motionless and high and dry. [He] blinked once, but that was about the extent of it. An ideal subject. Stationery, and no complaints. Beautiful.

The Stripe Project: Day 2

Our driveway is a nightmare. It is lined either side by our house and the one next door in a hell-run that ends at a gate that is a prick to open. I'm not much of a fan of gates, anyway. Maybe this is because I do not have little kidlets to send out of the comfort of the vehicle to go open them for me. Maybe I have lived in the non-dog non-gated world for far too long. Anyhoo.

Guarding the very start of this gauntlet run is a mailbox on one side and some sort of pole on the other. They're both annoyingly close to the nightmare driveway, so some sort of hazard control measures had to be put into place.



Out comes the reflective tape.

So really, to get in and out of the driveway you're still running the gauntlet, but at least now you can see the enemy.

The Stripe Project: Day 1

I decided I needed a new challenge. The colour projects I did a while ago were great for opening my eyes to different perspectives. Thinking about that this morning, I've decided to challenge myself away from the idea of colour and into a favourite land for me: geometry. In particular within this category this time it is stripes.

I don't know if this one will last a week, ten days, or a fortnight. Who knows? So far, (on day one), it's been pretty exciting to see things in a new analytical light again. To tear things apart visually in search of a useable pattern. You'll see if I get bored because I'll go off and do some thing else.

I've managed to con my sister Kat into joining in. If anybody else is game for it, drop me a line in the comments.

Anyway, here goes.
The Stripe Project #1:



Let's be clear on the terminology here.
No, they are not sandals.
They are not to be referred to in their onomatopoeiac form as flip flops.
These beauties of Australian culture are known as THONGS.

A thong is not some flimsy piece of material you wedge into your arse and call underwear. That is a G-string. Consider that the epitome of the range of thongs is the highly regarded double plugger. The statement "I just bought another pair of double pluggers because my old ones gave up the ghost" becomes a little too suggestive when it's confused with flimsy material bits.

So get it right, yanks.

The thong is footwear, the double plugger is king, and the G-string goes up your arse.

Mailbox Monday

Bend over and take it

"You're on night shift."
Translation: drop your pants, you're about to get screwed.

"Change of plans - there's a breakdown at another site and you're running the crew."
Lube? What's lube? Nothing like a painful rough job is there?

"Come see us in the office when you get back."
This one's an interesting one - basically they want the story of how you got fucked. Not only that, though. This is the time of after-fuck tickling that has the potential to make you really exhausted because you only have three hours left to sleep.

Do I fight this? No. Like a good little worker whore I bend over and say bring it on.

Then you get feedback saying that in one night your crew got through the same amount of work it would have taken the opposition an entire week to complete. It's like being told you give good head. You might not like doing it that much but a compliment, knowing that at least you do a good job, makes you more likely to want to do it all over again.

Quote of the Day

Out on a mine site where everybody brings a cooler bag for lunch, Mister SexyAwesome pulls out a handful of candy canes instead.

I wasn't allowed to have them as a kid, he explains. 'Cause I used to suck them into a point and stab people with them.

Three apparent impossibilities in food production

1. Post-mix orange juice concentrate that does not produce a drink reminiscent of gastro medicine.

2. Appealing airline food.

3. Picture-board menus that actually represent the finished, oversauced sloppy mess that is served up as a burger, rather than the stylised neatly stacked fluffy-lettuced vision of the unattainable.

Time for online quizzes

I decided to waste a miserable cloudy boring morning playing with online quizzes. According to one, I am 40% interesting. That implies that I am about 60% boring, which is probably pretty near true. Then I happened across this beauty. The Personality Defect Test. Have a go, I dare you.

Your result for The Personality Defect Test...

Spiteful Loner

You are the Spiteful Loner, the personality type that is most likely to go on a shooting rampage. In high school, you were probably that kid who wore all black and who sat alone in a corner of the lunch room, drawing pictures of dead babies. You are a rational person and tend to hold emotions in very low-esteem; not only that, but you are also rather introverted, meaning you probably bury any emotions you feel deep inside yourself, like all of the bodies in your backyard. Combine these traits with your dislike of others and your brutality, and it seems that you would be quite likely to shoot innocent people in a rampage. Most likely, you also have low self-esteem. Hell, I get low self-esteem just looking at you. This is only yet one more incentive to go on a shooting rampage, because you wouldn't care if you died as a result. Granted, you probably haven't gone on a shooting rampage and probably never will, but all the motivations are there. All you need is for someone to push you over the edge, calling you names and belittling you. Like me. But don't shoot me. I have a 101 mile-long knife, you know. In conclusion, your personality is defective because you are too introverted, brutal, insecure, and rather unemotional. No wonder no one hangs around you, you morbid, cold-hearted freak!

