John Lennon

 I was doing a major service on a Mazda Cappella (for yea verily, I was a mechanic at the start of my working life). Milling about on a creeper with the car up on jack stands, ripping out its gearbox.  A senior apprentice and the foreman came over and stood there in silence with me gazing out at their steel-capped boots. I thought I was in trouble yet again.  But they just stood motionless, not even shuffling their feet.  Not calling me out from under the car.  Just making strange and muted sounds. Altogether ominous.

  Finally I relinquished my fears and doubts and slowly slid out from under the car. I looked up at these two very tough men and was struck by the fresh tear tracks.  Wocko - the senior apprentice - was still crying, in fact.  These were men who did not cry.  Not in public, not in private.

  I thought my mother had died.

 "What's up?"

  The foreman could barely get it out. "John Lennon's been shot.  He's dead."

  "Oh", was a far as I got before I too started crying, lying prostrate on that metal rolling board.

  I'd only taken up guitar in earnest a couple of years before that day and learning the music of The Beatles and Lennon and McCartney and Harrison was de riguer. But more than that, it was joy unbound. The solo on Aisumasen (by Dave Spinotta?) was one thing I was going to conquer. And those words...

  Before too long, so many unsavoury truths emerged.  Lennon's heroin problems, his predilection for physical and emotional abuse foisted upon everyone he ever loved or who loved him, his excesses and hedonistic and cavalier disregard for many things I've long since come to accept as sacred cows.

 But I contend, in spite of these terrible failings, that the one thing he taught me - even though I never knew the man - is that he TRIED.  He made efforts in public and private not necessarily to overcome his schisms, but to make the most and the best from his worst faults.  He himself would probably have denied that he even had any.  After all he was a deity from the age of twenty until his death at forty.  Deities don't take kindly to the display of their numerous and very public Achilles heels.

  But that's what I took from his life and works.  He was fucked but he often made good headway into not being fucked.  As a man, as a human being, as a critical and often contradictory thinker of some small renown, as a living entity.

  And like him, I don't care if I'm wrong or right in cherry picking in this regard.  In much the same way as I took the energy of punk and it's progeny and tried to use it to half-decent effect rather than proselytising the pointless violence.

  And I will always look for the people less perfect and less blessed in my life and try to steal wholesale the good accords and actions that they themselves perform and finally come to terms with - often against there own seemingly innate violent natures.

  It's not about perfection.  It's about the unfucking of all that's the more diminished in ourselves.

  Blind exaltation aside, I can think of few I respect in this regard, as much as I respect the violent and often misogynist and arrogant John Lennon.

 And I still haven't conquered that damned solo.

I'm Sorry.

Self-assuredness.

You've got to know yourself, man.
What "you've got to know yourself, man"?!
What a load of horseshit.
Let me tell you a simple truth. Nobody knows themselves. And what, on this solitary blue-green ball, would be the point of knowing yourself?
You don't think people get to where they are by the good graces of their self-awareness, do you? Really?
Fuck, man.  Who would want to anyway? Riddle me the fuck that one!
You think I or anyone else gets up in the morning and says, "Today is the day of my magnum opus.  My greatest song.  My greatest lyric.  My greatest good deed.  My greatest shot at philanthropy.  My greatest crime" (well, there are MANY who think this one).
Self belief is all, you scream, red-faced and all passion and piss and vinegar.
Well, my friend, tell that to ISIS, the Republicans, the Australian Liberal Party, fundamentalists and filibuster conservatives down through all time, the lesser poets who rail against a world filled with deafness, the lesser singers and musicians and artists who rail against a public filled with a certain war-weariness for the pedestrian and the thoughtless and the mechanised, the white collar criminals, the blue collar criminals, the criminals of the clergy, the public masturbators, the soul-wasted abstainers, the physically frail, the flagellants and the fucked-up.
See where self-belief has gotten THEM!
There's only one thing to do from my jaundiced perspective.
Stick around.
Just stick around.
Stay here on this little planet, bumbling through each day, stumbling over the wrong thing said and the wrong deed, the eons lost in procrastination and doubt, the hours and lifetimes lost in a lonely sepulcher just shy of being visible to the naked eye, stick around for the measured allowance of laughter and sex juice, and just be there for THE MOMENT.  Whatever your moment might be.
And then stick around for more until the moments spill - one into the next - until you can honestly say, "Now I have had a lifetime of moments."
And then stick around to reflect upon them, or crow and gloat about them.
And fuck up.
This is important.
Make lots and lots of mistakes.
Mistakes that you can say are only your own
because life has a funny way of making you aware that the more mistakes you make on your own, the less regrets you have as time passes.
Even if the resounding echoes of those mistakes haunt your guarded hours down through the years. No, my friend, I have no time for self-assuredness, self-confidence, self-belief.
Self love, certainly.  No one I know past the age of puberty seems to be exempt from that one.
But as for the pinnacles and zeniths and victories and triumphs, I must let them come as they will, if I'm to make any sense of them at all.
And I'd advise you to do the same, if you want to enjoy your life.
Or perhaps you really do know what you want out of life.  In which case, I am of absolutely no use to you.
P.S. We're moving back to Melbourne.

Whiskey Girl

Dick Wagner.

I learned over the weekend that I lost another longstanding hero back in July besides Brett Jacobson. When I was a kid learning guitar, I used to catch the bus into the city and go to Palings Music on Pitt Street. I'd slink upstairs to the sheet music section and look at Elvis Costello and Clash and Alice Cooper songbooks. The latter were (and remain) a brilliant source of unique voicings and amazing compositions, primarily because Cooper's guitarist at the time was Dick Wagner. Wagner also happened to be a superb composer and brilliant lyricist (he wrote Cooper's 'Only Women Bleed' which Cooper only marginally altered). And it was his chords that made it to the books.
I taught myself to mnemonically remember the strange shapes that Wagner played until finally I could play most of the stuff between Welcome to my Nightmare up until about DaDa. The amount of store employees who used to come and watch this gawpy kid standing there, eyes closed and frowning furiously trying to memorise those shapes, only to have me buy nothing (I seriously couldn't afford those books hence the memory thing). Then I'd race home and play my cheapy nylon stringed guitar until they sounded vaguely like the songs.

That's all I wanted to say on it.

But if you are a budding guitarist or you're a player of some experience, or perhaps you've just hit a plateau with your technique, then I urge you to seek out those original Alice Cooper songbooks and hear and learn the magic of Dick Wager's arrangements.

I never wrote those songs.

Scribbles from Blayney.

Today was the Day of the Snake and Spider.
Wedged between the cattle paddocks and the rock quarry is a small block of land I'd called Copperhead Alley. So named because I'd seen a one meter Copperhead snake lazing on the hot road.
Today we had to spend some time pottering around this particular block and I had no idea how portentous my quip would be. Within an hour, five of us almost stepped on Copperheads, as well as a big Red Belly and a large Brown snake. And then there was the big old gum tree in the middle of it all, riddled with Tree Funnelwebs.
Tonight, after the storm, only the lingering fragrance of petrichor and cattle piss remains.
But tomorrow...

    ******

Dogfights the likes of which I never thought I'd see, today. A beautiful big falcon or kite - soft pearlescent bronze in the afternoon light. It must have been close to twenty inches in full span. Took out the raven first. Followed by some noisy miners, two galahs and a crimson rosella that happened to get caught in the crossfire.
Fuck not with the falcon, I did learn.

