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This is both a letter to my wife and my final blog post …

Isn’t it strange how the passing of time changes people and gives them opportunity to reflect on both who they have become, where they want to be and (for me as i’m sure with others) the mistakes they have made.

That has been the purpose of this blog for the last number of years.

I have made many mistakes in my life, and all of these I reflect back on now I realise that they *are* the journey, and for many parts that journey has been covered within these pages, albeit with enough of a cloak that only those who know me personally would understand everything i’m writing about.

Importantly, all of my mistakes and mishaps have led me to here, let me to this moment, lead me to you.

THey have lead me to the day when I write this to you, and to the people reading this blog, to share with them both of the new direction my life is taking and how this will be my last public post.  It has brought me to this time and space in 2009 when I finally, truly realise that I can be happy, want to be happy and importantly have the capacity to be happy.

It has bought me to you.

And therefore, after a long time of not posting here I am starting to realise why.  I don’t need to write about my life in this forum anymore, and the new forum of my life sits with you my darling girl, and therefore as much as I will miss this, I realise that it’s not the place I need to be writing anymore.

Does that make me sad (to a degree), absolutely.

I am moving on from a part of my life that has been a part of my life for so long I can’t remember not having it.  This blog was started so many years ago, back when I was at my first IT job, back when I was filled with hope and promise and I gingerly tried to find my place in the world.

And look where I am now.

My darling girl, you are big part of that journey.  For helping me to see the beauty in people, for teasing out my cynicism and fear and for opening my eyes to the world around me I can never thank you enough.  This journey has not been easy for me, I have made mistakes, and I know that I will continue to make more in the future, but I know that you are there for me and I will be there for you, no matter what.

And so today’s post is making me realise what life is all about.  It is about joy, it is about happiness and it is about opportune moments to reflect on what’s important ….. and what’s important to me is you.

I am not perfect, I never will be, but i’m getting there …… and so to you, and to all the people who have read here over the past years, for those that have encouraged, challenged, cajoled, hugged, cried and suffered with me, I say thankyou.

You have all been a part of the journey.

So to those of you who have read this blog, I thankyou for sharing the journey with me.  You have hopefully had the opportunity to see me start with very little and achieving not a great deal, to growing into becoming a man and making my life.

And to you my darling girl, Merry Christmas, I hope this is the first of many more to come and I can’t wait to see where the journey takes us next.

I love you

Adam

Adam uncategorized 2009, final post, rants, sex and love

Need I say more …. I think it fits my OCD’ish personality … 160 characters and post all the damn time … perfect

In fact, I think I might twitter about this now

Adam uncategorized 2009, rants, twitter

I am both sad and happy today.

Adam

Adam uncategorized 2009, rants

I registered a new domain for myself, and started a new blog….

(and no, i’m not telling *anyone* about it).

I realise now that in some ways I made a grave error when I first registered this site. I told people about it.

And by doing that, all the great benefits of anonymity went flying out the window, leaving me in a position where to get the things off my chest that are really going on would be to compromise myself in ways that were both not in my best interest, but more importantly could and would be perceived by others as something completely outside of my ‘real’ reality.

And almost certainly hurt people unnecessarily.  And that’s just not cool.

(i’m not sure if that makes sense)

So i’ve done the best thing I can do, i’ve registered a new space and i’m not telling anyone about it.

And now that I have ….. i’ve started to write again …… and I realised how absolutely and utterly delightful it is to just write what I feel and not have the repurcussions other than to get it out of my crazy headspace, turn it into a pseudo-reality and then from there … discard it as exactly that, the crazy and incoherent ramblings of someone who’s just human, who has learnt to deal with most of his limitations but still fucks it up sometimes and somebody who’s not the bad guy, just needs to have his own headspace once in a while.

It feels good to write and only be accountable to myself, and by writing about all the craziness, i’m freed from it.

And the best thing is that all the people I love and care about won’t have to deal with me (so much) when I decide to have an unnecessarily selfish and crazy bout of self-doubt, self-destruction and self-loathing.