To put it less negatively:

1. You are more RATIONAL than intuitive.

2. You are more INTROVERTED than extroverted.

3. You are more BRUTAL than gentle.

4. You are more HUMBLE than arrogant.

Compatibility:

Your exact opposite is the Televangelist.

Other personalities you would probably get along with are the Capitalist Pig, the Smartass, and the Sociopath.

If you scored near fifty percent for a certain trait (42%-58%), you could very well go either way. For example, someone with 42% Extroversion is slightly leaning towards being an introvert, but is close enough to being an extrovert to be classified that way as well. Below is a list of the other personality types so that you can determine which other possible categories you may fill if you scored near fifty percent for certain traits.

Take The Personality Defect Test at HelloQuizzy

Communication

Meet the self-proclaimed Mister SexyAwesome. According to him he can even take my ten dollar headlamp - covered in a watermark pattern of grease and grey dust - and make it look sexy. This picture depicts him exhibiting his form of greeting. It does not portray anger or frustration. This is a happy greeting. You are priveledged if you recieve one of these because it means he likes you. Otherwise you'd get ignored completely. I have another picture from a hundred metres above SexyAwesome and he still manages to greet me in this way from a distance. You can only just make his finger out in that shot, so I think it would be perfect to send to the boss as a potential aerial shot for advertising purposes. Or at least as a suggested desktop background for the company computers.

He leaves messages for me, too. We can spend all morning carving solid grease off a surface and yet he still finds a space to think of me.



I love these guys. Maybe that's because they truly don't give a shit.

I don't need to hear about your day because I read it all online.

I'm twenty-eight and I have wrinkles. I have only just realised this. It disappoints me more than scares me. Yet another failure in life. I haven't looked after my skin by lathering it in girly products that I have avoided due to lack of knowledge and pure fright at how much you have to do to "stay pretty". I'm not pretty, never have been. So no hope there.

I work in a bloke's world, but I still have to get driven to a toilet if I am in a remote location, because no matter how blokey I may come across at work, I still have to squat to piss.

I won't have children. I don't really like the idea of me raising a child in a gay relationship. Round of applause for those who do, but it isn't for me. So knock out being a mother. Besides, I'm happily in a situation where that will never be an option.

I make friends with a woman and the assumption is that I'm after that woman. I make friends with a man and the assumption is that he must want to turn me. It seems that my desire to spend the rest of my life with a partner of the same gender has intruded upon my ability to make friends. When did life become all about sex? I don't want a fuck. I want tenderness. Seperate from work, seperate from a social life, but privately intertwined into my being and everything I do.

The woman I love has just told me that I will never be able to make her feel safe. Only a man can do that.

So I'm stuck in limbo. I'm not a man. I'm not feminine. I'm neither and I'm nobody. Because I don't grandstand my past or present actions it looks like I've got nothing to offer except a few photographs and experiences that yes, you can read about online. I'm pixels arranged on a screen. A genome sequence of zeros and ones. The Binary Being.

Perhaps you can take those dots, that arrangement of zeros and ones, and arrange them so that they represent somebody who lives, breathes, sometimes laughs with happiness flowing through her entire body, and today.... hurts like all hell.

Why women make good cleaners.

I was supervising today. There is stuff all to do in this a lot of the time. Delegate the work, check it's done, do the mountain of required paperwork and cop the blame if anything fucks up. I took advantage of having little to do and squirreled away to read the newspaper for an extra fifteen minutes at morning tea. I was cosy. There was free crappy coffee (but still free). There was a space away from the sounds of welding, grinding, generators and reversing alarms on the mobile equipment. Relative peace.

It had to end prematurely. One of the workers hunted me down.

I asked him how it was all going in the machine.

Well. He says. It was all going great until the backpack vacuum stopped working. I've checked with the electricians and they say there's power definately getting to it. But it still won't work.

I looked at him, an older man who has the air of being looked after by a wife for many years. The kind of man who wouldn't have a clue how to drive a washing machine let alone an oven. The job he's been doing for the past hour is chipping about a centimetre of dust/mud off the machine flooring in one of the back areas. He's got to cover about five square metres worth of tight edges and dodgey bits with hoses running through it all. I'd figured it would take him the rest of the day to properly, because all our company sent with us was a dodgey little backpack vacuum. Normally our vacuum units take up a whole trailer.

