My favourite genre of everything, absurdism (which I have written about at length), is about embracing the meaninglessness of life. According to Camus, absurdism and death are inseparable. And, as we know with the faultless saying, “You are what you eat,” because I consume absurdism, I make things that are absurdist. And as absurdism and death are intertwined, I make things that are about death.

  People die. All the time. And this does not tend to bother us unless it’s someone we feel like we know. And so in my work, I tend to create characters that people don’t feel like they know that die. The Impatient Man (I don’t think this song has a full recording yet!), Moira, Soldier Sam, the Horse Brother and his murderer – and in That’s Absurd!, Kayden, Jo, Death, Jo, Eve and the Priest. Why do I do this? In the case of the film, because it’s kind of funny. In the case of the songs, you’ll find that they’re all stories of characters (who have different morals and do different things) and the natural conclusions to those characters’ stories is death. That’s just what happens. In the case of Moira, her tale is carried on after her death, the Horse Brother is avenged, the Impatient Man laments and meets God (sort of?).

  Anyway, the reason I am writing about all of this is because I was walking alongside a highway in Canberra (one of the ones adjacent to Lake Burley Griffin) and in my little trek to the bus stop, I had to step over multiple pieces of broken car and L- and P-plates. This is almost like a poem that writes itself. As cars beside me were whooshing past at eighty or more kilometres an hour, right under my very feet lay the remnants of vehicles owned by young people – and this is proven by the fact that the P-plates were red. In Canberra, if you’re over 25 you get the green P-plates straight away. The L-plates seem to mean that perhaps some adults teaching their kids to drive may have been in some crashes as well.

  For some reason, I felt an intense connection with this scene. Also, this is going to be the first blog post that goes over four hundred words because I am in a mood right now and am not going to be constricted by my own silly rules.

  Perhaps it’s because I’m learning to drive, perhaps it’s because a lot of my friends are on their provisional licences, perhaps it’s because of the tragedy of so many young people being involved in such a terrible thing. But it was seriously moving.

  Now, I don’t know if those people involved in those accidents actually died. I imagine when people are in serious accidents, the first thing they think isn’t, “Wait! Let me take my P-plates off my car so I can go driving again after this in a different car! After that, I’ll call the ambulance about my whiplash, internal bleeding and concussion.” But it was a really eye opening scenario. The biggest death I’ve probably experienced in my life at the time of writing was that of my dog of twelve years. And that was absolutely horrific, because I was in the room when he was put down. And for some reason in that moment it was suddenly very clear to me that when people die, they die. And I know that’s very hard for the friends of the dead.

  I wrote a song about my dog’s death, and even six months later it still holds tremendous emotional value to me. I tried singing it again a couple weeks ago and I couldn’t get through it without breaking down.

  Here is where I mention the cliché of this being the moment where I should give you a witty takeaway from this blog post. One can think of “memento mori” – “remember, you will die.” One can think of “carpe diem” – “seize the day.” One can think of “que sera sera” – “what will be will be.” But in the end, aren’t those all the same thing?