     *****

We were going to do so much this year.
This year of your 50th birthday.
But we started the thing as nearly broken and dispirited souls and didn't get too much past that before you left this world.
We laughed about taking a '68 Riviera Targa or a '71 Camaro, flying in to LAX and heading wherever the fuck we wanted, leaving our women and loved ones behind as we laughingly sought out the ghosts of our corrupted and imaginary youth.
So, Jake, this night I'm hoping against hope that I will close my eyes in this little cabin in this little town and I will dream big dreams.
Of desert mesas and movie stars. Of rednecks and socialites. Of friendly, slow-drawl farmers and car salesmen with unnaturally white smiles. Of racists northern or southern whose whole outlook is transformed by the off the cuff remarks from us two strange antipodeans. Of shy and wary bible belt folk stuck between their combine harvesters and their Millers Lite. Of musicians who can't play enough notes or tragically too many with any degree of proficiency, or more importantly, love. Of the learned and the unlearned from Van Nuys all the way over and up to the coast of Maine. Of the smile, the leg or the fading tattoo that once meant something to someone, somewhere between Portland and Pensacola. Of the hapless who find fortune and the paragons who seek ruin. Of rain-soaked redwoods and rocket ships. And may the dream be pleasurably slow. All the hours in this world, if you please.
Tonight I hope you come into my dreams and back into my life that we might share some careless laughter just this one more time.

That whole entourage thing...

  The following may seem trite to most but it's something that crosses my mind from time to time.  If nothing else it genuinely sheds light on the profound depths of my shallowness.

  I want to say something brief about fame and how our relationship with it has changed. These days everyone knows someone who's had a brush with it, at some point or another. But social media has altered the face of fame, possibly irrevocably. We probably have famous friends or even heroes and heroines that we follow on FB or Twitter but the specific nature I'm thinking of deals with generational fame.

  See, when I was  kid, we all said, "I want to be like so and so."  In my case, I wanted to sing like Stevie Wright or Steve Marriott or Sean Bonniwell, Alice Cooper or Eric Burdon.  Cooper being the odd man out here because the others are what we now loosely call white boy soul. But we wouldn't sing like that.  We'd merely get rollicking drunk on our parents cheap liquor and try to imbue ourselves with their spirit while we attempted to belt out Sky Pilot Or The Eagle Never Hunts the Fly or In My Mind's Eye or Reflected or St Louis.

  Where was I going with all this?  Oh yeah!  Social media.  Well, now on FB, I can leave a question for a favourite guitarist from a favourite 60s band and he'll cheerfully get back to me within 24 hours. And just now, a famous hero's wife (who in her own right is a celebrated soul so perhaps I should say I feel no small pride in being a Tweet buddy with a famous lawyer who has a rocker husband) started following me on Twitter. Don't get me wrong.  It isn't a simple nostalgic parlour trick.  This happens as much with contemporary celebrities (and/or their admin and interns) as with artists from decades gone.

  Part of the whole thing back then was  the unattainability.  The untouchableness. They made their fortune out of that mystique. They were and are exactly as the tabloids herald them - STARS!  I mean many of these people owned jet liners for Christ's  sake. Seriously! And now they are just mortal as the winter of our disco tents closes in.

  But the part I like, the thing I love the most about this modern world is that though it would appear the stars have arced, fallen and crashed back to earth, our hearts are lifted still by their not at all stellar and even all too human toil.

Bring it...

The Sparrows.

It was big. Very big and blackbrown. Is there any other kind in Sydney?
I'm sitting on the tiled verandah floor in Canon Street, Stanmore. Just smoking and staring at the afternoon light playing out over the roofs of Leichhardt. - This is a few years ago, now.
It scuttled along the tiles, looking busy. Or guilty. Both, maybe. As these things do.
The two sparrows were on it before I could give it much thought. Attacking. Attacking. Damn, they were angry little monsters.
One leg. Two - three legs. This thing wasn't going anywhere now.
The 'roach is limping and they stop pecking at it. Tilt their heads and stare. A small chirrup from one and four more sparrows show up.
They don't care about me. About the small cloud of smoke.
Jumping over my stretched, crossed legs with impunity.
I should have reached out and squashed it then but I'm lazy by nature, in spite of my best intentions.
All six set in on that little warrior. Sometimes pecking. Sometimes stopping, heads tilted to admire their own handiwork. Singing gaily among themselves now.
They took their time.
And by the time I finished the small cigar, all that remained was precisely one leg and one small and dark wing.
The Greeks were fooling themselves.
Those little bastards weren't avian Charons sent down to take the living across the Styx.
Those little bastards are just like the rest of us.

Flight reaction.

How?

How DO you exalt the ordinary?  The banal?  The average? The also rans of our lives?
How do you give, to all and everything that gives to you on a daily basis, the moments of immortality their accords?
The roads. Pitted or newly tarmac'ed. The weeds. The power lines and all that the modern forests of life throw up around us?
The sun from  these days of global warming.  These end times in which we mill about, helpless and happy.
The power sub-stations. The discarded and fractured lenticular plastic signs, The wrappers, of course. The crushed and empty and unloved cans. The flowers that the dying and disappearing bees won't even consider touching.

How do we put the wet, juicy pussy, the hard cock and the wiggling arse into the streetlight?
The houses up for sale. The detritus and discard of a billion carelessly manicured lawns. All that has seen its day. All that has been put out for recycling. All that has been put out. The street signs. Even the air, heavy with the smell of burning brakes and honeysuckle.
The crockery left under a tree for purposes beyond imagining or caring.
The vistas of us.
Everything made and all things binary that no one and nothing will know of once we are gone.
The shell of the cicada.

How do we revel in the foolish and the tedium?  Kiss Baudelaire and Rimbaud, Nietzsche and Celine, Bukowski and Strummer, McGowan, Camus and Pollack.  Kiss them gently on the cheek, take your hands off their shoulders, look them in the eye and tell them that
though they weren't wrong, they weren't right either.

Wasteland.

Laughing

I can't write
and you can't read.
And this is how we'll see out our days.
Laughing because we can do nothing.

You've been alive through more conflict than I ever want to see.
Seen out more dead enemies than I'd ever care to have friends
and sent off more friends than I could ever hope to have.

And I love you because after the job - a mechanic, a typist, a data entry clerk, a hairdresser, a mercenary, a CEO of a small production company whose name has long since faded from the billboard, a roustabout, an usher, a painter of landscapes, a project manager, an apps developer, factory worker for a cordial company, a shift worker, a counselor, a bastard, a stripper, a musician of some small renown, a lifeguard, a repo woman, a cold caller, an agent.
After all of these jobs and all others
You can't read and I can't write
And the way is thus shown.

You've been deaf for more arguments than I've had fast food.
You've known more people that you've never wanted to know than I've known sunsets.
You've spent more lifetimes talking above armies, legions of the sage than I have wasted lifetimes listening to the ceaseless drone of far off traffic.

And I love you because you've blown it - every chance, every golden opportunity, every shot at stealing a kiss, every occasion to stand tall and fight and beat down the face of bullying, every window to scream at every ghost who offered up every ounce of encouragement you ever received.

