Cheap as you are

Well this is all very lovely. I really am just lolling about in Osaka, back in my 'bicycle, book, DVD, internet and fabulous French pastries' mode.

I feel anxious sometimes, consistent with other periods when I haven't been working. Nothing unmanageable. I'm essentially here on holiday anyway, so it doesn't really matter, but I guess my mind turns to the future and sustaining this existence and as this blog will attest to over the past, what, six years (already?), that sort of thing always has troubled me and very likely always will.

So we're hurtling towards Christmas, which we will be spending in Kyushu (Beppu, Fukuoka and Nagasaki), and 2012 is rearing its head. I read the other day that the Mayan predictions for armageddon were in fact no such thing, and I felt disappointed. Evidently 2012 is just the end of some kind of era.

A few weeks ago, back in South Australia, I saw a kestrel or kite or similarly foul predatory bird carting off a desperate little sparrow, which was flapping its wings hopelessly. I felt like detonating nuclear bombs. My favourite part in Lars Von Trier's Melancholia is when Justine says, "Do not mourn the Earth. The Earth is evil."

This must all sound terribly depressive but really I'm completely fine. I've been re-reading Cloud Atlas and while I am not enjoying it as much as I did the first time (it's still a fine book – I guess I'm in a different era now, or something), it does make me think about power and abuse thereof.

Then the various international news websites just confirm how utterly fucked everything is.