On getting a haircut.

It's a process you can seldom recall enjoying. The crackle and static of busy voices, the chandeliers that always have one or two globes blown, the too soft voices in the mix, so you nod at every word uttered towards you, or pull a thoughtful face hoping you'll be able to hear at least once sentence clearly so that you can warmly reply, "Yeah. Short at the sides and what do they call it now? High and tight?".
And the oversized mirrors; four feet by three that do not give you the opportunity to turn away, turn off. Never completely anyway.
From a face you've never ... Not liked, necessarily but never really trusted. Never felt entirely at home with. The laughter lines don't genuinely reflect to the world a life of laughter. They reflect an over-eagerness to please, if anything. A face that isn't entirely honest the way you see the faces of most people around you. A face that begs like a broken puppy for love and attention. No, you can't in all candour say you like this face but at least you've had the good sense down through the decades to hold an uneasy peace with its disingenuousness.
You correct this thought as the hair starts to come away in clumps. You like the bags beneath the eyes, now that you've taken your glasses off. The bags speak of books and book people, of quietude over multitudes, of blind and selfish kindness over hate. The pouches are good.
Like the fingertips. The best your body could offer inasmuch as at least they could play instruments that may or may not bring pleasure to one's self and, on a good day, to others besides.
Sara cuts delicately the hair at the front, so now the eyes must close and the self-absorption must cease for a while. Another temporary truce.
Immediately the fate and fortune of a young Napoleon, uncertain even as evening falls in 1790 as to whether he will survive the night having associated with this faction and that. Having fought and commanded artillery for this cause and that.
Sara asks something that you can't quite understand and you say, "No, that's terrific." She seems professionally satisfied with this response.
The eyes shut again.
They've changed the piped music to hits from the '80s. For whom, I do not know. Your immediate thought is, "I hope it wasn't for me. That could just be a deal breaker for my returning patronage." And then you listen - in what seems like the first time in forever - really listen to Tina Turner's timbre and richness and the staccato switch up on the bass in What's Love Got To Do With It? Somewhere, your heart that was so bitterly certain mere moments ago, is now leaping with delight at the purity of these achievements. And the miracle of you recognising these things above the sound of a busy Saturday hairdresser.
Here comes the peroxide.
Eyes opened briefly, eyes closed again. An inverted augenblick.
And into the pit of the Greek Civil War ('43-'89). How the Communist/Stalinist EAM-ELAS took up arms against the Allied backed EDES. And how, as with all other conflicts since the dawn of time, there was soon nought but screaming from the innocent and guilty alike, sand and brick and stink and drying blood and viscera in the face of the ugly human condition that invariably occupies the uncomfortable, complex spaces between the best and highest of ideals and often the ever-present, profoundly petty vengefulness at the heart of both the victors and the vanquished. The rancour and recrimination that to this day define and constrain whole communities, the sons and the daughters of the sons and the daughters of ...
The eyes open.
The war ceases, Napoleon dies under mysterious circumstances, Tina Turner has long since walked out on you.
Sara smiles triumphantly. You catch a last glimpse of the bags before looking at your fingertips, for fear of holding her gaze too long.
You mutter thanks over and over again as you pay.
And you walk out into Saturday's rain.

Annual leave.

Eating chocolate while Cam takes out drug lords on an old console game.
My vintage car model is coming along and I keep meaning to get back to recording a song.
I look around me at paints, guitars, brushes, visors, bits of chrome foil. The detritus of love and fascination. The room smells of isopropyl and wood, with a hint of floor polish.
Someone the other day mentioned an expression: homegrown. It means basic, inbred maybe. It was not so subtly aimed at me. The internal dialogue went like this, "Fuck you you obdurate, arrogant fucking idiot. You really have no idea, do you?"
Outwardly, the best I could muster was, "And you're what? A paragon of sophistication, I'm assuming?"
Not my finest line but fuck it.
At least the conversation trailed away in my favour for a change.
And tonight Cam saves the world as I save my sanity once again.
My god I'm good at not working.
As the kettle boils and the teabag awaits once more.

Party.

This is not ...

This is not a house of passion.
Posing and posturing are kept to a domestic minimum in this house and tantrums are met with tantrums that rise and rise and shake first the walls then the foundations but by bedtime there is cooing.
There is forgiveness.
The hostility, such as existed, is spent and calmer winds prevail.
This house can offer no wisdom.
Friends and those who pay visit are misguided in taking that deceptive path.  There are no Sophists here. There are merely name dropping carnies and when the dust settles, I am more than happy with this nom de guerre dans cette mondial ordinaire.
Wisdom is for those who know, for those who see, for those who can walk a straight line without stumbling every few yards, for those who are nimble of mind and quick of conclusion, for those who harbour self-serving division all the while enucleating all that is humanity, and for their opposite numbers.
There is no wisdom here.

