I've come a long way baby!

Hello everyone, I just thought I'd jump on here and discuss what's been going on with me in the last month or so.

So in the last 18 months I've grown a hell of a lot and have become more me than I've ever been, I feel comfortable with who I am, and where I'm going, and who I'm going to get there with, and I'm happy I'm building something more meaningful with my life rather than just coasting along not achieving anything which has been the way is has for me for about 10 years now.  I'm a dreamer, always have been but never have the dreams felt so attainable as they do right now, I feel like I could capture the universe in my hand and really achieve enlightenment or at the very least greatness in myself, which is extremely refreshing. 

I've had so much hardship and stuff go wrong these last 18 months but I can't help but feel like it's all been leading me to this moment in time, sure I'm still short of money and I'm still in pain all of the time but now that I have this feeling of attainability, it doesn't feel like it's in vain and I can actually do something meaningful with my life.

As bad as it has been I don't regret it because of where I am now and what I have laid out in front of me and I think it's hard to see what's happened as a negative because of it. (p.s. if you don't know what has happened to me in the last year or so read this that should tell you what you need to know) I know my blogs have been a bit self servicing lately but I've been going through a hell of a lot of changes and now that I feel happy again I think I can get back to my regular scheduled programming of complete nonsense and random thoughts like this one,  "Custard is dessert gravy"

Cheers,
Vikinghammer

The foul year of our lord, two thousand and seventeen

2017... What a year,  what a downright, absolute pig of a year.  I can't wait to see the back of it.  Never have I experienced such mental and physical stress before.

I'll start at the beginning... Hold on to something this is going to get a little bumpy. 

In October of last year I got married to the love of my life, we had a lovely wedding with all of our friends and family it was a dream come true, I should have taken nature's warning at the end of the night when the wind rushed in and forced us out early!

But here comes the badness

About this time last year I busted my knees and had to have X-rays and an mri on them to see what the problem was,  turns out I have a compression of Hoffa's fat pad which is like a shock absorber in the knee so that means my knees are taking more force than they can handle which is something that will never go away but the pain will come and go.  I was out of work for a few weeks with excruciating pain and had to go to a physio to help me build strength and stretch the right places to help aid my recovery.

In January of this year I was suffering excruciating foot pain, I always have some sort of pain in my feet because I have plantar faciaitis which is a thickening of the tendon that runs under the foot which happens when you have a high arch, the tendon stretches to much and causes pain.  But the pain is usually manageable, this time it wasn't, something else was going on.  So off to the doctors I went, she said to get an X-ray to see what is going on.  "you have a bone spur on your heel, but that's likely been there a long time; OK so it's not that, maybe it's just inflammation of the facia, get an ultrasound" so I did that, "it's a bit inflamed".  So she said "you can either go and get some physio which would take some time to heal, or maybe get an ultrasound guided steroid injection, which is the quick fix which may not actually help in the long run but will take care of the pain now".  At this stage I had already been out of work for 2 weeks and really couldn't afford to have any more time off, so I went with the steroid injection.  So I'm at the imaging place they're getting everything ready, the lady starts ultrasounding my foot and ankle again and then stops "hmm, I think I need to get the doctor" she returns with the doctor.  The doctor proceeds to tell me that they won't be going ahead with the steroid injection because I have a 50% tear in my Achilles tendon and that I need to go back to my doctor and get in to a specialist up at flinders hospital... So three weeks off work turns in to 3 weeks and 4 months in a moon boot, not to mention I was in and out of work when I got back to it because I was still in recovery and struggling with the pain.  So all up I think it was probably about 6 months off work.

All of this time off work brought with it great financial struggle, it wasn't an injury that I could claim on work cover because it's a grey area, it's a wear and tear injury, they couldn't say I did it at work.  I could, because that's exactly where it happened, it's deemed a sports injury, I don't play sports... The only strenuous thing I do is work, the next hardest thing I do is clean up around the house which is nowhere near as hard as my work is.  So yeah, I used all of my sick pay and most of my annual leave when I busted my knees last year, so that means for 6 months I was relying on less than half of what I was usually getting from work which caused me to push more and more bills further and further back until the companies wouldn't give us anymore chances, I'm still trying to get on top of it all to this day, and probably will be for a time to come.