Have you emptied it yet?

Silence.
And a look that said you have to do What?

Seriously.

Mailbox Monday

Big machines: Drill part II

In theory it takes five hours for two workers to pressure clean a drill. The reality is that the time spent depends entirely upon what it has been digging into, and how long since it had it's last bath. If the thing has been drilling clay, and hasn't had a bath for a month, it'll take more like ten hours of blasting to get all the shit off it. If it's a coal drill it will all blast away really easily, even though it looks filthy. You're guaranteed to wear it from head to toe. Ears, nostrils, cleavage. Even my arse crack copped a bit last time I did a coal drill.



The ones I clean usually get parked on a washpad for us at night so they can have a bath before getting serviced at 7am the next day. This means all the chunky crap that could potentially fall on somebody, or impede them from reaching something has to blasted to smithereens. Any grease that could be a hazard to the work has to be removed, also by blasting and coating in degreaser. When we've finished climbing all over the mast - that big bit hanging off the end with the number on it - we get the thing raised up so that we can get into all the crap in underneath it. By that time it's usually somewhere near dawn. Then it looks like this:



Then we climb all over the motors and blast the crap off them. We try not to hit the little red wires snaking around the motor that will, if hit with a pressure blast, set off ten grand worth of fire system. We hose out all the crap from the radiators with low pressure hoses. We make the operator's cab (the bit with the windows) look pretty and if I have time I'll even blast out the crap from the boot brush so the operator can keep his boots clean. It's the creature comforts that count, after all.

Making Music

Dear Dive,

I first started reading you back around the time when I had a solo date with my laptop and anything alcoholic I could lay my hands on for National Drunk Blogging Day. That's coming close to two years ago now.

What really sold me was almost wetting myself while reading a post you wrote on playing New Year's Eve gigs. In the ranty viciously humourous fashion I love to see from you, that piece hit all the right points. While trying to avoid urinal disaster and gasping for air, I just had to keeping saying Bugger it, you're so right! I was sold.

You're amazingly supportive. You comment all the time even if I seem to never answer. It was you who gave me the name Groover. From such a distance you would not believe how much of a positive impact that contact with you has made in my life.

It's important to step back occasionally and think of the positive. You have people who have never met you who love you to pieces - how cool is that?!

I've been meaning to join in your Let's Make a Racket Thursday series since you started it. Yes, it's been an embarrassingly long time, but I'm here now. Just like a drummer I've turned up for the gig eventually.

This is one of my pieces - not a racket as such, but it's here. It's a classical guitar trio written in my first year of Uni (there'll be a few of the Uni days posts coming up - brace yourself). Citrus Twist, performed by myself, Stephen Tafra and Stephen Thorneycroft [aka EphenStephen] in a loungeroom. For performance identification we were usually known as Totally Plucked.

Glad to see you couldn't keep away from Blogville for too long!

Cheers,
Vic

p.s. Eat plenty of curry. If life ever tries to bite you on the arse again at least you can fart back.

Slow and Steady

Believe it or not, this little guy* was moving too fast for me to get the shots that I wanted. I had to pick him up, move him back into the sunlight, and hope the hell he went the right direction when he took off again. At least the little sucker behaved enough for this one.

[* Actually, most species of snails are hermaphrodites and when they shag, each snail with fertilise the other and they both will reproduce, so both pay the price for shagging. I think that's brilliant. Also they can mate themselves, so one snail alone in a pond can still reproduce.]



What I like about wildlife photography is that it's bloody difficult to get your subjects to pose up. There's so much chance involved, you're always going to get a different shot. I don't have a nice big fuck-off lens for my camera, so getting close is an issue. Wildlife, unless it's a variety of wildlife that's incredibly dopey or incredibly slow, tends to elude me quite often.

It's become a bit of a personal challenge to capture the wildlife at the local wetlands. Frankly I suck at it. Part of me says give up until you get better equipment. Then there's this other part, the inner teacher in me, that says for years I have urged students to get past these very sorts of obstacles. Don't give up. Be patient and persistent. Your improvements may be slow and steady, but consistent effort and thought about direction will always bring improvement. You wanna be a superstar overnight? Ain't gonna happen, buddy.

Patience, and you'll get there. Slow and steady.

Today is the day of "Hangover"

It was my birthday yesterday. I chose, in a lack of wisdom that appears to plague me annually, to end up plastered. That very special Oh shit I can't remember getting to bed kind of plastered.

Dammit. Another one down.