And you remain.

You are normal
and I am normal
And I can't write and you can't read.

And with the coming of the new day, we will win the lottery
Because every illiterate has their day this season.

Holy Joe.

Father and Son.

I'm no romantic but...
I was taking a break from work in a quiet street in Katoomba a couple of hours back and a guy walks past - early sixties Italian if I had to guess, care-worn. 

He was holding the hand of his son; big, possibly the best part of forty years old and reasonably crippled with autism. 

The son is leaning out on the verge and with his free hand, scooping up bunches of invisible and beautiful flowers the world cannot see. But I could tell the son could see them by the smile on his face and the way he squeezed and relaxed his hand. 

They must have reached me mid conversation because the son said, "Don't be a cunt, dad."
I'm not making that up.
"Don't you be a cunt too then!", chided the old man.
I'm not making that up, either.
At about this point they walked past me when the son stopped gathering invisible and beautiful things. And they both started laughing openly for all the world and me to hear.
I don't think they saw me sitting there with tears quietly streaming from my eyes.

Father, Son.

Jurek Kowal.

Came around to my flat. Asked me if I had any songs.

I told him I wasn't in the mood.

Fuck your moods, he said.

And I believed him

back then.

A Polish man - a mountain -

in the middle of one of his schizophrenic episodes is something to be feared, even when you laughed as he called you a lazy bastard.

He said, here's ten pieces of paper.

Write

me ten songs.

I wrote five.

Two of which my band would record.

He stormed out the door. Back

to his tall and wide canvases of naked angular women.

I let him think he'd left me feeling like shit.

A few days later

he was back.

Here's three pieces of paper. Give me three.

I gave him three.

He stormed out again, even though they were fine lyrics,

I thought.

Weeks passed and there was a knock at the door.

Let's start from scratch.

You're pissing me off, George Smith, I said.

In the space of an hour

I'd penned ten songs just to get rid of him.

I was 27. He was a drunken, Polish, schizophrenic artist.

He recorded all ten of them.

Not there back in Sydney, of course.

No. He returned to Krakow. Now that the system that had systemically

fractured his already frail health had come apart at the seams.

He sent me a letter, thanking me.

And that was that.

Jurek Kowal, if you're ever back down this way,

you owe me my ten songs,

motherfucker.

Song for George Smith

The white out.

You have stared and stared and the hours passed.
The screen got no darker. No words sullied the terrifying purity of the screen.
No character came to life. No memory drew pulse.
No gossamer storylines unfolded - haltingly or otherwise.
You simply stared.
And smelled your hand.  Is that tobacco?  Have you been sneaking a cigarette or small cigars again?
Jesus fuck! When will you ever learn?!
Was it not enough to stand outside in the cool air and watch the stars and storm clouds pass over this mountain while you sulked into the empty dark?
Was it not enough to hear the train and the traffic off in the distance?
You had to smoke?
Did you?  I forget.  The hour is, after all, late.
You've done this before too. But still you come back.
You always come back.
And why?  You pursue immortality of some small kind?  Are you kidding?  Are you fucking joking?
Like you've ever given a shit as to whether someone - anyone - even remembers your name let alone your risible, scrabbling snatches at posterity.
I sound harsh, I know.  I sound sadistic.
But no, don't turn me off.  I was kidding.  Just - fuck it.  You know?
I've missed you, my friend.
I've - and I'm being honest here - I've missed your gaze.
The way you sit and look at me.  I want to say stupidly but you're not stupid.
Or perhaps you are and I'm simply giving you the benefit of the doubt in this dying hour of magnanimity.
But it's not the point and you know that and I know that.
No.  The point is this.
While you weren't watching,
look what appeared!

'Cuz everyone is a fucking Napoleon.

Music=breathing.

Whatever other fortunes or misfortunes might have befallen my funny life, I'm grateful to have been born when I was.  I came into a world when the Beatles were just starting to make their mark and the world was changing at a hitherto unprecedented pace. I come from a relatively large family over a wide age difference and I have the warmest memories of two of my brothers (the Twins) coming home from their Saturday morning jobs, arms piled high with 45s and the occasional long player.

  Much to the chagrin of my father (the Old Man), Saturday afternoons and Sundays were filled with the Beatles, Roy Orbison, Desmond Dekker, The Easybeats, The Bee Gees, The Kinks, The Small Faces, Kaleidoscope (and Fairfield Parlour), The Pioneers and other early reggae acts, Elvis, Little Eva, Frankie Lymon, Little Anthony and the Imperials, The Byrds, The Monkees and countless others. Not too much later another brother (the Favourite One) would turn me on to WEIRD.  Frank Zappa and his proteges Alice Cooper, Iron Butterfly, Uriah Heep, early Pink Floyd, King Crimson and the not so very weird Creedence Clearwater Revival. My eldest sister would bring David Bowie into the fold eventually and my youngest sister would give me the age of the singer-songwriter. So it all comes as no surprise that to this day my heart skips a beat when I hear Sean Bonniwell's growl.  Or Eric Burdon's pissed off white boy soul.  Or the sheer level of quality in the harmonies back then.

  But the one thing those early years instilled in me was a boundless curiosity to look further afield.  Mercifully, by my late teens I was drowning in the company of friends who shared similar sensibilities and we'd sit around with whatever drugs and alcohol we could buy, steal or borrow and listen to Dantalion's Chariot, The Music Machine, The Litter, some Bob Dylan, The 13th Floor Elevators - basically anything that had fuzz guitar and/or some early skying/flanging/phasing across the instruments or vocals (Itchycoo Park, anyone?).

  Besides serving to let it be known that I am an unrelenting name dropper, all of the above is essentially a hopefully-less-than-maudlin farewell to Mark Loomis, the guitarist for the Chocolate Watch Band who was a crucial part of the melange and the soundtrack of our lives.

  To date, I have so few regrets but one will be never getting the chance to compile a fanboi biography on the likes of Mark or Sean Bonniwell or the guys from We The People or The Golden Cups.  I cannot begin to express how grateful I am to all of these people for radically altering my internal compass, only ever for the better.

  Who knows, maybe one days I'll suck up to the members of Talking Heads or The Jam or The Pretenders or The Plastics and at least partially fulfill the dream but the most important thing that all of those musicians taught me was that without curiosity, we are all the lesser for it. As people.  As call and response organisms. As spirits.   I hear that spirit still in the likes of London Grammar, Daughter, Jamie T and a whole bunch of stuff coming out of Australia, The States, Europe, Africa, South East Asia and Africa.

  And that's why if you ever hear me utter, "I just don't get the shit that they play today", you have my permission to punch my fucking lights out.

 Remain intrigued.

  If you've made it this far, here are some links to life-changing goodness.

Masculine Intuition - The Music Machine

The Smell of Incense - Southwest FOB

Follow me - Lyme and Cybelle

Action Woman - The Litter

Don't need your lovin' - The Chocolate Watch Band

New York Mining Disaster 1942 - The Bee Gees.

Hey Joe - The Golden Cups.

The ex-Marine.

