Posts by Scott Michael Savidge

  • Hard News: The next four years,

    It's good to see the Press Corp shaping up for the challenge ahead with an open letter to the Donald:

    http://www.cjr.org/covering_trump/trump_white_house_press_corps.php

    Since Nov 2006 • 6 posts Report

  • Hard News: The Greens' pretty good new…,

    Let it snow! This is the best kind of drug education...

    http://uberhumor.com/nellie-celebrates-a-white-christmas-with-cocaine-drugslab

    Since Nov 2006 • 6 posts Report

  • Hard News: Judicial caprice is no way to…,

    While our sentencing is pretty bad, it could be so, so much worse.

    Since Nov 2006 • 6 posts Report

  • Hard News: Bowie,

    Dangerous Minds spots a very non-excellent tribute here from Timaru...

    Since Nov 2006 • 6 posts Report

  • Hard News: Stories: Home,

    I currently live about 30km as the crow flies from where I was born - in Kenepuru hospital - yet over the almost 50 years since then I have not managed to find a place that truly feels like home. I am and feel like a Kiwi, but as a first-generation Pakeha the deeper connections have always felt tenuous.

    In the physical sense home was a place I mostly feared when growing up. Alcoholism and mental illness made it a shaky place. Certainly not a sanctuary and totally not a place to take my mates after school.

    We moved every few years, from Welly to Auckland (three moves while there) to Invercargill in my 5th form year. I went from the odd toke on the beach at Milford to cruising the empty streets with a keg in the back of the V8. It was cold and coldly conservative and I left for the imagined cosmopolitanism of Queenstown as soon as was feasible.

    The mountains promised a home and they almost delivered. Their unavoidable steadfast beauty, the stories they knew, the curves and peaks of their embrace. But I was a bit damaged and doubted my place among the lucky and beautiful so started a roaming that lasted fifteen years and took me to many mountainous places many miles from the place I started.

    There were slices of time in certain places when I felt like I was home, and could maybe build something out of that. Eventually I realised that it was the good people of that time that I wanted to share roots with, not any particular location. But it was their home, not mine, and I still felt lost.

    And then one day, like others here, I finally felt the call to come home. I had nowhere to go so I came back to the mountains. But they hadn't changed enough and I had so it was back to Welly, to study, and maybe to finally find a home.

    That was over a decade ago and now I have my own bad habits. Home is where I am weak and lazy and that's ok. It's where I gather strength to engage with the world. It's where I am loved and I guess that's my place to stand. It's where I look out at Aotearoa and wonder where on earth I fit in.

    Since Nov 2006 • 6 posts Report

  • Eating Media Lunch,

    Definitely an insult. The small man should fade away.

    Since Nov 2006 • 6 posts Report