i’ve explained to some that i’m viewing my unexpected return to Sydney as a transitionary step, wherein all the things that I hate about life in Sydney will serve to motivate me to keep this step a short one, say, two to three years, until I finally make it to the one place in the world I actually want to live.

it’s worth noting here that some people can’t fathom why I have no desire to go do the ‘live and work overseas for a few years’ thing, as Jon is planning to do.  well, likewise, i can’t fathom why some people would prefer to live in Sydney.  fine, whatever.  most of the time i just roll my eyes or smile amiably and STFU, because frankly the differences are relatively minor, compared to so many other places in the world.

unexpectedly, this relocation to Sydney – provoked by Jon’s job offer – has brought me a bigger step closer to not just the NSW Northern Rivers, but the ability to live anywhere whilst still doing my work, than I had first anticipated.  by coming to an arrangement to continue providing tech-support to two Melbourne clients simply as a means to ensure continuity of a base-level income until I establish some new clients (presumed to be in Sydney), in one step I’ve laid a big part of the groundwork toward having location-independence already.  previously I’d always assumed that location-independent income would have to come from something else (eg. iApp development).

two leads/introductions facilitated by a close friend for further Sydney-based work/clients have fizzled out to nothing, both incapable even of saying ‘sorry, nothing we can do to help at this time’ even via the impersonality of email.  i just don’t understand that.

a third lead morphed into a far more tangible opportunity to work for another IT support organisation, if i were willing to put aside my self-employed independence and, sooner or later, hand over my clientele to it.  having just made the realisation that I’d partially achieved location-independent income status, I wasn’t about to self-sabotage that any time soon.  nor would this job afford me the time or headspace to continue this process.

so I’m left hoeing my own path.

Jon’s new job is going as well as hoped, which is a relief.  i’m glad i made the move with him up here, to continue our path-of-uncertain-length together.  i like the place we’re living in, even though it’s not a direct 1-to-1 conversion of ‘Socio-Economic Location Value’ from where we lived in Melbourne.  for that privilege of living in, say, Newtown, we’d have to pay an extra $150/week rent, at least.  or live under a near-perpetual flight path.  fuck that shit.

i *hate* myself for the way I’ve put on so much weight in the past comfortable year, having somehow allowed myself to not choose a new gym when we moved in together in a new area too far from my old gym.  naturally i don’t expect or get any positive encouragement from the Sydney Establishment there.  but that is about to change, i guarantee it.  (rest assured though, some Sydney people will misinterpret this as some desire on my part to be more Sydney-like.)

and, despite not having any previous desire for pets, we now have two gorgeous ginger kittens adding a surprising amount of joy and entertainment to our home.

with all this so far, i’ve apparently lost my personal integrity (for moving back to Sydney, i assume), had my masculinity questioned (by uber-house-proud gay men living in Sydney, no less), my financial status looked down upon (“oh, you’re living in Dulwich Hill, the OUTER inner west, that’s not really the inner west, you know!”), and a bunch of other gratingly superficial judgements presented as substitute for conversation, all from people who, frankly, I know can be better than that.  of course the flip-side is that i’m probably just being teased a bit and need to grow a thicker skin – a skin thickness I never seemed to need in Melbourne.

so it would seem my viewing life back in Sydney as an uncomfortably motivational transitionary step is working just fine!

Bob’s suggestion:

Here’s the better course. Let the market work. Allow Australian bookshops to purchase books from the cheapest source, an overseas or a local publisher. Liberate them to compete with overseas sites that don’t pay a GST when they sell books into the Australian market.

as i said in part 2 of my ‘Seeing REDgroup’ posts, i agree, it’s naive folly to ask for the Australian government to drop GST on book sales. (instead, in this era of rapidly growing citizen importation from offshore online retailers, Australian Customs should be drastically lowering the duty &/or GST exemption threshold (from its current $1000?), back to similar or lower levels prior to the introduction of the Liberal Party’s GST, and slapping a GST invoice of every box that comes into the country from offshore retailers.  in other words, welcome to Part 6278 of Globalisation.

but the most infuriating aspect of Bob Carr’s argument is that he has no answer to the reality that a substantial proportion of the income that Australian publishers – and their authors, and printers, etc – derive from the parallel import restrictions would be lost by their abolition!

i posted a comment in reply to Bob’s post, and another commenter summed up my argument nicely (if a little incredulously).  check it out.  i wanted to reply, but for whatever reason further comments on the post have been disabled.  i don’t like my argument either, but my point is, what’s the solution?

ideologically i hate the notion of the PIRs (which if you don’t know, force Australian retailers to buy books – be they Australian or from overseas – from Australian publishers, rather than directly from overseas publishers, resulting obviously in a substantial increase in the shelf RRP), just as much as i hate the notion of territorial copyright, but it’s not as if PIRs on books is unique to Australia.  The USA and UK, who have similar restrictions, would just love it if Australia dropped its PIRs and all our book retailers bought directly from them – its one less middleman in the RRP equation that gives them more cream on top.  They’re not even thinking about dropping their own PIRs, btw!

undoubtedly books would be cheaper in Australia if we didn’t have the PIRs.  but at what cost?  at what consequence to Australian publishing and authors?  many, if not most, Australian-authored books serve mainly an Australian audience.  as such, throwing them to the ‘wolves’ of USA-based authorship deals, whose figures are based on the assumption you’re aiming for the USA or UK-sized markets, rather than Australia’s comparatively minuscule market, just doesn’t add up to a viable income.

having lived through, and successfully come out the other end of REDgroup Retail’s administration period, i’ve become keenly aware of how easy it is to destroy a business – even a profitable one, and how difficult it can be to re-establish it.  my involvement was merely as a minor creditor, a supplier of IT consulting services to one small business within REDgroup.

despite being a viable entity, the liquidity it needed to see through its next 12 months disappeared last February, never to be seen again (and, surprise surprise, none of those ultimately responsible for REDgroup’s pathetic failure, nor those who owned it, were held accountable or liable for is major debts – everyone else, including me, had to pay for their failure as supposedly competent capitalists).  what followed was a nervous six months of limbo and delicate negotiations to find a new owner for this theoretically profitable business, so long as their pockets were deep enough to fund it over the hump of its annual income cycle.

but it wasn’t just the REDgroup group of companies threatened (and most of them liquidated), and not just small-fry creditors like me effected – it was the entire Australian and New Zealand book and calendar retail ecosystem effected.

this is why i get rather pissy when ideologues like Bob Carr (and several “you tell ‘em, Bob!” fans on his website) blithely condemn Australian book publishers, authors, and printers to dire and immediate threat, simply to achieve a “free market” economic ideology (removal of the PIRs) – despite existing in an industry where there is no such level playing field to start with, without coming up with an actual, demonstrable solution or alternative means to support Australian publishers and authors.

