Things I'm grateful for this morning: hands

Things I'm grateful for this morning: hands, feet, eyes, ears, a working nervous system. Not being paralysed. Not being bombed. No-one I love died while I was asleep. Water at the turn of a tap, a five second walk from here. This water won't make me sick. It has no shit in it, no fracking chemicals, nothing radioactive enough to worry about. I can't set it on fire. Connected to those taps are reservoirs with water in them; it's years since the last drought.

No gas or oil or coal underneath my home. No coal trains in breathing distance. No nuclear power anywhere nearby either.

A fridge full of food. A cupboard full of food. Discovering, thanks to Charlie Wood, a sweetener that doesn't give me hellish despairing mood swings, and which therefore grants me the ability to eat cake mm cake. I went twenty years pretty much without eating cake, so I appreciate it. Cake is fucking good. So is hot chocolate.

= excuse me a moment while I go and make a cup of hot chocolate =

A window from which I can see the sky. The sky itself, huger than thought, huger than the huge clouds in it. The sun poking through those clouds. Life. LIFE. Billions of years of ancestors successfully cheating death and fucking each other and giving birth to each other and then to me. Thanks guys!

Having lived in places full of mice or flies or ants or cockroaches, I am grateful that right now I do not. I'm also grateful that snakes don't come in unannounced.

Having been taught to read. Having been taught not to believe the first thing I think. Having been taught to write. Having been taught to play drums in a world where everyone's looking for a drummer, and therefore finding a path out of the weird loneliness of high school. High school. Primary school. Kindergarten, even though there was that weird girl who said her dad was a cop and he'd shoot me. There were pieces of fruit cut up bite-size and we got to have naps on the floor.

Having experienced loneliness, anxiety, despair, depression, confusion, directionlessness, heartbreak: suffering. It makes you less arrogant, and it's so easy to be arrogant. Suffering is the bridge that lets the world in over your weird walls. I'm grateful though not to have so much of it that I can't think.

My lovely daughters Mei and Alaska Drenth. My lovely partner Hanna Tai, who puts up with me. Friends and family, without whom I'd have, and be, nothing.

People who try. The gloomier the news gets, the more grateful I am to the people who try anyway. The labor movement. The women's movement. The peace movement. The environment movement. Thanks to the love and sacrifice of these good people I get to have a decent life and so do many of the people I love. Thanks to these people I can imagine something other than destruction and despoilation.

OK there is much more but this is long already. The rest can wait for other days. X

Lik

Water

Riding home the other night I wanted to be a river and so I was a river. And the place where that wanting happened was right where I saw the mysterious owl a while back. I was wondering if those two moments are connected.

All I can think of is it's a spot where the network of roads and paths meets a much older network of creeks and rivers - one made by the restlessness of my human family, the other by the restlessness of water. And since we're mostly water maybe there is just one restlessness? It won't stop wriggling. We rely on that restlessness to ferry oxygen and whatnot around the network of creeks and rivers inside us.

(Sure we have a heart to move that stuff around and the world doesn't. The thing that moves water around the world is heat and gravity, which is to say everything in the universe. So the world's heart is everything in the universe, including us.)

What I wrote the other day and then deleted was that when I was a river I wanted to pour myself into the world's wounds. It seemed too grandiose a thing to write just like that. But fuck it: rivers have grandiose feelings: that's just how it is: they just pour themselves endlessly into the mother ocean: deal with it. Don't pretend they have tiny feelings about work and mortgages and renovations and waiting for tradies, cos they don't.

Anyway it just seemed a natural thing. The wounds were there. Why not pour yourself out and into them? Why not?

When I was a mountain the stuff just oozed out of me. It seeped out of the high places and ran down rocks and poured itself out into the world like a giddy cyclist crossing from the road to the river path, guarded by the memory of an owl.

Later it was 2014 so I was at work. I was staring at a big steel garbage skip and then I was the steel, full of old crap like broken chairs and bent racks and such. All I felt was homesickness, a dull aching want to be ore again back beneath the soil. Down there we felt the pull of two suns. One we'd never seen but was rumoured to be way out somewhere beyond our home. It was hard to imagine but that's what the old stories said; now I was steel I saw it every day, so I'd have something to say when I got back home, that was for sure. The other was its child: the molten core of the living earth. It kept us warm. X

14 loosely-connected thoughts on how that KONY2012 strawman is full of shit

1. So a few times this last week I noticed one person or another casting aspersions on online campaigning with some smug variation or another of a line like 'Hey, online campaigning slash clicktivism is cool. We got Kony, right? KONY2012!'.

