Stateside

If you had told me two years ago that one day I’d be excited about a trip to the United States of America, you might have got a multi-faceted reaction from me. One facet would have been scoffing at your obvious miscalculation of my enthusiasm of the US. Another facet would have been wondering by what authority you purported to be bringing information from the future. Weirdo.

However, here I am in 2013 and I’ve been dating an American for over a year now. And next week I’m off to meet her family in Ohio. It’s likely the blog will take a brief hiatus in the meantime, but rest assured I’ll be back with tales of trans-Pacific adventures sometime in September.

Wish me luck.

Garry with 2 Rs

Some Thoughts on Temporal Mechanics. Sort Of.

I spend a lot of my time pondering the great mysteries of the universe. Sometimes I sit and ponder the relationship between causality, free will, divine predestination and chaos. Other times I ponder my persistent inability to get my chicken burgers right.

This week I’ve been considering time travel. I mean, not considering it in terms of whether I should do it or not, but more in terms of which literary expressions of it make the most sense to me. This is largely Kim’s fault. She made me read the Time Traveller’s Wife. I enjoyed bits of it, but as far as plot lines go it was one of the girliest science fiction stories I’ve ever read. I shouldn’t complain too much. It was a lot better than Jane Eyre.

It’s important that you understand that I really do take my devotion to this subject very seriously. So seriously, in fact, that I recently finished editing my second novella on the subject. I wrote it in November for Nanowrimo and I’m planning on doing a third at some stage, just as soon as I can find a spare plot and an extra November lying around.

And I’d hate you to think that this is just some rubbish I made up while I was bored at work because I wanted to get an extra post in for April. No no no. This post is the culmination of weeks of meticulous research. You can find my sources here, here, here, here, and here.

See. I totally know what I’m talking about. I’m planning on having awarded myself an honorary doctorate in the dual fields of temporal mechanics and goofing about on the internet at some point last week. Wish me luck.




Garry with 2 Rs

The New Game

Way back some time in the last century when I was in high school I was part of an unusually close group of friends. There were five of us in total. It’s not really clear what bought us all together as we didn’t have anything observable in common except for irreverent senses of humour, an incination towards the theatrical and a tendency to call “bullshit” when we saw it (usually emanating from one of the other four) which tended to alienate us a little from other students, not to mention the teachers.

Chris, Phil, Jess, Garry (well…) and Dan.

Actually, the other thing we had in common was that all of us had parents associated with the staff or governance of the school we all went to. It was an extremely poorly kept secret that said parents had a number of informal betting pools running.

1) Which of the five would be the first to get married?

2) Which of the four guys would end up marrying Jess?

3) Which of the five of us would turn out to be gay?

Our school being of the fundamentalist Christian persuasion, obviously there was no actual gambling involved, especially on that last one.

Shortest odds for first married were almost certainly on Daniel, who was the oldest of the gang and had been voted the southern hemisphere’s most eligible bachelor (his parents had objected to the use of the term ‘sexiest man alive’) three years straight, albeit by a panel that consisted of the other four of us. Consensus on which one of us was going to marry Jess depended on whose mother you were talking to at the time.

In the end Chris was the first to go, in what was described in hushed tones as something of an upset. However, he had to go all the way to New Zealand to do it, which was agreed by most to be cheating. Jess went next and threw a spanner in everyone’s mother’s works by not marrying any of us (actually, Jess’ mother was probably quite relieved). At least she had the common decency to marry a local. Just a year later it was Phil’s turn.

And then there were two.

Ever since Phil’s wedding back in 2006, Dan and I have been engaged (huh?) in a gentlemen’s wager. I say gentlemen’s wager, but I really just mean friendly competition, as there were no stakes riding on it, and I’m not a gentleman. Basically, we decided to see which of us could go the longest without getting married.

