I came down and made coffee and muesli. What am I doing with my life? Is writing this blog, actually, doing me any good, or is it just a distraction from the sort of writing I should be doing to be successful and to make a living? Is it simply a distraction from reality?
I’m writing my journal and my blog. Is that going to lead to anything? To something? Am I just the equivalent of an ostrich with my head in the sand? Am I just destined for something small? I always felt as though I was destined for something great, but I’m beginning to loose faith in that feeling… as I head back to office work.
Shane came down later and said he was staying home.
I was restless and wanted to do something. I realised that the bills I made out for mum a week ago, which needed to be paid a week before that were still sitting on my desk, in their envelopes just needing stamps. I decided the first thing to do was to go to the post office to get a book of stamps and a 10 cent stamp.
Ha ha, the 10 cent stamp saga. I had a bunch of 50 cent stamps for which I bought the requisite 10 cent stamps. I miscalculated and didn’t buy enough 10 cent stamps so I attempted to buy some more. However, the post office was out of 10 cent stamps on several occasions when I went.
“No sorry, luv.”
“No sorry, luv.”
“No sorry, luv.”
But, then I finally bought the 10 cents stamps, yay for me! All was right with the world again. But, then I had a couple of A4 envelopes to send to the accountant, to hurry him up with late tax payments and diabolically late self managed super fund paperwork, which took $1 postage, two of my fifty cent stamps, twice. Then it turned out that I had 40 cents worth of 10 cent stamps left. So, I bought a 20 cent stamp to address the deficiency, only to find it was 30 cents worth of 10 cents stamps that I had, 3 of them attached to each other in a L shape and not 40 cents, so I still didn’t have enough stamps to post a letter.
So today I wanted a book of stamps, you know, for normal cheque payments for my mother’s expenses and a 10 cent stamp to make up the required amount for my on going, pet, stamp project.
I got the stamps out of the paper bag, where I kept them, just to check. A 20 cents and 3 10 cents all connected to each other. Finally, get to clear that away.
Before I left the house, Shane came down and said he was heading out for some lunch. Apparently, it was with D, although he didn’t tell me that.
But then, I have to add at this point, why would he? I’ve been a bitch. I haven’t been nice, I’m not sure why? Is it stress? Well, of course it is stress. Stress about my future. Stress about my failure to elevate myself beyond some tiny little job that I had and that I now have to return to. Stress about even that failing. Stress about my inaction.
I need to learn how to stride forward positively. I need to learn how to march ahead with confidence. I need to learn how to be giving and loving and not small and mean and wallowing in my own shortcomings. I need to learn the secrets of success. There, now that is the truth.
I went to the post office.
“Book of stamps, no problem… and a 10 cent stamp?” Raised eyebrows.
Here we go. “Yes.”
“No problem.”
When I got back, I matched up my 10 cent stamps with the rest of the small denomination stamps and only my 20 cent stamp was in the paper bag. They original 10 cent stamps had just vanished. What, I thought? How could that be? Gone. Inexplicably. I was mystified. What could have happened to them? I laughed. For such a stupid inconsequential thing, which had taken on so much more significance that it had ever deserved to, it was just funny. It really was nothing and it had become “this thing” quite by circumstance. I laughed again. I had no idea what had happened to them, it was a mystery and I decided it didn’t matter. Who knew what happened? I didn’t have to know. It almost felt like a fitting end to such a dramatic insignificance. It was one of those unexplainable things, that could remain unexplained.
I felt hungry, so I went to the bakery for food. I bought a smoked salmon, cream cheese, capers and rocket, sourdough roll and a peach pistachio muffin. I stepped back out onto Gertrude Street where it was humid but overcast, warm but threatening to rain. It was that heady mix of damp and heat and wet air and threat of immanency... is that an expression? There was that feeling that an almighty power could be unleashed at any moment.
I stood and felt it all and thought that I should go and visit Nicholas again. I didn’t really feel like going, but it was more the case of being lazy and slack rather than not wanting to visit Nicholas, than an inability. I stood torn, wanting to head across the road to home and wanting to be a friend to Nicholas. It had been two weeks to the day since I had visited last, which was the latest of only a handful of times in over the previous twelve months.
Go? Don’t go? Go? Don’t go? I dithered. Dilly-dallied, as Sam would say. My feet felt like lead, planted to the footpath, seemingly sunk into the bitumen, glued to the ground below me. Frozen with indecision. I stood and figuratively spun in circles, without moving at all. I stood and looked up and down the street. I was in indecision.
Would I have enough to say to him? Would I be able to be interesting enough to sustain a whole visit, on my own? Would we have enough to talk about? Have I let us drift too far apart?
