By the end of October, 2022, I had returned to the freedom camping domain where I originally parked up in May prior to heavy rains closing the domain and I moving into a caravan for June and July while working before house- and animal-sitting for the couple whose property the caravan is on. The domain is a fantastic open space with two long-drops and 4 rubbish bins, and doubles as a night star-gazing location for any astronomy enthusiasts (though I have never seen any turn up).

When I originally returned a month ago, I walked down to the riverside that runs alongside the Great Taste Trail for cyclists (mainly) and found a perfect spot to build a campfire: two stones adjacent to each other (or one stone broken in half!) that created a gap in which I could drop sticks and twigs into that would boil my water in the morning. Here would be my new spot for a fresh cup of coffee every morning (weather permitting). And it was made so.

By the end of 2018, Annie's Park had changed: Rains had come and gone, the river had risen and swept my campfire away, someone had come and stolen my dish-washing liquid and similar items while I was in town (immortalised in my poem 'Liquid Dish-wash Thieves' from The Tasman Journey), a council member had driven 10km out to where I was and questioned me about living in my vehicle, despite the fact that the park had no official council designation and the 'no camping' sign had been put up by a man across the road who lived right next to the man who actually looked after and named the park in honour of his mother and whom I had approached when first arriving and told him what my plans were, of which he had no problems with, and neither did any of the other surrounding neighbours in the community who I met!

My life moved on as well, as I met a woman and we started our own adventures together, travelling south (forthcoming poetry & prose collection Two Left Feet), and then North to do house-sitting. When that relationship ended, I stayed in the North Island for some time working to gain funds for my distribution drive of The Tasman Journey, only to have that interrupted on my way back to Tasman by The Kapiti Coast last year (of which makes up the entire second half of what will be my third collection of poetry & prose, currently titled as A Crook in the Elbow).

I revisited Annie's Park and it still felt welcoming (apart from the sandflies), but it was time now to be somewhere new, and Wai-iti Domain was that place. The walk to the riverside, however, is, at least from where I park my car all the way over on the other side of the domain, about 120-200 metres away, and it seemed a bit of a distance to take all my cooking gear and food for one cook-up and then return. So my first two campfires served as morning coffee trips.

What happened to the first campfire?

Ahh, the first campfire. Nature happened to it [fig. 6].

But I did not fret! When the rain ceased, and the river lowered, I went back looking for anything that might remain. I did find one rock still showing the sooty burnt face, and so, I set about rebuilding.

And then the council interfered [fig. 7] and left a wake of destruction right where my campfire had been [fig. 8], and all for the sake of reinforcing the opposite side of the bank that time will eventually erode away regardless.

Disappointed as I was, I did not give up. And I built a third fireplace, even better than the first two, and even better than any of the ones I attempted at Annie's Park. Once I had spent a few mornings making coffee on the riverside, I took my grill down and set up a cooking spot, and now I pack a frying pan (first one that replaced the original fry pan from fig. 1) into the same bag that I store all my collected sticks and broken branches, hand axe, paper rubbish, and matches in, and make my way down for an evening meal watching the sun fade into clouds on the horizon....

9:52AM

Here I am on the Sign-in Gatehouse manning the Arrival Time-in/Time-out sheet. There I was about an hour ago having a deja vu. It felt like a premonition of being here and being asked to stay on this job. I was awoken at 4:40 by my alarm playing the Allegro from Mozart’s Piano Concerto No 6, a light and fluffy rise to the morning, less brutally cold than other mornings, and time enough with 40 minutes of travelling to arrive at this destination before 6 o’clock.
       I cannot pull out my laptop on the civil construction site like I can now. Even if it has taken four hours to catch up on all the names that need to be ticked off after the vans, utes and cars coming up and stopping for my window to slide open, me trying to scribble down their names with their time of arrival, and then to find on the Time-in sheet afterwards, it is still a welcome change from labouring around concrete and machinery. I brought books with me also. I have done one set of 21 press-ups, 9 pull-ups with my boots on (leg-ups combined). I cannot do these on the site, unless we are in a waiting mode (press-ups, yes, but chin-ups I’d have to find a scaffold area).
       I have put on bulk. Weight is questionable, as I always seem to weigh around 65-68kg, but my stomach has definitely pushed out into a more rounded look opposed to the toned almost-abs I had last year. I keep buying shit food after work, ice creams while filling up with petrol (two in one night! (but to be fair on the ice creams - they were bloody nice!)), or takeaway hamburgers, fish and chips, and am not doing any exercise (of any consequence beyond some hard work on the site). For today, tomorrow and Monday’s stint here at the Gatehouse, I bought chocolate milk to have with my coffee, wine gums, a block of chocolate, gluten free bread with plum jam and "Everything Butter"; and I’m thinking WHY WHY WHY??? - this shouldn’t be any different from any other day. But it’s the old “eat to kill the time and boredom trap”. I won’t be bored. I have a laptop, I have books, I have vehicles consistently coming in and out needing to be registered. Truth is, I saw a toaster, a small oven, and a sandwich toaster in here when spending time with Ian on Tuesday and Wednesday to see how he did things and get a hang of the process, and my mind went crazy with thinking about the things I could eat and cook for myself while here. Yet all those things are not what I usually eat. And it would be okay to make an exception across these next few days IF I was exercising and eating better during the week. But after every dinner meal this week, I have continued eating: cheese and honey, salami, yoghurt, whatever I have that fills me beyond the point of satisfaction. Its been crazy. And I’ve had no self-control. I started bringing food to work, more to stop feeling left out while everyone around me ate than to try to curb the after-dinner eating by making me fuller through the day, but it hasn’t made much difference.
       It’s cold, and I want to eat to keep myself warm.


