Walking out of the train station this morning, tried to sidestep someone's massive vape cloud and stumbled over a pile of knocked over e-scooters. Then thought I was getting a friendly hand up from a stranger, but actually had an Uber Eats coupon thrust in my face.

Spring used to be my favourite season. Blooming flowers were the tonic for grey, winter skies, and some mornings in the sunshine my endocrine system would leave me feeling no more sophisticated a creature than the bees that buzzed about the swollen stamens around me.

I've been around the sun enough times now to recognise spring for what it really is: A blind, reckless orgy. And it sickens me. On a dry continent, in an era where we must be frugal with resources, this exhibition is mostly a brief and wasteful burst of Instagram-esque vibrance which doesn't represent reality. Literally days later the seeds are swaying in the breeze, the petals are rotted and falling, and the desiccated creepers are flopped and curled across the footpath in perfect postures of post-climatic clarity. Fuck Spring. Those weeks of blossom and sweet fragrances weren't worth the coming summer of prickles in socks, the withered, brown vines, or the extreme fire danger. Spring is nothing but a microcosm of life, a brief vignette of hormones followed quickly by decay. I don't need to see that every October.

Yes my favourite jasmine plant is dying, and no I'm not happy about it.

I sort my trash for recycling into plastic bottles, aluminium cans, brown glass, green glass, clear glass, soft plastics, coffee pods, mixed recycling, lids and bread ties, batteries, organic waste, and - if anything is left - it goes into garbage.
So I should be safe from climate change.

The view from Bradley's Head

We've been balancing a fine line the past months between living in the present, and planning our hiking holiday. Fortunately I don't need to learn any new languages to order beers this time.

Part of that balance involves the occasional practice hike to ensure equipment and processes are all good for the real thing. We've been up and down the Adelaide ranges testing shoes and learning lessons.

Lesson one: when taking a pre-walk selfie, find a background nicer than the toilet block.

This weekend we did Lofty the long way, an 18km walk starting in Chamber's Gully. I don't think there will be many cafes with hot, fresh coffee on the summits of the mountains we're going to, but when we reach the top you can always rely on a view to make all the hard work worth it.

It crossed my mind, this morning as I crossed a bridge, and a southerly wind whipped at my face, that Autumn is the most dramatic of seasons. Less than three months ago it was forty degrees, I could literally walk outside in shorts at any point of the day, and now I'm contemplating driving the long way home just to keep the heater pointing at my feet. I'll have to remember this for next Autumn's video...

Yesterday I had a craving for pasta, and all I really had to cook was a whole butternut pumpkin and a whole bunch of leftover pulled-pork. Well, it turned out pretty well after I turned it into a soup and dished it up on wholemeal spaghetti.

This morning marked the one week mark of having my new mouth-guard. It did turn out I opened my mouth too soon when I journal-jinxed my first major dental and not long after the temperatures dropped below the high-thirties the pain in my tooth returned. My endodontist's current theory is that nocturnal grinding is stopping the inflammation in the nerve from settling. Honestly, I don't believe that, but so strong is my desire to eat Weet Bix and berries with tiny seeds again that I was willing to pay $200 for a night-guard made custom for my mouth.
My dentist warned me that the first week would be challenging and that I might wake up to find the mouth-guard out of my mouth, under a pillow, or have trouble sleeping. I've had none of these problems, from the first night onward I've put it in, fallen asleep, and woken up with it in my mouth six and bit hours later. This is only reinforcing my theory that I am not a restless sleeper. I think it's also character revealing. I'm well trained at ignoring people and things that interfere with my personal space even if I don't want them there. One morning on the train a woman had the point of her high heel stuck into the toe of my shoe and I went twenty minutes without even clearing my throat.

In the USA they don't call it Autumn, they call it Fall. As in, I wonder how much further the Australian Dollar will fall before I start buying cereal and yogurt over there. At least it won't actually be Autumn in a couple of weeks, in both hemispheres, and at least I don't have to pay for major dental in US Dollars.

Let's start with some facts.

Fact one: The human race is going to die out at some point. That could be from climate change in a century, or an undetected asteroid next week, or - best potential end game - in a million years a single, wise and mysterious old human sits alone in a bar on an alien planet in a distant galaxy, drinking purple rum and listening to amazing tunes, knowing they are the last of their kind, and passing away peacefully in a puddle of rum and alien-kebab vomit.