Mailbox Monday

This Is Not Art

There is a festival on in town - This Is Not Art. They had a Sunday afternoon fair that I decided to go along to, somewhat for inspiration for my brain and somewhat just to sit back and peoplewatch.

There was a uniform for all the contemporary artist types in attendance.

If you're female, you must:
1. Wear stripey socks pulled up to uneven heights on the legs.
2. Wear outrageously bright leggings, with a definite favour toward flouro pink.
3. Have access to your own sewing machine and manufacture some kind of sack to wear that you obviously flaunt as expressive and arty, but in reality - it's just a sack made from your old curtains.
4. Shave off the hair on one side of your head and not bother with brushing the other side. Bonus credo for cultivating dreadlocks.
5. Sport a satchel of hand-sewn nature consisting of a patchwork of bits of other hand-sewing failures.

If you're male, you must:
1. Cultivate facial fluff. Do not shave, do not trim, do not wash.
2. Wear some sort military jacket, but avoid camouflage print at all costs.
3. Have some sort of metal bits hanging off your face.
4. Blue denim is not your freind. Wear black, black, and more black when it comes to pants.

I wandered past rows and rows of zines, wondering at how these people can happily charge five bucks for ten poorly photocopied pages of bad poetry and stick figure drawings. I wandered past jewelery stores that all seemed to make use of shirt buttons. Fancy an earring with a shirt button on it? Why thanks, that might come in handy some day. I wandered past racks of sewing machine "retro" [=sack] atrocities and hand-made political buttons.

This Is Not Art. Damn right. What could be a really inspiring festival exploring the personally defined lines between art and atrocity left me feeling like I had seen to much atrocity. As for expressing individuality, how can you do that when you all look the same?

PhotoHunt: Sad

Juno - aka Misskin, Snothead, Furrous, Little One.
I miss my little girl so much.

Looking after "self"

This afternoon the light was good for taking some shots I've wanted to take a road trip and chase for a while. It was pretty hot, so I could also have been out swimming. There was plenty to do outside.

But I chose not to. I stuck my head under my wing and looked after myself a little. The room that had really begun to resemble that of a teenager got tidied and rearranged. I closed the blinds and cranked the music while I was doing this and danced and sang in only a pair of jeans. I organised my CDs into genre and cross-genre.

The new feeling of organisation and tidiness is calming. I unwind a lot knowing that things are easy to find and not lying all over the floor, or even hidden in cupboards and not sorted. I also unwind completely to music. Dancing and singing while listening to anything that mildly took my interest was far better than spending an afternoon outside.

Time to look after myself (in all aspects) for a while, methinks.

Not a Half-Nekkid Racket

It's Thursday. I should be joining Dive in posting my own tragic attempts at music-making. I should also be firing up the old thursday tradition of posting arty Half-Nekkid Thursday shots.

But dammit, I'm too stuffed.

Eleven hours of dragging an industrial vacuum hose around a big-arse machine in the heat of a coal pit and I'm absolutely knackered. I'm covered in grease, dust, and layers of filthy sweat. If it's this hot now, how the hell am I going to handle the summer?

Mine regulations say that we have to wear long sleeved shirts and pants of a specific design. We also have to wear steel capped lace-up work boots, a hard hat and safety glasses. Over the top of this is the usual cleaner's uniform is the disposable chemical suit. Sperm suits. Those things are like little zip-up sauna body bags. You could sell them to quite a few women as a weight loss program and probably make a mint out of it.

My clothes were wet from head to toe with sweat. It was dripping from my lip and forehead which is so unattractive I get the shits with myself for being a sweaty pig. The mandatory safety glasses fog up every ten minutes, and by the end of the day it was so hard to lift my feet with the weight of the steel caps on them that I felt like just shuffling them along instead.

Is this so hard simply because I'm unfit? Do I sweat more because I'm fatter than I should be, and unfit?

Do I have to spend hours at the gym and lose all this weight? Become a little fitness junkie in bike pants and a sports top? Do I drink less water? How do I stop from sweating so much?

Sleepytime

In order to prepare for bed one must:

1. Block out weird demolition noises from unidentified source in new suburb.

2. Endeavour to fall asleep immediately due to the nagging suspicion that there may be bitey things cohabiting the bed.

3. Block out the fact that one's surrounds are in such a state of messiness that they resemble the bedroom of an adolescent, except that the papers on the floor are bills rather than maths notes.

4. Focus on the bunch of flowers recieved as a surprise left on my bed today as a warming point of happiness and content.

Goodnight.

Big machines: Drill

If somebody asks what my job is it doesn't sound all that interesting. I'm a cleaner.