I carried an entire conversation with Damon, yesterday. I managed to carry an entire coffee date, I managed a whole hour, or thereabouts, with Damon, someone who I know less well and probably have less in common with.
Cars whizzed up Gertrude Street and whizzed down Gertrude Street, people came and went and there I was perched on the incline of the hill clutching my two paper bags staring up the street and down the street.
So, what do you do when you have indecision coursing through your veins? What indeed? I just somehow force my legs to walk, as if pushing against a very strong current running quickly in a stream and forward they move. I could have stood there all day quite easily, frozen, stationary, still, stopped, as the world passed by. No problem. Somehow, I let go and auto pilot, or my sensible small voice, or my logical mind, or guilt kicks in and miraculously the Titanic is re-floated in that moment and the bow breaks above the sea line and the pointy end steers itself in the direction of the correct destination, in this case, the Epworth.
Still, wandering through East Melbourne is always nice, even if I am fighting my natural reticence all the way. I really do have such self-doubt. Maybe it isn’t self doubt may be I do just think too much about things. Everything. Every move I make, every decision I make, I think the hell out of them all. I over process everything, every move, every decision, every choice until I have immobilised myself with receptor overload, threatened borderline depressive bonkers episodes, threatened mental disease with the paralysing confusion generated.
But, I don’t want to walk away from something just because it’s doing my head in.
I stopped in at Holly Trinity Church, possibly as a delaying tactic, as a distraction, telling myself I just wanted to smell that smell that churches have; wood and stillness captured, caught and aged in serenity, just for a moment. It is something known to this atheist, something from my past – as you don’t think I came to my atheist beliefs without having hung around churches in my past so as to have some basis for those beliefs – that smell that all churches have. The smell of god? The smell of delusion? The smell of good intensions?
I hesitated several times, turned for home a number of times, before I pushed myself on. Turned and turned again. I don’t know how I came to have such self doubt, read patheticness. It was two steps forward and one step back there for a moment in Hotham Street, in the overcast afternoon. The sky was grey and cloudy and threatened to pour down the whole way.
I pushed myself though, as Shane was home and I might as well be out visiting when I can’t be home on my own, and anyway, I’d only have to go on Monday, or some other day soon. This way I’d be one visit up, you know, on if I piked and didn’t go.
I found Nicholas in the rehab room charming the old ladies, as only the handsome Nicholas can. His handsome face, his floppy hair, his toothy grin, his infectious laugh, I could see all of the old girls in for treatment responding like girls.
He sent me to his room to wait for him to finish his rehab.
Nicholas came in on his crutches. “Hello, hello.” He fills a room. He swapped to his wheel chair and I wheeled him outside for a smoke. The sun was shining. He told me how lucky he was and how he almost died. He told me how great everyone had been. He said it is going to take another 3 months to recoup and be able to walk properly again.
We came back in and Andrew, Nicholas’s roommate, who has cancerous tumours throughout his body and has had them since 1994, was taken away for treatment.
His wife got teary when she was explaining how previously all of her husband’s tumours were slow growing and that he was unusual to have survived them all, but the most recent one was aggressive and he probably wasn’t going to survive this time.
Nicholas was his usual cheerful self and told her he was strong and that she was wonderful and she should stay strong for her wonderful husband.
She said she believed that were we weren’t ever given more than we could handle.
Nicholas agreed.
Really? I thought.
No. There are so many people who had crumbled under the pressure they were put on, the history of the world is littered with people who have collapsed and failed and gone insane and died under the “lot” they were given.
“You are wonderful young lady.”
“You make me feel so much better just calling me young lady.”
When Nicholas saw that she was teary he said, “I think someone needs a hug, come here and let me give you a hug.”
She left. Nicholas said her husband, Andrew, was a gonna. We chatted for a while
Helen arrived, we sat and chatted the three of us.
Nicholas said that Tim had been in every day, he hadn’t missed one day.
Andrew came back from whatever treatment he had gone to. He has several tumours in his head, as well as the tumours in his lungs.
I saw that the sky was very grey and threatening to rain, so I said I was leaving.
As I stood by the back door the rain came down. I had to wait a while for it to even stop.
I had to hide in doorways as I walked as it rained again. I stood and watched it fall, heavy and light, sprinkling down. Eventually, I had to pull the hood of my hoodie up and walk hunched shouldered in the continuing light sprinkle.
Sam arrived after work. Ringing the doorbell over and over until I flung the front door open and threatened him with my outstretched hand. He laughed and asked how funny I thought he was?
Sam, Shane and I drove down to Victoria Street and bought duck, pork and rice.
We went to bed and watched Oz. A couple of old Beverly’s, in bed by 10pm. You know, I kind of like it.
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