Ladies & gentlemen we are now starting our descent...

The last couple of months of my life have felt rather like being in a holding pattern above an airport, circling endlessly, lost in the clouds, waiting for clearance to start my descent from freefall into a new era of my life.

I think yesterday the signal finally came through.

I got a phonecall asking me to come in for a job interview on Thursday afternoon; a job I really want, and think I could do well. If I get it there's going to be a significant period of adjustment, as I haven't actually held down a fulltime job since I quit the public service in 1989. Yes, 1989. That's sixteen bloody years ago. Shit. Let me shake my head in disbelief and think about that for a moment.

Sixteen...years? Wow. I feel suddenly old. Sixteen years of working in part time jobs (as a medical receptionist at the Victorian AIDS Council, as the Text Coordinator of the 2000 Next Wave Festival, and as the Artistic Director of the youth arts organisation Express Media). Sixteen years of falling in love with all manner of music. Sixteen years of writing, spoken word performance, zine-making, and now blogging. Learning to DJ, opening Apocalypse, Abyss and finally Q + A. What a wild 16 years it's been!

Admittedly I'm putting a lot of hope into getting the job in question, but if I don't, well, something else will turn up, I know. I'll have to sign up for the dole first though, as I'm running out of money fast!

The other 'end of the holding pattern' signal yesterday was that after talking about it ever since getting home from Europe last month, I finally went and joined a gym. Today I was weighed and measured, and on Friday I go in to be walked through my fitness routine and be taught how to use the gym equipment without hurting myself.

There are plenty of other changes I want to make in my life (like starting to cook again for starters, and then maybe finding myself a goddamn boyfriend) but it really does feel as if a new direction is opening up before me. Like every other change in my life, I have no idea where it will lead...

Whci I guess is the exciting part!

Comments

ekstasis said…
I know your post was about alot of other things (and good on your for them - I too am in a transitional period... hurrah for us!) - but couldn't help but notice you said you started Q+A? like - the Q+A that so many of my friends go to (and I've yet to be invited to tag along with... *grumble*)???? that's cool dude, very very cool.

ps. In case you don't know, I have a bad case of fan-geekiness, and I tend to get more excited about things than I really should... I'm not actually awe-struck, you needn't get weird with me.....

ummm

Look! What's that over there?? *points and runs away*
26/10/05 21:17
richardwatts said…
Yep, that Q + A, as in the club Queer + Alternative, which me and my DJ partner Peter started up ten years ago this November, and which is now in its third home following the shock closure of The Builders' Arms Hotel. If your friends haven't invited you yet well, they should have, but hey, now I can invite you instead, which is way cooler. Come to our 10th birthday, which is on the last Thursday in November. Please?
26/10/05 22:08
David Prater said…
richie,

what do you mean the builders is closed??? ***what's wrong with you?*** geez, i leave town for five minutes ... and i'm sure howard had a hand in it. sniff.

davey
28/10/05 11:57
richardwatts said…
Yeah sorry Davey - the Builders was sold about 4 months back and closed for renovations the same day. We had two hours notice that we had to go in and collect all our equipment, cd's etc, which meant that we only had 24 hours to find a new home for the night. It's now at A Bar Called Barry each Thursday...

And when are you coming home?
28/10/05 12:59
David Prater said…
not till february. i'm sure a bar called barry will have been sold off by then too. what a waster. stay cool.
d
28/10/05 16:59
Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Recent Call of Cthulhu work for the Miskatonic Repository

Image
The last time I posted on this poor, neglected blog was in August 2023, and a lot has happened since then - I've been meaning to blog about it for ages, but time got away from me. So, consider this post a quick catch-up on some of the creative work I've been doing over the last 12 months or so. I say quick, but given I'm an all or nothing kinda of guy, let's see how long I write for this evening and how much detail I go into, shall we? Last year, starting on Friday June 8th and continuing on over the weekend, I was a Guest of Honour at the innaugural Chaosium Con Australia ; a celebration of the games published by Chaosium Inc , a company whose work I've long admired and was once a regular contributor to, especially their game of Lovecraftian cosmic horror, Call of Cthulhu , which I first encountered in 1984; I also contributed significantly to Chaosium's Stormbringer and Elric! game lines, roleplaying games based on the work of enormously influential Englis...
Read more

Doing the Beats: Kerouac, sexuality and On the Road

Image
The long-awaited film adaptation of Jack Kerouac’s ground-breaking novel presents the perfect opportunity to re-examine the lives of the Beat Generation, writes Richard Watts. It’s not hyperbole to say that the Beat Generation – a small coterie of writers who met up in New York City in the spring of 1944 – changed the world. Without their individual quests for personal freedoms – a quest for sex and drugs before there was rock and roll; a quest which spawned the western world’s first counter-culture, the beatniks – the hippy movement of the Sixties would never have happened, and punk would have been a quiet snarl rather than a global reaction. Of all the Beat Generation writers, Jack Kerouac, author of the autobiographical beatnik bible, On the Road , is unequivocally the most famous. Born in Lowell, Massachusetts in 1922, to working class French-Canadian parents, Kerouac aspired to be a writer from a young age, though he was also a keen football player. Indeed, it ...
Read more

The streets of old Fitzroy

Image
I've lived in Fitzroy for 14 years, and long before I moved here spent some formative moment in its pubs and terrace houses. I have an unpublished novel that set's in Fitzroy in the 1940s (originally it was set in the 1950s but I've realised it was the wrong period). I love this suburb, even as it changes before my eyes, which is why I love articles and photographs and stories of its past.   From the Herald-Sun , here's a series of images of the old inner city slums that once characterised much of Fitzroy. And from The Age just yesterday, here's an article about a photographer who was documenting the vanishing post-war Fitzroy culture in 1973-74.  Happy reading. And maybe allow Dan Sultan to provide you with a soundtrack?
Read more