Basically as soon as I was well enough to go back to work, my wife came down with a mystery illness that sent her to the hospital more times than I can count including a few weeks stay.  Which was really hard for both of us, waiting around constantly in and out of hospital, ambulance rides, taking time off work to take her to hospital or bring her home, sleep was a distant but fond memory.  All of this lasted about 2 months... At first, then she got sick again with the same thing about a month later, they still have no idea what it was, they think auto immune but they never gave us a concrete diagnosis, it was all guessing basically. 

In between her hospital visits I got a toe injury which took me out of work again for a few days, X-rays and scans lead to nothing... Then I slipped a disc in my back moving furniture and I crumpled to the floor in complete agony and couldn't move.  I had my own ambulance journey along with so many painkillers to try and numb the pain as best they could but nothing seemed to help so yeah another week out of work, with light duties for 2 more after that.

By this stage work has had enough of me calling in sick and have started to question the legitimacy of my days off.  I've been out with so many injuries this year which I directly relate to work which has lead me to the point that my body is screaming at me to find something less strenuous on my body, it's breaking down bit by bit.

Remember how I said before about how we were on our last chance with all of the bill companies, all of the extra time off and my wife off from her work has only compounded our financial woes even further.

Now we move ahead to October of this year... My wife of not even a year decides to leave me, citing that I'm not giving her what she wants in a relationship.  Which is fair, if I'm not giving her what she wants she has every right to leave me and find her happiness.  But that still left me with a gaping wound that I am left to heal on my own.

So you could say I've had a tough year... You could even say a cunt of a year.

I've taken so many hits this year but I'm still standing, I've learnt a great many things, I've grown so much and I'm feeling good, somehow after all of that, I feel good.  Huh...that even felt weird to type out, but it's true.  Just goes to show you the true strength of the human spirit.

I've got a few more scars, I feel worn down, I have fought through all of this and never once have I succumb to those feelings of doubt, depression and helplessness.  I feel them but I manage them rather than being overwhelmed by them.  I get a little anxious from time to time, I feel a little nervous in large crowds of people I don't know.  But I'm still me at the end of it all, I still have those things that make me, me.  And if I can get through what's happened this year, that will never change.

Vikinghammer out!

The fallacy of inevitability.

Like the warmth sucked from the world just before mornings first light, just when things feel like their about to get better.  Inevitably it falls in a heap, like the crumbling buildings in a war torn nation.  But when you think all is lost and things just keep getting worse, the sun rises and casts it's warming, brilliant light upon the earth.  Bringing with it a new day filled with so much promise and a chance for everything to turn around and a chance for you to climb out of the rubble, shake off the dust, plant your flag in the ashes and reclaim what was once lost in those cold moments before the dawn.

All you have to do is have the strength to push those rocks aside and be great once more.

