Rather than face a new campaign in the springtime wars of my last
post, I left my home to the birds and bees for the afternoon and
went down to the nudist beach again. Took an even longer walk from
the distant carpark than usual to visit the site of a 1920s iron
ore mine that processed rocks erroded from the cliffs above the
beach. I didn't know that iron ore and sandstone went together
actually, but apparantly they can. Not much left now but scant
foundations, earthworks, and a dry dam where some people have built
a weird spiral path in the middle out of rocks and sticks. The
track through there isn't much longer than my normal route, but
quite steep. Still no sign of the old "RAAF prohibited Area" I was
trying to locate.
At the start I passed a couple of women turning down a different
track and engaged in a passing exchange that counts as a rare event
of attempted similar-age female conversation in my life, sadly
perhaps a significant boost to the year's monthly average. Later I
realised they were proably attempting an ill-advised route to the
other, better clothed, end of the beach because the lower carpark
was probably full and it seems a shorter distance by road than by
that steep track along the cliffs. I doubt they made it there in
flip-flops.
After relaxing on the beach in the perfect (for me) cloudy but warm
weather that I rarely manage to catch, swimming somewhat limited by
big waves, I thought about my social relationships on the deserted
tracks I walked back along. In many ways I'm not the typical sort
of person to walk among flip-flop wearing women and admire dam-bed
artwork. But although I spend most of my other time programming,
tinkering with electronics, or educating myself on topics of
science, technology, or history, I've never really had proper nerdy
friends besides internet aquaintences. Some friends I had at school
were more in that sort of artsy/adventure bent. One guy I talked
with a lot was on drugs and made up all sorts of progressively
unlikely stories about his sexual encounters. No interest in
computers or electronics at all but we had a common understanding
there, a way of thinking about things besides the issue of what we
were actually thinking about.
I think I get along better really with those sorts of people, who
usually share very few of my interests. That guy and another one of
my friends went on to art school and we lost touch. I don't know
what direction he took from there - art, drugs, or something
completely different, but it seemed at the time that we were set
for such different paths there wasn't much point even trying to
stay in touch. If I were to pursue a talent of mine that fits in
the vague part of society those people inhabit I guess it would be
music. I've always had a sense for it, and I'm regularly singing to
myself or writing down potential lyrics, but the prospects of
making a living off it seem bleak. Still it would be a way to meet
people, or more to the point, meet women.
