Category: Life
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On Tuesdays, we Chinwag
This was to be my year for pushing hard against the social anxiety that at times cripples me, or at the least just makes me feel uncomfortable and awkward and seem that way to people. HAHA!
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One day…
How often do we have an idea or a half-baked plan we think would be good, but tell ourselves we’ll get to it ‘one day’? If you’re like most people, quite a bloody lot. The world and society we knew as normal is changed, for a short time or longer, and it means most of…
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Gun it coming off of the line, corona
What a batshit crazy year 2020 is turning out to be, hey? Enormous bushfires shut down huge swathes of the country and crippled communities and the tourism industry. And then something I hope was named after a type of beer and an old Toyota reminded us of the actual meaning of ‘going viral’, shut down…
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The Westsider’s Volunteer of the Month, April 2020: JC Clapham
“The Westsider has been so great to me the past few years, it’s helped me find a voice as a writer, and strengthen my identity as a person. I love being part of this community.”
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There’s a spotfire in my head, and our home is burning, too.
Nothing I write feels ‘worthy’ of the page or screen right now. How could it? Our country is burning and our ‘leaders’ credibility even more up in smoke.
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Looking forward, looking back. I’ve come a long way down the track
Five years is a brilliant achievement for a printed publication, these days. Let alone one that is community-focused and produced largely by volunteers. FIVE. YEARS! Let’s all pause for a moment (or five) to acknowledge that in a period of time when printed newspapers are thinning in both quantity and genuinely-local content, The Westsider is…
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An appreciation of the winding road.
Yes, I’ve had multiple periods of time where my mental health was quite bad. Yes, I have hit the very bottom more than once. Yes, I have struggled to manage it in the past. Yes, I have had to take medication for a number of years, and I may need to for many more.It is…
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Good riddance?
1999 Green Day’s Time of Your Life was released a year or two before I finished high school, so naturally it was played a few million times by my year level as we approached our fork stuck in the road. Our adolescence coincided with the years of Seinfeld, the show about nothing and everything at the same…
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So-ober it
In the July issue of The Westsider, in a piece entitled ‘A brief history of my former life as an occasionally-but-very drunk dickhead’, I promised the next issue would carry a follow-up, on the very easy and very hard aspects of quitting drinking. Keen observers will know that didn’t happen. You see, I am quite…
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Running for mental health
It’s been six years since I did a run of any note. Six years… and during that time I’ve reached the end of the rope and managed to pull myself back, to once again smile. But not everyone is that lucky… Imagine a growing number of men, trained in mental health first aid, who can…