Dodgy bullets and Predator

One reason this blog is going to be a daily thing from now on is because of a bloke who went by the moniker of Predator. The other reason is that the dodgy bullets have caught up with me and I've got metastases(secondaries) from the cancer in my jaw. So far, the count is two one in my spine called 'arthur' and one in my shoulder called 'sinclair'. 

It's kind of a privilege to be able to know that your death is imminent. Although how imminent is still 'a piece of string' and I'm still finding out things, had my second cat scanned today since sinclair still is a bit of mystery.  Optimistically, 12 months give or take a bit of traditional Injibardi healing perhaps. Pessimistically, it depends on sinclair and his other undetected cousins. But I intend to live life to the full - I don't have a 'take it easy' gene and there's too much that I want to say and do.

Predator and his mate stacy
from cat.org.au
Let me tell you about Predator though. I came across his minimalist website from a link on the old Indymedia sites a few years ago. He was a young bloke, in his twenties when he died from kidney cancer. His passions were anarchy, alternative technology, all kinds of d-i-y science and illegal caving. The last involved exploring the drains and pipes that are found underneath every big city. Sydney his home town has a plethora. I used to catch the underground city loop train from Central station and dream about jumping the fence and looking for those ancient pipes and the Tank Stream. Predator and his mates were way beyond that innocent fantasy, they took major risks to tag and get into places that they were not welcome. A few weeks ago someone was dragged dead out of a sewer pipe near Bondi beach. One the clan.

He was destined to have a short life. The man was a genius with more energy and appetite than any normal human. There is a web site cat.org.au created by Predator and others way back in the late 1990's where they pioneered the use of unix and running their own servers to do web casts from community events. These days we rely upon, unthinkingly, ISP's to provide us with access. These guys grabbed there own DNS space early on so that they could run it themselves from the bottom up. It's become slightly redundant and the site is maintained as an archive rather that an active site. It relied, I think, on Predator's energy and intellect.
He wrote about everything from the information paradigm, 'a light hearted' epistemology, viewing human nature and life as an information system; through to details of his own hair rasing experiments of enhancing his masturbation by applying 20v electric currents at the point of orgasm! But his tour-de-force is his diary written upon his diagnosis up until he could no longer write. Maddeningly masculine in outlook, it is a gripping yarn and tragedy as he regards his disease as a biochemical experiment trying one cure after another, putting up with doctors who can't keep up with his intellect, how the allure of death improved his sex life and finally a few days before his death when he reaches the point of no longer being able to write.

I wont write as personally as him, but I'm inspired by him to use the occasion to record as much of the miscellany of indigenous history and culture and environmental knowledge that I've acquired over the years.