They had a three week eastern patrol over towards the Algerian border.
We've all seen the documentaries.
The relentless, blinding heat.  Wind that strips skin and turns bone to something beautiful and hypnotic.
But the way Eddy told it to me made all of this hellish exotica sound painfully ordinary.
Eddy was my age then.  Only I was twenty two and he was twenty two going on one hundred.
We were drinking champagne that someone had stolen from out the back of a restaurant.  Taking long and careless swigs straight from the bottle.
He thought it'd be fun to join the French Foreign Legion.
So he joined
and found out it was not fun.
Eddy found himself  squadding with former mercenaries, ex-regulars disenchanted by the peacable efforts of their respective sovereign armies, active heroin users, cuckolded husbands and jilted lovers and spiritually crippled alcoholics who would scream in the night at the insects trying to eat them alive- imagined or otherwise.
Three weeks of endless heat, sand and toxic, shimmering horizons.
He even saw a large scorpion one afternoon.  A big and fearless black one that scuttle-charged foolishly at a former Chinese People's Army 'adviser' who had developed an insatiable taste for all things lost cause. The guy just stepped on the fucking thing until it stopped moving which wasn't as long as some people might think.
All that marching.  All that sun.  All that wind and sand must really takes its toll on the body because midway into the final week, they were marching two abreast (seriously Algerian separatists??? Not. A. Fucking. Chance. We'd. Catch. Sight. Of. One. In. Butt. Fuck. North. Africa.)
And they're marching and the afternoon had rolled around and not too far ahead there's a sudden halt in the line.
This giant of a man - an ex-Marine - had collapsed.  Mid forties, face like a bat's folded wing.  All floppy and vein and bone from years of alcohol, sixty Ducados a day and an irrational hatred of boredom on civvy street.
He collapsed and started lazily flopping there on the side of an endless dune.  Eddy made his way through all that brutal and unloved soldiery.  All the different languages.  All the different skin tones.  All the competing ideological rivalries.  All the non-comprehending or simply uncaring looks.
Eddy knelt beside this man and moved his ear down to a mouth that moved up and down mechanically, fish-like.
And this giant, this veteran of foreign wars and grand and futile adventures whispered through cyanotic lips, "Cigarette.  Fucking cigarette."
Eddy fumbled.  Lit one.  Shoved it in the guy's mouth and ten minutes later they were back on patrol, for all the world like nothing had happened.
One man's poison etc etc.
After that there was nothing to say so we just stared out at the sun setting over Juan-Les-Pins passing that bottle back and forth.

Swan Swan H

Maria and Billy.

I'll forever be begging your forgiveness for my laziness but prior to starting this blog, I used to put my little ramblings on Facebook.  Here's one from a couple of years back...

Lived on the ledge of a cliff beneath the ancient, ruined fort along the eastern edge of Cassis.

I stayed with them for a week. Maybe more.

Billy was an army deserter. He'd been stationed in Northern Ireland.

On patrol with his squad one day somewhere up there (I knew nothing of the six counties then, much less now), a kid ran at him throwing rocks. Someone from his unit fired and ripped half the kid's neck out. As Billy put it, they were the longest seconds of his life as the boy died - blood flowing like a river - in his arms. Questions written all over his dying face. First leave he got, Billy took the ferry to Boulogne and never looked back. Except for the nightmares.

One day we lifted some items from the small hyper-marche up the back of Cassis. I hid a large bottle of Johnny Walker under my greatcoat, which I wore in spite of the Mediterranean heat. That night we drank but Maria was very sick, through lack of decent food. Practically everything we ate back then was scavenged from the large skip bins out the back of the markets. Sometimes, we'd return like the proud, stupid savages we were with an octopus that we'd manage to grab from the tidal pools on the rocky shoreline. Billy would cook it all up with a small buried stove he'd dug into the soil and rock. A trick he'd learned in the army. It gave little or no smoke.

Maria was shivering through the nights, in spite of the mild high summer weather. I'd given her my tattered greatcoat but it didn't seem to help - although for some reason, it made her revise her opinion of me. Billy said she just didn't trust strangers but I knew better. A lot of women didn't like me back then. A lot of men didn't like me back then, either. Who'd go back to being twenty one?

Don't know why I mention it all.

But Billy and Maria, if you two lovebirds are still under that fort, grimy and mad with hunger, alcohol and mistrust, know that this madman is sitting, drinking a civilised cup of coffee half a world away and thinking fondly of you now.

Paint it black.

Up and in in Surry Hills.

Yesterday as I emerged from an audition in Surry Hills, I had one of those go-slo moments.

 A woman on Marlborough Street walked past me (and I past her now that I meditate upon it) and I couldn't take my eyes off her.  Looking every inch of her many and hard years (she must easily have been in her mid seventies and still full of breast) I was gobsmacked by her garb; a soaked through grey ACDC t-shirt and billowing, shapeless skirt.  In truth, a Spring downpour helped leave nothing to the imagination regarding her ample balcon.  But it was her smile that did it for me.  It nailed something. An epoch. A lifetime. A war filled with memory. A triumph.  A rare win after too many knockouts. A "Yes it may not be a wonderful life but it's a lovely moment" nuclear second.
  That fucking smile.  Not beatific.  Not anything that makes one want to reach for a dictionary, in fact.  Just... Complete.
  Thank you, m'lady, for reminding me that even failing has its moments.

Another Girl Another Planet

An open letter to the universe.

Dear Universe,
I'm giving you a couple of options.  Either cover next week's rent AND give me a regular paying job that covers all the crucial needs of life, leaving evenings and weekends free to explore nothing in particular because I'm really not that adventurous OR pay me a cool twenty six mil up front and have shut of my incessant whining.
Think real fucking carefully before you get back to me.
m

Born under punches

Incidentally...

I'm not sure if I've plugged my produce with y'all as yet but here are some links to other things that are egocentrically me:

My songs can be found at:

Reverb Nation

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Sydney - Hi life and lo.

Forgive me my laziness but I've copied the following from my Facebook update last night.  I think it's worth retelling here...

A quick story my brother-in-law recently related to me that perhaps perfectly describes this city of Sydney.
My sister and her partner went to Town Hall to see their son perform in a prestigious choir. The recital went off beautifully and everyone had come from far and wide decked out in their finest satins and penguin suits. Praises were heaped on the young singers and reverent tones were used in the hallowed chambers of this most august venue.
After the last soothing voices had trailed off, the appreciative crowd started slowly moving out onto the steps of George Street with self-conscious reserve and studied dignity, milling and still talking excitedly about what the future holds for their talented progeny at the top of the steps.
But in short order, an arguing couple at the base of the steps started getting the better of the frockery and finery brigade. Their grating, drunken scream and rising volume soon drowned out the more tempered and virtuous dialogues on any Missa Solemnis or Mass #2 in E Minor. And when her McWilliams Sherry-fueled haranguing and when his scathing, vituperative outbursts failed to get through to each other, he stood right there on the footpath in the very beating heart of my beloved Sydney and said, "Oh yeah? Well take THIS, you fucking moll! " Whereby he undid the bit of rope holding his worn and soiled trousers up, allowing them to fall to his unwashed ankles and let rip a steaming and (from what I was told) altogether noisy and fat shit right there on the path! In front of her. In front of the the proud parents and guardians. In front of the children with the voices of angels. In front of the shoppers at Woolies across the road. Essentially, in front of a possible crowd of thousands on what may arguably be the busiest intersection on the east coast of Australia.
This, then, is a near-perfect portrait of the city that has offered me and millions of others succour and desperation by equal measures throughout most of my life.

