It’s been a while. When I was making my last post I was working in Sydney. In the following weeks, I had to leave my apartment and pack all of my possessions into storage and then wait in a kind of limbo. During this time, I cycled the length of Tasmania, been stuck indoors from fire and then the pandemic. Friends had children, others left town. With most of my stuff locked away, I focused on cycling and writing, while scraping cash together, so I could buy a house.

There were probably a few opportunities to start writing for this thing again. When I went on larger event rides, or on my bike tour, or even when I bought the place.

I guess the problem was when I was unpacking things that were gone for three years, it was more like I was inheriting them from a person that was no longer around. Everything was familiar, but at the same time, it felt it belonged to someone else. And to be honest, I didn’t expect to get any of it back. I expected most of it turning to dust being unattended for so long. It took time to process what I was returned to me.

I’ve spent most of my adult life in the company of others. This is the deal most of us had, stuck in a rent cycle, trying to buy our way out while sharing a place with others. One of the last places I lived was a perennial sharehouse. It was lived in by friends and friends-of-friends. It was built back in the sixties, as a former government house, a thing made of concrete and roof tiles. The place leaked heat and grew mould in winter. Heat stuck around in summer. Someone had laid out astroturf in one room and it became known as the jungle room. Every tap leaked. The carpet was threadbare and rotting. The mortar of the bricks was slowly disintegrating. And the owners were basically insane. But the house was in a leafy neighbourhood near the lake. The next place was an apartment along the main strip. Every night, was a new set of sirens against constant traffic.

I’m now in a quiet leafy neighbourhood. Occasionally, I can hear the distant air brakes of semi-trailers on the highway, or the rattling of my neighbours as they move through their places.

More soon as I spin up old projects.