Diary of a dying man

Harsh visage, tinted rose horizon

the dust rises from where I fall

a brilliant cloud of ashen doom

skyward, my huen gaze in stasis

the dust falls upon my clothes

motionless I lie in the sand

my blood soaks in to the earth

sputtering as it leaks from within

laboured breath weakens still

the rosen sky grows darker

no more blood to feed the earth

the void comes to take me home

so visceral and violent my end has to be

a violent life bleeds violent death

place your hands in that of doom

and reap your deadly measure

Light from Darkness

The waves come crashing, momentary lapse in cognition where the world felt as one again...  it happens now and then, but to truly have that feeling, I haven't had it in such a long time, the peace, that feeling where you can breathe easy.  god I miss that feeling but most of all I miss the feeling of not being in pain, I can't even remember what it feels like anymore, to sit or stand and not feel pain from somewhere, it's a distant but fond memory.  I have been down an extremely rough road these past 6 months, I should actually be saying WE because my wife and I both have been through the most trying times of our entire lives, the past 6 months, I've had more scans, more trips to the doctors and hospital than the rest of my entire life combined, and it's not by a small margin either.  but I'm not here to harp on about how hard we've had it.  While it's been a very tough and crushing year, when I get those moments of clarity, of peace I grab on to it with all my might, I milk it for all it's worth and I get to a point where I can see the light at the end of the tunnel, it's usually when listening to music or when I talk it through with my beautiful life companion that's when it all makes sense to me and then the neurons start firing and the dots start to connect and I feel it all, I take it all in I take a deep breath and we fight through another day.  It makes me realise how the human spirit can conjure up such immeasurable strength from the depths of a deep dark chasm and create something magical from nothing, light from dark.  I've been through hell this year, I've felt the cold hands of the void clasp it's dark hands around my neck and try to drag me down, but it's from there that I gather strength.  I guess what I'm saying is that, you can't be beaten, not by your own mind, not when you use the darkness to conjure light, use that hardship as a tool to sharpen your mind.

The Gun Club part 1

Imagine a place if you will, where anarchy and debauchery reign supreme, a place where nobody was crowned king and noone was trodden down, a place where everyone who had ever been, never came out the same...

This place was called The Gun Club and it was there that a biannual party was held for about 7 years, it started as a party for a group of people who's birthdays were held all around the same time in mid August, it then grew beyond measure, what started as a party with about 20 attendees ended up by the culmination of its 7 year stretch with about 300 people attending, it was known about and looked forward to by everyone in the local area, it was a place where you left your inhibitions at the gate and if you weren't physically and mentally prepared for what you were about to bare witness to, you would likely break down, which I saw many times.

I'm going to tell you some of the stories that I remember from the days of yore, so sit back, relax and try not to vomit.

In the early days of the Gun Club parties it was just a small group of close friends who were getting 6 birthdays out of the way at once, we would all turn up about 3 or 4 pm and start setting everything up, bbqs, generators, bins, beds and bonfires all the while starting to drink.  As you can imagine things started to get a little hazy and crazy by about 6 or 7 pm, by that time everyone had rocked up and the bonfire was about to be lit.  Douse the bonny with enough petrol to run a big block chev for a few days and away she goes, WOOOOMFFF.  Eyebrows, facial hair and pubes melt and curl from the heat.  These early days were pretty tame compared to what followed in the years to come, but that's not to say these parties weren't fun.  I can remember one of these early parties, someone 'found' a keg of beer, or at least that was his story.  I don't think I've witnessed so many people sculling beer before, it was a little warm, the tap was stuffed, so everyone was just hammering it down like it was the last keg on earth.  Now I've seen movies that paint a pretty good picture of what a Norse mead hall must have looked like but the little shed on the gun club property was as close as you would get to one in the modern era, there was singing, cheersing, sculling, spilling and screaming, the floor was slick and glistening with spilt beer there were young people passed out pissing themselves it was pretty much what you would imagine after the Vikings had returned from a successful raid and were celebrating their spoils of war... But it wasn't, it was 20 or 30 close friends making a mess of themselves in a place where they used to shoot guns at clay targets for fun.

Now this is when the word started to get out about these wild, out of control parties, the people who attended started telling people they knew and from here on out these parties started to gain quite a reputation. 

Ok so I can't really remember what order these memories come in, as it's been a number of years and I was very, very drunk for most of these 'memories' so I'll just write them as they come to me. 

It had become a bit of a tradition at these parties that people would bring old couches that they no longer wanted or needed so that people would have places to sit. I don't think many or any of the couches made it past the first party they attended, as they were always getting busted and thrown in the fire.  On this particular night one of these couches was an old kind of wooden one, with thin cushions and slats along the back of it, kind of like what you might see at your nan's house in the family room.  Anyway, I was sitting there chatting away... Uh... Bullshitting away to whoever would listen, when I look up and see my friend who is a larger fellow coming over to join me on the lounge, he says something smartass to another one of our friends who proceeds to give him a playful shove, my friend (this happened in absolute slow motion by the way, the world around us slowed to a glacial drip) he trips, stumbles grasping at anything that would slow his fall but there was nothing able to stop his descent, he crashes through... Literally through the couch, the one I am sitting on, but the seat over.  I saw my life flash before my eyes, I shot up, surprised I wasn't dead or injured and looked back at the lounge which was completely shattered, like the slats on the back were all snapped in half and the seat was smashed in beyond recognition, my friend was completely fine, we were brought to tears of laughter for about 15 minutes and then proceeded to smash it up more and lob it on the fire, because... It was broken.  We were probably going to do it anyway, but this gave us a better excuse.