If that seems like a reasonably pointless (not to mention backwards) competition, that’s just because… it is. But when you think about it, it makes much more sense than trying to see who can get married first. For one, it provides an extra layer of disincentive to do something stupid too soon if you get romantically entangled (“Maybe we should take this to the next level… nah, I wouldn’t want to lose a bet to Dan”) and also it has the added benefit that if you lose, at least you’re getting married, so that’s some sort of consolation. As endurance sports go, doing it this way has also made it much more competitive, as remaining single has historically been something both Dan and I have been pretty good at. It’s been six long years, and neither combatant has shown any sign of flagging.

That is, until now.

Yes that’s right, I have an announcement to make, the repercussions of which could shake the very firmament, but probably won’t. It has come out of nowhere and taken more than a few people by surprise, especially me, but… I, Garry with 2 Rs, am now officially…

The winner!

Indeed. Dan announced his engagement last weekend, and I am now The Last Man Standing. It has been suggested that perhaps I shouldn’t be as happy about this as I so obviously am. However, these suggestions have, without exception, come from people who gave up and got married years ago and are just jealous. As Josh Lyman so eloquently put it:

“I drink from the keg of glory. Bring me the finest muffins and bagels in all the land”

Or as Horatio Nelson said:

“First gain the victory and then make the best use of it you can.”

And as Sachin Tendulkar put it:

“You can’t hold a ceramic tiger with a pair of size nine mittens made out of apricot jam”.

…

The point is that, the wager now being won, I can stop playing. All this time people have assumed I am single because I’m a cynical cranky debt-ridden misogynistic bastard (or possibly that I turned out to be the gay one. I don’t know what the odds were on that and I don’t think I want to), when all the time I was just trying to win a bet. And now I have.

So it’s time for a new game. I was going to call this new game “Travel Monopoly Junior” but apparently that’s already taken, so I’ll leave the title open as a work in progress. Everyone else around me having been disqualified on grounds of matrimony, the new game is a variation of solitaire and begins when the person left of the dealer rolls a seven. Winner is the first person not to die alone. Spades are trumps, it’s tippy-go and only one person gets to be the top hat.

Make of that… nope. Just forget it.

Garry with 2 Rs

Home

My parents sent me a very strange link this week. It’s a real estate listing for our old family house.

Background? Sure!

My parents bought the house when they were first married and lived in it until they moved to Adelaide about six years ago. I was born in Royal Darwin Hospital and from the time my parents bought me home to the time I set off for university some eighteen and a half years later, 22 Kailis St was the centre of the known universe, at least as far as I was concerned. I knew every corner of the garden and was partially responsible for the destruction of a decent portion of it. I knew where to sit after school so as not to let the glare from the afternoon sun disrupt my view of the television. As I got older I learned which step not to tread on when I was coming home late because it went “clunk” and woke up the whole house (I later learned that my mother would lie awake at night waiting for the clunk so she’d know I was home safe). I also knew how close I could get to the motion sensitive light before it would go off, and how fast I could get away with moving once I was in range. I could get up in the morning, walk from my bed to the lounge room, pull out the stool, plug in the headphones and start piano practice without necessarily having to open my eyes first.

I can still remember the incomparable feeling of dislocation I felt the night my parents told me over the phone that they were selling the house and moving to South Australia. I was in my room at St. John's College in Brisbane, amongst close friends I had known for three and a half years by that stage, and yet I suddenly felt completely adrift. An image of Morpheus watching the destruction of the Nebuchadnezzar comes to mind. Thank God my friends, possibly in response to the far away look in my eyes, had the sense to declare an emergency late night pancake run.

There is something frighteningly powerful about the fact that, since that night almost six years ago, I haven’t held any one residential address for more than a year. Even now that I’m back “home” in Darwin, I’ve still managed three separate addresses in eighteen months.

It would be a fantastic story of coming full circle if I could walk into the real estate agent’s office tomorrow and put down an offer too good to refuse. Unfortunately there’s the small matter of “offers of five hundred and seventy thousand dollars or more” to contend with. I’ve done the maths on the bank website's loan calculation wizards. In my current financial situation I could get pre-approval for a home loan of just over eighty thousand, which might buy me half a parking space in Mandorah.