sure, eBooks and offshore online retailers (of physical books) are taking an ever-larger bite from Australian publishers & authors lunches anyway, and will – probably within 5 years – kill many of them.  but what’s the point of abolishing the PIRs, other than to THEORETICALLY lower Australian book RRP prices (far from guaranteed, given the New Zealand experience)?  who in Australia benefits from forcing this change in one short sharp shot, when the passage of a few short years will afford at least the opportunity (admittedly no guarantee) of a more organic adaptation of the industry to the quickly shifting landscape of book retailing?  why not give the Australian book industry the opportunity to get its eBook shit together, and allow eBooks several more years to overtake paper books sales, in a way that’s viable for Australian publishers and authors within the scale of Australia’s market?  by then the PIRs will be irrelevant anyway, but the industry will at least have had the years needed to transition.

a new catalytic converter – or at least the one i got – had a very distinctive chemical smell for at least several weeks after it was fitted.

for the last couple of months, i’ve noticed the exhaust getting progressively noisier – that airy hole-in-the-exhaust sound, and in the last couple of weeks a mechanical rattling of something that had presumably come loose.

so last week i booked the car in for a service & also to investigate what was wrong with the exhaust.  at the end of the day the mechanic reported that “the cat had to be replaced, under warranty” (because it was less than a year old, i guess).  beauty, i thought, fixed for nix!

but on the drive home from the shop (and several drives to/from work the rest of the week), it was obvious this supposedly new ‘cat’ was just as airy-noisy as the old one, just without the mechanical rattle.

and there didn’t seem to be the unmistakable smell of the previous replacement cat.

being preoccupied with life, i didn’t think too much about it, and just resigned myself to having them look at it again when it was scheduled to get 4 new tyres this week.

well it would seem i ACTUALLY have a new cat – it’s quiet, AND it smells like a new cat.

i’d previous judged my now-former mechanic to be fairly honest.  their prices have always seemed reasonable (unless spare part prices dictated otherwise).  sometimes they’ve been a bit flaky, but not discernibly dishonest.

this morning when i dropped the car off, the owner/manager was clearly having a heated disagreement with what appeared to be an insurance assessor, assessing a claim seemingly involving an accident in the manager/owner’s now-former business-partner’s car.  he was trying to bulldoze his way past the assessor’s job of working out if the insurer was liable or not, and doing what seemed like a pisspoor job of it – it was like watching a train wreck in slow motion.

every now and again you get little glimpses into other people’s lives, and sometimes get the impression that their life’s walls are crumbling down before your eyes.

meow.

p.s. i AM moving to Sydney!

now, I’m faced with the decision of whether to follow him to Sydney, or not.  WTF!??

you see, J, in his disenchantment with his now-former employer, started applying for jobs, particularly targeting places he actually wanted to work (as distinct from simply applying to places who just happened to be advertising on Seek or whatever).  in the interim, he accepted a 3 month contract with an agency, which he’s a few weeks into.

one of those leads was with a major globally-recognised web-based software company, BASED IN SYDNEY.  after a lengthy courtship, including a trip to Sydney at his own expense, he’s been offered the position, including significant assistance & reimbursement of relocation costs.  and now after several days of deliberating & number-crunching, he’s decided to accept it.  ignoring the bigger picture it’s almost a no-brainer, it’s a great opportunity that should directly facilitate his desire to live/work overseas in the web world a year or two hence.

but there IS a bigger picture.  those who know me know my thoughts on Sydney, and why I left there 11 years ago bound for Melbourne, and would understand my reluctance, or at least extreme ambivalence, to return, and in the process jeopardising my Melbourne-based client income.  (and for those who don’t know, no, it wasn’t for any of the classic reasons one usually flees a city (love/hate, STDs, parking fines), it was just, to cut a long story short, being totally over Sydney Life & needing a big change).

and there’s J’s youngest brother who lives with us, who’ll need to relocate – somewhere.

J starts at the new job in Sydney in mid-September, less than a month away.

suffice to say i’m a little shitty at J’s lack of consequential thinking.  although I was aware he’d applied, there was no “what if?” discussion if he were to be offered a job, and naturally need to start there within a month.  partly that’s because of his lack of self-confidence at landing a job with a high-flying company.  but partly it’s the reality of our ‘partnership’.

as you might remember, after I returned from Byron in April last year, I started hatching a plan; a plan that perhaps would’ve seen me living up there by now, perhaps continuing to service my clients remotely (with the assistance of a local pair of hands for on-site work), or perhaps doing something altogether different.

you might also remember that, shortly after I announced that intention, J “changed his mind”, and we rekindled what had begun & quickly ended 6 months earlier.  acknowledging that lightning doesn’t usually strike twice, there was still more than enough mutual attraction, interest & respect to “enjoy the ride together for however long it lasts”; which put my half-made plan to migrate north on hold.

well, now i need to balance “however long it lasts” with the financial feasibility AND desirability of moving back to Sydney.  don’t get me wrong, the last year with J has been totally joyful.  but, a man’s gotta pay the bills, too!

as far as my willingness to leave Melbourne, nothing has changed.  many of the friends I made in the first 5 years have left (or died), and 5 years of social stagnation from depression did nothing to rectify that situation.  whilst there’s still a few people here I’d really miss, there’s even more back in Sydney who are already rallying for my return!

it’s more than geographically closer to my intended destination, it’s a rut-busting move of similar proportions to the one that got me down here in the first place, and if there’s anyone who needs a comfortable, financially subsistent 11 year rut busted, it’s me!  1 to 2 years in Sydney (before J finally fulfils his overseas ambition, and I mine) could be just what I need to unsettle, stress and stretch me in hopefully positive ways, getting rid of some of the old, to make way for some of the new.

or am I just being a pathetic lapdog?

Dear Dell,

You are several kinds of idiot.

You also appear to think I am an idiot too, which I suppose makes sense given your idiotic disposition.

When I recently asked to buy a caddy for a hard-drive I wished to add to my Dell T410 server, you refused, cowardly hiding behind a  non-technically based “policy” preventing sale of a caddy-only (an item costing around $40), stating they could only be bought with a hard-drive.  So you quoted me one of the more expensive possible SAS hard-drives to accompany my caddy, $590, even though YOU KNEW I didn’t need a HDD and you could have quoted on the cheapest possible SATA HDD.

When I questioned this idiotic requirement, you hide behind “it’s Dell policy”, but are totally unable to explain or justify the policy.  I requested a phone call to discuss this situation, but all I received was another email from a difference faceless name repeating the Dell policy propaganda.  Hiding behind inexplicable policy is the last recourse of a dishonest business model, in this case one based on coercion & exploit of potentially ignorant customers.

I have since sourced a suitable caddy from an eBay seller (brand new, sealed in a box, which suggests Dell caddies CAN be bought without extortion from somewhere), and installed the extra hard-drive (which was originally from another Dell server).

