At last, a year later, we have managed to go through the personal effects of my Swedish brother. So many perfectly good warm clothes and shoes have now been dropped off at the local Caritas where they hopefully will be used for asylum seekers facing the winter sure to come after this Vienna heatwave.
Everything’s muddled up in my head and I’m due for a long break with minimum Wifi, smart phone, Internet of thingies. Let’s say it’s a question of mortality bytes.
A dear friend is fighting cancer again, another is going through chemo, both will come out on top, but the circle is closing in as I light up another cigarette.
The time away in the wilds of Sweden 
should clear my head and let me write in bigger chunks than the 150 weekly words prompted by Ad Hoc Fiction as a way to get some More Mercury Blobs together, collection which I am seriously thinking about making freely available. Life’s too short to just focus on goals in the traditional sense. The path is the goal. Process rules.
I dislike the word “author” for some reason. I’ve been told that if you write, then you are a writer. But I’m not a writer in the sense that I will not die if I don’t write, I do not have to live the life of a writer, whatever that is; I just write. And I read. I’ll be taking books with me on my Kindle and in my suitcase. They’re all books for which the hype has fizzled out. I don’t trust hype. I’m looking forward to re-reading Timothy Findley’s Famous Last Words.
But there is also a bright side, and it resides in the young. I was recently welcomed by two young Lithuanians to slam a mad poem to raise funds for Nepal. Tonight I’ll be meeting other teachers participating in the young start up Vienna Skill Smiths with whom I’ll be running a workshop in September. All the workshops are steered by passion not money and are thus affordable. It’s all about sharing. Touch just one person and make the spice flow.
Wishing you a great Northern summer and hoping things warm up weatherwise in Sydney for our Possum. No, I won’t mention politics, just read my lips. 
Onwards!