Besides, the current owners have completely remodelled the interior. It looks amazing, but nothing like what I remember, possibly due to most of the walls being missing. They’ve repaved the driveway, added air-conditioning, laid down polished floorboards instead of carpet and changed all the window fittings and … just about everything else. So it wouldn’t really be like living in my old home again. Those days are irrevocably gone. Plus, as my friend pointed out, while I could be the owner of the house, I wouldn’t actually be able to move into the master bedroom, because that’s my parents’ room. That would just be too weird.

No. I’ll just watch with interest to see how the sale goes, and then go back to walking along the street every so often and remembering one of the best upbringings a boy could have. And then I'll reach the end of the street and turn once again towards either the future or Tracy Village Sports Club, depending on whether we’re being literal or whimsical. And, as the great man once said:

“The future hasn’t been written yet. So make it a good one. Both of you.”

…

Garry with 2 Rs

Yesterday, Today and Tomorrow

I lost another old friend and role model yesterday. And this time it’s not an actor or a rock star. This time it’s personal.

She was a great woman of God, who was part of the team that taught not just me, but dozens of other Darwin Christians roughly my age how to own our faith and be serious about the things we claim to believe. Even as she battled cancer she was a source of joy to all those who knew her, especially her husband and young children, who now prepare to enter a very different world.

It comes as a bit of a kick up the trousers for me too. There’s the pain and sadness of losing an old friend for starters. But something deeper than that twists when I think back on all the truth and charisma that was imparted to us back in the day. And how for the last eighteen months or so I’ve been so vocal and bombastic about carrying on those ideas now I’m old enough to do something about it. And how I’ve done basically nothing at all about it.

Lately it seems I’m dealing with the vanishing or flat out destruction of some pillar of my youth every other week. I suppose that’s how it should be, as I’m far too old to be standing on pillars these days. But when I look around I don’t see many signs of reconstruction. I’m not over-awed by the abundance of great role models like I was when I was a starry eyed teenager at Easter Camp.

Maybe I’m getting old, or maybe I’m just a cranky cynic whining about how they don’t make them like they used to.

The obvious solution is to do it myself. “You wanna see a miracle son? Be the miracle.” And while it’s all very inspiring and self congratulatory to imagine stepping up to become the very hero I looked up to as a kid, the more I look back on those days the more I question whether I’ve got anything like what it takes. They really don’t make them like the used to.

For today, it’s enough to mourn and remember the life of a magnificent woman of God. Tomorrow is a question for tomorrow.



Garry with 2 Rs
In memory of Krysti Etherington

An Awesome Weekend - Part One

"Whenever I get sad, I stop being sad and be awesome instead. True story." - Barney Stinson, How I Met Your Mother.

Every now and again I nick off to Queensland for a few days. There's always an official pretext to the trip, but the main point of these south-eastern sojourns is to prove to myself that I'm still every bit as awesome as I was in my uni days. As time passes (and it does, I assure you) it's a claim that's becoming more and more difficult to substantiate.

Recently even the pretext has been becoming increasingly predictable; an old friend will do something silly like get married and I'll trip off to Brisbane to attend the ceremony and concurrently catch some sort of international music act. Last time, I popped east for a wedding and a U2 concert. Last weekend I went for a wedding and found by complete coincidence that New Zealand rock sensation Six60 were playing at The Zoo on Anne st. I'm sure the Six60 boys won't mind me saying it; U2 in Suncorp Stadium is not quite the same thing as Six60 in a converted community hall in Fortitude Valley, but that's not the point. The point is something closer to the incredible coincidence of being in Brisbane for less than twelve hours and yet timing it so perfectly that I got to hang out with Chris for a few hours and finally hear the band live. A coincidence which was further compounded when we discovered that as well as staying in Brisbane at the same time, we were also staying at the same motel.

I've never really imagined myself as the 'I'm with the band' type (That's probably because I rather fancifully imagine myself as the 'I'm in the band' type). Hanging out with Chris backstage after the show I got to experience the crazy collision of worlds that happens when you're chatting with friends like old times but you have your conversation interrupted periodically by fans asking for autographs.

