Being quite serious for a brief time, which is no effort, I'm happy to be leaving my current employer, and to be leaving Cairns. I've been 3 and 1/2 years with my employer, which, for me, is a reasonable enough time to do one particular thing well enough, and this time leaving without creating too much destructive trouble for the status quo. Long may they quo, as is their wont. I've been in Cairns, apart from about 8 years in Asia, for the last 25 years, or maybe more, and it has been...what can I say....very hot and tropical. My fondest memories of Cairns are when I was asleep once sitting naked in a deck chair in the shallow sea just north of Buchan's Point...asleep for 8 hours in that chair and in that shallow warm salty Coral Sea as the tides changed back and forth, and turned all around me. Blissful indolence and sensory perfection within the soft murmur of the Great Sea. You can only have that once, I think, and that was years ago. So I believe it is a good time to go from here... in this getting-near hottest wettest time of the Tropical Doldrum months, with cyclones yet to come. Yeecch! Cyclones are okay, really, but if you depend on them for entertainment of the mind and heart, then they are far too few and far between. And then to arrive in Old Melbourne Town in it's hottest dry time, as unforeseen bushfires grip the rim of the city as they do every unforeseen and unprepared year...and then to gradual equip for the first cold winter I will have experienced in 30 years. Street noise, trams, 4 million people...what the fuck? I have had enough joy and sadness in Cairns to fill me up equally...and now it is just too fucking hot. So, happy to have been here, and equally happy to go...the life before going, so full of wonder, of babies, of children, of families, of creativity, and of despair, and then creativity again, and then, family again. We have the apartment here, but somehow, I doubt we will be back. Maybe one day for a tropical holiday, in 30 or 40 years time. Til then, we welcome your visits to us in the Great South of this ancient yet still unmade undefined country for some reason still called Australia...whatever that was. In the Human Heart and Mind, we are tricked for awhile for it is not really the seasons that change at all, it is the Meaning that is always changing. In this way we are all travellers in one way or another.

Being quite serious for a brief time, which is no effort, I'm happy to be leaving my current employer, and to be leaving Cairns. 
I've been 3 and 1/2 years with my employer, which, for me, is a reasonable enough time to do one particular thing well enough, and this time leaving without creating too much destructive trouble for the status quo. Long may they quo, as is their wont. 
I've been in Cairns, apart from about 8 years in Asia, for the last 25 years, or maybe more, and it has been...what can I say....very hot and tropical.
My fondest memories of Cairns are when I was asleep once sitting naked in a deck chair in the shallow sea just north of Buchan's Point...asleep for 8 hours in that chair and in that shallow warm salty Coral Sea as the tides changed back and forth, and turned all around me. Blissful indolence and sensory perfection within the soft murmur of the Great Sea. You can only have that once, I think, and that was years ago.
So I believe it is a good time to go from here... in this getting-near hottest wettest time of the Tropical Doldrum months, with cyclones yet to come. Yeecch! Cyclones are okay, really, but if you depend on them for entertainment of the mind and heart, then they are far too few and far between.
And then to arrive in Old Melbourne Town in it's hottest dry time, as unforeseen bushfires grip the rim of the city as they do every unforeseen and unprepared year...and then to gradual equip for the first cold winter I will have experienced in 30 years. Street noise, trams, 4 million people...what the fuck?
I have had enough joy and sadness in Cairns to fill me up equally...and now it is just too fucking hot.
So, happy to have been here, and equally happy to go...the life before going, so full of wonder, of babies, of children, of families, of creativity, and of despair, and then creativity again, and then, family again. We have the apartment here, but somehow, I doubt we will be back.
Maybe one day for a tropical holiday, in 30 or 40 years time. Til then, we welcome your visits to us in the Great South of this ancient yet still unmade undefined country for some reason still called Australia...whatever that was.
In the Human Heart and Mind, we are tricked for awhile for it is not really the seasons that change at all, it is the Meaning that is always changing. In this way we are all travellers in one way or another.

I have noted over the life span that baby boys have almost a generic look to them, and when they become youths, they still do...and when they become men they begin to define their own features through experience, and then in old age they become somewhat generic looking again. The only hope for the real individual man, I think, is eventually, the damn hard, always unpaid, yet remarkably satisfying, work of eccentricity.

Poem: "Perfect". by John Fitzpatrick 26 November 2016 (written on the way to fire up the BBQ)

Poem: "Perfect". by John Fitzpatrick 26 November 2016 (written on the way to fire up the BBQ)

Time is short time is sweet
time is everyone you meet
in the world or in the earth
there's taking life or giving birth
and so you work out best you can
how best to do your perfect plan.

Sometimes the fame and glamour of mental health nursing wears a bit thin.

Home from work, 1130pm. Sitting at the 2nd hand iMac and with my second hand iPhone...both operating beautifully. They are so good second-hand, it makes me wonder why they ever bother to make them new. (Follow that Fitzpatrick-logic if you dare!). How was your day?

I Received a letter from Australia's outstanding Federal Border Force noting that they had received a package of 400 cigarettes from China addressed to our daughter and that we could get them simply by sending the government $240 in tobacco tax.

I Received a letter from Australia's outstanding Federal Border Force noting that they had received a package of 400 cigarettes from China addressed to our daughter and that we could get them simply by sending the government $240 in tobacco tax. Lovely. Thanks guys. Proud of you; I love your work.
With the move to expensive Melbourne a veritable Shining Path forward, I do need to make a decision on whether to have a home or smoke. A home would be preferable so I am going through the John Fitzpatrick process of 'Reduce/Replace' when it comes to both cigarettes... and Guinness, for that matter.
So, first is the replacing of the factory cigarettes with rolling ones...and delaying the hit, time-wise...and when it comes to the Guinness after work, it is simply a big bottle of Soda Water or Tonic Water, and then a Guinness. This seems to be pretty effective.
The inherent attraction in both factory cigarettes and indeed Guinness is the Remarkable Initial Axon-Dendrite Synapse Neurological Chemical Fizz and the Fitzpatrick Reduce/Replace Plan deals with that pretty effectively at this initial stage of The Shining Path forward.
(The Original Shining Path was a Marxist Guerrilla Group in PERU that evolved into "The FARC", as we know it today.)

On Plans for Melbourne:Yes, planning for Melbourne, quite cold there in winter I hear, and a big city...so I am thinking maybe just a black velvet onesie outfit should deal with that for work and transit and home. Probably no need to put on the full length Afghan Wolf Coat. I don't want to stand out or look odd in the crowd.