From my station at the station

Oh there’s been a lifetime of experience in the gap between these diary entries. Last I wrote I had just touched down in New Zealand, and then got blown away by the niceness of my bedroom and a coffee shop. And now I am 4 months a local, writing to you from a radio station turned apartment in a northern Kiwi surf town.

It’s not like it was once a radio station, and is now an apartment. It is a radio station that, at night, becomes an apartment. And it’s our apartment– for the next four days at least, while we tour Tauranga’s hot springs and talk to new friends about self-hosted clouds and how to make kubernetes computer swarms accessible to everyone.

We are having a sweet, strange life. Every time I try to write about it, it comes out like a transcription of a dream journal scribble. On my first week here, a couple of in-love Tasmanian synth poppers rented the room across from mine, found out I was a barber, and asked if I could trim their hair. So I cut their hair on my flatmate friend’s beautiful deck, watching the Sunday morning sun rise above the harbor, and in trade I got entrance into their show that night, the one being held inside an old fish and chippery that had since been turned into a radical shoe-making school. The dreaminess has not let up since then, it’s just gotten more intense because we feel so much at home in this gentle, strange whimsy and are working real hard to stay.

I learned how to code javascript in-between these diary entries. Like code it well enough that I could get paid for it. Coding feels reallly good, I’m at the point where I can now build some of the things that I had thought <em>should</em> be built–like tools or places that I felt should exist in the world. And they are all simple bits of code, and don’t fully match the vision I had before, but they are a clear enough approximation to the vision that it feels manifest. It feels a bit like when I learned piano, and could suddenly play an approximation of the melody I’d heard in my head. There was no rhythm, no bass line, it was all simple melodies played with the right hand...but these still sounded like pure magic to me. I am now coding small treble melodies for computers and it is exciting.

I’ma prolly talk about code a lil bit more in coolguy. I don’t think it’s a major part of how I talk about my life here, but computers give me so many feeeeeeeelings and coolguy is all about feelings. There’s a wonderful solarpunk balance of nature and computers here in New Zealand and here in my heart and I wanna talk more about both.

But not tonight it turns out. I just had a super-hot bath, and ate a big bowl of chips in the bath like I was fucking King Ralph, and now I’m mad sleepy. I am typing to you from the living room of 104.5 and every time I look up I see a signed photo of Josh Groban and a photo of Emmylou Harris posing with our AirBnB host. I’ma fall asleep to a dream and wake up to another, just a steady chain of dreams interlocked like train cars.