when rain falls on bluestone

An unedited stream of consciousness

It’s raining heavily. An unusual type of rain for Adelaide. The weather’s warm and the rain is heavy. Almost like tropical rain. It reminds me of home. It’s spring time. And at this time of year I start to get eager in anticipation for summer. But it never comes quick enough. After a long winter all I want is the sun, some heat. To be able to gallop through the mountains all day under the blue sky. But those days are few and far between. Some days it’s overcast, cold, windy. Others it rains. It’s not as brutal as winter. At least the winter weather has some bite to it, some attitude. Getting through a work out on a winter morning takes grit. It’s PAINFUL. But this? This is limp and flaccid. Raining too much to really do anything. But it’s kind of warm and not too bad so I guess I could run if I felt like it. I did a work out in the gym instead. Maybe that was the soft option. But it was a hard work out, so I don’t know. Do I have to get wet to prove something to myself? Now I’m drinking ginger tea in my office. And by that I mean hot water with cut up fresh ginger. Not some dried bullshit in a tea bag. I’m not a savage. My office is perfect and I think I don’t spend enough time in here. It’s dark and the view is nice. I can see the mountains out one window and the ocean out the other. Although today I can’t see the ocean because of the rain. But the window’s large and I can see the plane trees which have leaves now and I can see the stone and the timber of my gazebo. There’s something romantic about rain falling on stone pavement covered in vines.

I want to disconnect the wifi to write but I use Google Docs and you can’t do that. Google docs doesn’t have dark mode either. I wonder what’s up with that. I would get Microsoft Word but it’s a subscription now and they just put the price up $50 a year. They said it was because it has AI features in it now. But nobody in their right mind would use Co-pilot. And I just wish Microsoft would concentrate on making the app itself work properly. Microsoft Word is the world’s most simple software program and it still sucks to use. You can become one of the biggest companies in the world by moving first and then using anti-competitive practices to keep your shitty product the world’s default. Whatever…

Some days I work really hard. Like yesterday. And I get everything done and then I wonder what the hell I do on the days I don’t work as hard. And I wonder why I work hard on some things and not others. I wonder if I could work as hard on my own thing as someone else’s. I haven’t yet. Not for a while. And I think there’s something sad in that. And I wonder how much time I have left. And I wonder if I should make more money or just stop and write. I don’t know what I’d write. I think I’m on a journey to find things out. I think that the modern world is purposely set up so nobody has time to think. I think that if we took time to think then we’d make different decisions. When you’re in a quiet, warm-lit room with no internet or distractions the world seems different. When you’re caffeinated to your eyeballs with Microsoft Teams notifications going off every two seconds you’re too wired and stressed to even conceive of the big questions you should be asking. Like am I ok just being a profit centre for a big company. Why work 6 days a week for a salary? It’s easy to disparage a comfortable wage when you have one. But I remember not really being able to afford things and I think that’s worse. I guess I’m scared of the comfortable middle. The rat race slop. The forgotten masses. The unknown. The unidentifiable. I suppose we all want to be special in some way and maybe none of us are. But that doesn’t mean that I don’t feel like there’s certain things I want this life to be. And I feel a sense of despair when this life is not those things.

Sometimes when I write I get scared of my own thoughts. Like there’s things I’m not confronting and then I get close to those things and it hurts like an open wound.

Sometimes I think you have to have courage and stare into the abyss.

If you don’t have courage now, when will you have courage? The only time you can have courage is when you’re alive, in the present. If you miss this opportunity to show courage then you will die a coward and won’t get that opportunity back.

People show courage in different ways.

For me, publishing my thoughts and my writing was always difficult. It still is. I self-censor all the time. I’m scared to publish things. I’m scared to have certain views. I’m scared try new styles, explore new themes.

I’m scared to write things that I know the algorithm won’t like, because I’m scared of what people will think of a post with no likes. But sometimes that fear makes me write things that I think the algorithm will like but it actually hates, so, there’s that.

I’m scared of a blank page. That’s a writer’s biggest fear. What if I can’t do it again? So today I challenged myself to start writing about nothing on a blank page. And this is what I did. I always start just writing about what I see and think and then eventually it leads somewhere. The first half of this is rubbish. The second half is poorly written but there’s an idea in there. And if I hadn’t sat down at my desk in front of the blank page, if I hadn’t faced my fear head on, then I never would have explored this idea. It wouldn’t have bubbled up from the infinite abyss of my subconscious.

And now in the spirit of this random stream of consciousness, unedited, unread, unscripted, unplanned… I’m going to post it on Substack/X. Just to have it there. Not for attention. Not for likes. Not because it’s a spicy take on a hot button issue. But because it’s my goal to publish more writing. And to do that I have to stop thinking and just do.