Re-Starting

It’s  a year since I wrote last on this blog, and I have lost interest in writing blogs. Why? Right now I don’t feel I captivate readers. And I’m so tired of the bullshit on Facebook – like from trolls who don’t care about how bad this country is now. Since the start of this pandemic I finished the BA at Griffith University, which was good for my aphasia recovery. I got that degree on a special day – 19^th July, my daughter’s birth day. That has a lot of meaning to me. I am now in Macquarie University, online the same as at Griffith, doing the first two courses of the Masters of Creative Writing. I feel I still need this for my recovery, yet I have written all through my long life.

When I was young, in a forward-or-die situation in my life, I wrote a poem about asking Pegasus to help save me. I described myself as a “caryatid”, a draped female figure in Greek who supports an entablature – I saw her as supporting my own life. I filed that poem in a box at my mother’s home and haven’t seen it again for more than two decades. I would love to get it back, but I don’t know how. It seems I have to start again.

I had written some stuff in the two years before my stoke: at the start of 2012, I started a blog titled Whacksworks and I started to print stuff I should have ignored. Like:

January 26^th, 2012: “Australia Day. We’ve all seen the slogans – “Love it or leave”, “Fit in or f**k off”, “”P*ss off. We’re full”. We love it. We want to fit in. So why do the authorities make it so hard for us to become Aussies?”

March 25^th, 2012: “Yesterday’s Queensland state election had less to do with politics than it had to do with the kind of society we have become. “Rage”, in so many forms, has become the norm. Road rage, service station rage, supermarket rage, people getting beaten up for their takeaways, hold ups on an almost daily basis… gimme, gimme, gimme. We no longer believe we have to work for what we want, it’s as if we believe it’s our right, our entitlement. And if we don’t get it immediately, we get mad.”

July 22^nd, 2012, near the end: “We have become guilty of collective inaction.  We see the problems of the world as too hard to do anything about, so we voice our disgust at some atrocity, shrug and move on.”

December 11, 2013: “Do you feel the despair in the air? Do you hear the growing chorus of discontent, state wide and nationally?”

December 13, 2013: “Tonight I sat down to write a post about the despair and anger I see every day now in this country. I wanted to find out why, where it came from, when it started. I wanted to look at it in context of my own move here in 2005, and I wanted to look at it in context of social policy... After an hour I gave up. Everything I was reading was too depressing. There didn’t seem to be any positive stuff anywhere.”

January 20^th, 2014: “Something showed up on my Twitter feed recently which frustrated me and, truth be told, scared the shit out of me. The discussion was on asylum seekers and this tweeter said that in his opinion someone who has had a nose job and plastic surgery couldn’t be a refugee.  I was like, WTF? Is this really how far we have deteriorated as a society that refugee status is now not determined by the war and strife in your country of origin but by whether or not you’ve had a nose job??”

April 13^th, 2014, towards the end: “I will NOT chill when I hear derogatory comments. I will NOT chill when I see memes passing across my FB feed that use derogatory, insinuating, sexist, racist or gender-biased language disguised as humour. I will call them out, and I expect others to call me out if I slip up.”

Re-reading these blogs has held me down – I haven’t seemed to write anything positive! I had set up a website titled “Reibus”, named after my surname and the effect on business – Reid-Business - and on that site I started sections of prose, poetry, music memorials and, predominantly most, quote set on backgrounds that made me feel good. Alas, Reibus has been closed down, yet there are two Whacksworks pages with some of these: have a look at http://whacksworks.blogspot.com/2020/07/fantasy-and-life.html or http://whacksworks.blogspot.com/2020/07/pleasure.html . I reset Reibus up as a blog website – the last one was dated February 2021. Have a look at https://reibus.blogspot.com/ , there are a few pages which I saved out of my website, including poetry!

These two blog sites are, for me, distracting me from despair which is covering this country. I want to re-start these blogs, and I hope they might just draw people like me, who don’t want to live in despair. Let me know if you agree!