There was another tradition at the Gun Club parties where people would go out in to the empty paddocks in their cars and rip it up, it got to a point where people would buy cars or build something ridiculous specifically for this reason.  We had a guy build a home-made supercharger for his tiny little corolla which had to poke out of the bonnet, chain drive straight from the flywheel.  Or another guy had an old hq wagon where the exhaust was cut off and poked through the bonnet which shot flames and made it sound like a truck. My brother took his turbo cordia out there once and thrashed it so hard that the manifold was glowing red.  My best mate took his old Gemini out and thrashed it so hard and for so long that sparks began to fly out of the exhaust which managed to set the paddock on fire for a bit.  I got out there in my old camry or 'the ute' as we used to call it and did the old reverse ringies, it was basically a mini summernats twice a year.  Then after a few years of using the paddocks we graduated to the little lean to shed on the property and used that as a burnout slab, we had every man and his dog backing their cars in to have a go.  It wasn't until breakfast time that I realised no one moved the BBQ out of the lean to before the burnouts commenced, that took some cleaning before bacon and eggs the next morning.  There was one party where one of the "unprepared" people that I talked about earlier called the cops on us all and said we were being dangerous and what not, the police came out and said "at least it's not on the roads, in traffic, if anything this should be condoned" we egged them on a bit and they did a burnout up the road as they left.  It was a good place to get all of that utter nonsense out of our systems in a safe...ish environment and not on the roads where we could injure people.

I don't think I ever threw up at any of the gun club parties, but there were many that did, some were even unaware that they did and blamed others for their indiscretions.  Which is where I'm headed with this story.  Two of my good friends who are now married, slept in their car after drinking far to much one night, he got up first and was stumbling around looking for something to drink, I looked over and noticed something on his shoulder, I got up to get a closer look... It was fucking spaghetti.  I lost my shit, "someone was a little sick last night" I said.  He goes "aww she fucking spewed on me" I was in absolute stitches as was every one else who was awake.  She wakes up and was adamant that it wasn't her, regardless he wasn't having it and was sure it was her, it wasn't until much later when he remembered waking up in the night to throw up, panicking because he couldn't get out of the car because they had the back seats layed down and the doors were child locked for some reason, so he just had to spew and so he did... on himself... and his future wife.

So this is the end of part 1 of The Gun Club... be sure to stay tuned for part 2, I'm saving the best stories until last.

Vikinghammer Out.

Vikinghammers Life in Metal

Long ago at the end of the age of the power derived from flora a sinister sound brewed deep in the minds of the sick and twisted and when the power had grown the sound spewed forth and great evil spread across the land and created the profane art, with this power the gods crashed their fists upon the earth and demanded to be heard and as the sound grew in strength the disenfranchised minds of youth picked up their torches and marched to the beat of Bill Wards drums...

For most of you that know me, know that I'm a massive metal head I'm going to tell you how and why that all came to pass and I might generalise a bit and try and get a bit of the metalhead stigma out of the way.