City Of Fun.

The frying pan.

There wasn't a single, solitary time when he didn't feel as though he'd missed something.

 Every time he would look around the room, occasionally scouring the other rooms too, in search of an errant cup or small plate with a teaspoon on it. Only once did he find a teacup in the bedroom.  He liked the fact that neither of them drank their tea or coffee in the bedroom.  Or if they did, they had the good grace to bring the crockery out after themselves.  Not that either of them were particularly neat but nonetheless this was definitely one concession to cleanliness that they both adhered to.

  Today everything was laid off to the left hand side.  Teaspoons used over and over again and left lying about for the past three days.  The two plates from last night's dinner.  Two small plates with streaks of dried sauce from which they'd eaten pies the day before. A small porcelain bowl that still had an olive pip which he tipped into the plastic bag that served as a bin.  The breadboard used last night to cut the onion and garlic for the salad they ate. Five mugs.  Which was odd because no one had visited over the previous days and he was inclined to use the same over-sized mug, much to the scarcely concealed,  mild disgust of visitors. Two saucepans that had boiled the potatoes and snow peas - the latter of which were something of a luxury given that they were both unemployed. But it's acknowledged the world over that the odd small luxury can alleviate the stresses and uncertainties of simply dragging oneself out of bed some days. Look at the cigarette.  But since neither of them smoked anymore, occasional treats such as snow peas made up for the barely perceptible blanket of emptiness that chased their days.

  And then, of course, there was the cast iron frying pan.

  Plugs, discoloured through overuse, into both sinks and the delicate balance of very hot water in first one, then the other. The discount dish washing liquid in the larger of the two followed by the dirty cutlery and then the plates and olive pit bowl. Water still slightly too hot. But he preferred it that way.  Tap off and gingerly plunge hands into the sudsy water, in search of the murder knives - the two large knives they'd use to peel and chop the vegetables. Lifting one out, he slightly enjoyed the fact that his hands were already reddened by the almost scalding water but decided to run a bit more cold water. No point in getting stupid about it all. He carefully cleaned the gleaming knives and set them in the tray, out of harm's way as it were. The spud masher, which had been rinsed reasonably thoroughly anyway so there was little starchy residue at the base. After a quick rinse in the second sink, it too was set in the tray off to one side.  The bread board quickly followed. Rigidity was a moot point here on out.

  The knives, forks, spoons, a spud peeler and the two hand-made pewter salad spoons all received much the same treatment.  These last needed an extra bit of work to get the dried basil off the hilt. All but the pewter spoons fitted neatly in the front area of the rack.  These were laid upon the murder knives. They called them the murder knives because they were big and sharp and the name just seemed apt.

  And now the cups and mugs and a glass he'd almost missed, that had been sitting on the opposite sideboard.  She'd taken a soluble aspirin the night before to get rid of a nagging headache. He took care to clean the mugs with great attention.  By this stage, a Kinks song was running through his head.  He liked the Kinks.  Most, if not all, sixties music for that matter. He realised that he was now at the point of a strange happiness, not necessarily brought on by ritual - that would come shortly - but by the certainty with which this thing, this chore or task, should be approached. And while it wasn't a thing he enjoyed, as such, he could almost feel the serotonin release from the necessary informality of it all. The terror of outstanding bills and coming rent was mitigated somewhat and he knew it was in part due to this simple act.

  That was that.

  Except for the frying pan.

  He reached in and pulled the plug from first the main sink and then the now sudsed up rinse sink. He took this brief moment to enjoy the water draining away before turning on the tap again and scouring both sinks to get rid of the small amount of scummy residue.  A murderous bullet of a thought, "Three hundred dollars outstanding -" And now, almost as a defense mechanism, an early Runaways song, 'Hollywood' started earworming through his thoughts. And he let it. The bills would be there later. The worries too.  The doubt.  The mild, constant sadness from a year's unemployment from any steady job.  These and every other enemy of good cheer and joy would still be there.  But for now, they could go to hell.

  The frying pan was heavy in his hand.  It strained the muscles on his forearm every time.  Made of dark cast iron with a strong and solid wooden handle, they had  both long since developed a love/hate relationship with it.  Given to her by her mother, with the express agreement that it only be cleaned and rinsed in hot water, it had almost single-handedly cooked countless meals to perfection. He scoffed at this edict when she first mentioned it to him, thinking that it must surely be an old wives' tale but a quick check on Google had confirmed her mother's sage advice.  The idea being that the dish washing liquid was too efficient and that the pan should be left with a steadily increasing amount of barely perceptible detritus from each previous dish cooked in it.  So hot water and a careful scouring were the order every time

  This thing that had begun in tedium then, had become one of his many moments of satisfaction during these long months of unemployment. The frying pan through no virtue of its own had become something of a sand and rock garden to him, to be savoured and lovingly cultivated.  He was aware of all of this today, as he swirled the hot water around and around.  Now looking for something he may have missed, now gently scouring.  Until finally he was satisfied.

  But this was not the end. He could leave the other - the lesser - accoutrements to sit and dry in the rack and be put away at leisure but this frying pan demanded more care.  He sought one of the clean tea towels hanging off the back of the chair and awkwardly (for there was no other way to describe handling this heavy thing) dried every millimeter of the saucepan, paying particular attention to the inner base.  He even surreptitiously checked through the door to make sure she was engrossed in her work at the computer before holding it up to the light at the window to make sure he had done his best.

  He placed it down on the stove top with an unmistakable single clunk and reached for the bottle of olive oil, slightly greasy on the outside from so much use. The jukebox-in-his-head had decided to play an old, obscure Paul McCartney song and again, he did not object in the least, even going so far as to softly sing along. "Weeell, when I walk, when I walk.  Walk my horse up by the hill...", before trailing off to silence, not wishing to disturb the superior version in his head.  Unscrewing the cap, he poured a little of the olive oil onto the frying pan and resealed the bottle. With both hands, he swished the oil slowly around the pan before tearing off some paper towels and spreading the oil evenly all over the inside.

  At last the song finished and he was satisfied in a supremely ordinary way.

  And he was grateful that she had shown him the way.

Days

The fight.

