Delusions of Control - My archives
2nd half 2007
More current hysterical ravings can be found here.

December 2007

December 21st

It has been a week since Ian's funeral. For more information about what went wrong in the canyon, see Dave Noble's Canyon News page, and the Accident Register entry. Aside from Ian's experience and his high profile in the Australian canyoning community, he was just a really sweet, generous guy. Three years ago, when I was getting the first canyon slide night off the ground, his practical approach was of enormous help in distilling my nebulous inspiration into a concrete reality, and much of the night's success can be traced back to his original input. He'll be very much missed, and by a lot of people.

I'm noticing a horrible symmetry to this year.

The storms have been promising, though.. I suppose something has to be.

A few clouds at the bottom of my garden (looking south over Tuggerah Lake, 4th Dec 2007).

December 8th

I finished my notes for Berserk #292 a few days ago, but before I could post them came some terrible news: that Claustral Canyon has claimed another life, and this time it was Ian Knapp, a lovely man and one of those larger-than-life characters without whom the world would (and now will) be a much duller place. On the 6th December, Ian was doing the canyon with a group of four when he became wedged in a waterfall downclimb just short of the exit and drowned. I'm not sure that I can say much more about this (or about anything really) just at the moment - and certainly Ian deserves much more.

November 2007

November 24th

A one way ticket to hell and going down - yee-hah! We Aussies now have across-the-board ALP governments (that is all state governments and now the federal government as well). Man, this will be interesting. I can cheerfully take the part of a mere bystander - because I have no debt. But for everyone else, well - glad I'm not standing in your shoes, people, let me tell you. It's a sad reflection of my state of mind that I am actually enjoying this.

Honestly, I don't care that much - but that's just my approach to life in general at the moment. Could change at any time. Then again, perhaps not.

*sigh*

Interesting article in New Scientist (Don't Call our Soldiers Crazy, New Scientist, 17th November 2007, pp.56-57) about how US soldiers returning from Iraq bottle up the often horrific experiences duty has put them through (and I'm coldly wondering as I'm reading it why they don't just say to themselves yeah, I thought I was going to die at any moment, and I was scared to death and I lost friends but hey! I can come home - unlike the people who have to go on living there... and then I'm wondering if it isn't better to be shot dead or blown up in Baghdad than Los Angeles, but hell, what would I know? I'm equivocal on the value of being alive at the best of times, and this isn't the best of times).

The authors of the article make the interesting (and, in my experience, bleeding obvious) point that people unload better to strangers than they do to their own friends and family.

True, but it's no revelation. Why else have 'xyz' anonymous groups been so effective for so long (aspiring Fight Club members aside)?

Some people can talk to family about intimate matters, their personal fears and so on, but most people can't and don't. I could (and did) share everything with Ben, deep dark secrets and all, but in general the closer the relationship (friends, family), the less I'm inclined to disclose how I really feel. Think about the use of the internet here, and all those angst-filled teenagers spilling their pain across the ether. They get ridiculed for disclosing too much, but I've no doubt that it helps more than it hurts in many cases, simply because the act of distilling the emotions and expressing them can be such a cathartic experience of itself - never mind who reads it.

In the end, it's better to talk about things than not. Get stuff out in the open - fight, cry, argue, scream. But in spite of what I have just said, not to just anyone. If I 'unload' or rant or rave to someone I don't know that well (it's happened a few times this year), it's because I think highly of them and trust them in one way or another. And/or because there is a connection of some sort that I want to hold on to.

Actually I think the real value of the above-mentioned article is that it serves as a two-fold commentary on deception; one, it tells us how the 'western' world tries to disconnect itself from violence, pain and fear by pretending these things don't exist, and two, it argues that people should be allowed to feel how they really feel - without having to pretend otherwise.

Amen to that.

Brief reviews are done for Berserk #291 and Jaeger #27 and #28. The scanlation for Berserk #292 is out and I'll have some notes posted on that in a couple of days.