If the premonition was never realised as such, was the premonition just a deja vu of the feeling of a premonition?
       If time is static with no past or future and only exists as a present state within the three dimensions of space, what made my brain create a feeling of deja vu in the first place?
       But we know that time is a fundamental property of space by the distortions created on it from gravity and speed, so how can deja vu not be a real interaction with the future? In what way has time been distorted by gravity to create this sense within myself? Because gravity is already exerting its influence on me? Would that not mean then, that I entered a time-frame that itself had remained static? Had gravity in some way stopped, or slowed time from this future state and I walked into it?
       What happens after that interaction to that future state? Does it remain in a temporal stasis? Does it spring forward like a rubber band? Does it fade like it was the remnants of a quantum potentiality, an alternative path that I will never know because I either took it and it came to fruition, or I didn’t take it and it didn’t come to fruition?
       Is that what deja vu is – a rubber band of potential futures stretching backwards and forwards as these biological brains of ours suddenly come into contact with them? It affects us because we recognise a memory, but that memory is of us living in the now. And we ask ourselves ‘how can that be?’ We do not memorise the now, we experience it, and what we remember is translated into the concept of a past.

This morning I woke up to a couple of maggots falling on my head.

Since I moved into my cabin, I have had one or two rats entering into the ceiling where the insulation is and possibly nesting. Frequently I have heard them scuttling about, scratching, gnawing, and occasionally squealing with antagonism at another. It is usually only one at a time, and I have thrown the sides of my clenched fist banging against the ceiling to scare them and hopefully either shoo them away or just shut them up from fright. And that was usually when I noticed much upheaval of accumulated rat droppings on the other side of the plywood where they were living.

The ceiling has two 1.5x1m (aprox.) sheets of plywood over the room, a narrow skylight with two PC sheets doubled over top of each other, and directly above the bed two narrow half sheets of plywood covering that end.

About a month ago, after waiting for a sunny weekend, I ripped the corrugated iron roofing off the bed end and found lots of droppings that I cleaned up, but couldn't find any obvious entry points for the rat to get in from the outside, only pathways into that area from the other area. Two weeks ago, I attacked the other side pulling off the roofing and again, finding no rats but many rat droppings. But this time, after doing some research, I sprinkled the insulation and general area with pepper, paprika, and oregano to use as deterrents while also dropping some rat poison in one of it's travel paths, and down where some of the insulation was. 

I think the deterrent worked, as there was no more scuttling in that larger area of ceiling, but over the bed, the rat came back. Last night I heard a rat scurrying about, but then went quiet. This morning the maggots came to visit. Now, let me be clear, I expected there to be a dead rat up there: when the weather did heat up in the afternoon the last few days, I did start smelling the distinct stench of decomposition. So, I knew that at some point I would need to get back up and clean it out. This morning was that point. Three maggots at 7:30 AM, up I got, checked my hair - clean; checked the bed - a few more maggots; cleaned these up, got a bucket and put it beneath the plywood gaps in the ceiling where I suspected they had fallen from, and began getting the tools together to go back onto the roof and pull off the roofing. 

This is what I found:

Yay! Dead rat. Urggh! Dead rat and maggots. (I thought rats were supposed to go outside to die?)

While pulling the infected insulation out and shoving it into a big black rubbish bag, my flatmate/tenant seemed to only care about the minuscule fibers missing the bag and falling on the ground, or drifting through the air. That got me a bit pissed off since having rats in the flatmate's ceiling seems to be the least of her concerns and I replied quite angrily "right now I'm a little bit more concerned with dead rats and maggots in my ceiling." After I got it cleaned out and vacuumed I said that there will need to be new insulation placed in because I've thrown it all out. She said she'd get it herself instead of telling the landlord. 