What sort of image does that immediately bring to mind? A backpack vacuum with miles of orange power cord following behind like a lifeline? A trolley with half a dozen different spay bottles filled with various colours of merrily swinging off the side as I push it along? Me lazily pushing one of those scissor brooms with the fluffy shag pile rug pads on them across a big polished floor?

Well, none of the above.

I clean machines in coal mines. Here's a little one.



It's a drill. One of the easiest jobs in the list of things I've done so far in this work. What the hell does a drill do anyway? Here's one at work.



They make the holes for the blasting I posted pictures of recently. They track along, leaving little anthills where they've been and big shafts in the ground in a big pattern. An explosives truck comes along filling each shaft with fertiliser and at some point they blow the entire lot sky high. It's a dodgey quality snapshot, I know, but to the left a little and up you can just make out the trucks following this one around filling up the holes.

So where do the cleaners come into all this? Usually about 2am we set up a truck with high pressure water cleaning guns on it and two workers spend the next six hours blasting all the mud, coal dust, oil and grease out of existence with hot water and pulsing rotary nozzles. We climb all over the thing trying to work our way through a mess of hoses that are set solid in mud, clearing all the crap as we go and usually wearing a fair portion of it all in the process. Even though we wear two disposable chemical suits over the top of each other the water from the blasting will inevitably soak through them leaving us saturated.

Pressure guns are great for me. I get frustrated easily with grot that won't budge, so it's particularly satisfying to stand there with a few thousand pounds of pressure in my hands, take aim and fire, while thinking DIE FUCKER!!!

The work is grotty, the pay is crap, and the bosses are idiots. But hell am I seeing some things I would never have dreamed!

Mailbox Monday

The main highway in the state snakes along the coast, where most of the population choose to reside. Over the years it's been upgraded in order to bypass every possible place of interest to stop at. Not only that, it's been split apart into two seperate roads for each direction of traffic. That's a brilliant idea for avoiding being ploughed into by the bastard travelling in the other direction who's fallen asleep from the boredom because without landmarks to keep you interested it all looks the same. However, when you have an avid mailbox hunter such as myself hurtling along at possibly more than a touch over the speed limit the dual carriageway is the most impractical invention ever devised.



A few kilometres down the road to an emergency vehicle only turning bay. A few more kilometres back in the opposite direction, beyond my target and to the next illegal turning bay. All for a shot of a surfboard turned mailbox.

Was it worth it? Fuck yeah!

PhotoHunt: View

The views I like the best are the ones without platforms. Without man-made zones and protections so that tour buses can pull up and dump hundreds of camera-clad tourists and have their arses protected from possible lawsuits when some fat middle-aged lard stumbles on a rock and holy shit! has an encounter with nature.

I like to feel like an explorer. I like to feel that I own the experience I have with nature, not that I'm sharing it with hundreds of lardassed pretenders who are really only waiting for the next McDonalds atrocity to roll on by. I like to stand on the edge, with no platform as a barrier between me and the experience, and feel part of the danger, the raw, the wildness of it all.

The person in this picture is EspressoHead, who is shortly going to abdicate to the mossier pastures offered in Ireland. Remember these places, dude. They're all part of who you are.

Hell yeah!

I'm back, finally.

Before we moved I had a crappy internet connection, not much space, mental health issues and neighbours who would drive even the most tolerant of people toward thoughts of chainsaw massacre.

Now, I have a seperate flat of my own with space enough for a studio. Here I can practise without the fear of putting anybody off classical guitar forever. I have access to a wetland reserve virtually outside the back gate and the only neighbour I've had a chat with so far has cows and has lived here all his life. I moved to Planet Newy to enjoy the benefits of a city, but struggled with immersing myself in it considering I've come from a town that has two traffic lights and four escalators. Where we are now living feels like a compromise between city and country life, and I'm so much happier this way.

So where the hell do I start? Mailboxes? Some of the bizarre conversation I have at work? How about home science experiments? Half-Nekkid Thursday really needs to come back also.

I'm back and it feels good.

If I do not blog daily the entire world has permission to kick my arse.

What it looks like when you blow up the earth

Witnessed recently at Bulga open cut coal mine.

If there is a blast nearby to where you are working at the time, you are evacuated to a safe position, where you can sometimes witness the shot being fired. Sentries are placed at the perimeter of the safe distance so that nobody can enter the shot zone. Radio silence is called, so that all two-way communications are ceased except for the shot firers. You can tune in and listen to it all being called and counted down while you sit back and watch.