Your idiocy and greed means you now get NOTHING, instead of something, and you should all be ashamed of yourselves for supporting this policy.

Yours sincerely,
Anthony May.
On behalf of [REDACTED].

when i first heard about Instagram last year, i rolled my eyes and thought “oh just what the world needs, another social networking app”.  ok, so this one’s focussed on photography, but still, at first it seemed like a bit of a yawn.

in a somewhat unexpected change of heart, shortly before J & I headed up to Byron I signed up for Instagram.  in retrospect, something subconscious was telling me it might be a good way to “remember to breathe”, by consciously looking at my heavenly surroundings, seeing how they could be photographically captured, and sharing it with the world.  and i’m glad i did!

you see, i’ve never really been into photography.  i’ve had digicams for a decade, but either i rarely remember to use them – even if i remember to have it with me – or i take shitty not-even-amateur shots with them anyway, and they gather dust in an obscure folder on my computer, diligently backed-up for years on end.

the best camera to use is the camera you have with you.  and most of the time that means my iPhone.  and being an iPhone4, it takes a bloody good picture considering it’s a camera in a device whose primary function is not taking photos.

if you haven’t got a clue what i’m taking about, Instagram is an iApp, it’s free, and it’s a lot like Twitter, but with pictures instead of short sharp sentences and without most of the bad attitude you find littered on Twitter.  you take a picture with your iPhone (or import a pic from any camera into your iPhone), choose it from the picture library, optionally apply one of several photographic filters to give it a classic analogue camera feel, give it a caption &/or a geotag/location, and then post it for all the world to see.  and you can do all that in less than 30 seconds.  you can cross-post to several other online services (Facebook, Twitter, Flickr, Tumblr, etc), and being automatically and instantly online, it’s always there to look back upon.

there’s a whole lot more could be said about Instgram’s features and community, but you can check that out for yourself.  there’s something else i’ve become even more aware of, thanks to Instagram, than i already was.

Who are the 21st Century Professional (that is, for money) Photographers?

there are a huge number of “gifted” photographers these days.  forgive me if i’m underselling truly talented, gifted photographers, but after cruising around Instagram (and especially Flickr.com) you quickly realise that there really are an awful lot of people out there who know how to take a good photograph (i’m not one of them!), get the lighting and composition right, apply filtering appropriately, and many other subtleties, not the least of which is seeing the world from a different perspective than simply having your head – and camera – six feet off the ground and hoping for the best.

for a long time i’ve seen this as a devaluing of the traditional role of both professional and amateur photographers.  and i still think this is true; some traditional avenues to make a living from photography have shrunk dramatically.

for one niche example, just ask my dear friend Peter, the eye behind PetezImagez, someone who’s been honing his skills for longer than the 17 years i’ve known him, spending untold thousands of dollars on up-market gear, and who’s all but given up trying to get people to pay for the ‘vox-pop’ pictures he’s regularly employed to take of drug-fucked party bois n girls at gay dance parties (including the world renown Mardi Gras parties), or the wanna-be-model portfolio pictures he obsesses over.

being good at something isn’t enough, especially when so many Tom’s, Dick’s and Harry’s can put up such solid competition armed with only a mid-range digicam and Photoshop Express.

but perhaps the internet has opened up new opportunities too?  public image-banks, self-publishing, and online media are all new avenues for deriving income from photography.

but i think it’s ultimately broadened the gulf between professional and amateur photography.  not in the quality of their output, but in the intent and marketing of their work.  countless people can walk around with a point-n-shoot and undermine the income of “2nd-job photographers”.

unless you’re working in publishing or event photography, it’s those who posses the combination of education, technique, artistry, and compelling visual material with entrepreneurial flair who’ll be the money-makers from the title Photographer from now on.

here’s a few thumbnails of my pics posted to Instagram!

by the time i got back from holidays, the silence was deafening on all of that.  turns out that plan turned to dogshit.  other plans may be afoot, but no ones sayin’.  deadlines for placing orders for calendars for next season are looming, and if missed, severely compromise the entire retail effort, and possibly the entire business, as well as many of the smaller local publishers whose sales come significantly from Calendar Club’s retail season.  one of those local publishers is my client#2.

the Voluntary Administrators aren’t going to sign purchase orders for several million dollars worth of calendars for a business that might not exist in 6 months time, so if a new owner with a plan doesn’t come to fruition fast, Calendar Club, several smaller/local calendar publishers, and me, are in dogshit too.

suddenly i’m staring into an abyss of “what the fuck will i do if this all turns to dogshit?”.  i can’t easily survive without client#1, and client#1′s failure might have repercussions on client#2 (more than they already have), which might have additional repercussions on me.

options:  find new clients of a similar vein; or do something completely different.

despite 11 years of self-employment, i’ve barely had to lift a finger to get the handful of clients that i’ve maintained to this day, so finding new ones is just as daunting an option as doing something altogether different.  regular readers will remember i pondered these issues almost exactly 12 months ago, as part of a plan to relocate to Byron Bay.  i’m ashamed to say, i’ve done nothing toward that goal, lulled into complacency & distraction by the rekindling with J.

coincidentally, J is facing the same decision, but for mostly different reasons: tired of his status quo, frustrated by colleagues who don’t share his progressive ideas on UI/UX, but so far not finding a new job opportunity that would satisfy his desire to work in a manner, and with people, who share his views on UI/UX.

we’ve both been reading/listening to various people – industry ‘elites’ even in their own modest way – who’ve risen above similar situations and created for themselves situations where they, for the most part at least, have true independence from the vagaries & occasional stupidity of bosses/clients.  i suspect we’re both mulling over options on how to emulate their success.  it’s times like these i regret not getting into web technologies at any time over the last decade – if I had, we’d probably make a great team (professionally speaking) right about now.

i don’t suffer from real insomnia very often at all, but tonight would be one :-(

ok so i’m a bit late to the Lets-All-Realise-Everett-Bogue-Is-Suffering-From-Naivety-And-Megalomania Party. that’s fashionable, right?

i’ve been reading some minimalist stuff lately & it’s been impossible to avoid seeing Everett Bogue popping up everywhere.  so i read some of him too.  before too long, i couldn’t shake the impression that Everett Bogue is just another insufficiently read/educated GenYer who thinks he’s the first person to discover something, but had the nous to capitalise on it and get a bunch of Fellow Seekers to pay him to live The Good Life – for the time being at least.

congratulations Mr Bogue, you’re a the top of a tiny pyramid scheme.  you’ve successfully discovered the ‘secret’ of countless shonks before you.

my best friend spent a year traveling the world – minimalist style – in 1996, and maintain that low-possession-count lifestyle in two of Australia’s busiest & most capitalist/consumerist cities, until his untimely death a few years ago.  minimalism wasn’t anything new then, and it sure as frak isn’t anything new now, although for sure the lessons can be carried into the digital realm.

but inherent in that low-possession-count ethos was an underlying reliance on other people’s possessions typically via living in a room with other housemates WHO PROVIDED MOST OF THE FURNITURE. and fridge. and ice cube trays.  when we took a holiday in Byron Bay, who do you think brought the beach towels?!!

