I Hate Autumn

I think I will never write an entry inspired by a season or the weather again.

Chartered Territory

It felt a little challenging to find joy in autumn on a Monday. Most of the day's sunlight saw me mapping web services' outputs to a canonical data model, only to be briefly distracted by missing groups in a new Linux installation. I did get to eat my large salad for lunch next to the water feature - but you can do that any season.

After homemade pizzas on yiros bread for dinner there was still a ghost of sunshine left and I walked around Croydon as the skies played through all the pastels and a super moon rose to guide me home. No one was in their front gardens pruning their frangipani, again... But it was a nice stroll. I did have a spring playlist playing, but I reversed the tracklist.

There's No I in Funeral

I went to someone's funeral today and as usual I mainly reflected upon my own life:

I don't think it would be too much effort to add chapter and verse numbers to my journal entries in PHP. This would allow any bible reading to be easily replaced with a Bradism reading, as well as potentially enabling the easier sharing of my wisdom post my life.

I don't want my eulogy to sound like someone is reading my résumé and throwing in thoughtful pauses and looks at the audience. If any of the following get mentioned during the celebration of my life I will be disappointed:

• He was an IT professional
  
• He wrote music reviews for the Adelaide Street press from 2008-2010.
  
• He achieved his TOGAF certification in 2019
  
• He loved working with computers and digging through application logs for hours to identify the right Java Exception stack trace to report back to the developer who'd written the deployment steps.
  

I would be fine with "you had to watch out him outside, because he was good in the key, but would also hit threes." (Bradism 1063, verse 2).
I would be more than fine with everyone who attends having to go through my journal and find their favourite Bradism to share.
Failing that, just pick something vaguely truthful that I did and embellish it until it becomes entertaining.

The funeral itself needs to be done as cheaply as possible.
I don't mean simply saying no to all the upselling options given by the funeral home director.
I want whoever plans my funeral to treat it like a game of golf and aim for the lowest amount next to the dollar sign possible.
Get on OzBargain and Cash Rewards and stack discount codes with cashback to turn my body into ash and give people a platform from which to read Bradism from where everyone else can hear them.
There's a few friends and family I would probably pick out as whatever the groomsmen equivalent of deaths are, to directly assign them this tight-arsing responsibility. But as much as I love them I am hoping to outlive them all.
I mean, truth be told I am hoping to outlive everybody on the planet, including those that haven't been born yet. But I suspect it will fall to Alex's kids.

It's worth noting that I don't want the catering included as part of the cost cutting. Please let there be an open bar and a wide variety of good things to eat. There's no joke here.

The soundtrack is a tricky one.
At the moment there are two songs competing for speaker space as people catch a last glimpse of my cardboard coffin before it's fed into some guys pizza oven someone found through future Facebook marketplace.

The most likely choice is Talking Heads' (Nothing But) Flowers because I just love how it flips the idea of eternal, natural paradise into an inconvenience. That will make people think I'm deep and intelligent. There's also a good instrumental jam near the start which will give people time to reflect on some of the Bradisms they have just heard.

The runner up song is the Rennie Pilgrem remix of Zero's Emit/Collect, a 2003 breakbeat banger that no one will recognise unless Josh, Craig and Cowan are still alive. If they are - and they don't suffer from dementia - they will be the only ones moved in the room.

No one ever reads the Music entries on this site, so I doubt the DJ selection will be of much importance.

I want to be cremated.

I doubt they make standard sized coffins big enough for people my height. If I don't fit in the first class beds on the Caledonian Sleeper from Edinburgh to Euston Station I'm definitely not going to fit in a grave plot.

My ashes, which will inevitably have at least one Nash hair in them, can be discarded wherever convenient.

I don't have a problem with composting the soil beneath a passionfruit vine, although the council might.

More Autumn Pleasures

14th reading a book with my feet warmed by the sun
15th homemade mocha hot cross buns
16th bike rides after work
17th BBQs
18th warm nights watching football
19th sunset strolls
20th family days
21st morning barefoot beach walks

Dross

It was bin night tonight. As I fumbled in the dark with the combination lock on the gate a voice in my head reminded me I'd turned the top digit one notch upward when I locked up after gardening on Sunday. Usually, over the past 50 weeks, I've turned it one notch down.

It was striking, the fact that my brain remembered this insignificant detail so astutely after a long day of so much other brain shit. Maybe it was the beats of Multilateral Nuclear Disarmament in my headphones. Maybe it was the Pirate Life Hazy Mosaic and Balter XPA cans I'd just drunk over my autumn bbq. I swam for a second in a sense of pride that my mind was sharp and, perhaps, superior to other minds.

Then it took me multiple attempts to get the gate latch up. In the process I dropped the wheelie bin with a thump. Lesson learnt, I picked the bin back up and humbly dragged it to the curb.

At that point I did notice none of my neighbours had remembered it was bin night.

Parklands

We visited Gluttony tonight. I saw feats of acrobatics, core strength and agility from five human beings and one possum.