Some days you want to lash out.
Hurting in small ways that defy description.  Near-invisible, uninvited insects crawling under your skin.
Not many of them.  Just enough to make you want to lash out.
You want to lash out with envy at the tip of your knuckles. With terrible injustice at the tip of your tongue.
You want to lash out at every empty boast you've ever made. At every deception you yourself have exposed.
Every exaggeration and every idle lie. Through all time. From every quarter.
You are the protagonist with no name in Hunger, wobbling through a Kristiania of your own sealed and crippled and darkest thoughts.
You wanted something more and maybe it came. And maybe it went. And will be no more. Or will be too far off to be worth anything.
You want to lash out for every toy, trinket or heart you never possessed.  Or every one you did and squandered.
You want to cry "Why me?!" because it is something you've never cried before.  You want to scream it in a public place to make a fool of yourself in a way that you have not yet made a fool of yourself.
You want an answer and you do not want an answer.
You want cash.  Not much.  Just enough to get the bills and the rent and the outstanding loans paid down a little. And though they don't amount to much in the eyes of the not-understanding others (very much like your crawling insect woes), these worries are yours nonetheless.  Yours to resolve or not.  Yours to meditate upon or ignore.
But remember my attentive friend, if you ignore them, they'll return with the coming of darkness. When all the help desks are shut down.  When all the drunks have taken everything from the ATMs. When only the creditors seek to be your phone friends.
Some days you want to lash out for all that should be yours but the voice in the back of your head and the sloppy depths of your heart keeps repeating, "You are not worthy.  I was lying.  I was trying to deceive you and I succeeded with flying colours.  I did it as a testimony to life's ways. To the ways of others.  The ways of humans and animals and fungi whose sole purpose is to infect you so that it can go on.
And you cannot. I was only trying to instruct you."
You want to lash out and land one solidly in your own solar plexus so fucking hard that sleep may result from the wounding.
But you will tire.  As you've tired before. And will again in times to come.
For we are good at that.  Us people.  We are good at shadow boxing and grinding ourselves down. On indifference.  On consuming.  On knowledge that is no knowledge at all.  Occasionally on hate (but not too much).  On joyous, celebratory  altruism (but far too little). On talk, on work and on finding work.
Do we grind ourselves down on love?
I don't know.
I suspect that love is the respite between battles but I've seen too much evidence to the contrary.
And now I must apologise for lashing out at you.

Not drowning. Assessing.

My complicated lament.

Decades ago I was OSA (Overseas and Aimless) and living in Barnsley, the town at the centre of the miners' strikes under the Thatcher government.
Being young, dumb and full of self importance, I started going to the library because you could only derive so much joy from signing on once a fortnight or hitch hiking in the approximate area between John O'Groats and Land's End (inc. Anglesey) begging for work.
One of the more esoteric spin-offs of this thing I decided to call reading was that I taught myself to draw natal charts both for western astrology and Chinese astrology (Four Pillars and Zi Wei or some such names).
Of course I renounced it all, together with all religions (moral fascination and ways by which to best live from the likes of Lao Tze, Confucius, Mencius, Mo Tzu and the Zen crowd not withstanding, if that's some small compensation) by my mid-twenties.
But I've diverged from the rutted lane of sorrow I was trying to take you down.
You see, it was the cardinal sin of doing my own Chinese binomial chart that leads to this little useless feuille... It clearly stated that as I grew older, as long as I learned to curb my more base instincts, I would be acknowledged as a writer par excellence.
All of the above is true. Not the writer par excellence bit, but certainly the foretelling thereof.
Now, self-aggrandising delusion aside, I think I have managed to curb about seventy percent of my more base instincts.  Well, maybe fifty percent...
My absolute bottom offer is thirty percent and be done with the damned thing!
The point is I tried.
And what do I get for it?
Easily a thousand or more blank pages for novels, screenplays, poems, short stories, lyrics, librettos, usw.
And too few filled ones.
Even less the ones worth reading, after you take the cheap sleight of hand stuff away.
Anyone want to lend a hand stacking the natal charts, acceleration tables, ephemerides and abaci on the bonfire to ward off this middle aged chill?

A possible biography.

two

And the sky was blue and the sky was me.

She – the big one who loved us all – keeps talking. To me. To the concrete sink in which all the clothes get wet and hard scrubbed. To the walls and through the door back into the kitchen. Sometimes Her words are angry most of her words are angry. She looks at me from time to time and as long as I don't move too much Her voice sounds nice. Her voice hints of rewards. Warm, being held kind of rewards. Her breasts which I haven't sucked in a long time rewards.

Her beautiful breasts. My breasts. These beautiful breasts of mine.

And then Her voice is a mutter again. About Him. And I don't know the words or what they mean but He hurts Her in front of us all, and Her voice when we're alone sounds like a bastard file on rusted and worn through boiler plate. On the occasions She uses it in front of Him, He becomes quiet and not obviously scared. Not the scared we – my siblings and Her – feel before the beatings start but a scared where some part of Him disappears because it cannot respond to Her voice. It has absolutely no way of retaliating. At those moments she is beyond the pain, both inside and out. She is nature transcended to something that even hell will never see. Because if He tries anything to respond in this moment, the actions that will follow Her voice – Her actions – will be terrible and violent and we may be taken from Her and placed in homes even though She has done nothing wrong. Not to me. Never to me.

She fills the basket with clothes all wet and misshapen.

“Stay here, Bubba.”

And I go nowhere because the voice is nice. A reward unto itself. She feels peace after all the talking and muttering and I feel peace because She feels peace. After all. She is me. All of this is me.

Even the darkness that falls upon the deep orange walls late in the day that is me that are the walls of my room that is me but is shared with a brother but not the twin me and a sister me (of course, I don't know this yet. How could I?) And the chipped and stained white crib railings that I see when I turn my head to one side when I'm supposed to be seeps seeps seepy boes.

But not the darkness that brings the two terrors with the shoddy, glowing and haired and fanged mask monster head faces and their rubbery touch clawed and haired paws and their laughter and giggles and shooshes that sound like my me brother twins even above my screams and the smell of the poo and wee in my nappy and the snot running free from my nose down my scarlet and howling and teared face. And the rubbery glow paws and the rubbery glow fanged faces hover over me and trace over my face and tufts of hair and my bunny suit there in the 'lone dark and my screaming and tear-drowned eyes and my paralytic and crippled and terroredshaking body. That darkness is not me. Those tears and that fear and the shame smells are me but that monster darkness is not me and the vomity bits in my mouth and even after the giggles and fanged heads and glowy hair paws recede through the now magically opened now magically closed bedroom window and the terrible, terrible laboured breathing that is me – even after the light goes on and me all crib rattle and terror screaming and She all careworn of face or on the rare occasion He all scowl and Bela Lugosi handsome and metallic voice and near-angry remonstrations and fist all clench unclench, that darkness is not me and never will be. But this time now is light.

And the perfect light streams in through the back door. A living thing inviting and intimidating in its intensity and purity. She stumbles, almost upending the basket as she opens the door and walks down the three concrete steps and up the back path. I can see through the door that She has already unfolded the heavy wooden pen almost directly under the hoisted clothes line that creaks and sways and lazily tries to circle in the warm wind. She drops the heavy basket of clothes, comes back down the path and up the stairs. I have not moved much and I know this will make her relaxed and nice.

“You're a good boy. What did I ever do to deserve a goooooood boy like you?” It is a rare thing for Her to say the word goooooood. Both She and He are laconic by nature. Curt and choked so much of the time. She takes and discards what may or may not be a long piece of lint or cotton thread from my mouth (kikky poo) because I'm still crawling a lot of the time and because I'm so close to the ground, whatever I find there of course I will try to eat because it too is me and I don't hurt me so anything that goes into my endlessly voracious maw won't hurt me either.

She picks wriggle me up. This part of me knows that She/me has a hurt back because she makes a pain noise. Not the pain noise I make when I want something or I've made toilet in my fluffy nappy and no dirty nappy dirty stinky nappy change is forthcoming for a while but a deep pain noise that She/me does not want to share with the world. Much less Him. And now I'm all blue sky and worn varnish, splintery wooden pen bars looking at Her.

“The river sang softly to the leaves on the trees...”