The best thing here for me is that not only am I being paid while I have been evacuated from my workplace, I get to see some truly awesome sights (not to mention pass them on as best I can)!

Once the sentries are in place - which are just guys in four-wheel drives at every entry point to the shot zone - an all clear is given and the shot is counted down from ten. Depending upon your proximity to the shot and how deep it is into the cut you will hear it go off as a boom and a rumble. The higher up it is (this one is on the top of the cut) the better the sound seems to travel. The ground will shake for a period. Then it's called as all clear and off we all go back to work.

At work

Meet Shooter. He's one of the guys I work with in my cleaning job at the mines. Shooter is dressed in what we typically have to wear to scrape grease and shit from places it has accumulated in massive machines - a disposable overall suit. He is doing what we spend a lot of time doing: sitting around waiting to work.

Shooter makes my day. He's a motor-mouth. He says things before thinking and is as funny as hell. He's refreshing because you can't take things seriously around him. Young, full of himself... you can't help but love the guy.

Coping mechanisms

For the last week or so I've been unusually happy. Something snapped in me on the way home from a shit day at work one evening, and I where I would normally go home and be reclusive or ideally drink it off while being reclusive, I laughed out loud instead. I laughed all the way home. I came home and danced. While standing in the kitchen eating, I danced alone. Then I danced with the dog, because he was nearby and an inoccent victim I could rope into my happiness without noticeable complaint.

Work saw a different side of me. I'll write more about what I currently do for money at another point in the week, but suffice it to say the work is shit and the pay isn't great. But I've got renewed enthusiasm and have showed more of my old self to my relatively new workmates. My old self - the one who is not afraid to be seen as a bit of a dickhead, who isn't afraid to jerk around, but also who gets in and gets the dirty work done.

In short, I had my groove back.

My first in-depth appointment with my psych was on Saturday. We talked about the ex from over two years ago, mainly. Her task for me: write a letter to the ex describing all the ways she hurt me. Not a letter to be sent, I guess, but one that lets it all come escaping out of me and forces me to put it into form. Since this suggestion I've been fighting for my good mood. I have flat points - moments where I cannot comprehend anything that is going around me, even the smallest things. It's like time slows for me into dreamlike unreality, and then I wake up from the dream bleary eyed and unable to remember exactly what it was about.

These are things I need to confront. They are going to be painful but ultimately for my own benefit. The pain is scary beyond belief. How do people going into life threatening operations cope? I cannot comprehend it. This shit is not physical, it's only my thoughts! Somehow I'm afraid to face what I know I have to in order to get on with living.

I feel between a rock and a hard place when it comes to coping. Where I would normally shut myself away and blare some weird music on my stereo, I find myself only with my laptop speakers and a tenth of my music collection. The rest - the kickarse stereo and the collection of CDs that I have accumulated over so many changes in my life - are in storage at my parents' house about ten hours drive away. I cannot go there to retrieve them, because my dealings with them are a large part of the reason I've sought therapy in the first place.

So what do I do about this letter? How do I cope with writing it? How do I bust down all the mental barriers I've put up over the two years to block the bitch out of my head? And what do I do to save those surrounding me from having to see my pain?

Mailbox Monday

It's been a while. Not that I've stopped the hunt for mailboxes - I just keep forgetting that it's Monday until Monday is over.



So this one appears to have it's own crash barrier. Did it get run into too many times? Or is the owner a go-cart driver?

Sunday adventures

I got new toys today - a couple of filters for my camera. Naturally all I wanted to do straight away was go out and play with them. I decided to stop on the way home from the store and reef them out of the packet right there in a carpark at the nature reserve.

What did I find? Kids. Plenty of the little buggers everywhere. In prams, running around kicking footballs, throwing bread to the already fat ducks in the pond. So I wandered off in search of seclusion and nature, only to find that nature has kids too.

Air Guitar: Aussie Style

Coming to you from the Stroud International Brick and Rolling Pin throwing contest.

Preparing for battle with Boring the Great

It dons the full body sperm suit, elbow length gloves and safety glasses.

It removes the crusty acid drum from the pallet of other crusty acid drums.

It dips the crusty acid drum in the corrosive detergent goop.

It takes the high pressure water gun and sprays the crusty off the drum, usually wearing the blasted crusty bits from head to toe.

It places the clean drum on a new pallet.

It rinses and repeats for seven hours and three extended smoko breaks.

It leaves the site of the battle and heads for home.

It puts the lotion on it's skin.

PhotoHunt: Hanging

What do you do when you take off just one of your football socks?