A particularly enthusiastic pair of followers claimed to be Six60's biggest fans ever. They passed a band shirt around and asked us all to sign it. I was confused, but willing enough to oblige her. If she was as big a fan as she claimed, she might have realised she had more signatures on her shirt than Six60 has members, but I guess we'll never know.

In true rock and roll style, after loading the gear into a white mini van (hell yeah!) we continued celebrating a great show into the small hours of the morning. This was another great way for me to demonstrate that I'm still awesome, despite having taken my newly discovered I'm-with-the-bandism to the level of actually impersonating said band to it's own fans.

It was also a really stupid idea because I needed to be up ridiculously early the next morning to meet my lift to the wedding. It was a morning ceremony and lunch time reception in a town several hours' drive from Brisbane. I set my alarm for half past four to make sure I had enough time to get ready and catch a train to rendezvous with my friend at six.

A Not-So-Brief and Utterly Incohesive History of Time

Albert Einstein told us that time is relative.

Douglas Adams told us that time is an illusion (and lunch time doubly so).

The Doctor told us that time is more like a big ball of wibbly-wobbly timey-wimey stuff.

And clever scientists at the Secret Institute for Abstract Thought Experiments have measured the speed of time at a constant velocity of one second per second. However, anyone who has attempted to meet a deadline on an assignment while simultaneously waiting for mince to defrost in the microwave will realise that this assertion is questionable at best.

Last weekend some blast-from-the-past friends of mine and I met up for a ten year high school reunion. Sitting around a dinner table at the Trailer Boat Club and seeing how everyone’s lives have changed since the last time we were all together (spouses, babies, new jobs, new hats etc.), I came to realise just how long ten years can be in human terms. Or indeed, any other terms for that matter. Despite all beginning at a common origin, all my classmates lives have taken them to remarkably different places.

We had people flying in from East and West (but all obviously from a Southern kind of slant given Darwin's location) but the most interesting kick was how many of us still live in Darwin (or have returned to Darwin, in my case). Given how much we used to whinge and whine about Darwin back in the day, I think the amount of us that now call this place home either serves to illuminate the awesomeness of Darwin, or the lack of ambition in the class of 2000. I like to think it's the former.

Coincidentally on the same weekend as the reunion, the school itself had an open day to go and check the current generation of students out. Walking around the same courtyards and walkways where we so often ran, hid, created mayhem and occasionally studied I was amazed to discover that the same period of ten years seems to have gone by in the blink of an eye. The drama room in particular, whose construction I was around for and took full advantage of, gave me the distinct sensation that I had been there for my year twelve production only yesterday.

One possible explanation for this apparent temporal paradox, not to mention the discrepancy between time measured in standard Open Day Inspection Seconds (ODIS)and Empirical Trailer Boat Club Wine Glasses (TBCWG) is the space-time vortex that was well known to have been built into the old demountable block we spent our upper primary years in. That particular architectural feature was what made it possible to make a lunch hour stretch from forty minutes to three years, and also made it possible, when necessary, to teleport from the music room at the other end of the campus back to your classroom without being intercepted anywhere in between (a very useful trick if you weren’t supposed to be in the music room in the first place). I think it also used to bend the shape of space near the canteen, so you never did quite know for sure how long the queue was.

I don’t know how they managed to create such a vortex. Somehow the unique mix of medium density fibreboard and asbestos dust must have reacted at a subatomic level, warping the distributed space differential back along the pavlovian antecedent tangent and making a … vortex.

And then the crazy fools went and tore the building down! God only knows what primal and chaotic universal forces they unleashed when they removed those demountables. Not to mention the smell. Those of us who made the trip out to the open day were shocked and appalled to discover the backdrop to so many childhood memories had been reduced to a bare patch of (extremely) disturbed soil, ready to receive a brand new library courtesy of some economic stimulus money from the former Prime Minister. It sounds great until you realise that future generations have lost the chance to experience the thrill and trepidation that comes from crawling fifteen metres under a dusty (and indeed, temporally paradoxical) building to retreive a monumentally misdirected soccer ball. Thanks for nothing Kevin; you've lost my vo... never mind.