And i’m already starting to feel better about it.

So from here on out i’m going to try to write more about my life, try to use facebook less and write about the things that are good, that are interesting, that are hard and that are what I work for.

And i’m going to keep the insanity to someone where only I can find.

Hope you still drop back here from time to time to read about my ‘normal’ life.

Adam

Adam uncategorized 2009, insanity, rants

The perfect way to start ridiculous arguments!

I won’t get into my rant here tonight this morning as i’m simply being irrational at this moment.

 

However I will say that the complete and utter lack of regard that people seem to have when you’re getting married (‘what, you mean *your* wedding isn’t all about *me* … huh?!?!?!) has simply astonished me.

Warning to the wise folks : elope.

 

Adam

Adam uncategorized 2009, rants, wedding

This is an extension of a post I wrote quite some time ago, right about here…..

Because the last time I saw this post I was in a different mindset.

The core of my post today is to encourage you to watch the movie : Stranger Than Fiction.  A brilliant tale starring two geniuses of the the screen (Dustin Hoffman, Emma Thompson, both supporting), and a lead in Will Farrell that was completely unexpected however brilliantly cast.

The movie I will not go into a great detail about.  The meaning of the movie I will indulge a little in my post here:

Stranger than fiction asks the basic question : If you knew you were going to die, how would you rate your life?  (ok, two questions, the second being: What might you do to make it the life you truly want?)

Sounds pretty simple in reality, but dig deeper and you realise that life is chaotic, difficult, mundane (and let’s be honest) inconsequential ….  and many would say that the biggest and most influencing items are really out of our hands…

What this movie does is go to town to challenge you that your life is something that you are active participant in, even if you choose to make no choices, you still make choices (know what I mean?).  For while you need to accept what you can’t be in control of, and while you can’t make it all turn in your favour, there are a huge number of things that you can do to make your life the life that you want them to be.

 

This view of the world has been synonymous with my view of my own life over the past couple of years.  After some pretty reasonable weight and alcohol issues, I have slowly, but surely put my life on a steady path, and the more steady this path becomes, the more I find that I ask myself the real questions.

- Am I a good person?

- Where do I fit in the world?

- Do I deserve all the shit i’ve accumulated?

… and for the most part you can either be ignorant, arrogant or terrified as the media and external influences generally tell you that you’re either wonderful and fabulous (and have you seen our new hair product to make you even *more* fabulous?!!?!) or that you’re morally corrupt and basically if you don’t repent (ie now!) you’re going straight to hell.

So what does one do?

You need to live your life.  You just need to live your life.  Make choices, take risks, be awed by those things you don’t understand and constantly curious about the things that you’d like to understand.

Go to space camp, learn how to back cupcakes, commit to something that scares you, walk away from things that are hurting you, take that new job, get a new car, give money to charity ….. and for something different, tell those that matter to you most that you love them every.single.day.

Because we all need to remember, none of us are going to make it out of this thing alive.

Adam

Adam uncategorized 2009, rants

So my question posted above, has the mighty JJJ made itself irrelevant is one worthy of at least some of my time today.

A couple of pieces of background info here before we lead into the main game that will help provide some context on this piece.

First and foremost, JJJ was a radio station that came into it’s own about 10-12 years ago.  I was a teenager and the Big Day Out festivals started to come onto the scene.  And the radio world was somewhat different….  Back then you had two options of radio stations, you had the 2DayFM’s, the B105′s, the pop-rock stations of the world.

And then you had JJJ.  

Aimed squarely at the late-gen-x’ers, introducing music that appealed the alternative side of the psyche, JJJ became a rousing, and well-known success on the Australian landscape.  To be entirely fair, JJJ did what no other major radio provider in the country did, it supported new/up-and-coming/talented artists that otherwise would not have made it on the Australian radio.

