Unbeing dead isn't being alive.

If I could be bothered, he would fair dinkum swing all day every day.

he was in favor of all kinds of weather just so long as it's genuine weather

Tall ships in the morning. Sullivans Cove, April 2010.

I miss the high seas.

February 23, by David Lehman

Light rain is falling in Central Park
but not on Upper Fifth Avenue or Central Park West
where sun and sky are yellow and blue
Winds are gusting on Washington Square
through the arches and on to LaGuardia Place
but calm is the corner of 8th Street and Second Avenue
which reminds me of something John Ashbery said
about his poem "Crazy Weather" he said
he was in favor of all kinds of weather
just so long as it's genuine weather
which is always unusually bad, unusually
good, or unusually indifferent,
since there isn't really any norm for weather
When he was a boy his mother met a friend
who said, "Isn't this funny weather?"

It was one of his earliest memories

To understand is to perceive patterns.

Sandals.

Beautiful beam of sunlight.

Beatific look on face.

Henry or Jesus?

I like whiskey. I always did, and that is why I never drink it.

The grow the grapes and they turn the grapes into wine. Richmond, April 2010.

Grapes, glorious grapes. I prefer eating them than squishing them between my toes. That said, there is something awfully sensual crushing underfoot.

Especially when I'm being flogged with a flaccid celery stalk.

The greatest happiness is to know the source of unhappiness.

Here is one from way back in Summer, January second if I remember correctly.

He's so little!

Although our intellect always longs for clarity and certainty, our nature often finds uncertainty fascinating.

What’s in the box. On the Derwent one Autumn morn, April 2010.

Theme Thursday today, and I’ve finally made an effort.

People love not knowing stuff. Actually, that’s not correct! People hate not knowing stuff; what they love is the challenge of trying to find out the stuff that they know that they don’t know.

Inevitably, humans being humans and all that that entails, most people are frustrated and annoyed when they finally crack the code and solve the MYSTERY and find out the stuff that they knew that that didn’t know; the stuff that they hated knowing not knowing about, does not measure up to their expectations that their imaginations had set loose. Indeed, the MYSTERY around their lack of knowledge held an allure that reality just cannot match.

Today’s photograph is a good case in point. Walking to walk a few weeks’ back, I spy (with my little eye) a MYSTERYious object floating out in the river estuary. Handily, I am usually armed with a camera with a trusty zoom, and thus explored the MYSTERY a little more closely.

A box of some kind!

A box that appears to be floating untethered in the cruel ocean sea river estuary!

‘Whatever could it be’, I ask myself?

Is it a missing beautiful lady – a nightclub hostess, perhaps – brutally hacked to pieces by a jealous former lover, parts stuffed in an old apple crate and dumped from a bridge under the glow of a cold autumn’s moon? Has she returned to wreak the only vengeance she can from the dead: to pop up and allow justice to be done?

Might it be a package of the finest export-grade Bolivian marching powder™? A substance smuggled in on a small yacht manned by a lone, desperate Frenchman with a drinking habit out of control, a failed marriage behind him and gambling debts up to his earholes? In yet another bout of self-loathing fuelled intoxication and anger, he’s flung it over the side renouncing his debauched former life before scuttling his only love – a little yawl registered in Wallis and Futuna called Rêves Brisés – and mumbling the words to Non, je ne regrette rien whilst cradling a an empty bottle of Rémy Martin in one hand and a photograph of happier times in a yellow knit sweater in the other?

Perhaps it is waylaid shipment of enriched uranium, accidently knocked from a Belize container vessel in the South Pacific as it was boarded by Russian Spetsnaz forces (on the Israeli dollar)? A horde smuggled from a failed state that emerged from the disintegrating Soviet Union; once part of the forward defence of a grand empire spanning the globe, but now reduced to a shoddy –yet highly sought after – commodity to be bartered around some puissant religious ideologues who want it all and aren’t prepared to wait for Armageddon any longer?

Perhaps.

For the record; I believe that it is most likely a box of inflatable life vests or some such, carelessly knocked overboard by an aging GP desperately trying to recapture his youth and impress his long-cold wife.

Yet, like most of us, I prefer the MYSTERY.

The capacity of human beings to bore one another seems to be vastly greater than that of any other animal.

Children.

They taste like turkeys.

I promise...

Reason has always existed, but not always in a reasonable form.

The ties that bind... Sullivan's Cove, May 2010.

I've long held that there are only two kinds of people: people who ask questions and people who don't ask questions.

Oh, and mutes.

I'm not a mute and I ask questions.

That's the kind of people I am.

Now hatred is by far the longest pleasure; men love in haste but they detest at leisure.

Ezra here is starting to resemble Tasmania's most famous export: the master of the boudoir, one Errol Flynn.

Ads that I like: #98

The 1950s were a great time to be alive. Children were able to play in the street without fear, the Reds were under the bed, a man could discipline an uppity wife any way that he could choose and the coloureds knew their place.

Part of the beauty of the 1950s extended to doing whatever one felt like on their lounge chair, content in the knowledge that you could hose down that chair in the driveway – with little Jimmy and Scraps the dog – and expect nary a cross word from the neighbours.

They were good times. We won't see their like again...

Success consists of going from failure to failure without loss of enthusiasm.

A van full of money makes its way through Geilston Bay. April 2010.

Some days you start work more tired than you left work the day before.

Today is one of those days.

One secret of success in life is for a man to be ready for his opportunity when it comes.

I miss the beach.

Babes in bikinis, crabs, pearly white sand, clear blue seas, warm sunshine on the shoulders...

I miss the beach.

You may not be interested in strategy, but strategy is interested in you.

10 Murray in her Autumn finest. May, 2010.

My usual bus didn't show this morning, which means that everything has been thrown out of whack.

How I hate that. I'm a man of science and order. Disorder is not appreciated.

You can guess how much I have relished small children.

Every normal man must be tempted, at times, to spit on his hands, hoist the black flag, and begin slitting throats.

In Tasmania we celebrate Mother's Day much like those in other countries.

Yes, we all partake in a form of modified Bullfighting featuring toddlers as matadors and ducks as he bulls!

A government that robs Peter to pay Paul can always depend on the support of Paul.

Paddling around the CSIRO. March, 2010.

I quite like the hazy, mirage effect on the horizon here. I'm not sure what exactly caused it, but do know that it accompanied some fuel burn offs down south.

Time for todays Sunday Top Five!

I've consulted the terrible twosome, and we've come up with Henry and Ezra's Top Five Television Shows (at the moment...)

Dirty Jobs (with Mike Rowe)

Yo Gabba Gabba

Play School

Charlie and Lola

Mister Maker