When I was young, primary school young my parents used to have a radio on pretty much 24/7 which was great but it was also the worst first thing in the morning, before school. I used to listen to all of the old classics they would play on there and I loved them, David Bowie, Tina Turner, The Police that sort of thing but the band that I really remember enjoying the most was Creedence Clearwater Revival, it was something about the music that really sucked me in, John Fogarty's voice and the catchy guitar work most likely. I used to stop what I was doing when I heard CCR playing, I think dad used to have a tape in the shed he would play as well... maybe? I remember hearing Down on the Corner a lot when I was young. Then when I got a bit older maybe 10 or 11 I used to listen to a lot of Triple J which at the time was playing a lot of Nirvana, Pearl Jam, Smashing Pumpkins, Soundgarden (R.I.P. Chris Cornell), all those sorts of alternative bands, I was addicted to it, I would listen to music every night, tape songs off the radio all that sort of thing, I used to listen to heavier and heavier music and used to stay up late and catch the 3 hours of power on Triple J which was the metal programme they had on every tuesday night which was awesome, bands like Metallica, Slayer, Sepultura were regulars, along with some of the best Australian metal acts at the time like Segression, Sakkuth, Pod People etc. it was truly an awesome time for music. My parents weren't to happy about me listening to stuff that heavy at 12 years old so I never really got any CD's or anything but I was allowed to get the Hottest 100 compilation almost every year which was great, some of the best bands of all time made it on those cd's, I also really wanted to get the Led Zeppelin III album for my birthday, which they had just re-released on CD but I never got it. I used to listen to them day in day out and I was truly addicted. The only outlet I really had for metal though was listening to the 3 hours of power that I stayed up to listen to every week and I would record the best songs and make my own compilation tapes, I must have had about 20 tapes at one stage. Then when I was about 14 my dad and mum became good friends with the people who owned the Caravan Park in my home town and their son who was a few years older than me, had an amazing CD collection, he showed me some of the best bands of the time and which are still some of my favourite bands today, Deftones, Spineshank, Coal Chamber, Tool, etc. which was fucking incredible, I'd never even really seen metal cd's before and he had apple boxes full of them, I was always asking him to burn me off cd's which I know he hated me asking him to do all the time, but eventually he gave in and showed me this new kind of thing where you can put like 300 songs on a CD, he introduced me to MP3's and it changed my life, he burnt off 1 mp3 cd and I listened to it religiously for years, I lost it for a while when we were moving house, I was looking through the draws in my old desk and there it was stuck upright in the back of the drawer I pulled it out and was so stoked I found it again, I managed to copy off most of the songs but the CD was scratched to hell. He probably doesn't know how much that cd meant to me so thanks Dave, for a kid who loved metal but only got to listen to it for 3 hours a week, it really meant the world. I actually still try and find some of the songs from that cd when they pop in to my head.

I got older, got deeper in to highschool and really only got to listen to the mainstream stuff because there were no cd stores nearby and by this time the 3 hours of power had changed names got a new host and become really weak, so I was listening to bands like Pantera, Soulfly and Korn but occasionally someone would bring some true metal to school, someone bought Chaos A.D. to school and was listening to it on the computers in the library which was awesome and another guy was listening to a Cannibal Corpse tape on his walkman one day which blew my mind. As the years went on through school it got kind of boring and I stopped listening to metal almost at all (except for that mp3 cd) wasn't a fan of Limp Bizkit, Slipknot or Korn which were huge for everyone else but not so much for me, I wanted heavier music and also music that I hadn't heard a million times before. There was one other guy who was in the year below me who used to like the same stuff I did, like Acid Bath, Tool and Slayer then there was a few other guys who enjoyed metallica but little else. Highschool was kind of a dead zone for metal for me, it wasn't until I was at the end of my schooling career when Napster had just come out that I really got back in to metal, when I could look stuff up and actually listen to it, experiment and really come in to my own. I found heavier and heavier music, I still listened to a lot of the mainstream stuff because it was the early days of the internet there wasn't much in the way of finding out what music was good and even what bands were out there, but I was just muddling along finding more and more amazing stuff, even genres I had heard of but never really got to listen to like Black Metal and bands like Darkthrone and Immortal which I consider a couple of my all time favourite bands and even to this day Black Metal is still probably my second favourite genre behind Doom metal which is another genre that I found around this time with bands like Electric Wizard and Candlemass, I just ate it all up.