2. Maybe it's been going on longer than that but a) I am not that perceptive and b) I keep getting distracted by the majesty of the fucking sky. Seriously, that thing is amazing. I just stare at it like a fool.

3. If you don't know what KONY2012 was, it was an online campaign based on lies. The lies got found out and so it failed. What I am calling the KONY2012 strawman is the notion that because that campaign failed, online campaigns are necessarily a waste of time.

4. No-one actually puts it as bluntly as that, because if they did you might realise they are full of shit, but I will and you should and they are. Because here's the thing: the magic ingredient that causes a campaign based on lies to fail when the lies are found out is that it is based on lies and those lies are found out. It being online or offline makes not the tiniest fucking whit of difference to that.

5. I have noticed that some of the people making that argument - such as it is, since it's not spelled out - are people skeptical of the ability of anyone to do anything useful about anything. Some of those people, like Helen Razer, make a living by eloquently expressing that skepticism in print. Others are seduced by the combination of said eloquence and their own paranoia into repeating the argument. It's still a bad argument.

6. By paranoia I mean - and I'll go into detail about this another time - if you're alive now in a rich country you simultaneously suspect a) you're not doing all you could to help keep alive the thing-of-all-things that gave and gives you life, and b) that maybe there's nothing you can do OMIGODWE'REALLDOOMED.

7. re a), you're probably right. My humble suggestion is that repeating bullshit is not the way to deal with that. My humble suggestion is that instead you walk outside and gaze up into the infinite sky and ask the thing-of-all-things if it could use a fucking hand not bleeding to death and if so what it suggests and then see what it says and then go and do it. That will bring you as much peace as you can reasonably expect from this life.

8. re b) this is an old argument. It's half right. Our salvation lies in the other half. The half that's right is that there are forces larger than us and we don't have perfect freedom - all our choices are constrained by history &c &c - and many of those forces are dire.

9. The other half is fuck you, don't try and wriggle your rich-country way out of doing what you can with what freedom you have. It's 2014. You have so much power. DON'T FUCKING WASTE IT.

10. The thing-of-all-things is saying this through me. I asked it to speak through me and now I just say whatever shit comes out of my mouth. It's also saying it loves you very much: I LOVE YOU VERY MUCH. BUT SERIOUSLY, WAKE THE FUCK UP AND QUIT WASTING TIME.

11. I have been blessed this last 12 months to get to hang out with campaigners who don't care whether you're skeptical and who are getting on with doing what they can to save what ecological and social furniture they can as the flood of late capitalism sweeps lo! across this earth. All of these people use online campaigns as part of what they do.

12. Since those people are overworked and operating on the scent of a coaly rag, partly because you have not yet had that conversation with the thing-of-all-things have you and so they are doing it without you, trust me when I say they would not bother a second with online campaigning if it wasn't useful. Seriously. Think it through for more than a few seconds: why would they waste those precious minutes otherwise?

13. Sure there's all kinds of useful questions to ask about efficacy, especially around turning online actions into offline ones. But when it comes to thinking about those questions I trust the people who are actually using online tools to try and do something useful more than I trust the people who make a living out of putting hopelessness into fancy words.

14. Whatever your other views on online life, it's clearly a big chunk of how we are social, now, or you wouldn't be reading this. It's not a magic space somewhere else. So the fancy hopelessness people should quit trying to pretend we should cordon it off from how we work to keep the thing-of-all-things from bleeding to death. Because a) if we did that they'd just criticise us for that, because their schtick is critique, not efficacy; and b) their KONY2012 strawman is full of shit. X

Riding home the other night by the cold river I wanted to be a river too

Riding home the other night by the cold river I wanted to be a river too and so I was, for a little bit, a river on a bicycle, running through the streets. I had things living in me and trees were happy I was there. I poured myself downhill into the world.

Then yesterday in the hall I got bored of not being a mountain: "Fuck this not being a mountain shit, I'm gonna be a mountain!"

And so I was a mountain. I liked it. Time was different. Birds flew around me and found little holes in me and laid their eggs and raised their young and shat on me. I had things living in me and trees were happy I was there. The wind was just so: whoosh. It was pretty cool. You should have been there.

 Then today I was in the mall. This little red-headed kid was just staring upward, face all screwed up, looking amazed. I looked up to see what all the amaze was about and there was the sky: huge as a motherfucker, just there. I was like fuck yeah kid, I know how you feel. Look at it all full of clouds and such. That's where the oceans go when they get hot or when they just need a holiday. Whole oceans just hanging up there, taking in the view. X