Vestiges & L’Écho des Rues
11:29am on a Saturday. Rain on the colour-bond roof. The mugginess has broken. My laptop is open but I’m thinking about stones — cobblestones, brick and mortar, rain-slicked and centuries deep. The kind that still resist the boots of progress.
I left Europe at the end of January and my bones still hum with the echo. Not memory. Resonance. The way footsteps in a Parisian alley carry differently than in Collingwood. Older. Layered with centuries of the same decisions: to walk, to linger, to fall in love, to get lost.
I didn’t go looking for home. But something in me knew the streets before I arrived.
My ancestry report is a tidy spreadsheet of displacement. One or two convicts. Some forbidden marriages. A lot of ghosts. Colonial amnesia passed down like DNA damage — it leaves you hollow without context.
Scotland felt familiar like country Victoria. Vast horizons. Wind that cuts through a jacket like judgement. Landscapes sculpted not by time but by intention — a fingerprint pressed into the earth. From Cambridge to Forfar, something clicked. I wasn’t homesick. I recognised.
I spent a week in a castle in the Highlands during the first whiteout the north had seen in years. A bottle of whisky worth more than sense. Bordeaux and gin and slims. The air smelled of peat, musty wax jackets and damp wool.
In village charity stores I found treasures we’d never come across in Australia. In Edinburgh’s secondhand havens, a deadstock pilot jacket. Hobgoblin Music Exchange the next morning for a tin whistle. Proof that the past doesn’t disappear. It waits, if you’re patient enough to find it.
And Paris..
Paris wasn’t just the Seine or the Arc or Montmartre. It was the shared appreciation with my love. Art every day. Fine food and honest conversation.
Ivy-fit outfits — tweed jacket, blue straight-legs, oxford shirt and loafers — drew glances. In a London arcade, a watch seller turned to me and showed what was hidden in the back, not on display. You mean I just need to wear this uniform to be taken seriously?
It started as fun. Then it became armour. A midlife crisis, maybe — discovering the person I dressed as in 2010 had been right all along.
By the end of 2025, the old uniform had worn thin. Burnout. Full-time work and university will do that. But something was shifting. A new job. Time, finally. The gym. Weight dropping. And with it, clarity.
The old clothes fit again. I was not adopting a new identity. I was returning to one I had outrun.
Working in Ai. The tooling changes fast. I watch the display working away on something while I message it an update from my phone. A bridge between me and my agent. It is a beautiful and terrifying thing.
An “ah ha” moment. Somewhat Theodore Twombly, but more DIY.
The truth no one wants to talk about, we’re not riding the “AI wave” we’re building the ends of our careers.
In the office I’m predicting what comes next. Faster, better, smarter. In the evening I’m looking for what endures. These are not contradictions. They are necessities.
There is a gap opening between those who build and those still wondering what the deal is. Jobs aren’t being replaced. Yet. They’re being refactored, and the refactor is already live. I had a thought. Maybe social media could help us adapt. Its pace mirrors the acceleration. But its addictive rot is more likely to cause mass decay while the machines slot into the gaps we are too distracted to notice.
As my tests run. Something pivots.
Here I sit. Reevaluating.
I see both sides. The beauty of agents doing the work nobody wants. The dread of watching your own industry evolve without you. The comfort of a tweed jacket in a room full of hoodies.
The vestiges remain — in streets, in code, in the slow turning of a new decade.
We don’t inherit the world. We rebuild it with what we’ve inherited — stone by stone, line by line.
— Thomas James
Artificially intelligent.
Lost between worlds.
Sat 23rd Nov 2024
Staring yet again at a screen, avoiding most social interaction in the pursuit of knowledge, attempting a reshaping of the inner workings of my mind.
I ebb and flow between states of dreaming and focus. The real battle between good and evil.
I dream of having 48 hour days, 24 hours for myself and 24 hours for the world.
Recent readings include The Cosmic Puppets, by no means the best book in the world - it mostly has the ending to blame for that - but it managed to open up a gateway into another world. I quickly inhaled this short novel within two days. Phillip K. Dick never disappoints.
They my current selection seems relevant in these times. Although I guess someone is always trying to kill off aspects of this world they don’t agree with or understand.
I have barely taken a photo since.. I am unsure when. My musical well has all but dried up, Shrivelled in the screen glow of my University studies.
Closure is ever so close - 5 years - Yet I contemplate Honours? I shouldn’t.
I want to do it all and will try my hardest.
If only I had 48 hours in a day.
https://cheatsheets.zip (if you want to learn some shortcuts because you are lazy like me)
bye 👋🏻 - Tj