Well whatever. It’s possible those same primal forces were responsible for the curious feeling of time flowing past at an inconstant rate as I sat at the Trailer Boat Club and tried to get my head around all my contemporaries' kids' names. It’s also possible the effect could be put down to a nice shiraz with old friends and a glorious sunset.

Or both.

…




Garry with 2 Rs

Jubilee

Last weekend Darwin Memorial Uniting Church, the church I was brought up in, celebrated the fiftieth anniversary of its building’s construction. It was quite a grand affair with performances from the Darwin City Brass Band and the Darwin Chorale, as well as visits from past and present clergy and the odd politician not to mention my family, who made the trip up from Adelaide for the weekend. Fifty years might not sound like much, but in a city that was blown up by the Japanese in 1942 and then blown down by Cyclone Tracy in 1974, a building with some staying power is something to celebrate, especially given the rate at which the city skyline is changing.

Since arriving back in Darwin in November, I’ve been heard to say that walking back into my old church after nine years was a bit like stepping back in time. The same faces were all there to welcome me to the same style of service and same music that we were singing the day I left oh so many lifetimes ago. Having been associated with the congregation since I was born, I really got a sense of having been part of the congregation forever.

It blew my mind and put me right back in my place to see how many people attended the celebration who have been around the church since it was opened in 1960 and had also been part of the seed congregations that went before it. It gave me a real sense of continuity, and of being part of something much larger than even my whole lifetime. Of course, most things in the universe are much larger than my lifetime, but in a society that prides itself on constantly advancing and changing, it was comforting to know that at least some human endeavours have the ability to stick it out.

One of the more moving aspects of the celebration was the music. Someone had managed to dig up copies of music which was composed and performed especially for the opening of the church fifty years ago. As far as anyone knows, it hadn’t been performed again since, until someone slipped a copy to the brass band. Listening to the same arrangement of Abide With Me blended with The Last Post (the church building also serves as a war memorial) that had been played fifty years ago gave me the same sort goose bumps as opening a time capsule, or stepping out of the DeLorean after a flux capacitor malfunction.

Having celebrated the past, the capstone of the weekend was an open discussion on what the future might hold for Uniting Church in Australia. It was fascinating to hear different people’s ideas on what the church might become once the mysterious and unpredictable under 30’s crowd inherit control. I have my own ideas on that front, and I'm planning on putting my grand takeover plan into effect sometime in the next few months. Watch this space.

...




Garry with 2 Rs

A Blast From the Past

As early as the mid nineties, when I was thirteen years old and half way through year eight, it became fairly clear to me and a quite a few people around me that my life was headed down the rocky, sporadically lit and capsicum flavoured (not really, I just felt I needed a third descriptor in order to generate the right cadence, which I have now, ironically, destroyed) road that is the life of a worship musician.

The problem was, even in the mid nineties, the most advanced musical instrument Darwin Memorial Uniting Church owned was a Casio keyboard which had been constructed sometime in the early seventies. It got the job done in terms of accompanying the Sunday School sing along each Sunday morning, but once I graduated to playing in the real service, it was clear I was going to need something a little more sophisticated. Although I will say this: When the church got rid of the old Casio, my dad bought it off them for about twenty bucks. It still works.

This was the time of the great DMUC bakesale of ’95. Basically a posse of church leaders, figureheaded by my mum, went bananas cooking shortbread, apricot slice, rum balls without the rum (it was church, after all) and about a billion different variations on lamingtons. Every Sunday morning after church we’d sell them to the congregation and put the money into a fund to buy a new keyboard. It was a hectic few weeks, but when the shaved coconut settled we had put enough cash together for the glory that was the Yamaha PSR 225.

