Last night I was bathing, my favourite pastime that typically demands a roof overhead, except for hot tub or spring bathing which ideally is exclusively outdoors, preferably in the snow/while snowing and I’ve been having issue with the ‘random blog’ button/function I built, but I was pretty sure I figured it out earlier in the day, so anyway, spam the random button I did and effectively crammed +10 years of reflection into the, relatively speaking, 10L bucket that is my bath tub, a mean feat given my ideal bath temp: apocalytpic. I guess I was reflecting on the reflections that are my blog posts. Therein, the reflection not the boiling, is certainly the biggest motivator to the sometimes delicately laid proverbial jargon that populates these pages, I’ve known it since basically forever (in my photography epoch) but every time I go for a deep dive im struck in a different way and I think last night I drew the conclusion that obviously its got nothing to do with the content, cuz it hasn’t changed, especially when the bulk (bulk in terms of number posts, not volume per post) is around a decade + old – so its clearly go to do with my psyche at the time of consumption, and granted last night brain might’ve been skewed by the steam and profuse sweating, I’m fairly certain sentimentality is more a product of my current state, more so than the thing I’m actually thinking about.
Obviously this is clear in some cases, like death or break ups etc, at the beginning it hurts more than my boiling skin but as you heal looking back hurts less, without what happening have changed at all. In the case of these posts I was looking at, via the random button, I was like oh shit yeah and then I was like fk I was having quite the time and then I was like gimme more of that shit and then I dropped my phone in the bath cuz of my sweaty mitts, and then I was actually swearing, but after that chaos I realised a big part of why I was having such a good time, in a brief moment of bathtub hindsight/insight, was a) I was doing fun stuff, not really working and developing my love for photos – honey moon period there – but then I realised that this random button creates a space to think in one of my favourite manners, which is to define a, usually weakly, tenable link between two completely different ideas. But instead of doing that about things-relating-to-work or some other lame shit it was my past and these seminal post-youth experiences I was undertaking, and in turn forging my self. It’s crazy how even in the most unrelated posts, years apart, I was finding/defining/imagining these consistent themes/links between posts/divulgences/introspections that really could’ve been written within weeks of each other, except for the change in my language.. and grammar.
I figure the language thing is mostly cuz I went from having a close group of mates, who in hindsight probably sounded like we had some other language, to spending swathes of time in North America where English isn’t like that of Australia, which isn’t like that of any other English nation. On my first skate trip to the states I was like oh these Americans really don’t get Aussie humour and then I was like well maybe my jokes are shit but then someone pointed out that it wasn’t the humour that they weren’t getting, it was the words in general. Part of me wonders what it’s going to be like going back to Aus and if I’ll be able to articulate properly – I mean there was even a time before I moved up here that some dude in my home town was like oi where you from and im like here and he gave me a weird look but then I was like oi mate yeah na totally. K I think I still got it, just gotta remember to pepper in max swear words and minimum R sounds – to be replaced by H sounds.
You know what else I realised between huffing my own melting skin? Work was the lowest priority back then. Well, I was trying real fkn hard to work only with my camera so work in the sense of becoming a pro camera person was something I was prioritizing above all else (hmm) but it wasn’t work at the time, and I was so deeply in love with it that it was never gonna seem like work back then. Somewhere along the way I decided work (not even just cameras, work in general) was most important, either by way of enabling other things through the income or as a coping mechanism for the emotional turmoil I was experiencing towards the end of my skate-photo-epoch-mk-1. I’m torn right now because I want to write about the work vs not work but I also want to write about the coping notions. I reckon I can probably do both at once, using the aforementioned thought-vector mental games (which I learnt recently is a deep learning technique for bettering search results (natural language processing), but like most words or phrases I thought I’ve made up they never have anything to do with what I want/thought they would, also the google dev page relating to it is a 404, also im getting super distracted cuz I’m looking for it now). So anyway, back to trying to talk about the completely unrelated topics I mentioned about work vs not work and coping notions at the same time I guess what happened is the times I was having outside of work stopped giving me the joy it once did and I started looking elsewhere, which ended up being work.
