525,600 Minutes

When the writer and humourist David Rakoff died in 2012 at the age of 47, This American Life ran a previously unaired reading he had done for show about the hit musical Rent. It remains one of the funniest things I have ever heard.

The characters are artists, creative types. They have tatterdemalion clothes. Some of them are homosexual, and the ones who aren't homosexual don't even seem to mind. They screen their calls. And when it is their parents, they roll their eyes. They hate their parents. They're never going back to Larchmont, no way. They will stay here living in their 2,000 square feet of picturesque poverty being sexually free and creative.

Here's some ways to broadcast creativity in a movie. Start plinking out a tune on a piano. Scratch a few notes on some music paper. Plink some more. Suddenly crash both hand down on the keyboard, then bring them quickly up to your head and grab the hair on your temples screaming, it won't work! Or sit at a typewriter, reading the page you've just written, realize that it's shit and tear it from the platen, and toss it behind you. Cut to waste paper basket overflowing with crumpled paper.

Here's what they do in Rent to show that they are creative. Nothing-- they do nothing. They hang out. And hanging out can be marvelous. But hanging out does not make you an artist. A secondhand wardrobe does not make you an artist. Neither do a hair-trigger temper, melancholic nature, propensity for tears, hating your parents, nor even HIV-- I hate to say it-- none of these can make you an artist.

They can help. But just as being gay does not make one witty– you can suck a mile of cock. It does not make you Oscar Wilde. Believe me. I know. I have tried. The only thing that makes you an artist is making art. And that takes the opposite of hanging out.

That's a lot of quoting – sin – but it's all just so good. It's also more apt than ever, I feel, as I mark exactly one year living in Paris. The titular 525,600 minutes from the musical I've never actually watched.

I arrived here on June 10, 2025 and the last three months or so have been the best and worst of it. The thought occurred to me to write about the worst of it and indeed I did get through some 3000 or so words before I'd made it even a week into the subject matter at hand. At this point I realised it was only making me more upset and, perhaps more importantly, in urgent need of an editor, which was making me even more upset.

On Monday night, feeling that particular kind of brittle that can poison whole days, I dragged myself out of the house at great effort to go to dinner with my friend Felicien. I say my friend, which he is, but like all people you meet in global cities far from your own homeland he was at first loaned to me by another friend and then I refused to return him. Of course, this is how all human connection works and if you really want to draw the network map of amity to its natural end you'd be thanking homo habilis for hosting the first fondue night.

But I digress, by about 2.4 million years.

Felicien, if I may, is extremely French. He's one of the few French friends I have managed to make here which in itself is quite an achievement.

'No really,' he said over a wine, 'do not underestimate that. So few people manage to make as many friends as you have in a year here. Paris is a tough city, it can be very closed off.'

And I've written here before about my patented methods in building friendships which revolve, chiefly, around the subtle power of routine. If I possess any gifts in this life, they are born from a supernatural commitment to custom. In Paris, where everything is at once always and never changing, it is habit that dictates; habit that is rewarded.

It is a source of some irony that I had to break the habit of a lifetime to move overseas in the first place. The Mortons are not an especially mobile people. It's hard to know for certain anymore but I'm not sure my father has even been to Sydney let alone left the country. Mum did it once on her own when she was 19, to Japan, and then only again for her 60th when I flew her to New Zealand with my sister, their second and first international trips respectively. Not everyone wants to travel and there are many who do who cannot, privilege that it is. I had assumed inertia might bind me to the continent on which I was born. If not inertia, capitalism. If not capitalism, fear.

Delusion is a powerful drug, though, and I was upfront with myself before I left Australia that one cannot m0ve countries and change themselves totally anymore than one can take a giraffe from Taronga to the Western Plains and expect it to reach enlightenment. Wherever you go, there you are, ad infinitum. But any zookeeper worth their salt will tell you that habitats do encourage and reform, prune or even damage the animals and we are all animals. It is true, then, that I have bumped into old versions of myself in Paris that I do not much like. But my enclosure has also been enriched and some new, kinder more prosocial behaviours have emerged.

'I feel that you are very Paris-coded,' my 700-year-old friend Ella, who lives in the body of a 20-year-old Swedish barista, told me over a wine recently. 'I think you were meant to be French.' Delusion. Fine, whatever, but a fun, harmless delusion. Australia is my home but I have never felt especially Australian in nature. I eat a burger with a knife and fork. I hate the beach. The sun troubles me a great deal.

Fleeting discombobulation aside, Paris made immediate sense to me. And as Felicien and another friend I met here, an Australian called Christian, said my entry to this city has been charmed, or at least brushed by some passing fortune. And it is this that I return to again and again. The why of it. The how of it. The disbelief I have in something that actually happened. People ask us to believe in so many things – spirits and gods and boogeymen and what have you – and I'm like 'whoa whoa whoa, let me get my head around things that are real first'.

Let me get my head around life!

After the past few months, from which I am only just emerging into some semblance of my better self, the understanding I have reached is that I am – have to be – a man of faith. Not of the cloth, but of the things I can feel and touch and see. As I understand religious faith, this is the hard part. I remember having these arguments with Christian friends during school about how I needed to know for sure whether there was a god or not. 'But then it wouldn't be called faith,' one of them told me. I always found that too convenient; now I know it's all we've got.

The novel is not going well. I fell into the Rent trap articulated so well by David Rakoff; never writing and only ever drinking about it. The career burnout was worse than I had assumed and admitting that felt like a level of weakness to which I have never previously succumbed. And who am I, man only ever defined by his work, when I am not actually really working? In this sense, Paris has felt like an even more intense fever dream than it might otherwise have been, especially for a kid from the bush who is still learning how the big the world is.

At first, this excursion was supposed to come to an end right now, having experienced all of the seasons.

A series of fortunate events has meant I can stay for much longer, perhaps even most of the four years I have approved on my residence permit. I would like to live here. It seems proprietary and wrong to say that Paris is my city, but that is the sense I have. What follows from this is that I cannot continue to hide from myself on the flimsy pretence that this is just some jaunt, some escape from the quotidian.

I am back in therapy for the first time since 2021, about to do the hard thing I've been putting off in cycles since I turned 20. Whether it works or not is another matter, but there are paths here that I have not yet travelled and I cannot keep making the same mistakes. The only character development happening in Paris at the moment is on me, not the ones in my novel.

So it goes. Or, as the barely able to talk little girl on the metro yesterday said to mother, in the sweetest sing-song voice: Et voila, mama!