Once upon a time I was falling in love, but now I'm only falling apart...
"Total Eclipse of the Heart", Bonnie Tyler, lyrics by Jim Steinman, 1982

November 15th

Yesterday I had the opportunity to get back into a canyon, since the children are with their grandparents for a couple of days. Julie was organising a trip to the north branch of Bowen's Creek and she very kindly invited me along. It was a great day: good company (Julie, Rick and Michael), good weather and a beautiful but not overly taxing canyon. All the same, I felt distinctly clumsy, and I'm very, very much out of condition. Packing for the trip the night before (since I had a 3 hour drive in the morning to reach the canyon) was daunting because I was packing memories as well as equipment, and there were a few moments there when the whole thing threatened to get the better of me.

In spite of the fact that I wanted to go, in the end it turned out to be surprisingly hard to do. Still, I needed to get out again, I needed at least to unlock that mental door, to oil the hinges a little. It came open a way and has shut again, but at least now I've left it unlocked. I've had a glimpse of what lies in the adjoining room. Perhaps it won't be so hard next time.

Some photos of the trip can be found here.

Hopefully I will have some new reviews for Jaeger and Berserk up in the next couple of days.

"...I will oppose them until the ends of When and Wherever, and someday day I shall win."
Roger Zelazny, "Love is an Imaginary Number", 1966 (Reprinted in "The Doors of His Face, The Lamps of His Mouth", ibooks, 2001)

October 2007

October 5th

The Australian summer has arrived, in spring. At last, the thermometer has finally hit 30°C, just where I like it to be. For which I am grateful - or would be, if I cared. Apathy has its uses. The problem is, I still want to mess with people... well, at least I thought I did.

Sometimes... No, not really.

My web surfing over the last few weeks has been (mostly) limited to the weather, the local news and the physics arXivs, of which the latest item to catch my eye is Nature of Time and Causality in Physics, by Francisco N.S. Lobo (arXiv:0710.0428v1 [gr-qc] 2 Oct 2007).

Tonight I have wandered a little and have been reading reviews. Reviews of short SF stories, as it happens. And I have to laugh ( I take no comfort in the fact that laughter is occurring, even cynical laughter - which it is - because it means that engagement is present and I'm not as disconnected as I hoped I was). A fair proportion of these 'reviews' were more like blog comments, and that's OK, provided they're packaged as such. However, there was a lot of unsubstantiated sniping going on, much of it along the lines of "if only the author had included more sex/dialogue/characters/ideas/elephants" etc. I find myself getting really defensive for the writers when I'm reading this sort of stuff. But hell, what would I know? Is it fair to say that a review is not constructive every time someone complains about something a writer has left out?

Ummm... Yeah.

I remember back in high school, we were asked to conceptualise the perfect work of art... and I suggested a box (a tesseract, actually) and (this is before the 'select inverse' function in Photoshop came along to save me) called it "Inside Out" - the whole idea being that the outside of the hypersphere contained everything that might be considered 'Art", i.e. the whole universe (except for the very small space inside the 4D box). And now I'm wondering about the very small space inside the 4D box... But my point is that writing is highly selective, and it has to be. You have a story, characters who have something to say, and a point of view (or not, sometimes...). You can't cover everything or you might as well just spread your hands and smile maniacally. "It's all out there." And that it is. The goal of most writers is to draw attention to the bits that shine a little brighter, or smoulder just a little more darkly, than all the rest.

Criticise at your peril.

Berserk #290 'review' (hopelessly unconstructive) here.

September 2007

September 20th

Well, it looks like the family sniffling and the coughing has finally gone. But just when it appeared that good health might be on the horizon, both of my children have decided to come down with toncillitis. I'm not impressed... and neither, unsurprisingly, are they.

