The Queen died

Yesterday I had to go to the dentist. I had made an appointment at the Melbourne University Dental School - instead of at the clinic in Carlton where I last went, three years ago - in the interests of dentistry costing less money (I got a mortgage in September last year and monthly interest has doubled since then) but I should have thought it through just a tiny bit - they did a whole lot of xrays and so on which the other dentist had already done. Just in case you don't think you want to read the whole story, the important thing is this: it turns out that there wasn't that much wrong with my teeth so dentistry is not going to be very expensive not just yet. Well, before all that became clear I still had to go through the whole process of going to the dentist.

I'm on six weeks of long service leave, and spending it working on my book, it's a graphic novel! it's about the Shrine. 

by the end of tomorrow I'll have done 55 pages out of 138. I've been working on it long enough to have found out that when I tell someone I'm working on a graphic novel, the first question is usually 'who's doing the pictures', which makes me wonder what they think a person does when they do a graphic novel, if it doesn't include...doing the pictures. While I've been holed up happily at home, on leave, just working on the book I've mostly been listening to podcasts and not to music. 

While I waited for the bus to take me to the dentist place, it was such a nice day, and even though I could see the crooked stick-on bricks on the front of the new apartment buildings going up across the street and they always make me feel really repulsed and angry, and also, I was going to the dentist, I felt like listening to music instead of replaying again the daily Guardian news podcast which that day was gratifyingly detailed and specific about how much further south Peter Dutton's personal approval rate has gone. So I looked in the playlists I had saved in Spotify.

I sent some messages while on the bus and missed my stop by two blocks so I had a reasonable walk back to the dentist. I walked past the multi-level car park in Grattan St which some local authority has said is a heritage building and some people object to it being called that. Having just been looking at a 2023 build I felt that the car park was easily the better building and could probably be easily renovated into beautiful apartments that everyone would really love, or something like that. I was really enjoying the music, and honestly, I felt unreasonably happy. It's an easy enough claim to make, 'oh I felt unreasonably happy', but if you consider that I was walking along with dual awareness that everything right now was really good but also within mere minutes I would be reclined in a chair with implements and someone's fingers in my mouth, probing for bad news, you'll know it's not mere idle words.

I have to stop this nonsense now but it seems likely there will be more just like it in the very near future.