Wheat & Chaff Unplugged

I’ve had trouble finding the motivation to post lately. It has to do with the fact that I feel stuck in Faulkton. I just can’t be bothered doing much when I want to be somewhere else. I’ve got Pollyanna’s voice in my head telling me to appreciate where I am and what I’m doing, but there are aspects of my former lifestyle that I’m craving more and more as I see the tips of those New York City skyscrapers on the horizon.

At the risk of sounding like a wanker, espresso is at the top of the list. I drove an hour to Aberdeen last night to get a Starbucks coffee, which isn’t too bad, but it’s eons away from the quality of the brew at Bertoni in Balmain. I found my best American coffee in a place that I would have least suspected, a little town in North-West Nebraska called Gordon, population 1,800 (back in July!). The café was called ‘His Place’ and was run by lady called Pam who had moved from Seattle with her husband Phil who was in the ministry. The staff worked for free and the profits went toward the church’s ministry. And did I provide them with some profit. We had a few rainy days in town. I’d sit there banging away at the keys of my laptop, knocking back lattes, cappuccinos and moccas from mid-morning until close, by which time I’d be pinging off the walls with all of the caffeine in my system. Good times…

Incidentally, this post is the first of a couple that I’m going to call ‘Wheat & Chaff Unplugged’…I’m feeling the need to shake loose the shackles of semi-polished writing…I need to prattle on a bit...more chaff than wheat. It’s therapeutic and hopefully gives a bit of an insight into my frame of mind at the moment.

I thought the above picture was a good one to accompany the post. Scuba Steve went through a similar period of restlessness when he was back in home-town Kiowa planting next year’s wheat crop for Greg. He started photographing beetles that he saw walking across the gravel in Greg’s yard.