The weather has been uncooperatively normal. Nothing inspires. I have been writing, but this has been more frustrating than empowering. After knocking over a 4000 word short story in just under four hours, I came back to it a day or so later knowing that it hadn't quite worked... and I hate that feeling. The problem is that it's a different angle on an old idea, and if you don't get those exactly right they come out sounding derivative, or worse, just plain dull. I can fix it, but actually summoning the energy required to find more words is proving difficult. And I was lucky to get those four uninterrupted hours in the first place - even though they fell between 10pm and 2am, usually one small child will wake at least once during that stretch of the night. My concentration is a fickle thing at best - disturb it and it can be gone for days at a time.

However, that's enough of my complaining for now. Review of Berserk #289 at the bottom of this page.

August 2007

August 31st

The OzCanyons Slide Night is over... and I can relax now. While it does take time and money to organise these things, the cost is so much worth it for those few moments during the night when I get the chance to stand back and watch people enjoying themselves, or catch up with someone I haven't seen for a stretch of time. The material shown this year was excellent (as it was last year and the year before) - one of the perks of being the organiser is that I get to see a whole lot more of it, and then have to make the agonising choice about what to leave out.

So much happened this month, and nothing really happened at all. I didn't read much... a few physics papers, some science articles, very little fiction. The flu lingers and I'm very tired. Weary, which is not quite the same thing. I'm impatient for so many things to happen, but I'm no longer trying to reign that impatience in. Good things might come to those who wait - but so does oblivion.

So there you have it.

..."We're just animals, howling in the night. 'Cause it's better than silence."
Suzie Costello, Torchwood, episode 8 - "They Keep Killing Suzie".

August 10th

*vomit warning... no, seriously.*

Yesterday... after another one of those days where everything went well only because nothing went badly, I drop on to the floor for a while around 11pm because I am having trouble keeping my eyes open. Even with my eyes closed my head is spinning and I really ought to go to bed. Then comes the sound of coughing from the children's bedroom. I look up, wondering how long to wait before going to check on them, and then out comes my son, upset - because he is covered in vomit. So too are his pillows, his sheets, and all of his blankets. Not only that, but he has managed to drop globs of it in a meandering trail all the way into the lounge room.

OK... take deep breath, reassure child, wash his hands and his face, change his clothes, strip the bed. Clean the carpet. Make the bed. Give the by now bemused child a drink, and some panadol because he says his head is hurting and he feels hot. Five minutes later he throws up again, this time all over the lounge room carpet, and the lounge, his spare blanket and himself. I was in the process of getting another bucket just in case - and I wasn't fast enough.

OK... take another deep breath, reassure child, wash his hands and his face, change his clothes, take his blanket (it would be easier to draw teeth) and after turning the house upside down I manage to find him another one. Clean the carpet, and the lounge. Put a DVD on for him so that he can calm down, before trying to put him back to bed. He watches Toy Story from start to finish. Midnight comes and goes. Eventually, I get him to bed.

My daughter has had the gastric badly for three days now... and I feel a little weary.

This winter has been particularly bad for illnesses in Australia. At least five children have died directly from Influenza A and over 1000 people have died from flu-related pneumonia since the beginning of June. My ex-husband rang a couple of days ago to say that he was suffering flu complications and felt like he had malaria. He sounded absolutely dreadful. My mother had the flu vaccination this year and she has still been sick for about four weeks (flu vaccinations won't actually stop you getting flu. What they do is make it less likely you'll develop complications). There has also been a surge of diabetes-1 in children from the Sydney-Newcastle area, possibly the result of immune system overloads in susceptible people, and the flu has been masking their symptoms as well. A whole host of opportunistic infections have had a field day, including a serious outbreak of gastroenteritis in the Newcastle area. There is a report this morning that a 37 year-old boilermaker in QLD has died after suspected complications (multiple organ failure) from the flu.* And I've heard about other deaths of young, healthy people in Sydney from flu sepsis, cases that haven't been reported in the news at all.

Suddenly I don't feel quite so stupid about being sick since mid-May, or for taking my baby boy to hospital last month when his temperature wouldn't come down from 41°C. This was a big thing for me - I've always felt that hospitals are for the seriously ill only - you go if your leg is hanging off, otherwise you stick a band-aid on whatever gaping wounds you have and you get on with it.