Everett brags about how little he owns on his site.  i couldn’t help but notice there’s no refrigerator.  or beanbag.  who supplies those?  i’m guessing someone else.  that’s not minimalism, that’s an externality of the likes that any economic rationalist would be very proud.

fuckminimalism.com ? no, fuck you, Mr Bogue.  i understood the core of (and resonated with) minimalism from one brief conversation with my best friend 15 years ago.  i didn’t need to (and thankfully now can’t) spend $17 on your ebook to tell me what can be gleaned – for free – from hundreds of honest, well-meaning people.

and us$47 for your Minimalist Business ebook? yer kidding right?  i haven’t bought an ebook for more than $15 from highly talented writers who had something NEW to say.  no surprise you ignored my tweet politely asking why Minimalist Business cost so much.  so much for Twitter being the best way to communicate with you.

as for this $25/month letter.ly cybernetic yogi shit, omg, that’s where you really lost me. as above, just another GenY kid so far up his own fundamental orifice he can’t see that he’s stumbled on what’s already been discovered long ago.  the abundance of nonsense cyber-infused new-age terminology won’t work on those who’ve seen it all before.  Facebook out – Twitter in?  fuck me, you sound like a vacuous fashion queen of the most objectionable kind.

Everett Bogue IS what i consider convergence; or history repeating itself, depending on how generous you feel today.

p.s. contrary to you bragging about your google rank for ‘cybernetic yogi’ etc, this (leanmeanminimalist.com) site and 4 others ripping you a new one, were the first 5 hits when i googled “cybernetic yogi”. i pray that when i click on Image search i’ll see a cartoon Yogibear who’s been altered by the Borg.

mwah!

Past

In one simple innocent statement, my partner highlighted the outstanding success of applying “pop-up retailing” to calendars, first brought to Australia in the mid-90s by Paul Breen, licensing the USA-based ‘Calendar Club’ brand and seasonal pop-up retailing concept.

Back then, and apparently still in many countries, wall and desk calendars were either low-value things that businesses gave away to their customers, a cunning exchange of vaguely themed utility for under-the-radar advertising; or “high end” products in niche retail outlets.

Nowadays, calendar retailing is worth several tens of $M (in Australia), forged in large part by Paul Breen’s tireless efforts to convince shopping mall managers to allocate open floor space for short term rental where – voila! – overnight in October/November a ‘kiosk’ appears at your local mall lined with every type of calendar you could possibly want.  They made easy gifts, Christmas ‘stocking fillers’ for those whom you just CBF’d buying anything more meaningful.  I’ve received a few over the years!

The trick to getting people to part with up to $25 per calendar, where previously they were free from your local mechanic / dentist / etc – is personalisation and self-expression.  The burgeoning range of wall and desk calendars catered to almost every social niche, from every breed of faithful dog and fluffy cat, to side-splittingly funny Gary Larson cartoons.  A calendar hung in the home or office signalled to others what you were ‘into’, and provoked conversation.  Oh, and you could also record what you had to do next week – if you remembered to look at it.

Present

However I believe that gravy train is slowly running out of steam.  I have no insider knowledge of sales or returns, but my hunch is they’ve been either plateaued or been slightly falling for a few years, a drop that’s either been masked by Calendar Club’s progress toward market saturation (geographically, the number of stores open each Christmas retail season), or unfairly attributed to the 2008 GFC & low consumer confidence statistics.  Or both.  I believe there’s another – perhaps bigger – culprit.

We’re nearly 4 years into the smartphone boom, heralded by the Apple iPhone first available in June 2007.  Until then Palm Pilot, Windows Mobile & Blackberry PDAs & smartphones were the sole preserve of geeks &/or geeky businessmen.  Among countless other things, a smartphone gives you a calendar that typically syncs with your desktop/laptop computer(s) including your corporate email/calendar/contacts system, and actively reminds you of imminent appointments.  Add the outstanding success of the iPad a year ago, followed by viable competition to the iPhone (Google’s Android, Palm/HP’s WebOS, Blackberry, Windows Phone 7) and “suddenly” a whole lot of people have a lot less reason to record their plans on a traditional calendar trapped on a desk or nailed to a wall, especially those intended for the office or home-office.

This ubiquity of high-tech calendars has only just begun, and I believe signals the beginning of the end for physical paper calendars.

Future

Sourcing calendars from publishers all over the world, Calendar Club is justified in having the tagline “The Best Selection Of Calendars In The Known Universe”.  But as the retail end-point for many calendar publishers and image banks, Calendar Club’s ability to capitalise on that imagery needs to move with the times – into the digital space.

Calendar Club needs to tackle the smartphone, pad / tablet / slate, & computer calendar reality head on.

Other than the same disease that’s beset most old-media for the past decade, there’s nothing preventing Calendar Club from creating their own software calendar ‘apps’, featuring the same imagery from their paper counterparts.  As a major multi-national paper calendar retailer, they already have the relationships with the calendar publishers & image banks necessary to garner trust to take this step into the digital domain.  It isn’t just Calendar Club who stands to rise or fall on this issue, it’s the entire ecosystem of paper calendar publishing.

Imagine a smartphone app that features all the crowd-pleasing imagery that modern paper calendars are known for, seamlessly integrating into the phone’s built-in calendar system (that syncs with your desktop/laptop computer or office groupware system).

People want to customise their smartphones for exactly the same reason they were willing to blow $25 on a dozen sheets of paper with cool pictures – especially given the ubiquity of Apple’s one-size-fits-all iPhone & iPad where there’s zero ability to ‘theme’ the built-in calendar app.  Part of the appeal of ‘jailbreaking’ an iPhone/iPad is the ability to customise the UI, and – for better or worse – Android and other smartphones offer that ability to customise.

If Calendar Club doesn’t take the lead and bring great themed imagery into digital calendars, someone else surely will.

The failure of REDgroup is ‘A Perfect Storm’ writ large.  They were saddled with major debt right form the start, have been financially squeezed from every corner, but more than anything else they’ve compounded their problems with a sequence of bad decisions made by “bovver-boy” managers installed at the expense of losing their inherited experienced staff, thinking that the book publishing and retailing industry would yield to corporate thug tactics, or that consumers would be the slightest bit interested in buying barbecues from Borders.  One could argue that PEP made a mistake even buying the beleaguered (Borders) chain in the first place.  Alas, 20-20 hindsight comes easily.

Books are a sacred miracle of human evolution, representing that quantum leap from storing information only in our heads to be re-told to our descendants in stories, song and teachings, to miraculous devices that are easily and cheaply copied with fidelity, allowing an author, perhaps dead millennia ago on another continent, to speak directly into our head.

