I have to be honest with you. I wouldn’t have high expectations about this article. Not because the article’s terrible—though I’ll leave the final critique up to you. The reason has something to do with this week’s post being a batch to write. And when I say batch, I know that you know what I really mean. A bitch. There, I said it.

Feels good.

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Last week I celebrated my dad’s 63rd birthday at a topless waitress bar. I was writing this week’s post when my mum asked if I’d like to go. I said yes, of course, partly because I wanted to see dad, partly out of curiosity and partly because I couldn’t think of a damn word for this story. I needed a break.

“I’ll be there in three hours,” I said, believing that was enough time to write another chunk.

It wasn’t enough time, though. And here’s why.

I was having dinner with my aunt and uncle, Jane and Haydn. They were saying how they had to plan their kid’s school lunches for the week. There’s four of them, you see. The plan included a trip to the shops every Sunday to buy four loaves of bread and two jars of both vegemite and peanut butter. These were the days when peanuts were seen as benevolent, of course, and not dangerous enough to quarantine a primary school. After lining up the bread along the kitchen bench in a conveyor-belt fashion, they’d spread each slice then stack each sandwich. The process was meticulously planned, efficiently executed, but the result was a meal that could’ve tired out the palate of a labrador. So nothing special is what I’m saying.

You’re probably wondering what sandwiches have to do with writing a blog post. Quite a lot, as it turns out. During the three-week break, I began planning each Episode for Season 3 like Jane and Haydn’s kid’s lunches. I wrote the subject for each post and a few anecdotes, as well as a couple of cartoons. This week, for example, I planned a post about customers who order a coffee without sugar and then, as they collect the coffee, ask the barista whether she has put in sugar (rolling eyes emoji).

I was set, ready to go. I had a plan.

By the time I wrote the first few paragraphs though, I couldn’t help but think the words were the writing equivalent of peanut butter and vegemite sandwiches. I followed a structure and a story angle used several times before. But the result was ho-hum. I say ‘ho-hum’ as if I was care-free about the story not materialising exactly how I planned. I am now, but at the time I had an inner dialogue that was as self-effacing as Dobbie in the first Harry Potter film where he is slamming his head into the closet. “Bad, Dobbie. Bad, Dobbie.”

I was discouraged but continued to stick with the plan, which meant staring at the page for hours, bottling up angst, until I stopped looking like a poised writer on a posture chair and more like the face of a weightlifter going for the world record. And the more I thought, the more the mind drew a blank.

Nothing.

Not a word.

And here’s the thing about being stuck in a plan that isn’t working. I panic and hold onto the plan tighter and tighter, believing that if I grip hard enough, eventually things will turn out the way I imagined.

Holding on isn’t comfortable, of course, but the alternative is worse. Letting go of an imagined future of yourself is giving up, right? And you know what terrible things might happen when you quit. I may become a failure and then have to start renting in a trailer park and eat Heinz beans for the rest of my life. Yes, my mind went there.

I would’ve kept daydreaming about trailer parks if my alarm didn’t go off, notifying me to leave the writing desk for the bar. And that’s where everything changed.

The bar was not what I imagined. First, there were no young and topless waitresses (that's only on Thursdays and Fridays, apparently). There were no young people at all. The room was filled with seniors watching a jazz band who had an average age of about 75. I later found out the band had been playing at the venue for over 40 years. Most of the regulars had been attending for that long, too.

The dance floor was packed. Swing dancers twisted and righted and stepped in unison with perfect form. And in the middle, moving out of step, out of beat, was my dad. He wasn’t even trying to blend in. He ran around the floor, high-fiving fellow dancers and jumped up and down like a child on Christmas morning. Hardly swing dancing.

I have to give you some context here. Dad is a former Christian monk and a Religion and Life teacher who likes to spend his weekends in silence, overlooking the garden. He's always been very methodical, too, and not what you'd call spontaneous.

“Want to go to a coffee shop, dad?” I’d often ask.

“No,” he’d grunt. And make another instant coffee with a lump of sugar.

I never thought that would change. So as you can imagine, the scene before me at the bar came as quite a shock.

Then again, my dad, while having plans, doesn’t seem to hang onto them as I do. He has no expectations of carrying them out in a particular way. Otherwise, he probably wouldn’t have found himself celebrating his 63rd birthday at a topless waitress bar dancing fanatically to a senior swing band.

Plans are easy to blame because they can feel rigid and inescapable. But they're not the problem, really. A plan is just words on a piece of paper or an excel spreadsheet or a mere passing thought—harmless. And if I didn’t have at least a vague plan, I’d probably still be in remote Sumatra working the papaya fields to pay for my next Bintang and surfboard. Not writing to you right now.

There’s a proverbial saying that writing is easy, you just sit down at the computer and bleed. The saying refers specifically to writer’s block—a loss of ability to produce new work, or the experience a creative slowdown. The experience isn’t limited to just writers, though, but relevant to every human, because the block is merely an insistence that things should be a certain way and, in turn, a resistance to things as they are. And it deadens the beauty of the imperfection of things.

At the start, I asked you not to have expectations because I planned to always write about cafes. But this happened instead. And by surrendering expectations, maybe, just maybe, this article delighted you unexpectedly on this beautiful day, too.

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