And without going into detail here, there are many exceptional artists in this country who can directly point their initial successes the the dedication and support of the JJJ network.  And for that i’m (honestly) entirely grateful.

 

With that in mind, for many years you could only be in one camp.  You were either an alternative-against-the-world-hippy or you were a middle-of-the-road-wannabe-pop-listener.  And never the two shall cross.

So for someone like me (definitely in the second camp I might add), the sly ridicule of not being within the educated or ‘cooler’ psyche was the standard fare.  Listening to Pop and Rock was the equivalent of a ticket that said ‘Please deride me’.  

Alternatively, for the most part us middle-of-the-roads saw those alternative-types as not much more than wankers caught up in their own navel gazing.

And so the world continued relatively peacefully.

 

And then a few things happened pretty much in succession:

Firstly, us late gen-x’ers got older.  We got older and we weren’t replaced by more Gen-X’ers, no no folks, we were replaced by Gen-Y’s.  And the Gen-Y’s, they …. how shall we say this …. they think Gen-X’ers are a waste of space and don’t know our musical taste from our behind……

… and in a slow-moving instant, one which most of us completely missed ….  the Gen-X’ers became seriously uncool …. (ed: I’ll note that Gen-X’ers believe they are still cool, get over it people, you’re way past your due date …)

Secondly, a itty-bitty radio conglomorate came along … thy name was BMG….. (*sigh* for those who don’t know who BMG is, they run Nova around the country … and they’re one of the largest radio networks on the planet).  And Nova decided that a new era in radio was on the cards.  They realised that Gen-X’ers are cashed up, discerning, and above all else, cooler (in their view) than the rest of the world.

And Gen-X’ers didn’t want to listen to endless pop music 24/7.  They wanted edge, they wanted class and they wanted style….

 

They also realised that Gen-Y’s are flighty, unpredictable, unreliable, uncommitted, selfish and generally self-focused.  So trying to cater to them with one stream of radio, one style or one theme, just wasn’t going to work.  So it’s all about short-attention-span time capture.

 

And a new era of radio was born.  That of the ‘we play everything’ radio.

 

And in an instant, listening to radio became an entirely different ball game.  Suddenly Nova, 2DayFM, JJJ and everything other radio stations were playing alternative, new, up-and-coming artists…. but on top of that, they started playing music from everywhere back as far as the 60′s and 70′s and in a heartbeat caught the attention of the Australian music public.  Now you could switch on and hear Merrick and Rosso (from JJJ), some Kings of Leon (they’re CD is on now so they’re on my mind.. *and* they had the number #1 song on hottest 100 this year!) and some 70′s rock all without flicking the station.

Suddenly Australia didn’t need JJJ to listen to something that wasn’t middle-of-the-road-pop.

 

Thirdly (and possibly finally), those same radio conglomorates realised that promoting new talent was the great untapped niche.  For the Gen-Y’s, the new, just-released, pre-released and almost-famous is the thing to be listening to.  To be cool to a Gen-Y you need to have an edge, be unique in a world filled with senseless repetition (their view not mine).  And to get that edge, to be cool, to be up and coming you needed to new and interesting artists into the country and on stage, you need to get them to festivals and at events or every type.  You need to start promoting the types of bands that JJJ has been promoting for years, for that is the great untapped niche.  And that type of promotion takes money.

And the big stations have what JJJ doesn’t, cash…. lots of it.

 

So today, switch on Nova or 2DayFM or any other number of the big stations and I guarantee you that the artists you will hear in any 60 minute period are likely to have as many ‘almost there’ artists as JJJ turns out.  For the big stations it’s an easy win.  Festivals are now not aimed at those who scour together $60 for a ticket, now you’re upwards of the hundreds of dollars per ticket for a major mult-day.  And let me assure you, the Gen-X’ers, they’ve got that type of cash going on.  For those with less cash, the smaller festivals out there still top the $100 mark but make it in at a point that a Gen-Y can still attend, still be seen as cool and meanwhile make those massive radio stations an absolute bucketload of cash.