Perhaps this is all just a curse of me selling my passion (photos) and how that completely blurs the boundary between work and not work, but also fun times (cuz I was shooting fun things and trying to make it pay). I guess it could be that simple, part of me hopes its not for which I’m not sure why, maybe so I can rant re introspection in perpetuity. What really seems simple is my immediate need to reprioritize work and fun times, and return to the past to bring to the future my love for not working. I’ll still work obviously, but I needn’t work like I do now because honestly it seems like the amount of effort one puts in doesn’t really matter these days, given Price’s Law where its totally accepted that in western workplaces 10% of the workers do half the work, and somehow everyone’s okay with that? Well not everyone… if someone is doing half the work they should get half of the salary pool, cuz we’re there to work, not get paid. Getting paid is a consequence of work. But we have to work to get paid cuz we gotta pay rent. Perhaps that mentality is why I’m in this spot of overworking in the first place and I feel like I’ve contradicted myself so many times in such a short set of words that its now just proof – proof that we can fire half the cohort and still get the job done.. tax the robots, bring on universal income and let us spend our time fostering momma nature, compassion and to abolish prejudice. And also let those that want to work work, which, fk, would probably be me still. ARGH.
You know what I gotta work on? Not being indoors. Which is fkn hard right now, if you read this shit you’d recall me frothing on how I actually took note of something I wrote on here about “riding forever” – so I did that, turns out you can’t do that, well at least over the mountains I was riding, because I ended up inducing a gnarly injury in my knee tendons whereby they’re now littered with tears, an injury that results in around half of it’s sufferers retiring from their sport. Which is really fkn LAME and also kinda scary cuz for the first time in years I’ve got concrete dreams (riding) and they may be shattered before I even really got started. I really hope I’ve not destroyed my ultra-endurance cycling fun times because I rode only 2000km in 6 weeks (1000k over 4 days, at the end of it), having ridden ~2000km in the 52 weeks leading up to it – my biggest ride before august this year was 102km, during the insanity I was stupidly thinking I could ride 200-250km days back to back and I’d be fine. FARK. More on this later, and more on the rides that induced in the injury, but In hopefully good news Im seeing a specialist physio who is hopefully converting the bulk cash they deem nessecary into my repairing my string-cheese tendons, which at the end of the day is totally up to me cuz the only way forward is rehab as there are no positive outcomes from operating on an injury like this.
You know what I love/find funny, this blog has become an exploration into itself, as in, I often write about writing on here, its a consistent theme since ~2013/14. The wild thing is in the bath tub last night I was like oh my I fkn love this blog and its diary/journalesque nature but that bliss was not at all restricted to reading about some glorious trip or person I love (which I really do believe is the purpose of this blog, as a photographer I suppose), the things I was frothing on were rants like this, rants about ranting (or rants about my thought-rants, cuz I’ve probably got adhd, I should get my genes tested, cuz yeah we’ve learnt its present in the genes). Which was all really relieving and blissful, cuz I now know it doesn’t matter what’s on here, all that matters is something is on here, because this way I like to write is to basically just think (I type fast) and in that process I imprint my present psyche simple by way of thinking/typing and what I’m really interested in is that, my thinks. Because yeah, sure, I love photos, I love photographing beautiful or peculiar or nuanced things and I love writing about the trips and chaos etc but that was my job for a long time, and to an extent still is, so really that part is just work that I’m not getting paid for…
This journal isn’t about logging experiences, I mean, that’s what you’re here for probably and that’s how I got the dream job etc, but this journal is about logging my mind. I really hope that if anyone reads this shit there’s enough in here to illustrate this psyche-imprint to those that don’t exist within it (I exist within it, its my own brain) but realistically I think that’s basically impossible for anyone that isn’t me, especially when I tend to under-explain real-world complexities at the best of times, albeit with what I consider to be a complete understanding. But hey, that’s why there are photos and with that I’m gonna top up this tub with some boiling water – cuz taking really hot baths every day is a preach (and reduces risk of CVD by a third. I’ve always loved baths but water in Aus certainly isn’t the seemingly infinite resource that it appears to be up here in BC, I doubt I’ll ever enjoy baths as much as I do here because of that fact.