I am song and I like these moments. I am alive in these moments when I am Her voice and I am sun rays streaming down through the blueness to form a halo around her mahogany dark hair. She is forty five going on seventy some days. Every women in every country in nineteen sixty five is forty five going on seventy some days. But now I am a woman's voice I am a river I am singing softly I am being sung to I am the leaves on the tree I am the two hands gently shaking the wooden bars of my pen. Not so much looking for a way out as trying to determine in my small and underdeveloped brain why even these constraints are me.

“I am going to take take you on a journey with me.”

Water sloppy shirts baggy underwear much too much colourlessness in browns and greys and blacks and deep blues. Prefer the colour of the sky the cracked concrete path the punctured rusty forty four gallon drum that serves as the incinerator up between the blossoming lemon tree and peach tree. Peach tree gives birth to wrigglers because Sis picked a peach and was going to eat it and there were small wrigglers living in it and she threw it down in disgust and pulled a sour and frightened face (to think IIIIII might have eaten that! she says with her eyes and downturned corners of her mouth). And one of the older brothers looks at her with his downturned corners of his mouth and says, “Well why doncha just eat a passionfruit. The flies don't like the passionfruits.” And Sis catches her hurt breath to say something, slightly shakes her head and walks away. But I'm growing up ahead of myself and the day that the sky was blue and the sky was me.

What does He do for a living? “He's no frigging good”, she mutters again and again. She mutters a lot more. A lifetime of muttering when there's only Her and me. She mutters more words about Him than anything else in the whole wide world. She mutters a lot. Except when my brothers and sisters are around. She barely says anything then. And when He is around, she goes from saying not much at all to screaming with a few normal sounds in between. And this happens. Maybe it happens a lot. I don't know what a lot really is. But maybe. And there's Jeff and there's Johnny and there's the bloke from down the street and the bloke from across the road and the bloke from Ford Street you remember him, don't you, mate? No. Why would I want to?

“Get us another bottle outta the fridge will ya, Peg?”

She walks back into the living room and looks hood-eyed. Tired, sceptical, and tired. I toddle over to hold Her calf, climb Her knee and His look goes from warm to freezing cold. Terrible things are about to begin but Her lips tighten as She looks from left to right – not at all scared this time. Her eyes look at the drunken faces of the drunken laughing men whose laughter has magically gone a little bit quieter now. She wipes Her hands on the apron and steps back into the kitchen and I toddlefollow.

The laughter and loud men talk starts again in the other room. It is very laughy and Her name is mentioned quite a bit and they all laugh very hard when someone says Her name and she stops and stands stiff like a big soldier and a light passes across her eyes. I see the light comes from within and I see she wants to mutter, scream, with great and careful forethought reach for something – a knife, a screwdriver, a bottle opener, a discarded sharp tin lid from eaten Ardmona peaches, a large baking dish with chipped edges from years of oven abuse, anything – and stop the laughter of Him and these blokes. And she opens up the refrigerator door and with noticeable and purposeful grace removes three bottles barely making a sound. Normally the business of removing beer bottles from the fridge involves much clanking of glass against the plasticoat poor-fitting metal shelves in the fridge. In this way the household and the world can know the true pride of, “YES I AM PISSED!” But that's how He does it. Although She does it from time to time because I've seen this.

And she holds the bottle opener too tight. Her hands are white from holding the sharp fanged bottle opener too tight and One! Two! Three! Pfft, off come the bottletops. And the laughter and loud voices of very Big men keeps rolling in from the other room. A wave of fun and funniness. An army of individual ha's and hehehe's that add up to a fusillade that time and the world can never escape from. And still the battle rages as the laughing and friendly sounds drown out the noise as She carefully pours approximately half the contents of each bottle down the laundry sink. And there in the dark corner of the small laundry, She reaches up under her skirt, smiling at me all the while and making the shoosh face, pulls her undies down to her knees and puts the necks of One! Two! And Threeeeeee! bottles up under her bunched skirt.

And the soft, ocean sound of her wizz filling the bottles.

“Took y'time”. He attempts to look warm as he chides but nobody thinks he looks warm. Jeff and possibly Johnny even look away a bit. Embarrassed and not laughing now that She is putting the bottles on the low glass table.

“Pour 'em yourself, then!”

And She is back off into the kitchen to throw the tea towel that she wiped the bottles with into the dirty laundry pile and they fill their glasses and laugh as they drink and when I was in the war and you were never in the war you lying bastard and I was! Stationed up north at Rathmines!

And they keep drinking and laughing.

But I keep growing up ahead of myself.

“I'll be seeing you in old familiar places...”. She/me really does have a beautiful voice. It's a voice that sounds right. It is rich and it carries forces that science is only nineteensixtyfive now starting to understand but toddlers know nothing about other than the fact that it is reassuring and rich and strong and tuneful. A wooden peg splits and she coos, “Oh bugger.” Just that. Soft and benign. An afterthought or mistimed reaction, almost. Oh bugger because this happens quite often and that is what is expected of the world I have to live through kind of oh bugger. She kicks a broken half of the wooden former peg away with her foot as though it's a kikky-poo bitey but for the most part harmless insecty thing and off it artlessly flies into the grass an inch or two away and I rattle the cage that is me but I'm starting to doubt that.

“Maaaac”. Cautioning. An inverted accent circumflex that speaks of a smacked bum if I do that sort of thing too much so of course I rattle it the me cage again and she sighs, puts two wooden pegs back in her gob and pins the sloppy rags up on to the low line and they will dry to be clothes.

A wind comes up and ruffles my blonde hair. This gives me license to make whrr whrr noises and rattle the cage in something approaching a rhythm. Whrr whrr. Whrr whrr. Whrr whrr. Whrr whrr. Whrr whrr. Whrr whrr. Whrr whrr. Whrr whrr. Whrr whrr. Whrr whrr. Whrr whrr. Whrr whrr. Whrr whrr. Whrr whrr. And so it goes on and She is not paying any attention and I don't understand this at all. She used to pay attention EVERY SINGLE TIME but now she only does so on the rare occasion and even the me cage rattling doesn't break her concentration. In fact, now that I look at her. Really look at her. Reeeeeeeally look at her, I can see that she's concentrating perhaps more than she needs to because as my other Sis says, maybe just maybe I'm being a little shit. And She needs to get the washing hung and in order for Her to do this to the utmost of Her abilities, She needs to not think about a toddler in a ramshackle playpen that adamantly keeps making whirring noises and rattling the cage.

Some small part of me is learning about me at this point. That maybe me isn't sky. Maybe me isn't even Her or the grass under foot or me isn't the wind or the wind noise through the peach and lemon trees or the flap of the soapy sloppy rag clothing or the smell of ash deep inside the rusted forty four gallon drum. Maybe me doesn't really exist. Is me sky? Am I blue?

Help! Because that was Shotgun by Junior Walker and the All Stars! The people type people over the back close the door to their house and the radio sounds aren't even a muffle any more which I don't like and I rattle the cage to make my dissatisfaction known and the door opens and I can't get no satisfaction and the door creaks shut again and the cage rattles again and maybe I don't exist and I have to accept this new state/non-state I find myself in.