Just look at the V Festival…..

 

So where does JJJ go from here?  The angles of new, alternative, up-and-coming, foreign is no longer their primary domain.  Their listener base got more cashed up and realised that they didn’t need to move stations and the Gen-Y’s (hard to hold onto) are accepted in the fact that they have no loyalty, will move, quickly, dependent on who’s bringing them ‘the next big thing’.  

And JJJ just simply doesn’t have the cash to fight the big groups on their own terms.

 

Or let’s look at this from another angle …..  for those that will (inevitably) start ranting about how JJJ is still at the core supporting the little guy, roll right on over to the JJJ Hottest 100 page.  

I own 18 of the top 20 tracks in my music collection……

 

And if i’m listening to everything that’s big on JJJ, then they really have lost their edge…

Adam

 

p.s – If you think i’m missing the mark, check out the demographics for listeners and numbers for radio stations in Australia.  8 years ago JJJ owned (easily) the 24-32 age group, now they’re just a blip on the radar…..

Adam uncategorized 2009, rants

I read a friends blog today asking people to keep their opinions to themselves when it comes to the ’cause’ of the Victorian bushfires and how some of those people could have survived had they done something different.

This was my response …

A thought to remember is that most of those people with strong opinions (mostly male, mostly outspoken) are people who are actually hurting just as much as you are, they’re just finding it difficult to direct that emotion when tears are (seemingly) an inappropriate response…

Those guys probably just find it really tough to attempt to comprehend the death and destruction and their basic protective instinct is useless …… which makes us feel weak.

The release outlet for all that fear and all that sadness for many men is anger. Our new-age display of that anger is what appears to be self-righteous ranting.

Reality is we’re hurting just as bad as you are and have been on couches all over Australia, just like you, with tears streaming down our faces.

——–

…. and that’s all I have to say about that….

Adam uncategorized 2009, rants

NO XMAS party cocktails tonight…

Adam is sad…

Adam uncategorized drinking and debauchery, rants

Adam and Jules’ Wedding proposal story….. here we go…..

Location: Vietnam, ~ 125k’s outside of Hoi An (ironically the honeymoon capital of Vietnam)

Temperature: 7,00,000 degrees and 492% humidity

Back Story (aka The Hill)

So we awake on day 10 of our journey through Vietnam, and after hitting a few snags along the way (the whole of Vietnam being flooded, possible malaria, days of dysentry-like bowel cleansing ….. you know, the usual), we reached the physical pinnacle of the trip, we reach the hill.

Now, before I go into the proposal story, I really must give you a description of this monster so you to can understand the pain that we suffered on this fine day. The hill is a 50km  journey of pain, with 36km’s of all-uphill-pain and no flat sections.  Riding on a (thankfully) quiet, newly bitumened stretch of  turf, we excitedly, but nervously meet for a final photo at the bottom of the range before we head off into the wilderness.

After the first 12 kilometres, of which I was holding back with the back group (including Jules), I realised that to make this journey that it was going to be entirely about me, there simply wasn’t any space to cajole or support anybody else to the top, you just had to keep plugging through it.

And so slowly but surely, I broke away from the girls behind me, and soon realised that I was alone.

Now to place this into context, being on your own for even a few seconds when on a ‘group holiday’ becomes a fairly rare treat.  As most of you would know who have traveled in groups, alone time is a wonderful yet short-lived space in time where you can finally be yourself and start to navel gaze endlessly, a favoured part of mylife.  This usually occurs between when you drunkenly get home and when you promptly fall asleep.  If you have a partner, it just ain’t happening.

… anyway, back to the story ….

So i’m on my own, and when on my own I take the opportunity to try to block out the relatively high levels of pain that are associated with riding up a big fucking hill, and after a few short kilometres my thoughts turned to my life, my work, my friends and everything that’s important to me.  Now i’ll be honest, the thoughts that invaded my mind in those early kilometres on my own were about the significant changes that were about to occur in my work life, assessing my life now that i’d moved back to Sydney and the general twists and turns of being in the rat race and away from my friends and how I had changed.  And for an hour it was great to reflect on the wonderful life that I have, the amazing friends who share it with me and the family (bless them) who understand that I will almost certainly be, always, nomadic.

