trip to capital city

created 08-08-2024

this is a blog post about a trip

recommendation: listen to this playlist while reading

I went on a little trip last Saturday night.

I’ve been on rides like this before, but never here. Not at this time. Not with this feeling. Australia’s capital is a quaint town - not quite city, but not entirely state, either. It’s some denomination below a city-state blessed with all the delightful little designs of carefully thought out urban planning intertwined with the curse of bureaucratic entanglement. It’s a very new city, as well. Barely breaching a centennial of age, I feel bad for blaming it not having the same cultural richness as its counterparts in the nation, let alone other cities overseas.

I moved here a few months ago across the country. At first, my experience was imbued with novelty inbound -- I wanted to explore every little crevasse this place had to offer. I was starry-eyed while lugging my suitcases off the plane and on the cramped bus-ride to the university campus, thinking this is it, this is finally a place where I could build something meaningful and call home. The first week in the city, I crafted my dorm room poster by poster, trinket by trinket. I plastered the space around me with the wallpaper of my soul and made it my own the best I could without violating the tenancy agreement.

It looks a lot like my room in Perth.

The months afterwards, I think I lost track of where I came from. I started becoming complacent -- not in a content, nor authentically satisfied way, but more so by losing that drive and ambition that had propelled me through the latter half of my senior years. I erased my history. Kamala Harris puts it pretty well, funnily enough: "You exist in the context of all in which you live and came before you". I forgot that! It seems pretty trivial, but it does matter. It’s hard to remember that you have come a long way if you’ve let go of your point of reference.

It might seem a bit bulbous(?) that I’d only reached (or remembered) this epiphany after [REDACTED] without prior reason nor rhyme one impulsive Saturday night, but regardless, I am grateful. Sure, I could have reached the same conclusion by another means, but this happened to be the way I did so. And I’m happy I reached the conclusion either way.

Like with the other vacations I’ve taken that were like this one, it starts in a room. My room. With a friend who’d sort of egged me on to do the same thing. The first few hours of the come-up was pretty stock standard. We watched funny videos, listened to a bit of music, general tomfoolery was manifesting. I was a bit hungry, so I ordered in fast food. There was a bit of a kerfuffle over who would go downstairs to pick up the delivery. We spent five minutes squabbling, then as I was about to go outside the housing complex to pick up the bag from outside, the delivery bag was right outside my door.

Look: I’m not one prone easily to mysticism, but for a second, I genuinely thought I had lost the last of my marbles.

Immediately, I accused my friend of conspiracy. I thought that he was fucking with me: he insisted he wasn’t, so I took a step outside and looked around left and right the hallway with paranoia imbued in my veins before I resigned that you can’t know everything about the world and just took the food inside.

But just as I was ready to accept the unknowable, it turned out that things do tend to have pretty simple explanations. I checked my phone by habit and found a text from a fellow resident that dropped off the order in good will after the deliveryman had asked around where I lived in the complex. How grateful I was! Rather embarrassed too, because he had probably heard me freaking out inside my room dispelling strange charged remarks like "Holy Shit, the Gnomes brought it here." and "Did I go downstairs, but just forgot? Oh my days. Am I losing my memory?"

The food itself was unremarkable. We opened our share of onion rings and burgers and tried to begin feasting. The first few bites were what you would expect - greasy, oily mess. A few minutes of arduous chomping passed, and I broke the silence. "God, this feels like slop." My friend nodded. "Don’t you feel like a pig?" I said quietly to myself. I was sitting cross-legged with my back against the heater. "I don’t want to feel like a pig," I mumbled, and put down the feed in front of me and stuffed it all in the fridge. That scene felt profound in the moment, but in reality, I think I just lost my appetite and felt a bit nauseous. Make of it what you will!

pictured: NOT me because i was NOT happy eating onion rings

To cope with knowing I spent a woeful amount of money on take-out, I ended up eating most of it the next day anyways as leftovers. So at least it didn’t all go to waste.

By this point in the night, I think we both felt a bit cramped and stuffy in the room. Our temperature regulation was getting all sorts of messed up, and I felt a lot like a Sisyphean Goldilocks on an endless quest to find whatever was "just right" for her. We’d both agreed we wanted to go on a bike ride of some kind beforehand, so we buckled down and thought this was the right time. He didn’t bring his phone or any valuable belongings out of fear for losing them. I dropped a water bottle, keycard, and phone in a sling bag and just hoped that I’d forget that I was wearing it. If you forget that something’s on you, you can’t lose it in the first place.

Biking out of campus was uneventful. The path was still familiar here, even at night. We cycled into the city with few words spoken between us, and soon the border of campus buildings began to fade back into the horizon, and the skyscrapers became taller and more glossy. Soon, I didn’t remember which street I was on, or how many traffic lights I’d passed. I was the minotaur, stampeding around aimlessly in this labyrinth of metal wildebeests! (Don’t forget -- cars are REAL!) With enough effort, you probably could have convinced me I was in Darwin, or Ottawa, or Los Angeles. I don’t really have the close perceptive skill to quickly tell the difference. At one point I tried to will myself into the mindset of that Geoguessr guy, but I was quickly bottlenecked by my lack of expertise and skill. Fun regardless.

The strange thing about the Canberra city centre is that I don’t really notice the history. Maybe it would be different if I had grown up here, or if I’d paid closer attention on my everyday cycles around Civic, but everything just seems so new. I have no connection with it. Every building here looks like a mash of functionalist utility with a few abstract coloured shapes plastered on top to give it a minimum baseline of palatability for the people who dwell here. Where is the old city? I was drowning in towering commercialist titans. This can’t have been all there was 111 years ago. Where did the fathers and grandfathers of every passerby I zoomed past go to work? What was their city centre like?

