noise

The OG Ted E. Quinn, 1966 to hopefully still in the land of the living, but MIA since Boorloo (Perth) in Febraury 2023

Life’s Noisy — Use Earplugs (And Eat Dijonnaise Porridge)

I could say that at 1.11am on Monday 29 April 2014 at the Sydney Railway Square Youth Hostels Australia (YHA) was the moment when I stopped blaming others for my woes and troubles and accepted that I’m the master of my own disaster.

Except I made that realisation many years ago, and so it was at 1.11am this morning that I didn’t have an insight about my culpability in this world, but fervently wished that the wally in the bed underneath mine would have had such a personal breakthrough because he was acting like a twat.

Alors. I snore. Loudly. And had probably been doing so for a couple of hours from 9pm onwards, when I was probably inconveniencing few, until just prior to midnight when I awoke with one of those ‘I’m awake for a reason’ feelings.

Chummy in the bed below me had been rearranging his meagre belongings for an age while I’d been slipping in and out of sleep. But at 11.51pm he must have decided he now had an entitlement to free airwaves, and started violently shaking the bed every time I started drifting off.

Either that or he has a most concentrated and intermittent masturbation practice. Whatever gets you there.

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For want of anything more meaningful in a meandering, blathery article, all photos in this web version will be from my various trips taken so far in 2024 from Brisbane to Perth, from Colonel Light Gardens to Mparntwe

This article also appeared in the April 2024 Edition No. 162 of Trad & Now magazine.

Greetings from Tarntanya on Kaurna Lands, home of the red kangaroo dreaming. I’m Bill Quinn, the artist formerly known as the author of A Punter’s Perspective and Folk On The Road.

I published my last Trad & Now article in February 2023, and I had intended it to be about crowds and noise.

I say ‘last’, but to quote the Billy Bragg song, “[It] should have been the [second] last, but [it] was just the latest.”

Here then is the start of that latest article. I’ve gone for a title using what we call in some brands of written English, parallel structures. It was called, Thank You And Goodnight Pt 1.5.

Although if you’re the type of person who has kept every copy of Trad & Now magazine, plus most issues of its predecessor, Tapestry, and they’re sitting in the top cupboard in the spare room, or shoved under the bed where your first wain Gwenevieve slept from ages two to 22 before she graduated from Kikatinalong University and then moved to Wealabarrabac for post grad (and also that internship with the medical research group) – take a deep breath; I’m puffin – then you can search out the February 2023 edition.