Two hundred voices. Sixty-one touch sensitive keys. Ninety-nine different rhythmic accompaniments. I was in my own worship musician Nirvana, which is the stupidest cross-religious metaphor I’ve ever tried to get away with. The point is I loved that old keyboard. I knew every voice inside out, and exactly what sound I should use for whatever songs they picked for any Sunday service. Although it technically didn’t belong to me, we took it home most weeks so I could practise. All through high school, that old Yamaha was close enough to being a part of who I was. It wasn’t just regular church services either; That baby handled camping trips, Scripture Union mega youth services, school concerts and birthday parties. I think I even used her for a couple of gigs with the rock band we formed in year twelve. That keyboard rocked.

But, as the Oracle (not the one from Delphi, the one from the Matrix) so wisely declared, "Everything that has a beginning has an end". The time came for me to move to university in Queensland. I passed the Yamaha on to the next generation of church DMUC musos, knowing full well that none of them could ever love her the same way I had.

Once I got to Brisbane, I decided it was time to get serious, so I got myself what was, at the time, a top of the line Korg Triton named Samantha. Sam is basically the best thing ever, and is still sitting in my room next to me as I write this, but I never did forget the Yamaha that started it all.

I’m back living in Darwin now, and last weekend my mother came through town to visit me. We decided to head into DMUC to catch up with old friends. DMUC have bought a new electric piano with weighted keys and a good stereo sound they can run through the sound system. Things really have changed since the old days.

Having said that, some things seem to be immovable constants of the universe. Mrs S., the same woman who taught me in Sunday school is still running that side of things. She called me aside after church and asked if I could have a go at fixing a problem the current Sunday School musos were having with their keyboard. I couldn’t believe my eyes when we opened to the cupboard to check things out. There she was; my old Yamaha, just as I remembered her. She’s got some loose connections now, so the onboard speakers (Samantha thinks those things are so quaint) cut in and out. Mrs S. said I could take the keyboard home if I wanted to try to fix her.

I’m absolutely useless at all things electronic, but there was no way I was passing this one up, especially after they threatened to put her in the op shop if she couldn’t be fixed. So I put the old cover on, tucked her up under my arm like I always did, and carried her out to my mum's car like it was 1999 all over again.

The Oracle can shove it; the PSR rides again! Now all I have to do is find a way to keep her from fighting with Samantha.

And since I still haven’t settled on a usable new sign-off line of my own, I can think of no better way to end this post than with the benediction we used to say every week after Sunday School (for all I know, they still do).

May the Lord watch between me and thee while we are absent one from the other.

Amen.




Garry with 2 Rs

Back to Basics

I've recently been reading back over some of my old posts from the early days. I laughed when I came to the re-realisation that I actually started this blog as a way of documenting my adventures in overseas travel. Once it became clear that I wasn't actually going anywhere any time soon, the blog sort of morphed into a whinge festival about how much I disliked Adelaide. The title "Far From Home" gradually became more and more ironic the longer I stayed living with my parents.

And now here I am in sunny (at last) Sydney where I have been living quite happily for the last year and a bit. I've obviously gotten a little carried away with the self important metropolitan lifestyle, as for the last 12 months at least the blog has just been one amusing (well, I think so anyway) anecdote from my life after another, coupled with the odd cheap shot at Hillsong. And while that's all well and good, I think the time has come for the narcissistic rambling to stop, take a good hard look at itself and figure out what it wants to do with it's life and why it insists so strongly on only wearing fabric imported from Denmark.

Is this the end of Far From Home?

Hell no! It's just time to get back to basics. If I'm going to write about being far from home, then it's high time I actually got myself a little further from home.

I figure Western Europe is about as far as I can get, and still be on land (the diametric other side of the world is somewhere in the North Atlantic), so I've booked me a one-way ticket to Madrid. FFH is going inter-continental, baby! And about time too.

I'm not actually leaving Sydney until January, so you can expect a few more months of inane drivel between now and then. Oh, and I'm planing on actually visiting Hillsong sometime in the next few months, so I can take cheap shots at them from a more informed point of view. Stay tuned...

Far from home



Garry with 2 Rs