But where we buy books (and many other things) from is anything but sacred – most of us don’t give a toss, we just want to pay a fair price, and if Amazon et.al. can sell & ship it to me for up to 50% less than Borders or A&R can, where do you think I’m going to go?  And if I can have a book without a single tree being felled… hello?!?

It was this ‘revolution’ in book publishing that was partly responsible for lifting of the veil of the Dark Ages, a fundamental shift in humanity’s course.  Why should a significant refinement in how books are made, delivered and read also not have a significant impact on society again now? It’s not like I have a vendetta against bricks-n-mortar book retailers, but we simply don’t need as many of them as we used to, and will continue to need less of them as more people buy online and switch to eBooks.  Blacksmiths and shoe repairers died out because we didn’t need them any more.  So too will many categories of brick-n-mortar retailers, and hopefully coal miners.  That’s unavoidable progress.

REDgroup isn’t the first retailer to face the 21st Century and fail.  It won’t be the last.  But relative to its book retailing peers, it fell *now* because it made a bunch of bad decisions by people who didn’t understand the subtle, respectable, low-profit-margin art of bookselling.

And I’ve learned a lesson in being dependant, albeit indirectly, on an Old Media business failing to meet the challenges of the 21st Century.  But I’ll talk more about that in a forthcoming post, whose working title is “The Future Of Calendar Club”.

Angus & Robertson have been around way over a century (albeit with a litany of former owners in its more recent decades), with a long and respected reputation for selling quality books in a demure manner by demure middle-aged ladies wearing sensible shoes in demurely designed book stores.  From cities to countless regional towns, they brought quality books to every corner of Australia, the Everyman’s bookseller.  They’re classic Old Media, and they sold just one product category, and – until the last several years – did it fairly well.

Borders, the hip young USA brand that Gen-X & younger oozed over in the 90s and early 00s for its multimedia retailing tour de force – not just a massive range of books, but music (pressing a few buttons to sample any CD on headphones was a revelation!), DVDs, glossy magazines & more, in large, plush, comfortable stores with its very own cafe, seemed to take the book retailing world by storm.  Clearly Borders was commoditised American economic imperialism propagating across the world like a virus, but unless you were wedded to your local indie bookstore and studying a double arts degree, visiting Borders was like a guilty pleasure, but without the guilt.

The only way these two could be less different would be to compare them to Woolworths or KMart, or an indie one-store bookshop up the proverbial street, whose rickety floor-to-ceiling shelves feel like they’re about to collapse in a plume of dusty old-school dignity.  But despite their obvious differences, two pillars – the oldest and the newest – of the Australian book retail world have suffered the same fate at the same time.  What on Earth went wrong?

When Borders entered Australia in the late-90s, the two were genuine competitors with unrelated owners, and quite different business models.  But for individual reasons, both came under the ownership of Pacific Equity Partners (PEP), who formed REDgroup Retail to hold them, alongside Whitcoulls in New Zealand (and other sundry non-book entities).  By this stage, the wheels were already wobbling.

My guess is these two very different businesses were originally seen as complementary; A&R serves the Everyman, and Borders served lattes to the hipsters.  Unfortunately the devil is in the detail.  Borders AU/NZ/Sing were already in serious debt when snapped up by PEP, and A&R were headed down the same path.  Not surprisingly, two negative cash flows do not make for a positive cash flow, and under this growing mountain of debt (now totalling some $130M !!!) some truly horrible things have been done to both brands in a desperate futile attempt to stem the flow of borrowed money.

There’s been a bookshelf of words written this past week about REDgroup entering voluntary administration & who’s to blame.  Some of them hold water, some of them are utter nonsense, and some I’m really not remotely qualified to comment on.  Fell free to tell me which ones I got wrong!

• Much hoohar has erupted over the claim by REDgroup’s CEO that the parallel import restrictions were a significant contributor in REDgroup’s demise.  However, given that (a) many of their books were marked ABOVE the Australian RRP (ie. they can’t have been too concerned about discounted books from offshore retailers), and (b) REDgroup’s own submission to the Productivity Commission in 2009 recommended KEEPING the PIRS, this is all clearly bumkum smokescreening.  According to Henry Rosenbloom from Scribe Publishing, the US and UK don’t allow parallel imports either, and if Australia were to do so it would have severe implications for local publishers, authors and printers, to the benefit of their overseas counterparts.

• That GST should be applied to offshore imports, or be exempted from certain domestic retail categories, to “level the playing field”. This one’s gotta be the ultimate scapegoat, and Gerry Harvey had his hat handed to him in the court of public opinion in January this year trying on this furphy.  Suggesting that some select few endangered species of the Australian retailer genus should be GST-exempt is mind-boggling.  AS IF the Australian Government is about to do away with a major component of its GST income – the GST targets the retail level!  Online retail – from both national and offshore retailers – has steadily grown in the last decade from obscurity to significance.  In 5-10 years when I can try on a digital pair of jeans on my digital avatar and check for proper fit & see what they’ll look like from a virtual mirror on my high-resolution monitor, or point my smartphone at the corner of the room to project an image of a new sofa to see if it’ll fit in my room, and click a button to have it delivered, clearly the scope of what can practically be bought online is only going to grow, so why on earth would the Government set a precedent for slitting its wrists & slowly bleeding to death?

• That too much of Borders stock was inappropriate for Australian readers’ tastes.  Maybe.  As Patrick Carr says on Newmatilda.com, Borders “sacrificed profitability for market share. They poured huge money into extensive stockholdings. Their hope was that if they stocked everything, shoppers wouldn’t look elsewhere.”  Unfortunately that didn’t work out so well, and I’m guessing that’s behind a lot of the $130M about to be written off by banks, publishers, and other creditors (everyone except their owners, PEP).  Whilst it was a correctable problem, paying off the debt from that catastrophic error when it’s already a tough market obviously wasn’t possible.  But it doesn’t explain Angus & Robertson’s equal lock-step demise…

• That the honourable centenarian Angus & Robertson have been disrespectfully relegated to bargain-bin & best-seller-pulp status, undermining the value of their time-honoured brand.  If you narrow your range to pulp, don’t be surprised when customers buy pulp for a fraction of the price from Woolworths or Amazon/et.al.  But how did that happen?  Perhaps extorting smaller local publishers for an additional $2.5k to $20k to stock their books might’ve had something to do with them deserting the once respected chain, leaving A&R without unique compelling product?

• There’s just so much more entertainment available now, and so much more competition for our disposable dollar & attention.  Even a mere two decades ago we consumed media distributed by news papers and magazines, TV, movies, music (vinyl/CD), and that was about it.  Computer/video games were niche, and there was no (recognisable) Internet/WWW.  Nowadays we have a smorgasbord of tech to keep us entertained & distracted on a whim anywhere, and all of them are seriously challenging the old-school old-media business models of physically-distributed media with territorial copyright licensed to 3rd-party distributors, or highly regulated & gate-keepered traditional electronic media.  Whilst the pie has grown much larger along with our prosperity, the number of ways that entertainment pie is now sliced has exploded.  We are reading less books.

