Leaving, on a Jet Plane

It’s been about twenty years since I went on holidays with the rest of my family, but it seems we’ll be breaking that streak on Tuesday when all four of us gather and fly down to Adelaide to spend five days at the Fringe Festival.

We fly back Sunday night.

And on Monday, I turn thirty-six.  It wasn’t until tonight, looking at a calendar and planning my work week after I get home, that I realised that last bit.

Birthdays are weird. I expect, this year, I’ll be reducing my celebrations down to the absolute minimum: sleeping in, re-reading Murakami’s Birthday Stories anthology, getting on with things. I mean, what little celebratory energy I usually have is going to be burned out by five days of awesomeness as the Fringe, and any reserves are going to be needed to get me through the week that follows at the day-job.

In theory, the coming week is a holiday. I want to take it as one, I really do, but I’m already mentally planning out the various things I need to sneak in between time with the family and the shows I really want to see.

There are still things that need writing, whether I’m on holidays or no. There are things that need doing for the day-job. I’m proving remarkably bad at putting either away at this point, which largely means Shifty Silas is making the trip to Adelaide with me and I’ve just spent a half-hour figuring out how to access the internet by hooking my laptop up to my phone.

If anyone’s got any recommendations for good places to hide out and write in the city-centre of Adelaide, I’m eager to hear about them.

If anyone’s got a free afternoon and they’re interested in meeting up for a write-club somewhere, I’m similarly interested in hearing the news.

These are the things that occupy my mind at the moment. It’s 9:53 on a Sunday evening, which is actually a little early for me to get down to the act of writing. I’m drinking scotch, ’cause it’s been a drinking scotch kind of weekend, and I’m going to be kicking off a short burst of writing that will serve as a precursor to some truly manic packing in the hours to come.

I’m looking forward to Adelaide. I’ve been to the Fringe a couple of times before and it’s always been ten kinds of fucking awesome. I’m looking forward to spending time with my family, although that’s tinged with trepidation at this point.

And, despite the fact I’ll be taking work down there, I’m looking forward to getting some distance from Brisbane. There’s a lot of stuff that I’m processing this year, a kind of unrelenting onslaught of things that need to be sorted out, and it’ll be nice to get away and get some perspective on things.

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A final PS: I can’t remember who first pointed out that actor Donald Glover rapped under the name Childish Gambino – I think it was probably Patrick O’Duffy, but I’m not 100%. Either way, I kinda owe them, ’cause I’ve spent the vast majority of this weekend either a) re-watching the early seasons of Community, or b) listening to Gambino’s latest album.

It happens like that, sometimes. I develop a strong level of focus when I’m consuming media and I just start consuming *everything* I can get my hands on that fits within a particular area of interest.