Leave just that one on the fence and walk away, of course.

Project Black #5

I've been reading travel magazines lately. Obviously the urge to go discover is coming back with a vengeance, and this time around when I finally do unleash myself on the countryside, I hope I will be better armed to cope photographically... not to mention mentally.

In an editorial piece a mocking challenge is set to any person travelling to Broome. See if you can resist taking a photo of camels walking in a line along the beach with the sun setting behind them. Now the only camels I've ever come across are the ones at that spend their weekends carrying sets of children around in an endless procession at various market days and country shows, and the occasoinal camel race for charity. I've never been to Broome either. But the statement strikes a chord with me. I love a silhouette in the sunset. Can I resist it?

This tower is on a beach not far from home. It's a moody beach, and my experiences there match it. I've laughed and been consumed by love there. I've grinned at the waves in defiance. I've roared and screamed and been consumed by terror there. I've even unwittingly exposed my arse to an entire wedding party there.

The moods change, the weather changes, yet in this place there is one constant: the tower.

Project Black #4

Meet Joey the Turdlet, also affectionately known as BlackTurd. This boy is the biggest sook known to caninekind. He will stand at the back door, bouncing up and down and barking, causing a menace until he is let inside. From the second he is inside he turns to butter. He just lays around sleeping and begging affection.

Project Black #3

i = dx

where d is the distance removed from home,
x is the age of the relevant monument
and i is the resulting factor of interest.

It’s funny how travelling changes our perspectives and our willingness or desire to see certain things. Around home, wherever that may be, I have absolutely no desire to spend time wandering around churches. I have no sneaking religious tendencies and therefore no business being in these places. But… take me away on a road trip and suddenly they are architectural wonders that captivate me and draw me in.

Project Black #2

Two hundred and thirty million years ago trees were dying in swamps. Enormous forests sank bleow the water, and after the debris collected in the basins of water that had drowned them they were eventually covered by large quantities of mud and sand. This process happened over and over again, with layer upon layer compacting onto the last. Somewhere down the line heat and pressure come into play. Layered in between sandstone and other sedimentary rock, like a club sandwich, we have the final product: Coal. Disaster, dead trees, and time.

Pisshead

Cigarettes in this country come with a warning label by law. A series of government warnings that say such things as
SMOKING KILLS
and SMOKING WHEN PREGNANT HARMS YOUR BABY.
When the warnings first came out, a lot of guys I knew would only buy the packets with that last warning on them.

I indulged in a moderate night of drinking last night. I can remember everything, I didn’t make an idiot of myself, and I went to bed before I was anywhere near sloshed. I even had the presence of mind to drink a shitload of water before thinking of going to bed. In the aftermath I have a dehydration hangover from hell. I’ve drunk litre after litre of water and I feel like I have mutated into a piece of sandstone. Why so bad today when it appears I did all the right things?

Red wine.

I think it should come with a government warning label also. Something like
RED WINE WILL DEHYDRATE YOU
or THE CONTENTS OF THIS BOTTLE WILL CAUSE YOUR BODY TO HAVE THE PROPERTIES OF A POROUS STONE
or perhaps a more simple warning of REMEMBER THE LAST TIME?.

This could extend to cartons of beer also.
FRIDAY NIGHT? AS IF YOU’RE GOING TO TAKE IT SLOW!!!
Others could be labelled with
WARNING: POSSESSION OF A CARTON MAY CAUSE YOU TO EXPECT OTHERS TO DRINK WITH YOU.

Project Black #1

Ten days ago Anna started Project Black. Somewhere between going on road trips to the Blue Mountains and work and generally having my head up my arse, I missed the entire thing. I thought Dammit, Vic. You missed another opportunity to push yourself. But did I really? I'm late with it, but this is the net after all. I can publish what the hell I want whenever I want. There are no rules and that's why I love blogging so damn much.



Black: the absence of colour. The muso uniform. I look around the space I am in and immediately I see muso paraphernalia staring at me. Amplifiers, cases, accessories. Even my folders of music are black. You get so used to it in music that diversions from this are unusual and interesting. For that reason I love my red classical guitar case. It's falling apart and is essentially pretty tragic, (especially when you see the yellow plush lining inside), but hell does it stand out.

PhotoHunt: What IS that?

Yes, it's a bird.
In fact I'm pretty sure it's a Crimson Rosella.
But why the hell does it have something pink in it's mouth?
What the hell IS that?



The answer? Chewing gum.