• No one’s talking about this one, but it can’t have helped matters that REDgroup made the tragic mistake several years ago of being convinced that SAP would be a good thing for their business IT infrastructure.  Surely a swish new world-class enterprise management system would make things better, right?  Did no one at REDgroup do their homework and read about the litany of over-budget & over-time SAP implementations scattered across the world in the previous decade??  Books have been written and websites dedicated to documenting their spectacular failures.  As other smaller entities in REDgroup came to make major IT infrastructure decisions in recent years, SAP was given a wide berth, for fear of crippling their own business with a grossly expensive and agonisingly slow development cycle.  Aside from that, any IT department that has a two week waiting list to delegate an internet domain name for their own online ecommerce store (something that can be actioned in 5 minutes) has way bigger problems than being duped by blowhard SAP salesmen.

• eBooks & eReaders are taking a share. Yes, but I suspect this one’s a trivial component dwarfed by the other factors, but no doubt it’ll grow into a major additional bite in the coming years.

• Let me drop two dirty words in the book industry: self-publishing and eBooks.  Thy time approaches.

Despite all the posturing to the contrary (by retailers & luddite consumers alike), there’s a heap of stuff you can confidently buy from reputable online retailers, Australian & overseas, many of whom DO offer genuinely good service, without needing to actually see, touch, try on, or spend any time whatsoever in mind-numbingly sterile malls offering the same narrow set of brands everywhere.

Until the early 2000s, Australian Customs *did* levy import duties on some stuff I bought overseas.  I don’t know what the dollar amount threshold was, but when combined with the cost of shipping from overseas, and the exchange rate below $0.60 to the US1$, it usually made it a more expensive proposition than shopping locally, and thus relegated offshore retail to stuff you just couldn’t get locally.

But that world is gone.  For unrelated reasons the US & AU dollar are virtually parity, international shipping can often be quite reasonable, and there’s now no import duty or GST applied to imported goods totalling less than au$1000.  Now I can go on a clothes or sneaker shopping spree – online – and have several hundred dollars worth of stuff (which would cost anything up to double from Australian bricks-n-mortar retailers) and have it all shipped to me for $20-50, still making it a clear financial win.

Is it wrong that overseas retailers don’t have GST applied to their sales?  Absolutely.  I mean c’mon!  In this globalised age where anyone can buy stuff from anywhere else on the planet so easily, why shouldn’t the Government apply GST?  A better question is why don’t they.  My theory is in the ideology of the GST itself.  The GST forced nearly every Australian business to become a tax collector for the Government.  It spread the administrative burden far wider (though about the same thickness for all), whereas the previous Wholesale Sales Tax regime involved at least an order of magnitude fewer Australian businesses and virtually no individuals.  Clearly corralling retailers across the planet into becoming GST collectors for the Australian government would be Mission Impossible (even if legal), so having it levied by Australian Customs at the import waypoint is the only practical option, basically slapping an invoice on every box before local delivery.  With such a cavalier attitude to turning every Tom, Dick and Harriet businessperson into a GST collector for the Government, it’s no surprise that the (Howard) Government wanted to divest itself of the administrative burden of applying and chasing import duties from a strongly growing citizen import tendency.  A decade ago Amazon was just a distant blip on the radar.  Now, with zero import duty/GST and a steadily strengthening AU$, it’s a serious bite out of not just local retailers’ income, but Government’s too.

But lets not make the mistake of thinking the lack of GST applied to consumer importation accounts for the attraction of buying from offshore eretailers.  It doesn’t.  As I said above, the price of much of the stuff I buy offshore can be nearly half that of local retailers.  Even the addition of 10% GST, or more, wouldn’t level that ‘playing field’.

In any nationally competitive industry, prices stabilise at a value that lets all the links in the retail chain make at least a workable profit.  Australia is a small population, spread out over a massive continent.  Out retail prices reflect primarily the ‘economy of scale’ of our comparatively tiny population, and often the cost of shipping product over our vast distances to tiny towns.  So when Europeans and Americans come here and bitch about the price of everything, well, that’s in large part because they come from a country/region with a much higher population, and population density, among other factors.  Get over it.

Maybe you’re more a Readings type of bookworm, one of the few who likes to go to a bookshop who actually reads through several pages of a book, shake hands with the author, AND then buys it from the shop at whatever price they decide to charge.I’m not.  I buy books based on recommendations from my social network, reviews, and occasionally author reputation, in which case I don’t need a physical shop to visit.  Seems I’m in good – or at least voluminous – company.

The reality is that so much of what we buy has become so commoditised, we don’t care where we buy it, “value adding” is often irrelevant, we just want it for a fair price, and we’d especially prefer not to pay the inflated price of faux-discount retailers who use expensive TV advertising.  How can all the existing bricks-n-mortar retailers with expensive mall rents, extensive multi-site IT & POS infrastructures, and a vast staff with structured management spanning a state or country ever compete with a website operated from an ‘invisible’ office-with-warehouse out in a cheap suburb with no public shareholders to please?  Ruslan Kogan is laughing all the way to the bank on this business model!

“Dear Myer, thanks for prompting me to find that expensive moisturiser online for 40% less than you, with free delivery to my door.”

While numerous Australians were worrying if their $15M worth of Angus & Robertson, or Borders gift certificates would be honoured by the chains’ new undertakers, that’s what I tweeted this afternoon, inbetween worrying whether my No.1 client will be (a) able to pay me money owed & (b) be allowed by the new administrators of REDgroup Retail (owners of Borders AU & NZ & Singapore, Angus & Robertson, Whitcoulls (NZ), & my client Calendar Club AU & NZ who are the only profitable business in REDgroup) to continue using my services.

But I’m getting ahead of myself – we’ll come back to REDgroup…

I’m referring to the mindless smoke-screen kicked up last January by Gerry Harvey & his whiny band of helpless billionaire retailers bemoaning that the world is changing and GST-avoiding online offshore retailers are slowly killing them and somehow it’s up to us, or the government, or someone, ANYONE ELSE BUT THEMSELVES, to save them.

I dunno why it’s taken me seven years, but when I noticed my Biotherm Homme moisturiser running low recently it occurred to me that maybe I could find this stuff online for a helluvalot less than Myer charge for it. Sure enough, I let my google do the walking and spent ten minutes getting a rough idea of who’s who in the online cosmetics retail scene, and placed an order for the same thing for 40+% less than Myer.  A week later it was delivered to my door – free (i.e. no additional charge).

