Listening To: Original Pirate Material : The Streets

Looking back over my last post, I was struck by the sense of something which is probably readily apparent to rest of our regular readers, and has been brewing in my sub-conscious for a while, but up till now I’ve refused to acknowledge.

It’s an almost-indefinable sense of something ‘missing’. Of course, on first glance a lot of what’s ‘missing’ from my life these days as opposed to a decade ago is the painful-immediecy of multiple ongoing chemical addictions, and the youthful bravado of concerted intent-to-shock. Being free of those imperatives is certainly something I certainly don’t regret. But if you scratch the surface, I think it’s more than that.

For better or worse, a decade ago you certainly couldn’t accuse yours truly of not ‘living’ in the rawest sense of the term. I firmly believed back then, as I still do now, in ‘sucking the marrow out of life’ to paraphrase The Dead Poets Society. At times lately though, I must admit it feels like DB ain’t living up to that ideal with quiet the same zeal he once used to.

If you’d told me at 17 that I’d end up chained to a desk, doing a job I loathe and which I really think is slowly but surely killing my soul (along with my body … my eyesight is surely getting worse again from staring at the screen all day !), getting drunk on a regular basis for want of anything more intelligent to do, living in Sydney, worrying about mundane things like making my measley paycheque last a whole fornight, not reading, with barely enough time to write and no time at all anymore to write music … well, I would have probably laughed at you and called you more than a few dirty names !

Yet all this, and more, alas has come to pass. The ‘weightiest’ matter on my mind right now is remembering to program the video recorder to tape Desperate Housewives for my flat-mate, and getting enough time to go for a jog after I get home from work before cleaning the inside of the fridge. It would seem as if my day-to-day existence has been all but reduced to the banal, one-dimensional, vacuous travesty-of-a-life I used to so voiceiferrously rail against in my late teens.

Perhaps part of it is that all this is so different from what I expected back then, and from what my life used to be. I used to be the guy who was always pissing off overseas or interstate, living in strange places and sleeping with bizarre, artistic, troubled people for extended periods of time, while my friends were stuck in Sydney, going through a series of short term relationships with normal people whom at the time I perceived for the most part as spectacularly ‘dull’ (sorry guys !).

Now, my two best friends are living in Perth and London respectively, virtually everyone I know is ‘coupled up’ and has been with their partners for what seems like an eternity, and here I am living back in the town I swore I’d left forever 6 years ago, only recently having entered a ‘promising’ relationship after a series of short-term duds and god-awful dates. While she’s neither bizarre nor troubled (thankgod !), my partner is a far more talented musician than I am among other things, and I find myself wondering at times whether I haven’t become the ‘dull’ counter-point to her buoyant vitality.

Essentially what this all points to, I think, is that DB is somewhat overdue for a bit of a change. I’m not talking about following through on the series of SMS’s I sent my mate in the UK towards the end of last year – “give me six months and I’m probably gonna be flatting with you, Taz”.

I’m not talking about leaving the lovely IG either, since she’s turning out to be the sanest choice I’ve made in a long time and the best thing that’s happened to me in sod knows how long. I am talking about making this a “year of Pete” though … not in the original sense we first used that phrase Ms.Mellipop … but getting back some of that ‘sucking the marrow’ spirit I once used to have – minus the more self-destructive aspects.

All of which means (apart from everything else) I’m going to have to change jobs again, and soon …. but hey, it’s about fŨcking time, isn’t it ?