Fact two: Australia’s contribution to halting climate change and cutting emissions is about as relevant to the fate of the world as Seth Curry’s contribution towards winning an NBA Championship. We’re minor players, our only relevance comes from our relationship with the big names. Sure, with the wrong policies we might emit a few extra thousand tonnes of greenhouse gases, ship out a whole bunch of dirty coal without much in the way of nationalised royalties, and dredge through a bleached UNESCO World Heritage reef to make some offshore bank accounts a little taller. But in the scheme of things, i.e. surviving a million years for the last human to die in an exotic bar, we’re not that important compared to other major countries on the Earth. To truly halt climate change we really need the entire human race to take a long term view, forget about investments and profit margins, and sacrifice.
It’s not going to happen. Humans are animals. There’s 7.5 billion of us. The United States doesn't use the metric system. Australian states can’t even reach a consensus on daylight savings. Millions of people base their lifestyles on varying imaginary friends. Sure, a lot of people might say they’re for global equality, but wait until they find out equality means living on $1000 a month, and everything at KMart is suddenly five times more expensive. So...

Fact three: Climate Change is already here.

Facts established, we can now see that for a lot of people the problem of Climate Change is not “How do we stop it?”, but, “How do we survive it?”
If you believe in capitalism, and you’re rich or think you’re getting rich, you’ll probably believe the market will provide solutions. Heat? Drought? Rising Sea Levels? Technology will save us. There’ll be profits in it. It might be expensive, but it can be bought.
Yes, Climate Change will cause mass extinctions, dehospitablise major parts of the globe, and generate millions of refugees, but that’s easy fixed with a strong border force.
From this we can derive the values of the self-centred, the scared, the ignorant. Jobs are needed to make food and smartphones affordable. Fighter jets and submarines are a crucial part of protecting the Great Australian Moat, the money we can make today we can save for a rainy (that is, really, really sunny) day.

And, I mean, there’s some problematic media issues driving these values as well, but all the most successful news outlets prosper when they tell the majority what they already want to hear.

And that’s why I think people vote for nationalistic, populist parties and outcomes from the privacy of their voting booths. Partly fear, partly ignorance, mostly the delusion of self-preservation.

You might think, Brad, surely you’d want to vote for the Liberal-National Coalition too? I am well paid, in a white-collar job. I own property. I’m more likely at the moment to receive franking credits than welfare. I won’t have children that need child-care payments, or fresh food and clean water for their own children.

Maybe I’m an idiot.

Maybe I want to believe that humans can, with the right amount of social support, in a country and world where education standards are higher, health outcomes are better, and where incomes allow for people to be smarter, less overworked, less exhausted, less hopeless, ascend beyond basic human instincts.

Maybe I'm a tight arse who doesn't want to pay a premium for second-rate Weet Bix and yogurt fifty years from now.

Maybe I’m too invested in the idea of humans eventually cracking faster than light travel, and cellular regeneration, and clean energy, and being able to digest alien rum and process alien rock and roll.

That’s why I voted Green, and why I started drinking last night before the vote count even started.

Before lunchtime today I was in the bathrooms at work applying SPF 50 sunscreen to my face and neck.
“Going for a walk?” Someone asked.
“If we're going to set a new heat record today,” I said. “I want to say I was there. I'm going out to see what it's like.”
For those who stumble upon this entry in the future, or if I add a feature to sort entries by maximum temperature, this is what it was like: It was hot.

In 2004, during a brutal but not the most brutal heatwave Adelaide has ever seen, there was talk on the news about breaking the 1939 record. To which my step-grandfather scoffed. He'd said they'd got through the ‘39 heatwave fine, with no air-conditioning, living in a tin shed. As he said this I realised that he actually lived through the 1930s and remembered the heatwave. I was impressed. At the time I could barely remember what the weather had been like the previous weekend. This was before I added the weather feature to my journal, and at a time where I did too much binge drinking.
On that day I said to myself, I want to live through the hottest day on record. I want to regale young people about the experience and force them to pay attention to me.

I did it.

Now in 65 years I can tell people (or robots) that the streets were nearly empty. The gym was empty. The free cold water being handed out at the train station was lukewarm. I came home to Vanessa making hot chips in the oven. The seaweed along the length of the beach was cooking in the sun.

Who am I kidding, the way the planet is going we'll beat this record again a lot sooner than we'd like to. I give it less than a decade. I have a wedding coming up in February where I need to wear a three piece suit on the beach. It'll probably be broken then.