No longer must I wade through that excruciating cacophony of smells, and fight off the obsequiously friendly staff who insist on offering me “package deals” of shit I don’t want or asking to sign me up to some loyalty program every freakin time I walk in there that’ll invariably add more crap to my letterbox/inbox, and have to pay above-RRP for this so-called ‘premium shopping experience’.  Now I’m paying at least 15% less than I was for the same product seven years ago.  I’m still loyal to the brand and product – but not the retailer.

And before you get angry at me for buying expensive moisturiser when supposedly “the cheap stuff is just as good”, I beg to differ. ’nuff said.

I routinely buy lots of stuff online: gadgets / tech / software, sneakers / clothes, books / music / tv / movies (almost all digital now, not physical), and sporadic other stuff for myself or gifts.  But it’d never occurred to me to buy such an obvious fit for online retailing – cosmetics – until now (dumb), thanks to Gerry Harvey’s bleating (dumber).

gotta love my Mum, like many her generation, they still think forwarding jokes via email is a nifty thing to do :)

every once in a while one of these jokes will really get me giggling, like this morning.

While suturing up a cut on the hand of a 75 year old farmer, whose hand had been caught in the gate while working his cattle, the doctor struck up a conversation with the old man. Eventually the topic got around to Julia Gillard, and her being our prime minister.

The  old farmer said, “Well, ya know, Julia is just a Post Tortoise.”

Not being familiar with the term, the doctor asked,  “What’s a “Post Tortoise?”

The old farmer replied, “When you’re driving down a  country road and you come across a fence post with a Tortoise balanced on top, that’s a post Tortoise.”

The old farmer saw the puzzled look on the doctor’s face so he continued to explain. “You know she didn’t get up there by herself, she doesn’t belong up there, she doesn’t know what to do while she’s up there, she sure as hell isn’t goin’ anywhere, and you just wonder what kind of dumb bastard put her up there in the first place.”

:D

it’s not like i have an attic with a lifetime’s collection of McDonalds wrappers, scifi action figures, & milk bottle foil tops, but despite the periodic shedding of junk that’s inevitable after a lifetime of house-moving every few years inculcated from my parent’s lifestyle (a story for another day), i still tend to accumulate more stuff than i ever need or are likely to use in the foreseeable future.

despite what i like to think of as a less-than-normal compliance to the consumerist lifestyle, there’s a few exceptions:  clothes, movie/tv media, & technology.  today i worked on my wardrobe.  i’ve given several bags of clothes to the Salvo’s over the last 4 years since i moved in here, and turfed a bunch of sneakers only recently, but after a couple of hours this afternoon, this is what i had culled:

3 of those piles are well over a foot high, more than 3 full garbage bags of jeans/pants, shorts, tshirts, shirts, jackets & hoodies, underwear, belts, beanies…  and i’m not done yet.  it’s less than half my wardrobe, stuff that’s either too small, too big, worn out, styled-out, or i never liked it in the first place.  hopefully the Salvo’s can find a new home for it.

i’m getting rid of this shit that’s been not just taking up space, space that i probably won’t have as much of in the new place with J, but a constant visible reminder of of the last 10 years of my life, some of which is good, but some not so much.  to make way for the new, you’ve gotta get rid of the old, literally and psychologically.

and that’s just my wardrobe.  i’ve got two draws of ‘emotional baggage’, & an office full of past-life techyjunk.  i can’t wait to shed more shit!

i’ve been reading some minimalist lifestyle bloggers recently, something that i think might go hand-in-hand with life Up North (or even a nomadic life).  perhaps i’m taking my first step toward that…

metaphorically, of course, i haven’t visited one of those places where you’re likely to come home with more than you expected in quite a while.  oh wait…  um, nevermind.  i’ve been living in this 2 bedroom flat for over 4 years now.  i spent the majority of my ‘depression years’ here, and for the last 18 months i’ve felt the ‘itchy feet’ urge to move elsewhere; possibly on my own still, or possibly sharing with a friend.  i haven’t really understood why i’ve had that urge, until recently.

J & i have decided to move in together.

it’s a fairly monumental decision and change for me.  i’ve been single for more years than i care to admit.  and i’ve lived in a place on my own for 3/4 of the decade+ i’ve lived in Melbourne.

J & i have been getting along really well these past several months.  i love spending time with him, and always crave more.  we never argue or fight about anything, which is kinda weird given what a crotchety, tetchy, old curmudgeon i can be!  without any mutual discussion on our part, we always try to do different stuff, eat at different places, and get away for weekends – mutual rut avoidance.  as a former depressive, this is hugely beneficial for me – a partial definition of depression IS being in a rut.

though it wasn’t a straight-forward decision.  there’s advantages to us keeping things as they are.  J’s youngest brother, T, will be living with us, likely until mid-next year.  and his middle brother, C, is planning to move to Oz within the next year, and his mother might follow, too.  it’s likely C will need to live with us for a while too, until he gets on his feet.  with J still sharing with his ex, & his youngest brother T, & the likelihood of C replacing T next year, my place has been & would become even more a refuge for J away from all that.

regardless, another factor came into the decision.  aside from simply wanting to spend more time together, i want to make the most of however long we have together.  i’ve written in a previous post that J & i have quite different medium/long-term goals.  J wants to head overseas to live & work for a year or three.  i want to move to the NSW Northern Rivers area.  they’re not exactly compatible, sympathetic directions :).  but neither of us are in the right situation to do that, yet.  but in a year or three could well be a possibility, and i doubt i can postpone my deepest desire to move up there much longer than that.  hence, carpe diem.

after only 1 weekend of house-hunting, our first application was successful, and we’ve signed a lease on a 3 bedroom apartment in Richmond.  when pretending to be a gay couple while house-hunting with my friend A2 twice before, gay couples really do seem to be attractive to agents/landlords – it’s the quickest and most painless house-hunting process i’ve ever gone through!  if that hippy-spiritualist ethos – which goes something like “if it’s meant to be, The Universe will provide” – is anything to go by, perhaps we’re on the right track?

as my mind navigates the myriad issues & stuff to organise for the move, i’m buoyed by the potential & possibilities of this fundamental change, of shedding hopefully the last vestiges of old/bad/unhelpful habits & routines that infiltrated my life during The Depression Years, and taking the plunge with J.

though integrating two Mac geek’s stuff aint gonna be easy!

when i returned from a month of holidays up north, i started hatching a plan to live up there permanently, in perhaps a year or so.  it involves developing new skills (or exploiting old ones) to create new source(s) of income, to replace what would undoubtedly be a loss of income – partial, or total eventually – if i were to move away from my Melbourne-based clients.  that, and also to get into stuff that i hope i’ll be a lot more passionate about than i am now about small-biz IT consulting.

then J turned my life upside down (again), and for the last few months we’ve been rekindling what we began late last year.  that journey is progressing nicely :)

but i use the word journey deliberately.

