Continuously Rolling Can Continuously Rolls, Continuously

When I saw the can rolling across the empty car park of Preston train station, it was dark with the night and illuminated only by the lonely flood-lights hanging from metal poles stuck in the ground and rooted there. I felt a surge of energy come from inside me. In the fifteen seconds it took me to decide to pull my phone out and record it, my spirits had lifted, gone from half-smiling and peaceful, melancholy resignation, to excited. Onward to ecstatic. Happiness. Authentic joy. OH! The catharsis!

Of course, things hadn't been going wrong entirely.

Ever since getting back from Falls and Byron Bay I've been feeling a little off. It always takes a while to acknowledge these kinds of things, and then a while longer to start acknowledging them to other people – for me anyway. This up-and-down beast is still something I'm coming to terms with, I'm sure everyone feels it at some point: sometimes we're happy, sometimes we're sad, sometimes we're manic, sometimes we're inert, sometimes we're jumping on bins and sometimes we're lying in bed wishing the day away. Sometimes the guy who lives two rooms down from us and who we hate because he cut off our internet for no reason other than that he thinks we're a dick walks past our open door at 1am in the middle of a 5-day heatwave and casually looks into our room to find our embarrassingly naked body sprawled out on our bed as we try to catch the remnants of wind through the window in the hope that we might fall asleep. Sometimes life throws us a curveball.

On Australia Day I decided to try and describe my feelings of late to a few of my close friends for the first time, thereby also acknowledging them myself. I said that, normally, what I'm used to experiencing in cycles of varying lengths are dizzying manic highs and depressing lonely lows, but normally the highs feel high, like maybe eight out of ten points above zero, and the lows feel average, like maybe four or five points below. Lately though, it felt like the ratio had been flipped, so my highs were like fives out of ten, and my lows were at negative eight. I don't know whether this was accurate, or still is? Or what part of it I would change if I were to change some, but it did honestly feel like I hadn't been myself for the better part of three weeks.

Naw :(

Normally Australia Day is one of my favourite – if not my ABSOLUTE FAVOURITE day of the year. Maybe New Years beats it out, or the first day of Winter, or the first day of Summer, or maybe the day I meet the year's coolest person, but for me Australia Day is always a highlight. It's got nothing to do with the whole nationalism schtick, at least, not directly for me, it's just that everyone is always in a good mood on Australia Day. Everyone is always down for fun, and everyone has the day off, and everyone is happy and excited, for whatever reasons they each might have. And this excitement is infectious, because there's nothing better than good vibes to bounce a smile off. This year though it seemed like my Australia Day was headed for bland mediocrity as I failed to make any plans and spent most of the day moping around my room and the bar in ever more hopeless alternation.

I took part in the debate, “There's Nothing Funny About Australia” – a shameless nod to an embarrassing event from 2012 that I am sure no one but about three people continue to care about. I played a few games of pool. I fell asleep in a sunbeam, and somehow failed to enjoy even that. I had a quick Skype to my ever-faithful and dear friend Melanie in France, who lifted my spirits briefly.

At around 10pm Alice and Jaimie came around and picked me and Kev up and we went to Carlton Gardens with the soccer ball, met up with Luka and Beau, and then after another short while the girls left. Beau, Luka, Kev and I ended up chalking out a four-square court on the brick floor in the Exhibition Centre, taking off our shirts, and playing like primary school kids for around an hour until something like 2am. It was absolutely fantastic, and I felt like my day on the 26^th of January had been finally salvaged. Saved, and redeemed, against all the odds.

Turning points never really feel like 'turning points' when they are happening. Maybe that's because the very idea of a turning point is a wishful and impossible concept, because life doesn't exist in simple one-way trajectories of up and down, good and bad, happy and unhappy. Emotions are things to be felt, and in every moment a cocktail of conflicting thoughts – reactions to life at large – is mixed together to bring about the distinctive, unique feeling. Moments can never be purely good or bad, but somehow because we can only process one thing at a time, the aggregate of feelings inside of us tends to express itself as one single point, somewhere on the happiness scale. From Australia Day, and for the next twenty-four hours or so until my trip on the train the night after, it felt like the scales were tipping, and so in the useless tradition of backwards-looking introspection, a turning point is what I'll have to call it. Because right now, I feel happy again, just happy. And I can't bring myself to try and break that down into its constituents.

When I got on the train on the 27^th, I had no idea that I was getting on the wrong one – I had never intended to go end up sitting in a car park at night, waiting for my lift and staring into the fluorescent-lit darkness. But after sharing a laugh with some fellow travellers over our mutually futile appreciation of a beautiful girl, I didn't much care. I got off at somewhere, and backtracked to Preston where Luka could come to pick me up. As I sat on the steps writing joke ideas in my notebook, I spied a baby cockroach scuttling along the concrete, and seeing an opportunity to do some good in the world, went over with my thong brandished in hand, and killed it. The attendant at the ticketing station saw the whole thing, and so I looked up at him after my successful good deed, and gave him a quick, hearty thumbs-up, as if to say; “Stay strong, brother. Together, we can win this war.”

And then only a few minutes before Luka finally arrived in his car, I saw the can rolling across the empty car park, dark with the night and illuminated only by the lonely flood-lights hanging from metal poles stuck in the ground and rooted there, and I felt a surge of energy come from inside me.

The video below encapsulates that moment, and I consider myself very lucky to have found the presence of mind at the time to record it, in all its realness, bare and untouched, I will smile when I remember. The wind blew that can for two solid minutes, and for two minutes there was only happiness, nothing but joy in the mix.

Peace, Taco.

PS At the end, the person I said "hey man" to was a cop who I realized had been watching suspiciously about ten metres behind me as I lost my mind at this can. He turned out to be cool, exclaiming, "it just kept going didn't it!"