Story Cafe

G'day!

Hmm. Where to start? I’d been storing a whole bunch of emails from writing.com and leaving them unread … until today, when I decided to finally click on “login”. Haven’t been here for … oh, just on 3 years, according to my email. Now, that is some serious procrastination. What’s my excuse? Especially as I’ve been retired for over 10 years?

Let’s wheel out the domestic chores, for starters. My wife is a workaholic and the main breadwinner in our family, to the point that if she wasn’t, I wouldn’t be “retired”, so she’s excused from domesticana. In this category, let’s add domestic maintenance and renovation. While we’re at it, may as well add paper warfare, such as financial matters.

When all is said and not much done, I try to make room and space and time for my hobbies. These include newly discovered (well, a decade ago!) interests in digital art and metal sculpture, but no longer include my former passion for aviation. I was a professional pilot for most of my working life, but am very much over flying for a living. (Even flying for fun, for now, although I hope to regain that passion once my wife eventually retires!)

Wait, I have a couple of other passions, ones that I’ve maintained all my life. That is, I’ve been surfing since 1964 – eh, that was sooo long before modems that I’m sure you understand that I mean “surfboards” – and I’ve been playing guitar since about 1969. The thing is, while surfing last year, I met the drummer of a band, and now I’m playing guitar with this band, which takes up a lot of time.

Oh yeah, that was what this diatribe was all about … time. Well, I’ve got quite a lot to write about, and just to make it easy on myself, I’ll start on aviation, because those years were the most intense of my life, and I’ve documented most of it through my pilot’s log book and the rest of it through diaries. I’ll always be grateful to a very, very close friend whose brother was an army helicopter pilot in Papua New Guinea. Before I left to fly for an airline there (landing up the sides of mountains), she gave me a huge diary and told me to record my flying days. I’m very glad I listened to her.

So, some of my aviation experiences will be a good start. When I get around to writing, that is. It’s now been over a decade since I started writing a short story, and I’ve been both procrastinating and abrogating my responsibility to record certain events. Worst part is, I’ve actually been retired for all of that time. And no, I’m not that ancient, I’m not 60 yet.

And the story I started over a decade ago has absolutely nothing to do with aviation, but instead, something even more fascinating. It involves some pretty weird stuff, something at least half the population doesn’t even believe in – psychic phenomena – so I’ll leave this and procrastinate a little longer while I’m preparing dinner for my wife. Hell, I’ve hardly touched the glass of red wine I’m enjoying while I’ve been explaining my excuses for NOT writing … but then, I’ve got some seriously fascinating diversions with finally getting my guitars connected to my computers, and – and – and … oh, I’d better check out which smoke detector’s going off in the kitchen. (I hate cooking!)

Good evening!