Diving Board

I'm living in the outback in Australia, and just down the road there's an old swimming pool, and on top of it there's a giant diving board.

Squatters have moved in and they're having a party and so I take my daughter and we go down to visit. It's fun, the jungle all around, jumping off the board - it's really not so much a diving board as a platform or treehouse high above the pool. These squatters, they seem nice enough.

And I'm swimming with my daughter in the pool, on our backs and I'm beneath her, holding her up to the air because she doesn't swim so good and I'm having difficulty keeping us both alive and so I push her to the edge of the pool where she can hang on, then come up for air myself.

At night, when we're back home, we talk about the squatters. They've fixed up the pool well, and the diving board - well, it's a treehouse now hundreds of feet in the air, but someone wants to develop that area and they're to be evicted.

We're over visiting the next day, they know they're going to be evicted but they're not going. The guy of the treehouse, he's a beard and looks very granola, he shows me a cheque for $38,000 dollars, they're going to destroy the treehouse tomorrow and they want to pay them to leave. He wants to spend the money on a huge party, a grand act of defiance, but I tell him that maybe someone in his family will need it...

It's a beautiful day to be in the treehouse, jumping out from high above the swimming pool, splashing about, climbing back up and doing it again...

The next day they explode the treehouse. Everyone is killed, except the wife (his wife, Granola's), but she's disappeared someplace and no one knows where.

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Category: Dreams

Created: 05 January 2011

Auld Lang Syne

The New Year, and the standard heap of resolutions. How to set yourself up for failure.

Now I have the same yellowed piece of paper that I've had the past 20 odd years, filled with the things that need changing. I'll post it above the desk for a few weeks before taking it down and carefully laying aside so I can check my progress next year. Generally I find I can just reuse the old list.

This year there are a few additions - Unpack & cleaning being high amongst them. And so I've begun to clear a path through the office - there's no way I'll get EVERYTHING I have into that rather tiny space, and so there will have to be a selection process, then a pile of boxes will be filed downstairs. When the office is done then there's the living room, not so tough but again overdue, there's no living done there, rather it's more the private quarters of a particular cat. There are the renovations (the unpacking was to follow the renovations, but in the absence of any immediate progress I'll unpack. That's a sure charm certain to guarantee me all the luck I'll need finding my materials...).

So far the New Year is looking rather like the old year.

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Category: Miscellany

Created: 04 January 2011

Advice to Writers

This is good, and just in time for the New Year. Myself, I've resolved to write more, that's a daily thing, and there are some gems of inspiration here - writerly advice from writers to writers.

Link: Advice to Writers

Link: Tweets / Advice to Writers on Twitter  (Careful - there are so many GOOD links to follow here you might never get back to writing...)

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Category: Link of the day

Created: 03 January 2011

Radio Roulette

I'm terrible to drive with. I'm one of those people who if they don't like the music that's playing or the station, I change it. Again and again. My passengers think it's a little game I play to drive them insane, but really, there's not much music I like and I either love it or hate it and not very often am I ambivalent enough to just leave it on.

There's SHINE FM. Get off that station ASAP. But sometimes you arrive in the middle of the song and you don't know they're singing about their love of Jesus and you find yourself humming along or listening until you realize - that brain in your brain kicks in - that you're on the Jesus station and then you change stations in a hurry.

There are both the French radio stations - these are usually a good bet, and if you're driving late at night you'd do well to just leave them on.

There's CBC radio 2 DRIVE, which seems to play the same music - exactly - day after day. The commentary is the same, but the music is looped so that once you've heard a couple of the songs you can almost predict which one is coming next. They gotta get out there and explore a little more and stop trying to push whoever they're pushing to the top of the charts.

And there's CKUA. I like CKUA, really, and I'm definitely part of their target demographic, but I always tune into them during their fundraisers and feel that I should be donating money, even though overall I probably listen to them the least of all the radio stations.

And on CKUA, if you're very unlucky, there's "THE ROAD HOME". It's this program whereby the announcer talks about being in the North Woods someplace petting porcupines and cuddling squirrels and about the impermanence of trivial things, but he has a wonderfully seductive voice and you can imagine him all there, tucked up with his hot chocolate beside the fireplace, reading his fan mail and letters, the poems he reads aloud...the girls, you know they lap this stuff up, they devour it, they can't see him but they only can wish they knew a man so tender and sensitive...

It drives me insane. But when you're playing radio roulette you don't look at the dial, and sometimes you end up listening to a good song, one that creates, evokes, sets the mood, and then "He" comes on to talk about the bear in the woodpile and how all things have their place and you start to froth at the mouth and can't hit the "search" button on the radio fast enough.

 

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Category: Calgary

Created: 01 January 2011