Creature Comforts

One hundred and seventy-something million years in the making, it appears that a local network of limestone caves has evolved not only as a place of amazing beauty, but has also evolved to meet modern waste disposal demands.

Half-Nekkid Thursday: Tied ankles

On a road to nowhere

In honour of Dive's week of Car Porn I thought I would post an excerpt from the recent adventures of EspressoHead and myself.



A graveyard of machinery in the middle of nowhere.
Of course we had to climb on it.

What do you feel on the edge?

I've just been away for a random destination weekend with a good friend. It was brilliant not to be constrained by time for a couple of days. Decisions about where to go next were made on the basis of Why the fuck not? and without much other limitation. Want to stop there? Why the fuck not!

Of the many adventures we had - ghost towns, mailboxes galore, crystal blue rivers and limestone caves - the most brilliant was finding a random walking track in the Blue Mountains west of Sydney. National Parks signs always lie - this is a fact that I have always been aware of and will forget without fail before embarking on a walk - a walk that is signposted as just over a kilometre will always be a shitload more. I think they are working in conjunction with personal trainers. Just a little bit further is in fact twice as far as you've already come. We walked and walked. I whinged and whinged. We ran to make the distance fall away quicker and still we weren't at anything that looked remotely like a lookout. But what do you do? They have you over a barrel. If you give up and turn around because the sign lied about the distance you miss out on the reward at the end. So you keep going. And going.

Then you come across something truly amazing. A view that puts your life in perspective. A view that has been formed over millions and millions of years and my existence is not even a breath of wind compared to it's lifespan. Yet I can stand on the edge of this amazing formation and be completely overwhelmed by the experience. As beings, we are driven by emotion and each of our individual experiences are completely unique. I am the only person who can ever experience my own emotions, as much as the person next to me can only ever experience their own emotions.



I have been driven by a need to share my own experiences with others and I have come to realise how pointless that actually is. While it is awesome to have travelling companions and shared adventures the only emotional experiences I really need to nurture are my own.

Who

I am Vic.
I love catchy music, whether it be funky basslines, elctro, classical or any other genre you can throw into my circle of aural judgement.
I can't draw for shit.
I am an intellectual snob - I have little to no tolerance for idiots.
I like to be surrounded by order in the form of alphabetisation and categorisation.
I hate to sleep alone. I have a teddy bear that keeps me company now and I stress if I cannot find her to snuggle to as I am falling asleep.
I am a sucker for anything limited edition. I am a marketer's dream.
Fresh fruit and vegetables make me happy, and rump steak is my absolute favourite cut of beef.
I take photographs. I am not an artist, just a collector of my own visions and experiences.
A genuine smile from a stranger, or a fun conversation, will make my day.

Birthday suits:

Happy Birthday to my friend of pierced penis fame...
I know you’re only reading for the pictures, TruckieMan, so this one's for you:



Love and hugs,
Miss Vic the Bondage Mistress.


p.s. Why the fuck were you born in winter?

Apathetic Emo

I've had this recurring image lately. It comes in various forms but with the same theme, and occurs mostly when my mind is unoccupied by other goings on such as work or listening to different music. The image: my feet, tied together with rope bindings. Within this image I don't struggle against the binds. I am comfortable knowing that my feet are bound, in fact I'm quite happy to be that way.

There has been some talk kicking about the house of photo shoots of cut skin, and blood. Internally I am screaming Pick Me! for these shots. The weird thing in this, though, is that I do not want to harm myself, especially in the emo cutting type of way. I want to be surgically sliced into by somebody else.

I can't figure it out. There is no sexual motivation behind it. So what the hell is driving this imagery? Am I an apathetic emo, too lazy to do my own cutting?

More rambling.

The last few days I had some surprisingly happy moments. I find myself liking some of the things I do at work, even the hours are terrible and the pay is less than that of a trained monkey.

I went to see my doctor today. Two weeks ago I was a messy lump of indecision when I went to see this doctor about fixing the shit that has taken over my brain and functions. Today I walked in, was at ease straight away and spent some time laughing with her. The result, though was a weird one. Instead of being just normally happy, I walked out of the surgery to find my hands shaking uncontrollably.

I've had that reaction before in a different context: performing a classical guitar to an audience and coming through it all okay. Adrenaline rush. But why with a doctor? I didn't have an adrenaline rush going up on a work platform high above the ground on a mine site yesterday, even though it was my first time going more than a couple of metres off the ground in a wire basket. So why now? Adrenaline because I have perfect blood pressure and an informal chat?

The brain is weird. My answer? Join the local library and borrow some books on philosophy.