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Thanqol

occasionally a jerk
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Autumn

2 min read
We've gone from hell to heaven. From an air of toxic smog to crystal clear autumn days. From 6:30 wakeups and lurching, barely sentient, directly out into the dark and choking smoke to the luxurious clarity of 8am. From cramming myself into an office chair and trying to avoid terminal boredom to having all the time needed to spend on my crafts and hobbies. From having backlogs that run for miles to seeing the conclusion of projects start to line up ahead of me.

It's time you can lose time within. It's time when everything is being done as it should be. It's not quite retirement - the phone still rings, the inbox still beeps, and I still do need to guide people through the forms of technology, but those moments in between crisises all became mine again. I've freed myself from the hour and a half on the bus. I'm liberated to cook my own food on my own schedule. I can walk in the sunlight and weed my garden and I never knew the day had this many secret hours.

I hope this quarantine lasts forever. To some people it's a curse, but to me it's a blessing. Time's washed away into a strange new abundance, like it too melted in the wake of the bushfires.
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Summer

2 min read
Dawn was a brilliant, fiery red and all that remained was a gaunt quiet.

It's a vision of hell out there. When I woke up I noticed the light pouring through the gap in my window was the colour of faded empire. If you don't know, Australia is experiencing historical bushfires and the vast columns of smoke are visible from space. For weeks now one of the columns has been passing over Canberra, smothering the town in smoke. It's thick, white, and smells of eucalypt and pine. Sweat a little in the heat and you'll start smelling like a christmas ham.

From the eighth floor of an air-conditioned office building it looks like winter. A heavy fog has rolled into town and eaten up all the mountains, but the vents are cool so it doesn't seem remarkable. Step outside and you're into an oven and the bread is burning. Breaks creep into everything. The water in the bathrooms ran faded brown for a few hours. The computers are all broken the people are all on leave and yet the workload just keeps accelerating, who are all these people and why do they need access right this second? People are coughing in the halls, the bus still has too many people despite it being deep holidays, people are wearing those medical facemasks, and I've got soul-draining office parties to attend! A little hotter and the asphalt will start sticking to your feet when you walk!

The season is doing its worst. Summer is sick and dying and wants to take the rest of us with it.

But damn it, I can take it. I'm ready for it. I've got everyone and everything I need to make it through. I'll smile right back at the bastard sun as it glares through the smoke and she'll blink before I do.
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Spring

2 min read
Spring is sleepless.

Every morning at 5am on the dot a wattlebird lands on the tree outside my window and screams non stop for an hour. It's so loud. It's like having an alarm clock go off, it's impossible to sleep through. Every spring. Every year.

I've been through all the stages of despair.

I tried to get used to it, block it out, wear earplugs. I got insanely, unbelievably mad and started throwing rocks at it to drive it away. I went shopping for anything I could think of to drive the thing off. Nothing works. I get up at 5, drive it off, 10 minutes later it's back and screaming again. After two cycles of this I'm completely, fully awake and there's no way I'm getting back to sleep in the hour before work starts. And this loss of sleep ripples throughout my entire life - I'm disoriented, grumpy, tired, drained. I've lost multiple amazing dreams to the sound. If there is a hell that bird will be there waiting.

It would even be fine if the bird just landed, like... 2-3 trees in the distance. Then the sound would be muffled enough for me to sleep through. But it insists on the one directly outside my window despite the fact that this is the one tree where I can easily throw things at it from. It doesn't have a nest or anything, it just constantly loops back to this one tree. If it were on my property I would have chainsawed the damn thing without blinking.

I have finally reached acceptance. I go to bed at eight pm. And then when I get woken up by the screaming I go out there and throw rocks at it until it's well and truly gone. If you make my life hell, bird, then I will make your life hell in turn. We will remain trapped in this miserable embrace until daylight savings comes.
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Winter

2 min read
Winter is busy. Busy busy busy.

You scurry during winter. Head down in the scarf. Hood up on your head. Enough coats and wrappings that it looks like a mobile carpet trundling down the street. Moving at maximum speed to get to the warm place as quickly as possible. Scurry scurry scurry.

