adventure

Barham to Swan Hill Cylce Loop

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I’m heading out from Barham tomorrow. I’ve had a great couple of weeks here, but it’s time to get my legs on again. Before i go i’ve got some typesetting corrections to finish, which just arrived. So it could be a late night, but i usually can’t sleep before a tour anyway.

I’ve mapped out the following route, which i will probably discard within the first day. I like making maps more than i enjoy following them:

Barham to Swan Hill LoopAt around 400 km it’s not the longest ride you ever heard of, and i’ll be stopping at Kerang for a day to ride with Max and his friends, and i will stop around Ouyen to see the pink lakes at Murray Sunset National Park.

The only other relevant details about the trip at this time are that i will be visiting one town called Quambatook and another town called Chinkapook. No doubt everyone along the way will call me a nincompoop — not because i am stupid, but because they lack imagination and a sense of adventure. It can get a little frustrating out there that i am seen to be such a novelty. But then it gets me free steaks from time to time.

I am aiming to arrive in Swan Hill around the 21st of March to join a host family there who need help on their organic garlic farm. Check out helpx.net if you’re interested in exploring work-exchange as a way to travel cheap.

Yeah!

introducing Day Four, The Return of Vision | Adventures in Sobriety

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I have published the entry for Day Four in the series Adventures in Sobriety.

Day Four saw me make an oxymoron of myself by applauding “vision” in a post where i “accidentally” conduct a tirade against time. It is one of those long and sprawling posts, written under the weight of what felt like a hangover but was presumably actually withdrawals, which I guess are what hangovers are anyway.

Two months into this adventure I see that some of the inexplicable emotional pain I feel at times is probably the withdrawals from half a life spent on one ‘soft’ drug or another. I’m crying a lot lately – allowing myself to cry. They are old tears, unattached to any event in the present. And the feel good. Highly recommended.

Meanwhile, Day Four.

Day Four, The Return of Vision

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Tuesday 27 January
Renmark, South Australian

Day Four of my Adventures in Sobriety series, in which I make an oxymoron of myself by applauding “vision” in a post where i “accidentally” conduct a tirade against time.

the-persistence-of-memory-1931

Salvador Dali’s “The Persistence of Memory”, which I had hung in my room as a teenager and only just now realised is entirely appropriate for this post. At the time I just thought it was cool because I was a stoner, but maybe it came into my life at that time for a reason.

I can’t sleep. I haven’t tried, but i know. I’m in that state where my body is exhausted but my mind is inexplicably energised.

For the last two days i’ve been wracked by hangover symptoms (headache, nausea, mysterious aches and pains) and i joked with someone about how it doesn’t seem fair that i should suffer thus for not taking drugs.

But obviously i’m detoxing. And these are the consequences of a heavy month-long binge, and actually i’m more interested in seeing this suffering through than i am in seeing (as an experiment, of course) whether a small joint would alleviate the symptoms—thereby confirming that these are withdrawals. Now there’s an addict’s reasoning par excellence.

But it’s not the symptoms alone that are keeping me awake: it’s also the sudden influx of motivation, mental activity, hope, pride, self-respect and vision.  Continue reading →

Day One, Adventures in Sobriety

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Saturday 24 January
Renmark, South Australian

Day One of my Adventures in Sobriety,
in which i renege on the first day of my resolution to not smoke marijuana

I am reluctant to say this, but i’m calling today Day One, the first day of dragging myself away from the pot-hazed fugue my life has been for the last month or more.

I was tempted to use Ground Zero, because i do feel i have a clean slate, though nothing explosive or catastrophic has happened.

We read all the time about people who cleaned up their act after some disastrous event, usually by doing something drastic and out of their league—right now i’m reading Wild, the story of a 26-year-old woman who walked the Pacific Crest Trail after her mother suddenly died and her family imploded.

I don’t really have that, the whole drastic-premise thing: my experience has been more of a slow-burn of ever-increasing disillusionment with what is typically offered us as a way to live, and a growing sense that i need to do something to drag myself back to life, to find the alternative way of living that is most conducive to my wellbeing, and therefore least conducive to relapse.

It’s a long road, but i’ve never been one to take short cuts. Continue reading →