It wasn't until I was about 21 when one of my best mates introduced me to another guy Mick who was like me, listening to every heavy band he could get his hands on and we used to just hang out and listen to metal for hours while we drank beer and talked shit, this was the real growth period, we would constantly be showing each other new bands we had found or showing each other stuff we'd heard years ago, it was true metal appreciation. So much so that we formed a band with a guy who played guitar, me on vocals and Mick on drums, the other guy wanted to play punk sort of stuff but we managed to get in a few metal songs here and there and even write a few original ones, we left that band because I didn't really like the guy and we weren't playing the music we really wanted to, but another friend of ours Bunyip had just started learning guitar and his new neighbour was a massive metal head, so we would head around there and get on the piss, listen to music, play some music until the neighbour came and told us to shut up or we were to drunk to move. This period lasted years and was great, we had some amazing parties and some epic jams, then when Bunyip was good enough we started a band with him and we got pretty good, we were writing original music, probably not what we thought we would be playing, it was stoner, kyuss like stuff which we still really enjoyed, we had a few gigs here and there but we always had a revolving door of musicians, we had 3 different bass players, 3 drummers, 4 guitarists, Me and Bunyip were the only mainstays in the band, me on vocals and Bunyip playing guitar or Drums, so in the end it got to hard to keep retraining musicians so we gave up, I still miss it to this day. This all ended when I was about 28 and I didn't really do much else other than join a few groups on facebook and post some metal which is where I met my future wife then when I was about 31 myself, Mick the drummer and my fiance and future Wife decided to start a Metal website called The Metalithic which was doing really well there for a while and I was writing review after review and really enjoying it, we were interviewing really huge names in the industry and had some of the latest news but it got to a point where I had to focus my time on something that was going to make some money so about a year ago I decided to give it up and now my time is dedicated to video games, I still listen to metal any chance I get (I'm listening to Drudkh at the moment) and am thinking about starting up The Metalithic again as a YouTube Channel but am yet to pull the trigger on that...

So there you go that's how I became a metal head now for the WHY am I a metal head.

There are a few explanations as to why I am a metal head in the last chapter but that's not really what I mean. Metal for me and for most metal heads is more than just mere music, it is a passion beyond measure and beyond compare. The music has more substance, more emotion and more talent than any other genre and if you ask any true metal head they'll tell you the same. Most people listen to metal and say they can't understand it, or it's just noise or crap and that's because they don't want to give it the time it deserves, but for some people I understand it's just not for them, there are genres that I don't understand and don't like, I have given them some time but it's just not for me and that's fair enough, same goes for non metal heads. I'm not saying if you listen to metal you will fall in love with it, but you should at least try it out see how it goes, but that being said you have to jump in to something casual, you can't just go from nothing to Inquisition or Extermination Dismemberment and expect to have it rock your world that will take some warming up to. Start with something like Metallica or Black Sabbath and once you've got the hang of that move up the chain of brutality. Metal offers something that not really any other genres offer and that's variety, there are so many sub genres of metal that you'll almost find something that will suit your tastes, I like other sub genres more than others but I'll listen to them all depending on what mood I am in at the time. I've been known to go from orchestral power metal straight in to brutal death metal one after the other and I've also been known to stick with a single genre for months, depends on how I'm feeling.

Metal heads do get a bad rap, we're all labeled as satanists or mental when in actual fact some of the nicest people I know are metal heads and when you're at a gig there's no fights or people being dickheads it's just people enjoying themselves and enjoying the music we all love. The majority of the time metal heads also listen to other genres as well, I like my rock and I've been known to listen to indie music and even occasionally pop music, all it really takes for me to listen is a catchy tune and some actual talent which I can respect in (some) pop singers. It's something that is often misconstrued and can be rude, I have been genuinely offended by people calling me a satanist or saying one of my favourite bands is shit and because it's a metal bands it's acceptable, but when I fire back I get told off... I guess it's a whole other thing, it doesn't happen often anymore but when I was in a band and you get told one of the biggest influences on you is shit or absolute crap it's hard not to take offence.

Anyway I think that's enough ranting and raving for now, I might make a regular blog with bands everyone should check out or something like that but for now...

Stay Brutal,

Vikinghammer out.