Moving swiftly along to resolving those internal conflicts, I got to thinking about my happiness, and in turn I got to thinking about Jules and I and how she had very silently (almost literally) shown up in my life one night, half drunk at the Epping hotel where I (as I do) announced to the people in front of me that I was going to run the City2Surf (details of said City2Surf experience I thought were etched in stone in this blog, but apparently I was too busy getting drunk that night…) and this girl, who I didn’t really know (Hools) and another friend, (who I did know) said they’d join me and start training.

Now as with all drunk endeavours, one forgets these fairly soon after they occur, though early in the next week I receives this e-mail that I almost, sincerely, deleted as I thought it was SPAM (it was the last name that made it seem salacious, as with just one letter change would make her last name seem like more like a sex toy than a humans last name…), but for reasons still not known to me, I opened it and realised who it was.

It was Hools.

(now I digressed here for a second to make a point.  As I realise now that knowing Hools (as I do now) means that had I not replied to that message she almost certainly wouldn’t have chased me down, spoken to me again after the incident or even mentioned it in passing and I could be heading home right now and drinking beer because i’d be single!)

…. So back to it (again) …..

And there she was, in my head and making me happy in a way  that, while driving me completely batty at times for her complete lack of worry in the world, made me the happiest, sanest person I had been in many years… and didn’t ask me to change a thing.

Of course what I had done is change.  Change in ways that are so much for the better.  I am better with my friends, closer to my family and overall, I hope, a better person to know and be around.  And in the swiftest of seconds, in the shortest moment that I can count to you, I simply knew.

I knew that Hools was the person I wanted to be with for the rest of my life.

Now, for someone like me, with a heart rate already going through the roof from the hardcore exercise, you’d think that this might set me into some kind of heart failure/early warning/resuscitation type scenario ….. meh?

But in fact the opposite happened.  I found peace and calm in the world, and for the longest of moments, longer than I can imagine even now when I think about it, my world and everything around it stopped and that moment of clarity became a very long, very distant light over the horizon.

And I knew that I was home.

Riding up the rest of the hill was something that I will never forget.  While it was hard physically, mentally and emotionally, I was committed to making it, committed to seeing Hools at the top and celebrating with her the most excited i’ve ever been about anything in my life.

Reaching the top of that mountain gave me a sense of accomplishment that made me (literally) jump around for joy.  I was so excited I could barely contain myself.

Of course everyone else thought I was just a little too excited as I was 2/3rds of the way down the pack.

So after making it back to the hotel, excited and a little delirious we headed off to dinner.  One of the group decided to drink far too much red wine and then decided to give several long, arduous speeches ranging from how great we all were, to how bad the wine taster over here and even as a tribute to his wife.

All the time i’m pushing my chair out inches away from the table, desperately trying to get a word in sideways (define irony!) and wondering if someone would kill me if I got up to speak (ed: someone did actually threaten that just moments before I climbed up  to speak).  But eventually I made it.

The worlds really just tumbled out of my mouth, though i’ve been told that I quoted about moments of clarity and moments of resolve combing together to define you as a person, and realising that my defining moment, my moment of most happiness and absolute clarity, was when I was with Hools.

So after a gentle prompt, some shoved chairs and two of the girls starting to cry before I even got a chance to finish my speech…. (and Hools completely unaware of what was going on), I got down on one knee and said…

Julia, will you marry me?

…..

And that was that.

(We’re off to get married in Fiji next year kids, very small group and a weeks holiday away dashed in with a wedding somewhere there in the middle. Promise i’ll write a post about it when I return….. well, maybe….!)

Adam

Adam uncategorized rants, sex and love, wedding