I'll be your baby tonight.

A monster's centenary.

You came into this world around three months after the cessation of hostilities - the war to end all wars.
Model T Fords wouldn't become a regular sight until you were six or seven here in Australia.
It is said that your older brother and you would wait out on the street after school for the two younger girls to come home. If you heard and saw your parents visiting drunken horrors upon each other the four of you would troop up William Street, Leichhardt and look for a place to sleep the night in Balmain Cemetery. If the weather was fine, it would be you four children against the headstones gazing up at the stars. If it was inclement you weren't above breaking into a mausoleum to stave off the cold and rain.
That hunger, though. Phew! Enough to drive generations insane.
Later, as it was told to me, the two sisters would go and work for Kate Leigh or her pale and forgotten imitations on Palmer Street or whichever house might take them in, to sell for a pittance their innocence and their hopes and their dreams. I never asked how old they were.
By all accounts you seem to have shot for honest back then. You would travel far and wide to turn a coin.
On returning you would bring what money you managed to earn or hustle or swindle home to that house on Charles Street where the stink of the Hawthorne Canal would still manage to permeate the darkened rooms, in spite of being a decent sized block away.
Then came the Second World War followed days later by the incident up the back of Gloucester, followed some months later by the wedding, followed soon after that by the arrival of your first born.
By now you were poor and troubled and handsome, dishonest and gifted with the gab. And they all wanted you but our mother wanted you most.
I could never even remotely understand why. Why love you? How? You were just too damned broken, old man. Even then you were just too damned broken.
It is said that during the war, you paid a pretty amount to an arms dealer up the Cross. Ma would later imitate your voice as you dragged the stenciled locker 'round under the back stairs to the house off Young Street.
"What the bloody hell're you doing with that, Jack?!"
" ... Just in case they invade," was your best effort.
Together you cracked the lock, you to marvel and to gloat and her to cajole and ridicule, but the moment gave way to the dust of ignominy as you instantly realised the cache was filled with children's air rifles and not .303s. I can't pass judgement. It could have happened to any thug. Any fool. Any would be gangster of the era and you, to all intents and purposes, definitely fitted the bill for all three.
It is said you perforated your ear to avoid serving, yet after the war, you heard about the island girls and enlisted to defend a different kind of honour. Cooking and fucking your way in the former protectorates.
By the time i came along, you couldn't even cook well.
The fifties came and went in a whirl of hate, love and hate, love and hate, and by the end of them, the brood had grown to six.
Finally the youngest in sixty three and the collapse of your little empire two years later.
Oh of course you'd drag the kid from lover's house to lover's house, pillar to post, St Ives to Roselands, Dundas to Maroubra. Sydney to Perth. At one point nailed the kid's bedroom window to stop him running away in the middle of the night, as he did so often. As all the others had done before him to finally get away from the stinging tongue, the stinging words, the stinging back of the hand.
And the kid got it easy. Easier by far.
So finally I too ran away and you died some months later. Some say holding presents for the grandkids down on George Street. Someone once even tried the whole Black Irish Died Of A Broken Heart routine. But I doubt it.
I missed the funeral. I missed the ashes scattered under the lemon tree on Eastview Ave. For a brief moment in history, I felt thirteen year old guiltybad but that was a million lifetimes ago, a thousand miles away and an era of shadowboxing gone. I've long stopped caring about feeling anywhere near that helpless since. Truth be told, before long you'd become too much the stranger crowding out the madmen already socialising in our young, fractured heads.
One day I may write at length about it all. Especially the made up portions. You'd like the fantasist tracts. You, like me, would like the fictional non-dramas that bind the narrative. You, like me, would swear on the bible that it was all true.
You, like me ...
Somewhere deep down in the mire, still like you.
But most likely, outside this unmistakably vitriolic screed, you'll get nothing more out of me. Or us. Or history.
On this, your hundredth birthday.
22/2/2019

Why I love sleeping by Malcolm Ian Connell. Aged: 56.

The night before last I had one of those dreams.
A slow train with a view out the window of manatees performing studied ecstatic curvets through the clearest of clear waters.
Pulling up at a seaside town, in a Canada that can't exist, bound by arched weatherboard buildings and a boardwalk with the most filigreed railings this side of the nineteenth century.
For an impossible long, brief moment I can't recall feeling anything approaching such breathtaking joy just as a wall of North Atlantic steel grey water roiled and towered threateningly over the frail crowd and in a fit of pique or dream spite or possibly just maritime identity confusion, decided it liked this whole suspended-in-time thing far better than whatever it had been prior to the moment and clearly resolved to simply hang there, miles high and assured of its place in the universe at last.
I walked the boardwalk with old friends, laughing and often losing them over dunes and in and out of warm, dusty shops made of shimmering tourmaline and azurite.
Until I was left seated, smiling and bland and delighted, on a train bound for the seven o'clock alarm once again.