But why not tell the landlord since it's his property, his housing responsibility?

"I just don't want him to be too concerned about what's happening here, especially with repairs, otherwise it might tip his decision to finally sell the property."

This has been her concern for some time I think, and should he sell, we are all out with nowhere to go: I return to a car that isn't running, potentially back to Tūranganui-a-Kiwa to live with my parents if I can't find a place as cheap as this to rent. With no current car running (mine stopped working about two months ago), returning to living in a car isn't much of an option: I could sleep in it on the side of the road outside the house, I guess!

So currently, I live in a cabin that the tenant doesn't want to contact the landlord about fixing for fear that he'll decide to sell. This property with the potential for vegetable gardening has become her home, the house is her home, and the village we live in has become her home. I understand that dilemma for her, but I do feel at times there is a lack of compassion and concern for her fellow flatmates.

If this cabin is to remain my home, then I am going need to fix it myself and block up every potential entry point for a rat to enter in through. It's not something I can rely on a landlord for, or the tenancy holder. It is my home, my responsibility.

New Zealand went into their second Level 4 lock-down last Wednesday 18th August on only my second day at my new job as assistant gardener at a retirement village. 'What an opportunity' I thought to myself. Here I was in an isolated cabin halfway down the property tenant's jungle of a backyard garden, a writing desk, a kitchenette (double hotplate, fridge, basin, jug), and time on my hands to continue writing Dim Day.

One of the tenants visits the beach every morning here in Paekākāriki which was great non-verbal encouragement for me to do the same - most mornings I have. Once lock-down arrived I chose to be a lot more discreet about it, running approx. 3km up the coastal trail, checking out how deserted the beach is before finding an unoccupied spot to wade in and feel the rush of winter salt water washing over me before jogging back to keep up my warmth. Occasionally the debris lapping in on the morning waves has left me less clean than when I went in, so on my arrival back I pop around the corner of the cabin out of sight and have a hose-down. A minimum of 21 press-ups, 21 "leg-ups" (lying on my back and lifting the legs up and down) accompany the morning rising from my bed, or the return from the sea, occasionally I do straight-leg sit-ups with my back as straight as possible. The abs aren't quite showing yet, but that's probably the fault of that packet of Toffee Pops and Whitaker's Artisan Chocolate I bought last week (...and the yoghurts, and the salamis, and the cheeses I bought many times before that as well!). But still, as I said to our new flatmate ("resimate" as I refer to the house dwellers on the property (i.e: Residential Mates)) when she expressed the fact that at her current mid-50s age this is the healthiest, both mentally and physically, that she has ever been, I concurred and was able to relate - in my 44 years this is also the healthiest, mentally and physically, that I have ever been. There is a photo of me from 2010 with quite a puffy face - years of Burger King, Burgerfuel, and heavy protein and carb dinners that weren't being worked off. Since moving into my car and living on the side of the river from 2018, all that unnecessary fat has been shed; with a much more consistent approach to physical body toning without any obsessive desire to build muscle, a massive reduction in food focusing on one good meal each day and only snacking (at most) (mostly nuts) beforehand (and coffee with honey replacing sugar) adding up to an average of 1.5 meals a day, I have consistently weighed-in at less than 67kgs for the past four years. There is no guilt should I choose to eat some Toffee Pops, some licorice (unless I eat them all at once, which I have done *shakes head sadly*), because I know that their energy source will get used rather than be stored (I mean, mostly - like I said, my abs still aren't showing *grumpy face*).

Anyway, enough about me. Dinners are coming along just fine. As you can see, tonight I made a crushed Pumpkin and Sunflower Seed curry with mixed beans on pulse pasta instead of rice. A very tasty meal for this lone red cabin dweller. But this is not a lone lock-down bubble (though I would have no problem if it was). Every day of the week, the five of us take turns cooking for one another in the house (back of photo, extra sleep-out to left), and have ranging conversations from gardening (everyone's a gardener, except me - total newbie!), to books, to music, to covid, to "can we trust the authorities???" - it's all up for discussion, and makes the evening over a glass of wine that much more enjoyable.