J & i have started brainstorming ideas, for web-service &/or iDevice apps.  we briefly talked about doing this a year ago, and was one of the avenues i was considering taking recently.  whilst these ‘ideas’ may or may not generate revenue, they’ll certainly develop the skills that should lead to further projects.  going down this path with someone so talented in the visual & UI/UX area is a major bonus.  going down this path with someone who also shares my bed is also kinda cool ;) [& yeah, i know, fraught with danger]

but as i mentioned in that earlier post, J & i have quite different medium/long-term goals, at least geographically speaking.  J wants to go live & work overseas for a year or three, likely Europe or the USA.  i on the other hand have a burning desire for a sea/tree change in Byron Shire.

where this journey will go or end is totally unknown to both of us, an open question, a journey with no set destination.  and i think i’m starting to like that.

since then there’s been an explosion of ‘gay dating’ iPhone/iPad apps (they don’t like that term, they prefer ‘social networking’ – yeahwhatever) – most of them new, nimble upstarts with little to lose & everything to gain from ‘first mover’ opportunity – that’ve surely been eating into the big-boy’s revenue, particularly Grindr, who offer essentially the same basic service with the hugely engaging & useful ‘location awareness’ features, for free, or a few $/month for Push Notifications of messages & no ads.

well wadda ya know, Gaydar finally came out with an iPhone app a couple of months ago, and guess what? no premium fee to use it, over & above normal paid membership!  unfortunately version 1 was a pretty poor effort, but i guess the only way is up ;). (i haven’t looked at it since)

i’m aware that Manhunt.net – another of the web-based ‘big boys’ – also have an iPhone app in the works, and are working through the agony of complying with Apple’s puritanical ‘decency’ conditions.

the question remains though, is this too little too late?  i estimate it’ll be 6+ months before Gaydar’s iPhone app will reach some reasonable level of useful maturity, and you still need to be a paid member, a price well above any of the iPhone newcomers.  Manhunt remain to be seen on the mobile.

have the new kids on the iPhone block (and other mobile platforms) stolen too much mindshare for the big-boys to recover their losses?  or will the big-boy’s superior established large-scale infrastructure & reliability be matched by an eventual maturing of their iApp offerings and leave the new kids in second place?

last October 09 i “woke up” and realised that the ground of life was rapidly rising to meet my slo-mo free-fall.  the consequences of 5 years of blocking out life in a haze of THC smoke loomed like a tsunami  SFX in Hollywood movie.  thus began a tumultuous process of getting my life back into sobriety, balance, positivity & connection.

i quit dope cold turkey, which was a huge step forward in clearing my head to re-engage with life.  curiously, this was easier than one might have expected, though i can’t really explain why.  i guess i’d been in the pot-hole-of-depression long enough to finally realise that nothing was going to change, until i changed.

i saw a psychologist for several months, turning over several of the rocks in my mental garden to see what scurried out.  i can see now there were significant contributors dating back at least 10-12 years (5-7 years before Dysthymia struck), all of which layered additively, like blankets over my life’s fire.  sometimes it’s helpful to simply become aware that specific factors in your past have had an impact you were previously unaware of, and sometimes you need to dissect things a little more.  that’s where a qualified psychologist can really help.  i may yet go back for more, if and when i feel the need to peel away some more layers of my onion.  the $80/session Medicare rebate certainly helped there, too!

getting back into my physical self has also been critical.  it’s hard to beat the natural high that comes from a mildly exhausting cardio or gym workout at least a few days each week, especially when it’s one of the first things i do in the day, it leaves me feeling good for the rest of the day, and helps with sleep, too.  sure, it’s hard to break old lazy habits and establish momentum, but i just take it one day at a time, and i don’t berate myself if i miss a day’s scheduled exercise.

having several friends who have used or currently use anti-depressants, i carefully weighed up that option for myself.  i believe they can be of tremendous benefit, even necessity, for some people.  but my gut instinct was that my issues were more – for want of a better word – situational & attitudinal than brain-biochemical, and thus far i’m not regretting that decision.  i’m also wary of the “life on ADs is ‘nice’. nice can kinda suck though” factor, as articulated so eloquently by my friend Richo.

and last but not least, there’s the people factor.  one of those ‘blankets’ over my life of the previous 5 years has been a major erosion of my ‘inner circle’ of friends for a bunch of reasons, leaving me feeling isolated and restless.  i don’t make friends easily or quickly, so it’s a slow process, but i’ve pushed myself to connect with new people, and reconnect with some ‘lapsed’ friends.  it makes a hell of a difference.  it’s nice to complain of not having enough hours in the day when the main reason (other than work) is time spent with friends, instead of time spent in the pot-hole-of-depression in front of the tv!

it’s an ongoing process, a work in progress, and some say that’ll always be so (i’m not so sure about that).  but it’s a state of mind so different to where i was only a year ago, it’s starting to feel like a receding memory.  my spiral upwards out of depression and the things that propel it bear a curious symmetry (equal but opposite) to the habits that dragged me down into it years ago.  i couldn’t have done it without the support & understanding of my friends & clients alike, a professional psychologist, and a huge bunch of awesomely inspirational people on Twitter :).

it’s his birthday today, and a bunch of his inner circle & family are descending on Melbourne for a warm dinner of reminiscing & laughs, should be a great night, & brunch with some of them again tomorrow.

call me lucky (particularly with the AIDS epidemic deaths of the 90s), but other than my grand parents, Tony is by far the closest person i’ve lost to the randomness of death.

we met at the Flinders Hotel (twinkville, ah those were the days ;), one dark wintery night in ’95.  my version of the story is that it was him who tried to pick me up, tho he always politely begged to differ, as apparently it was me who offered my phone number first ;).  whilst we never actually got around to doing what two gay guys do so readily, thus began the closest and most intimate friendship i think i’ve ever had.

Tony was awesome.  i could list two dozen superlative adjectives right off the top of my head now and still not come close to doing him justice.  despite having an enormous circle of friends all over the world and Australia from his extensive travels, somehow he was able to make each one feel like the most important person in the world, when ever he was able to spend time with them – and he always went out of his way to do so.  i often felt a little intimidated that despite having so many extraordinary friends from such diverse walks of life, i held a place in his life that few did.

out of the blue one day around christmas 2005, he pensively confessed he was in love with me.  i was gobsmacked.  why now, after a decade of friendship?  such is the mystery of love.  whilst he was the closest person to me in the world, and i loved him greatly, it just wasn’t that kind of love.  but could it grow to become that, given this prod, this opportunity with a man who had such a huge heart?  i’m ashamed to say, i never gave it a chance.  and for many months our friendship suffered, including a very awkward holiday to Perth & Byron Bay a month later.

time passed and wounds healed, and Tony’s heart moved on – though sadly, to someone else who didn’t reciprocate his love.  in that, Tony & I were also alike, having not found true equal love for great stretches of our lives.

i’ll never know now if that could’ve worked for us.  but i wish it had.

Happy Birthday my dearest Tony.