So it feels like a bad year, and the media are getting on board. But... if you look at the NSW Influenza Surveillance Reports (this is a live link and the reports update), you'll find there was another spike in diagnosed Influenza A deaths back in July 2003, and the last three flu seasons were relatively mild. So it seems that this year is nothing really out of the ordinary, though 2003 was considered a bad year.

Before you get too comfortable however, consider that H5N1 is still lurking in the background, and it has worried authorities so much that it headlines most pandemic preparedness information, like this from NSW. There is a theory that endemic flu strains weaken before they are replaced by something much more virulent, something which then goes on to become a killer ("Do flu vaccines really protect the elderly?" New Scientist, 1st July 2007). So, is this current season in Australia the result of the H1N1 Influenza A fighting back? Or is it the last gasp of a subtype on its way out before H5N1 knocks it off?

I don't remember the last 'mild' pandemic of flu (Influenza A H3N2) in 1969 because I was only about 6 months old at the time, but I did get the flu and I did develop pneumonia - and my mother likes to remind me every now and again of how sick I was. But there are a lot of people out there who are too young to remember and who aren't reminded. So while I don't like to see our media beating up stories or frightening people without good reason, raising awareness of how dangerous flu can be sounds like A Good Thing. Scared people panic, but they are also more likely to take notice of health department directions if a pandemic does develop, rather than just shrug it off and ignore it altogether.

Beware the Virus...

*Stats come from local media, mostly from the Sydney Morning Herald, and Yahoo AU via the AAP.

Review for Berserk #288 here.

July 2007

July 29th

The almost full moon is bright and clear. The night is breathlessly quiet and the lake is a plate of black glass with stars stuck in it. It's beautiful - but that's all.

My 16 year-old cat died two days ago, on a warm and sunny winter's afternoon. She had been seriously ill on and off at various times during her life, but this time she wasn't 'sick' as such, she was dying. So instead of stressing her with a visit to the vet, because there was nothing anyone could do and she didn't seem to be in any pain, I made her comfortable and let her go in her own time. She was, after all, more than just a cat - she was an old friend. But I still feel an intense sense of guilt that I didn't pay her enough attention, attention she used to get but had been deprived of since the children arrived.

Death, whatever or whoever it touches, has a creeping presence that can't easily be mistaken. In reality I believe this is nothing more than the empathy that comes from loving others, but I don't like being faced with something I can't strike out at, especially, particularly, when it threatens those I care for. This frustration, this sense of something still hunting behind me in the shadows, might well be the reason I've snapped at (or at least tried to provoke) almost everyone I've spoken to this last week. Perhaps I'm just looking for a good argument to stir the blood, to remind me that I'm actually still alive.

What good that might do, I can't possibly imagine.

July 19th

The OzCanyons community lost another friend this week. On Saturday 14th July Paul Bell was abseiling Boar's Head in the Blue Mountains of NSW when he had some sort of turn, possibly a heart attack, and died on the rope during the 65m descent. His friends lowered him to the ground but there was nothing that could be done to save his life. He was only 49 years old. Paul was with a group of highly experienced canyoners/abseilers (including a doctor) and could not have been in better company - and it just goes to show, in a way, that while being safe can minimise the possibility of something terrible happening, if something is going to go wrong there's not a damn thing anyone can do about it.

I had been looking forward to seeing Paul at the slide night this year.

I thought about quoting Algernon Charles Swinburne, at least a chunk of Atalanta in Calydon(II) (... Strength without hands to smite / Love that endures for a breath / Night the shadow of light / And life, the shadow of death) because it fairly well sums up my present mood, but this isn't about me, and perhaps it's better to let Rupert Brooke have the last - and appropriately unfinished - word:

He wears
The ungathered blossom of quiet; stiller he
Than a deep well at noon, or lovers met;
Than sleep, or the heart after wrath. He is
The silence following great words of peace

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C.A.L.