Week 46
Hellos and Goodbyes.
I’ll get back to the fungal world next week but this week I found an old wordless comic I made. It was made before I became a Dad, so it’s nice to see I always had a dadlike energy. It was in pencil so I just coloured it using a nice palette I made this week.
Lizzie loved to play with the frisbee. She was the first dog I’d had that was into chasing objects. She never tired. We would go out and throw the frisbee for hours in the clear Perth daylight. I would listen to the Game of Thrones audiobooks in a time when I believed Book 6 was just around the corner. Once she bit me in her enthusiasm to get the frisbee back and I instinctually lashed out and bonked her on the nose and felt really bad about it not because she was hurt or even cared but because I didn’t like the violence of the surprise reflex lurking in me.
Despite being away from Perth for months at a time she never forgot about me. There was always a beautiful short moment that was the moment of recognition, a shift in her attitude from caution to excitement. It was always thrilling and deeply gratifying.
We became close in the year or two I spent living at home after returning from overseas. I was somewhat depressed during that time. Taking her for walks was always good.
She would cuddle you like a person. Flinging her arms around your neck.
She had brown and intensely human eyes.
Her lust for play was quite annoying at times because you would always run out of energy before her. She would bring you a toy and then turn away from you, tensed, ready for you to throw the toy. If you didn’t throw the toy she would wait, coiled for as long as it took for you to throw. Sometimes you would forget and then look over ten or fifteen minutes later and she would still be there, waiting to be released.
Lizzie was my parents dog for 16 years. She died this week, a week after they all moved to Melbourne. She was in pain, she had lymphoma. She was beautiful, graceful. Much cherished. My mum was her constant companion. A new start for them in Melbourne twinned with this massive loss.
Rachel’s friend Jess died on the same day one year ago. On that day we saw a single tiny cloud float low over the CBD and both noted at the same time we thought it was Jess. On the day Lizzie died I spent three hours trying to get the new scanner to work. Rachel thought it was Lizzie’s spirit trapped, waiting to be released. When I got it working it did feel like a huge rush, a relief, I almost cried.
This week I listened to the album Box for Buddy, Box for Star, by This is Lorelai on the recommendation of friend and TWIL subscriber Chris Vernon. I liked it on first listen and have grown to really love it. Every song is recorded in a different style but then is also somehow the same song. If I was AI I would say the album has revealed itself to be ‘quietly brilliant’.
I drew this picture while listening to this album:
Next week I am going to listen to We Will Always Love You by The Avalanches. I saw that Trixie Mattel gave it a Perfect 10 and I realised that even though I’ve heard plenty of bits of it playing it on radio I’ve never spent much time with it. So that’s next week. Join me if you like and comment if you have a suggestion for me to listen to!
For context, this is what I’m doing if you missed it.
This Week I Learned…
You need to scan using the ‘photo setting’ in the Brother app to bypass Apple’s automatic whitening of an image and get the RAW data, then put it in Photoshop and adjust it.
My google search history.