Commuted Sentences
Disjunct thoughts on the way to and from work
I really like my commute. Heck, let’s take a risk and say I love my commute.
The broad contours have been the same since we moved here from the Blue Mountains in late 2022. Northside1 to Parkville and back. But there’s been enough variations on that theme to make Bach nod his head and say ‘respect’.
86 tram to intersection of Smith and Johnston, then walk
11 tram to intersection of Brunswick and Johnston, then walk
1 or 6 tram all the way to campus
Walk some of the way, then get one of the above trams
Walk all the way in,
sometimes via Brunswick, sometimes via Nicholson, sometimes via Lygon.
sometimes sticking to main streets, sometimes taking side streets, sometimes taking alleyways filled with cobblestones, weeds, graffiti, street art, cats, abandoned whitegoods, mysterious back entrances and other oddities.
Sometimes walking through parks and along bike paths.
Ride in, ride back home, fall off my bike and dislocate my elbow (only done this one time).
Lately the rhythm has been to walk all the way in in the morning, then take a tram back of an evening.
I love the morning walk.
Sometimes I think about work. Occasionally this is productive, organising thoughts, hatching a plan etc. I might make a voice memo on my phone, or jot down something in the notes app. Sometimes it is circular, mulling over things without making much progress. Sadly, it has often involved checking my email. I’m happy to say I do this less now.
A recent example is a panel session on fire and climate risk that I’ve agreed to chair at a forthcoming conference in Hobart (finally, an opportunity for a middle-aged white male!). On my commute I thought of a few questions I could ask the panel, like What gives you hope? and How bad could things really get?
Sometimes I get ideas for blog posts on the commute. Like something about this offering from Marco Turco and friends, The emerging human fingerprint on global extreme fire weather. I thought to myself, what about doing a deep dive on a single paper? Talk through the methods, the findings, how it’s presented, what it all means. I could talk about how we are getting pretty good at saying precisely how much more likely specific heatwaves are as a result of our insanely persistent tinkering with the climate system. I could even point to the recent study that did this for the heatwave associated with the major fire outbreak in Victoria in January this year (I was on the team but played an exceedingly minor role; my main contribution was helping come up with the title). I could talk about how figuring out our contribution to changed fire risk is a bit trickier than doing it for temperature, but that great strides are being made. I could sympathise with the desire to quantify the human influence on climate extremes, while also wondering whether it’s ever going to make a lick of difference.
Sometimes I listen to podcasts (main rotation: Open Source with Christopher Lydon, Social Science Bites with me David Edmonds, The Taxcast hosted by Naomi Fowler; but I’ll occasionally admit new entrants2.
Sometimes I listen to music. Passersby may have spotted a tear or two welling up in my eye as I listened to Kate Bush’s A Coral Room. They may have seen my mood lift and my pace quicken off the back of any number of soaring, driving, funky tunes. I recommend the opening to Batuka from Santana III as you are leaving work for the day. They may have seen me giggling to Weird Al or They Might Be Giants. Aside from their creative genius in writing and recording all those songs, you gotta hand it to them for creating moments all over the world where people spontaneously sing lyrics like this out loud:
For everyone who only just arrived
A quick synopsis
If you came late and missed the commotion
And you wonder what was all that
Here’s the recap
I have no idea what I look like when listening to Angine de Poitrine, but that does give me an idea for what to wear when I’m giving my talk at the Hobart conference…
Sometimes I trip over a stupid bump in the road on Lygon St while crossing Pigdon St. A couple of oncoming pedestrians may have been confused or unsettled by the look on my face the other day when I finally saw it coming. I thought to myself ‘Not today’, and gave an involuntary snarl as I towered over the bump in the bitumen like Muhammad Ali standing over Sonny Liston.
Sometimes I’ll make a call. Sometimes I’ll make a pitstop at A1 Bakery.
Sometimes I’ll read a book. I absolutely loved 100 Demons! by Lynda Barry. So funny, so poignant. Some of the best bits (‘demons’) are on lice, street ball games, the tragic transition from unself-conscious to self-conscious dancing and the smells of people’s houses. Here’s a taste.
Sometimes I just walk, daydreaming or taking in whatever’s happening around me. Occasionally I’ll be moved to make a photo. Would somebody please dim the lights? The slideshow is beginning.
Thank you. Please take your rubbish with you when you leave.
I made the mistake of calling it the Inner North for a while, by analogy to Sydney’s Inner West, where I grew up. Our friend jokingly called it the Golden Triangle when she was selling us on this as an area to move to. I’ve heard someone call Brunswick East ‘the Beast’ and someone else call Castlemaine ‘North Northcote’. I love discovering all these local terms of appreciation and derision. I need to take a night class on this to extend my knowledge.
I just listened an interview with C Thi Nguyen on what games teach us about life, on the recommendation of my pal Ned Haughton. There was a lot of laughter, not just from Nguyen but also the host, Adam Conover. I need more laughter in my life, you hear me?! Anyway, it was a good listen. Their discussion of the beauty of games and play reminded me of something Douglas Hofstadter once said, about the ability of a well-constructed set of constraints to unlock high levels of creativity. I prize playfulness and am drawn like a moth to the light of other playful souls. Does that make me a non-serious person? The interview also included a great discussion of the danger of metrics. Metrics perform the miraculous service of compressing and abstracting rich, dense reality into a form that can be effortlessly shuttled between highly divergent domains. Think points scored, likes, subscribers, citations, lifespan, GDP, area burnt, increase in mean annual global surface temperature. They are countable, stackable and portable. Unfortunately by necessity they strip away all context and leave us highly prone to caring about the metric instead of what it deigns to represent i.e. we eat the menu and confuse the map for the territory. We live in a world of metrics. People are working furiously to build new ones all the time and when the inevitable critique arrives, it is so damn tempting to think that the answer is just better metrics. I will tip my hat to the incredible Kate Brady, who floated a set of cozy metrics and punk metrics to complement the traditional metrics that dictate all activity play a motivating role here in academia.
BTW Conover’s laugh and voice reminded me of Seth Rogen. Rogen is not quite on my Mount Rushmore of distinctive voices, but he’s not far off. Someone who is definitely there is Gilbert Gottfried. I listened to his amazing colossal (and often highly inappropriate) podcast during my biweekly commute from the Blue Mountains to Wollongong and grew to love his voice. His laugh was an excellent tell for when things were about to get bizarre and/or hysterical. RIP GG.