“Sheets!” Half sung and She is walking back down the path but I know she will return with another full basket with bigger blobby wet rags so I am not scared because even if I am not blue and I am not the sky I can rattle me cages and that must be worth something to somebody somewhere. The wind gently blows the back door closed after her.

Hahahaha! Ssshhhhh! It's my brother who is very old and seventeen and his friend who is very older or slightly very younger and they laugh. They laugh as they run from around the side of the house and across the back grassy yard to penned me and they punch each other and try to stop each other laughing as they lift me up because I loved being lifted up because I can see different things or the same things very differently.

Ssshhhh idiot! Hahaha-ssshhhh!

And I love it now because in his arms I am now slightly up towards the sky and now slightly down towards the ground and the dirt driveway and this is my brother running and although I don't know what to make of him in all the time I've been alive, I like when he runs when he is holding me and I can feel his jerky ribs as he tries to hold back the giggles and I can smell the beer on his breath and it is definitely the breath of beer because He smells that way but only a bit that way after those threeeee bottles. (hanging on the wall they all sang). The doors to the open topped MG are so low and my brother and his friend are so big that they can step over the doors and not stop laughing and we are seated and somewhere close by an engine starts and sounds fast and free and wonderful too.

But I don't see any bottles – empty or otherwise so perhaps just perhaps that's not the breath of beer (which I don't like because now that means that I can't sip the froth which is what both He and She let me do when they think no one is watching) but perhaps it is and we pull around the bend and I see the brown and gravel siding of Lane Cove Road ahead. Now the wind really IS whipping my blonde hair and I'm feeling uncomfortable that I'm not the wind. Disappointed. And my big brother must know this because he squeezes me tighter and we fly around the orange lights on to the Epping Highway and one day cars will have a thing called seatbelts but again I'm growing up ahead of myself.

“Where to?” “Anywhere.” “City?” “Anywhere.” “Pub?” “Uncle Mitta's.” “Wherezy live?” “Just keep going this road.” “Wherebou-” “I'll tellya when to turn no stay in this lane.”

Fast and free. The chemical smell of Selleys on the hill there and that's where I usedta go to school, says my big brother looking at something that I don't understand what he and his big friend are looking at. And the big screens of North Ryde drive-in are ahead, level, gone. Down the hill very fast past Wickses Road and there was when the rains come and stay this part of the fucking highway gets flooded, didja know that?

“Thank fuck it's not raining then, eh?!”

Lots of trees and traffic lights and Delhi Road we stop. “DELHI Road. Fucking. Isn't that another country?” “India.” Isn't that India or something?” “Yeah.” “Bloody India!” “Yeah.” A man in a car made in the nineteen fifties is next to us at the light and I smile as my head wobbles because two things: I like it when my head wobbles in a car from moving and b) I like smiling. That's two things at least! And my big brother looks at the man (for the man does not look particularly happy – not really unhappy but slowly making up his mind about something and that something involves my big brother and the conclusion does not look to be a happy conclusion).

“WOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOO!” All bar one of my brothers are, by nature, scary. This one moreso when he tries to be and he starts becoming scary by opening his deepbrownyblack eyes abnormally wide and shouting out things like woo to strangers. And the stranger at the Delhi Road traffic lights is duly scared to the point where his car stalls as he releases the clutch too early and we in this small and carefree boat commonly referred to as an MG TF take off with a beautiful note from a happy engine.

Us three happy things. “WOOOOOOOOOO!” “WwwwOOOOOOOOOOOOwoo!” “whrrrroo”.

The new Channel 10 building on the left and the sign should be black and white and why is it colour and

“Fess Parker. Like 'm.” “...who's Fess Parker?” “Fess Parker. Daniel Boone. Dickhead.” “Ah, that bloke.” And we're quiet again all except me and I'm not and I'm going whrroo!

Bye bye channel 10. We are going very fast and bye bye. And the sky is still blue and the sky.

Down again through the front windscreen and for a second I panic because there is water either side of the road above the water and the water might not be good but I see other cars – lots of them – going over the road above the water and I think we may be okay after all. And that terrible smell! Not the terrible smell of farts or soiled cotton nappies or my big brothers' socks. Not the smell plasticy, chemical of Selleys because Selleys is behind us on this road and we have NOT been going backwards. And give me one good reason why the new Channel 10 building should smell.

“CSR” “Sugar?” My brother's friend nods. He knows things. No doubt this upsets my brother because my brother prides himself on knowing more things than anyone else and he didn't know this thing. And my big brother squeezes me tighter but not the happy, carefree squeeze or the squish squeeze or even the protect you squeeze. I will note this squeeze as the 'don't know enough and definitely not as much as my friend and I don't like it one. Little. Bit.' squeeze. But I like it when I look up at my big brother's face and his somewhat gaunt face and hollow cheeks and fine and rich jet black hair and sharp deepbrownyblack eyes and thins his lips and sucks his cheeks in slightly. He lets go of me and rummages around in his pockets, pulls out a packet of cigarettes and lights one with great difficulty against the wind. Accidentally ashes on me after a couple of drags.

I didn't notice that we had crossed the river until I wriggled on my big brother's knee and looked back. We all jump as a car honks going past us. To whom and for why, no one knows. But the car definitely honks. And we definitely all jump and breathe in the terrible CSR smell that speaks of terrible goings-on down by the river stay in this lane.

“No! Stay in THIS lane!”. Nobody likes being told what to do (in no uncertain terms) and my big brother's friend twists and grips his hands slightly around the wheel used for steering this delightful MG TF. My brother can't help it if he likes (trying) to tell people what to do (in no uncertain etc). He gets it from my family. Only: a) one brother and b) one sister don't really think much about telling people what to do and as a result, don't often tell people what to do. But the rest of 'em sure do, they do! Hyuk. And my big brother flicks the cigarette away from the car so that it won't set fire to us and will probably only set fire to the trees down along the river and we go right here.

“WE GO RIGHT HERE! But watch out because there's a sharp left hand sweeper. Mitta lives just past it.” But there is much oncoming traffic and we are stuck waiting to make a right handed turn and the cars behind us are honking because evidently my big brother's friend did not indicate with enough notice to the honking cars behind us and this is, of course, why they are stuck behind us. And honk. And both my big brother and my big brother's friend are slightly extending their lower jaws and not looking at each other now. This is what they are doing. And flicking glances to the mirror that looks back and the place from whence honking comes. A final clench of the lower jaw and a small break in the traffic and we FLY through!

FLY down the short small road into the creek gully and FLY up the short small road and FLY 'round the short sharp left of this short small road and FLY rrrrright up the arse of a big, long angular Dodge Phoenix, as my big brother later describes it all to the police and do you need an ambulance?

“Nah. We're alright.” “The little one doesn't look alright.” And another copper off by a car yells an ambo is on the way and my big brother's friend is sitting on the gutter looking at the scrunched up nose of his fun MG TF and the parts between the two cars that now make it one new and funny looking kind of car and I can't see blue and I am not blue now because I can't see because there's blood all over my eyes and my head hurts.

...

“It may have been a bit of glass from the windscreen or he could've just bashed his noggin on the dash. Either way, we'll have to take him to North Shore to get that gash stitched up. You blokes want a lift? Haven't been drinking have ya?”

And the sky is not but is red and I am the sky and what'll Mum say and the Old Man and don't worry mate, we all have scars. Whaddya reckon?