Mental health

A quinquagenarian. (Almost.)

Approaching 50, I guess you could say I have opinions. Buckle up.

The good things first. Fatherhood is mostly a matter of wanting to be a good dad – things fall into place when you accept that precondition. Same goes for being a husband. Reading is an excellent lifelong habit with no downsides; whilst my tastes have matured with age, it’s harmless once in a while to return to airport fiction. There’s no shame in wanting to feel warm in winter – flannelette shirts are awesome, and so are nice socks. (And trousers, let’s not forget.) Using a handrail to traverse a flight of steps is fine. Comfy shoes, tick. Wind through trees on an otherwise quiet hike. Rinse aid and fabric softener. Streaming services – all of them. Recreational lock-picking. Apple One & Amazon Prime. WD-40. Ice cream. GPS. Caring for pets. Holidays – especially island holidays. Home ownership and financial security. Silhouetted eucalypts at dusk. Floating in the ocean. Kewpie mayonnaise. Time and space for deep thinking. Transactional certainty. A fountain pen that still works brilliantly after 35 years of near-constant use. Nexium. Boating. Strong coffee (from a machine). Strong tea (from a pot). Watching Douglas Murray never lose a debate. Nicotine gum (yeah, yeah, gimme a break). Cordless stick vacuums. Blue skies in winter. Moisturiser. Nag Champa. Waiters that write orders down. Art galleries. Lollies. Reverse-cycle air-conditioning. Efficient queues. Sobriety. Merit as a fiat social currency. Ryobi’s 18V garden care range. Kind people. Washing on the clothesline that dries in a single day. The Norfolk Pine I watch from the kitchen window each day while the kettle rumbles.

The not-so-good. Erratic drivers. Unmanaged expectations. Card fees, especially now that cash is obsolescent. Roof leaks. Unsolicited noise. Very small font sizes. Most real estate agents. Ironing. Being asked personal questions. Smelly fridges. The lie that is anti-dandruff shampoo. The bigger lie that is whitening toothpaste. The decline of long-form narrative. Body corporate committees. Nocturia. People who tell me they’re either the Queensland kickboxing champion or the nephew of a barrister as they’re shown the door. Needing an app for every household appliance. Activists. Days that feel implosive. Recruiters. Grind culture. Universal mobile phone obsession. Sandfly bites. The AI ‘revolution’, even though I happily own Nvidia stock. A frequent craving for solitude, even though loneliness is carcinogenic. Coding exams for underpaid IT roles. Fixing things I’ve already fixed. Crazy inflation because of knee-jerk money printing (thanks, pandemic). Poor sleep buffering: waking up with a to-do list that’s several kilometres long. Star Wars, since the prequels. Hobbies that I’ve let decay – the novel, the guitars. Inaccurate weather forecasts. Imperceptibly trending towards indolence. No more Iain M. Banks / Umberto Eco / David Foster Wallace books. People pleasing. Whatever McDonald’s did to Sprite. Losing agency and being buffeted by circumstance. Dirty feet. An outwardly subtle but internally overwhelming sense of shrinking.

Now you know.

Writing again

Queues and stacks are familiar to anyone who has studied computer science. It struck me a while ago that, to my detriment, I organise my life like a stack. Writing fiction is at the base of my stack, and I only get around to writing (and painting & music to much lesser degrees) once I’ve accomplished everything on top. I really need to change my way of operating from a stack to a priority queue. Lifelong habits are challenging to break.

After a very tiring handful of years (deaths of loved ones and career chaos), I currently have enough bandwidth to resume my novel. My stack is practically empty, which is eerie – but, hey, I’m not complaining. Although re-entering the workforce is something I have to do soon enough, for now I’m aiming to get the first draft down.

For me, there’s always been more joy in producing than consuming.

Rain

Hope is seeing light rain through discreet black shutters as the afternoon retires. Hope is watched through the same pane at night, too. Only it has become an old telegraph post’s sodium light.

Despair is too much rain. Debris-covered drains. Pools, saltless with excess summer. Audible drops on cream ceilings that later race down mouldy paint. (None of these things are welcome, by the way. Not one.)

Anxiety lies somewhere in between. It is the doorbell that makes the dog bark. A door answered to a man shaped like an agent, unaffected by the hurried, dry breeze. Such a weathered face.