Canberra cha cha cha

11 November 2011

FCT #27: creative moments

learning to write

I don’t know where to start and so I start with the desire to write.

It seems an ancient one: embedded back in those earliest memories of bedtime stories, birthday cards, roadside signs. A world of codes and symbols just outside my reach. I taught myself to read for the sake of those signs, convinced that one could never be bored with so much to decode. The highway markers proved disappointing whilst books brought the real revelation. A best friend to an often solitary child. Devoured voraciously.

I don’t remember learning to write, but once I did it formed a kind of holy trinity – reading and writing and me. When I wasn’t buried in a book I was an inexhaustible correspondent, barraging friends, family and faceless pen-pals with letters. Cataloguing birthday gifts. Capturing anything list-able in endless lists. A few years ago my Nana handed back an early example: an inventory of every food required for a summer visit to my grandparents’ sleepy coastal town, with each item carefully illustrated. Strawberries, floured fish fillets, dry ginger ale and extra-strong mints, clearly remembered in their giant jar atop the fridge. Oh, the audacity!

My first diary was a gift for my twelfth Christmas. A common brand of notebook still found in newsagents today, given to me by my brother and sister. Black-and-red-cover, hard-back. I made it my own with shining Easter egg foils – blue, gold, green, pink, a scene of frolicking bunnies and chicks – and set about documenting my summer, then my first year at high school and part of my second. Starting with sweetness and light, dear diary, and then descending into teen angst.

Many of the themes have remained the same in the subsequent notebooks. Identity, love, loss, friendship, family conflict, depression. The struggle to make sense of it all. For many years the notebooks were a struggle in themselves. I wanted them to be good. I wanted to create something that was beautiful, imaginative, insightful but more often than not I created a giant whinge. The same woes, repeated over and over, instilling a sense that nothing was changing. Finally I realised that the only unchanging element was my need to expel the rubbish, to exorcise it through writing it down.

I have never been without a notebook since age twelve-and-a-half, and I mostly use them when times are tough. There is little about the writing that is beautiful, imaginative, insightful. It doesn’t come anywhere close to capturing my experiences or thoughts as a whole. And yet the role that the notebooks play in my life is one of enormous importance. I would not be without them.

08 September 2011

FCT #16: songs (+ serendipity + solace)

Sometimes ya just gotta go, get out, escape, leave town. And when those times hit, ya gotta be grateful for friends to go to.

Most days I feel grateful for friends but today even more so. Today I needed to make that escape and C+J dropped everything, said "we're here" and "this is your home". I needed help and they had help to give.

When I grabbed for a first disc to play on the drive it was - completely coincidentally - a compilation that C made me many years ago now. And the first song? Well it was exactly what I needed to hear...

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If Love Was A Train

if love was a train i think i would ride me a slow one

one that would ride through the night making every stop

if love was a train
i would feel no pain

and i would never get off

if love was a train i think i would ride me a long one

hear me talking, i'm talking fifty boxcars long

aw, what's the use?

most trains these days ain't got no engine

much less no caboose

if love was a train i'd throw my body on her tracks

if love was a train i'd throw my body right down on her tracks