The world gets smaller too. Most of it is uninhabitable. You can't go there and don't want to. There's no warm little pockets out there and you should be focusing all your efforts on getting to the nearest source of warmth. Work. Home. Heater. The house fades away as you get into a smaller and smaller bubble. Hurry hurry hurry.

The days are shorter, less time to explore. The fires are warmer, more reason to stay. The bed is softer, more sleep is craved. Shivers burn energy, more food is needed. Vanish into yourself and your little fort of coziness against the wind and the rain and the big grey days where the temperature struggles to punch above five degrees. Shiver shiver shiver.

There are no holidays in Australian winter! It's the chunk of the year where you just work and you work and you work for months on end. It's a joyless winter without even christmas to warm it up. You just scurry and you hurry and you shiver and you fill the time with as many things as possible to make the short days go faster, the cold walks go quicker, and the small world stay far away. It takes a lot of work to keep that busy. Hurry scurry, busy busy. That's winter for you.
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Autumn

4 min read
There's a ghost in the radio.

So there are only two real radio stations down around my way. They're the worst kind of radio - constant ads, annoying announcers, boring news, and only the most begrudging music. Like 70% faff 30% music. They're also both owned by the same company so the jerks sync up their ads so that even channel flipping doesn't get you out of it.

So when I discovered that my town was just baaaaaarely in range of the radio signals coming from the next town over I was ecstatic. That doubled my choice in radio! Two good stations, too - one was a dance music radio station that alternates between weird garbo and amazing trance stuff, and the other is the country music station. I prefer the dance station but sometimes it's playing extended weird garbage so I flip over to the country music station and as a result I have developed a weird appreciation for country music. There's something about a man singing to his tractor - to his tractor, not about his tractor - that just speaks to me, you know?

But with out of town radio there's a catch. The signal is patchy. The country station is a little more distant so it gets weaker around my house and stronger as I head west. But the dance station? It only fails in one area. Around the new hospital.

It's like the radio is haunted and it has been ever since the new hospital started construction. It's the dead centre of town and the dance signal comes in firmly in every other direction. But around the new hospital it stars layering over with garbage and gibberish, distorted voices breaking through the pounding club music or harmonic trance until I'm clear of it. I started taking to a longer route around the building because the vibes it gave me were unsettling.

Directly across the road from the new hospital, after all, is the creepy old abandoned naval intelligence signal complex. It's a vast area the size of an entire suburb through beautiful rolling hills and golden long grass that a picturesque little red and white house sits on, surrounded by towering antennae. I found a hole in the fence one time and went exploring and found an abandoned military barracks where fifty soldiers would have lived, worked and exercised. It's rotting and empty and hasn't been lived in for ten years but all the doors are open and the beds are still there and a single wheelchair sits in the empty basketball court which is cracked and overgrown with grass. If I'm ever homeless I could move in there, sweep the floor, and have a roof over my head no problem.

So what do you call it when your favourite out-of-town radio station goes out to be replaced with crackling static and eerie voices in the gap between the abandoned military communications array and the brand new gleaming hospital?

Well, when I got into my car two weeks ago it was tuned into a radio station I didn't recognize. It was .2 points down from where my dance station normally is, 87.6 to 87.8, so practically adjacent. This station isn't listed. It plays exactly my kind of music - weird quirky indie-ish stuff - with zero downtime for commercials or announcers, so I've got no idea who runs it. And the sounds I heard around the sigint site are clearly the sounds of that station overlapping my dance station - that's the only place in town where that happens, so that must be the location they're broadcasting from. Just the other day I listened to a song from a weird AMV, go to my car, turn the ignition, and the exact same song immediately comes on the radio.

So I'm haunted by the ghost in the radio and she wants me to know that she shares my taste in music.
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Featured

Autumn by Thanqol, journal

Summer by Thanqol, journal

Spring by Thanqol, journal

Winter by Thanqol, journal

Autumn by Thanqol, journal