Laid bare in Melbourne Diaries

I haven’t written for a while, mostly due to long working hours and failing home computers. I’m struggling to adjust at work – never have I been in a place with so many competing tensions and agendas, and contract negotiations with the likes of Microsoft, Amazon, et. al. don’t make for an easy life.

More cheerfully, I’m saving quite a bit of money, enough to get a house earlier next year. I’m also enjoying my new office location, which is in the centre of Melbourne’s food district. It is impossible to eat badly for lunch here – a five star Asian restaurant even set up a pop-up restaurant for Korean food 100m from the foyer, with a beautiful. Melbourne is strange example of organic city planning. The government spent billions building a Federation Square nobody likes, but in the meantime small businesses and teenagers started to reclaim previously uninhabited parts of the cityspace, the many small alleyways slicing up the city grid. In the space of a few years they have created numerous graffiti murals, live music venues, cafes and weird theme bars. The city now teems with life, and is a wonderful place to wander around after work, with musicians, street art, light displays and a generally safe vibe each and every night. Thank god I didn’t have to go back to Canberra this winter (where it has been unusually cold and frosty).

Read a book last night entitled ‘Laid Bare’, an autobiography by a man who went through a nasty divorce in his mid-thirties and for the next few years spent his time harnessing his passing resemblance to Robert Downey Jr through online affairs with numberless women in varying stages of desperation. It was an incredibly depressing read. The author is incredibly self-deprecatory, and depicted the slow process of his own physical and mental decline, the usual stuff that men go through in their late thirties, coming to the realisation that he would never be as good as the person he once was, and would never get back what he once had. While far shyer than the author, I feel at 37 much the same way as the author. Ten years ago, things weren’t super, but I recall being so much more energised. I read practically half the Western canon of literature in a few years, watched films avidly, was in a long-term relationship, was unusually fit, had started work as a lawyer, and was eager to develop myself at work and at home. Now read about a third of what I used to, am facing sore knees and the inexorable decline in fitness (though by Australian standards I remain fit). Long hours at work (12-13 hours a day on average) are also taking their toll, as I wake up exhausted most weekdays.

Nothing adequately prepares you for your thirties. I imagined that I would have all the key issues in my life resolved, and instead ended up as an older man struggling with teenager’s brain. Nobody I know seems particularly satisfied with their lives. Several people have lost their jobs from the public service cuts I avoided. Friends who got married and had kids complain of sexual frustration and feeling trapped within their own lives – in one case I almost wish the husband would have an affair, so badly treated is he by his wife. Those thirtysomethings who are single seem addicted to online dating trying to upgrade their relationships. One person, who, while a nice enough girl has even travelled around the world the last month with a different Tinder-style account in each country, claiming to the Italian, Greek, Spanish and other men she picks up to be three years younger than she is. Is this usual practice now (because it seems borderline sex addiction to me)? Another, a woman I was fond of but who now works in a different part of the city, went straight onto an online dating site the same day as she was dumped by her boyfriend (thanks former work colleagues for passing that on to me). Some of the entries on this site betray a similar sexual feverishness - one woman spends much of her time complaining that the men in her life are not satisfactorily loyal to her, but will then describe a threesome with strangers the next entry. At least the one time I ever really fell in love and that love was requited was when I was 19, as anything after your first adult love inevitably feels like a cheaper lifestyle deal, mediated by the phone in your pocket. It’s a louder, nastier world that I’m increasingly retreating from – Christ, the idea alone of putting my face on a widely-viewed webpage is by itself a slightly nauseating prospect. I’ve become way too comfortable with the house and work and life that I’ve created for myself.