We can go to sleep.

David Montgomery's mum.

He was a year or two ahead and every day I'd walk past his house on the corner to and from school. Sometimes we'd cross Lane Cove Road together without exchanging a word, even though we knew we'd get into trouble for not crossing at the lights up by Cox's Road if ever we were found out.
He lived with his mum who worked with my mum at the nuthouse, as it was known to everyone, and his house had a fibro garage. One Saturday I rode past his place and saw him, through the open tilted, rotting garage doors, holding two slot car set controllers, working out how to use both at the same time.
"Hey!"
"Hey."
He looked out towards the back door of his house. What he was gauging I don't know but it appeared the right thing to do.
"Want to have a go?"
In answer to the invitation,I immediately forgot the Mustang I'd received for Christmas and let it fall to the dirt driveway, hiding my excitement as I shambled towards the dank garage. Such a momentous occasion was this lure that I didn't even mind when I realised it wasn't a Scalextric set but rather a modest figure eight circuit made up of grey plastic track with corner rails that refused to stay in place and what looked like rather fragile rheostatic plastic grips. The cars, one a Dodge Phoenix in American police livery and the other an ugly blue Chevrolet Corvair, lazily went round and round never picking up any great speed no matter how hard we squeezed the triggers with their odd, hollow grating sound.
We must have watched the cars perform desultory loops for the best part of half an hour without exchanging a word. We seemed, like kids through all lands and all time, to have gone quiet for the strange absence of reason that only we could fathom. It wasn't discomfort or shyness. Nor was it intense and singular focus. It was simply the thing to do.
"Daaaavid."
Mrs Montgomery had a young voice, belying her hard face etched with lines born of too many disappointments, too few triumphs and comforts. I later sensed that she must have spent a very long time paying off the slot car set on lay-by. My own mother, I'd learned, started lay-buying Christmas presents for us as early as February.
"You'd better go."
As with the pushbike, we both casually dropped the slot car controllers and ran our separate ways. He was nice kid. Taller than me by an inch and a countenance that had a perpetual sad, gentle grin.
I never got to know him outside that moment.
We never visited each other's house nor rode pushbikes together. We would, at most, nod in passing in the quadrangles and the Cocky Laura fields.
Some months later when I was visiting my mother, she mentioned that Mrs Montgomery had been watching us race the cars and there that side of the story ends.
***
Perhaps a year or two after all of this, my mother was holding a Tupperware party in her tiny flat. Whinging wogs and poms any other day, at Tupperware parties they were all just wonderful friends - or so it seemed to me - who talked too loud and drank too much beer or cheap white wine or Vok Advocaat, with not a single adult male in sight. Arguing and laughing, smoking and smiling, putting on scratched Burl Ives and Bing Crosby albums, pointing at nothing and collapsing halfway through unfinishable adult anecdotes.
"Did you hear about Emma?" This from Mum's friend from Yugoslavia. I remember this small thing because I liked the word. I liked the way it sounded when I'd repeat it to myself in the bathroom as the water went cold around me.
The laughter and chatter subsided.
"She was found dead in Walton's over in West Ryde!"
"No way! No bloody way!"
"She ..."
Unfortunately furtive adult glances in my direction brought on a wave of soft voices and conspiratorially close faces, as the women dragged their assorted array of chairs into a huddle while I continued playing with tiny army men.
The last thing I remember hearing was, "...in the women's toilets!"
***
I never did learn why or how Mrs Montgomery died in the women's toilets at Walton's. I broached it once with my mother some time later who forced me to settle for a laconic, "Never mind," and I never did walk that part of Eastview Avenue again thinking I might run into David. Yet throughout the times - through the maudlin teenage years, de rigueur then as now, and throughout the adult years, lost in the heady haze of profligacy, confused certitude and sobriety, my mind still occasionally turns to the strange and unknowable death of Mrs Montgomery.

Your life and your life and my life.

IWD - 2018

To the woman with the beatific smile in the car behind me, thank you.
Same goes to every woman I've ever met and never met.
Thanks for being good, bad, indifferent, inspiriting, impossible, chilled, heated, brutal, tender, insane, enlightened, vulnerable, impenetrable, transparent, abstruse, transcendent, monstrous and human.
Thank you for your noise and your silence, your profound ministrations and your unabated hate, your whimsical obstruction and your caring help, your crushing imperiousness and your restorative attention.
Thank you for raising me, teasing me, teaching me, guiding me, bringing out the best in me to better see the road ahead, bringing out the worst in me to better understand what it is I'm fighting for, ignoring me in my hour of petulance, beguiling me in my moment of apathy, praising me through the darkness, chiding me through the hubris.
Always, always, always inspiring me.
Thank you for getting me up and over the line when all I ever want to do is lay down and give in every second of my life.

She