We cycled out into the periphery of the city. The skyscrapers calmed down, and as the streetlights dimmed, the sky became brighter. Friends from the stars smiled down at us as we kept riding away! Uphill, downhill, it didn’t matter. It was all exhilarating - when you’re in this state, fatigue packs away its bags and you’re left alone with your own faculties to abuse your body to whatever dirtbag shit your volition is willing to let you get away. The streets were still hostile - roads that weren’t meant for two lone meatbags littered our purview. At one point, the shoreline was only a few meters away from us -- but we couldn’t get past the Great Fucking Wall of Highways in between! A more irresponsible me would have bagged the three-lane highways, but remember the old adage: CARS ARE REAL. So we both agreed it would be wise to bike the long way there.

We biked through parallel to the highway. We crawled down from the sidewalk into a gutter of dead autumn leaves and dusty carpark lots. It was here that I saw a few rabbits running around from possums (crazy that such little critters sustain themselves like pigeons in the city!) and I was hopelessly entranced by them. My friend was behind me, going on about something I don’t remember, but I was locked onto my target already. I had to chase that fucking rabbit down. I started pushing down harder on the pedals with my hamstrings, my only plateau of speed being my strength of spirit, and I accelerated. It must have been under ten seconds where like a hunter, I uniformly stalked this small hare with piercing speed and really, unneeded determination through the modern trenches of this small part of Canberra. The rabbit made a sharp turn to its right, climbing up out of the gutter. It was able to jump and escape my grasp under the wire fence that bordered the trench from the walkway. I was not aware of this fence. With a resounding clang, my forearms made contact at around twenty kilometres per hour into the thick wire. My friend immediately stopped talking while I was dazed and ran over to make sure I hadn’t shortened my lifespan by ten years. It’s hard to tell what’s actual pain and what’s just modified physio-psychological sensation when you’re [REDACTED]. Both my forearms were swollen, cleary, and my friend was concerned enough to question if it was time to head back home. But I saw no wounds. And as he put it: "we’re two young adults, in the capital city of one of the most developed nations in the world. We’re immortal." Besides, I’d never broken a bone in my life. So we continued. I’m glad we did. My forearms are still bruised as I type this.

The clock had probably struck some soft hour past midnight at this point. We passed by fences that enclosed nothing meaningful but open air, strange household doorframes which led from one open space to another, and the rush around the city quieted down as we kept biking to the shore. We’d made our way to some park that we knew the river was adjacent to and got lost in the grassy fields. But when we finally saw that rippling mirror which tore the horizon apart, beckoning us to swim out in dull hope that maybe we could reach the stars too, we felt some deep sense of accomplishment. Finally.

There was no concrete destination when we started riding. My friend had a vague idea of "the shoreline" which I don’t think he’d been to before. I thought I had in mind the same thing, but in reality it was likely somewhere else by the lakebed where I had biked before. It didn’t really matter in the moment. In the moments before we finally both reached this purported promised land we were looking for, when he was skeptical of our location, I tried to reassure him: "This is it! It’s somewhere here, I remember."

"[REDACTED], I just made it up! I made the place up! It doesn’t exist!" He cried back with narrativistic pretention.

We made it in the end anyways. At the first site, two marching-soldier lines of streetlamps stood erect rank and file, framing a pathway through the water. It seemed like an impressionistic painting dappled in waves of gold! Despite it being near zero degrees celsius, it felt warm. I sat at the bench for a few minutes, but my friend bothered me to keep going. I couldn’t stay there indefinitely, no matter how much I wanted to just lie down and with angelic solitude melt away into the ground, becoming one with the gold that I thought I had saw.

This lake was man-made. We biked across the manufactured shoreline that bordered this massive body of water. To our right were what felt like towering cliffs (in reality, small hills with highways on top.) In front of us? The great city. Maybe not so great, actually. The medium city. The okay city, the so-so city. We sat down and talked for a while at an old wooden lemonade stand long abandoned by its old creators; and also on the edge of a pier overlooking the lake into the mess of skyscrapers that stood at the other side. I’ve never had a good sense of direction or place at home, let alone here in Canberra. It made me nauseous trying to triangulate myself, and I felt a bit like a rat in the Sistine Chapel.

We biked back as we both came to realise the cold was slowly creeping in back into our consciousnesses again. The last contingent scenario we’d wanted to anticipate was a DEFCON 1 Cinderella scenario, where the magic wore off before we got back to the safety of familiarity and our warm beds. By now, the real clock had struck long past twelve, but our fictive doomsday clock was somewhere around an hour to midnight.

We made it home safe and sound, and we spent some more time in my room. I listened to Gnaw by Alex G, and we parted ways before dawn. I kept tossing and turning in my bed: I could go on and on about the revelations I think I made that night. I never quite got to sleep, either.

I won’t tell you exactly what was on my mind. But it did feel meaningful. Although I don’t exactly think I was treading new ground, either. The thing with trips like these is that it never makes you smarter or more intellectual, it just opens you up to different perspectives. I don’t really think I made any new grand epiphanies: rather, I just remembered past deeply meaningful cycles of thought, and actually internalized them rather than discarding them at a first glance. By 6:00am I resigned any hope left that I would get to sleep. I canceled the work I had that day and went down to the communal kitchen pretending I’d slept a good eight hours, and made five scrambled eggs for breakfast. Yummers.

I read a bit, and collapsed into a nap at 9:00am. When I woke up, I hung out with some other friends who were taking their own vacation that I had originally planned to go to. I ended up just visiting and keeping them company, but I had quite enough of life-altering experiences for one financial quarter.