But what about Dim Day? Yes, what about the novel I've been trying to write since 2009? I have reached 48,000 words with only 5-6 scenes left to either write or finish off, which I expect the total word-count to be around 60,000. This is a good amount, as there has been a bit extra world-building going on, which I am cautious about. Why? Is not solid world-building the goal? Yes, but this book was never meant to describe a 'world' as such; it was only ever meant to describe a place. Imagine walking into a theatre to watch a play, seeing the curtains rise you know that the props in the background are not real, but you suspend your disbelief and invest in what the actors portray. This was always my intention, and I have tried to keep that world-building to a minimum so that the reader doesn't get distracted, so that the reader only knows what supports the story directly related to the characters. This is not science fiction, this is not mainstream 'genre' fantasy, I wouldn't even call it magic realism; there is no magic, there are no monsters and strange creatures, no technology advancing and changing society other than what characters may project with limited knowledge; what there is instead are animal and plant variations that inhabit their own ecological niche, there are people who act and feel like us living in a similar past, but there is only this place, similar, but very different, and the story that unfolds from one dim day to the next...

The 26th begins this tale of the last days of July. Come into the passenger's seat here with me, listen to the wind bow the trees, truck suspensions grunting over potholes, rapids winding downriver settling the storm; and the ticking of time as feet point upwards perched between door and window.

I have you here in my heart. A thought, a happiness long past. We shared days in the sun, cuddled for warmth during rain, joked about opinions and rational assumptions. 

But numb are the laughs. Dying days for ghosts.

I sit by the fireside, coffee and poached eggs, morning light drifts between trees. I wonder: Is this the end? All I have to look forward to - collecting wood, drying it over ashes, washing dishes in the river, reading a book when mind and body are too tired for anything else.

Or will spring raise the spirits up and remember feet are for walking, the pen is for writing, the mind is for thinking? Is today just a dead day?

I have you here in my heart. Sleep wants me to forget, light all I can see. I awake to me, as I have always been.
​​

What is it about the salty sea breeze, lapping waves, rusted chains? These things that set me at ease? Glistening sun across ocean bays, harbouring yachts, crustacean homes on weathered rocks. So far away the horizon speaks of unknowns, eternal dreams, far from the pat of feet across concrete walkways travelling a pondering mind forward. Always forward.

My mother is the daughter of a fisherman; My grandfather, in his later life, made nets. I remember visiting the sheds once in Gisborne where they all hung up and he was there trawling through used nets looking for holes to repair; I see his worn and sunburnt Italian hands knitting the nylon materials through knots and patterns he held in his mind. I remember his laughter and joy, the good spirits he held in his heart up to his last days. These are all the merits I see in my mother. Her love never dies.

I have been drawn to the ocean for years. Songs I've written would occasionally feature stories about ocean life throughout my years as a songwriter: 'The Pirate's Flesh', 'Diamond Betrayal', 'Dullfish Angler', "Daddy never came home...", and 'Seafarer' are some of the songs that feature heavily the force of the ocean in the lives of men, and sometimes the impact on family. The Blessing's 'Hurricane Room' from their debut album Prince of the Deep Water has been one of the 'great songs' of my life, a tale about travelling coastlines, the oceans, and the colourful characters and situations around that; not so much a 'tale', but a travelogue of experiences through imagery, and a chorus that pleads "I sing my misappropriation song for lovers land-locked far too long."

Yet, I am not an ocean dweller. Nor do I see myself becoming one. The ocean has fascinated me, occupied my mind; perhaps will remain the greatest force of nature untameable by humans. Winds scour the earth, we harness them for power; fires scorch and destroy land and houses, we use it to keep our houses warm; mass oceans of salty water filled with life, we dump our garbage into, trawl nets to feed the masses... But the ocean will have the last say. When the winds become too destructive and carry too many storms for us to inhabit ground level, will we burrow into the grounds, or will we finally seek refuge by sinking into the watery depths?

Clouds are low here in Nelson. They fascinate me too. Crawling across surrounding hilltops, resting in the crevices, the slopes and valleys; I have never seen such low cloud cover before. This morning it covers all of the Tasman bay, hanging just above us all. If we climbed one of those hills opposite the bay, as we got to the top we'd walk straight into the cloud cover. Today's forecast was for sunshine.

My river campsite calls me. The river is a pathway to the ocean. Maybe I will walk the pathway only, return to the boulders and stones, the scavenged dry wood; and be content there, be at ease there, be at peace there. Far from the maddening crowds, the traffic cues and horns, the forced conversations, the deserted conversations; the desire to only know those in an immediate circle and leave others to perish with the vultures. The city has no desire to nourish, nor those entrapped inside it; the individual must break free if they are to be true to themselves, true to their human nature; true to acceptance, trusting, supportive, and loving.

Life expectancy is low when walls of the city enclose. Helping others lives only through the dollar sign, every bit of dishonesty builds to alienate the honest, to trample sincerity, to disown trust.

Are we too soft? Is this what honesty breeds? Can't lie to save myself, can't force my will to get what I want, can't pretend to ignore the strife.

​Hopelessness dreams of escape.
​

~//~

​I have lost faith in finding any kind of happiness.

- 06/08/18, Richmond