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After over a month with no contact I return, loyal subscribers, to your bedsides and Electric Viewing Consoles™, humble with apology and laden with tawdry gossip. Since returning home from the cloud-crested mountainsides of Colombia I have been gradually resettling, a process which took significantly longer than I think anyone could have anticipated, but which seems to have advanced to a stage with which I can feel comfortable and ready to call life "on track," once again.

I have recently added a StatCounter to this blog which lets me to see quite a lot of information about every single one of you who comes to read about me and I am happy to report recent visitors from places such as Lithuania, Egypt, Saudi Arabia, Japan and Guatemala. I can see that due to the second last sentence of my last post I have attracted hits from charming North American pedophiles Googling "adorable pre-teens," and that, mysteriously, I have developed a fanbase in Canberra, a city in which I know no one but produces more hits than any other city in the world including Perth. I do now realise, however, just how much people actually look at this thing, which is more than I ever expected, and so in order to satisfy the clearly insatiable appetite of my legions of world-wide fans I present, just quickly, a digest version of news from the last few weeks of my life:

1. I am now the owner of a new laptop which means that, in theory, blog entries should be much more frequent as I am able to compose updates from basically anywhere - the beach, buses, strip clubs, hospital beds and so on. I would like to take this opportunity to publicly thank the small Chinese child who was employed to assemble my machine out of its composite parts, in poor conditions, for very little pay. You are whole, you are much-loved.
2. A lot of my days are spent fiddling around on this new computer in the snug and lovely environs of a small alleyway cafe in the city called Tiger Tiger which was apparently not named after the Mandarin phrase "Horse horse tiger tiger" (ma ma hu hu) which means "so so" or "comme ci comme ça"; nor was it named after the line in the William Blake poem "Tiger" (Tiger, tiger, burning bright / In the forests of the night); although it was, however, named from an artpiece in the WA State Art Gallery which was in turn named for the Blake poem, according to reasoned speculation. The cafe has lovely wooden tables and communal couches and a candy jar and staff who grin & joke and wireless internet & "special" hot chocolates with all sorts of surprises mixed in including, but not limited to, shredded coconut, cinnamon and sesame seeds. Anyway, I am here at this place a lot of the time, drinking such hot chocolates while the speakers play Dylan or Tim Buckley or Ryan Adams or Bon Jovi and the grey clouds spatter rain on the city streets.
3. Next week I am moving into a new house, away from the oversized parental home by the coast and into Northbridge, in a street scattered with the houses of friends and which runs into Hyde Park, which remains one of the most beautiful urban parks I have ever seen. I am moving in with two girls - Jess (who was formally known by me and select others as "Lil Cutie" until I swore I would stop calling her that if I moved in) and Laura (about whom I know not enough to give even a brief anecdote). The house is a terrace which is exactly opposite in layout to the next door house, and the girls have a cat who used to live next door until the owner killed its siblings and said it would have to die too unless someone could take it. Which Jess and Laura did, and for a while the cat was so confused when it came into the house because all the rooms were in reverse.
4. I am no longer "seeing anyone" and can guarantee that I won't be for some time.
5. Today I went for a ride by the river. Let me paint the picture. It's overcast, ok; theres a chilled wind and maybe a bit of drizzle, and my knuckles are bitten with cold. My bike sweeps around the river's edge, the water glinting a metallic brown blue, flat, calm. The trees are tipping down the cliffs on the edge of King's Park, dark and drooped and speckled with clusters of yellow acacia. The sky is rich with clouds, and its making the earth glow. There's black cormorants, proud and still, with wings cocked; there's pelicans; there's shelducks followed by furry ducklings the size of children's teacups. Theres a row of Australian flags pointing northwest and flicking in the winds, which makes the flagpoles squeak like hospital-bed wheels. I am riding through puddles. Two guys in beanies are playfighting on the grassy banks. A girl in tight ponytail stares at the water. There are streaks on sunlight emerging from behind cloud on the banks over Freeway South. The low cluster of city skyscrapers. Engine Oil. Cold sweat under my backpack. The smell, everywhere the smell, of wet leaves.
6. Last week I was in hospital for a double-ended visual inspection of my digestive system. If you get my meaning. I got to starve myself for 4o hours or so, then drink litres of a solution that tasted like sea-water. Then I got to see a televisual broadcast of the inside of my empty gut, which was mostly healthy except for a little mini polyp in there somewhere which got lanced by a little mini laser before it could grow into something sinister and nasty.
7. There are two courses I am applying for next year. One is a Masters in International Relations, specialising in Peace and Conflict Studies, at ANU in Canberra for one year and at the International Peace Research Institute in Oslo for six months. The other is a Masters in International Development at RMIT in Melbourne. There are certainly positives and negatives in both courses, so my policy right now is just to wait and hope that the universities help me by deciding for me...
8. I will soon be participating in a local project in conjunction with International 24 Hour Comics Day which will lead to my being locked in the WA Film and Television Institute for a full day, in which time I must personally complete a 24 page comic, which at first didn't seem too hard until I considered the idea of a page an hour, which assuming there's about 10 frames a page is a frame every six minutes without counting time for eating or thinking or planning or going to the toilet or whatever. Which: Ha!

That's the news, folks.
Now that that's out of the way, expect future posts to stick to descriptions of sunsets and trees with occasional ill-informed diatribes about social justice and complaints about the absolute static stillness of Perth and the aggression exhibited by its bored, mindless citizens when fueled on alcohol and even occasionally, actually, not.

It is about time to get out of this town, more or less for good.