Note to self...

I want to take Cam to Europe after I square away a few more debts and outstanding bills. Hopefully next year. Not to revisit the places I vaguely recall and love with all my hardened heart and arteries but rather to just amble and shamble over new landscapes at our leisure. A no name, poverty-pack Wild Swans At Coole, if you will.

My problem is, I somehow think I'll insist we stay there.

Live till our 90s, argue the spectrum of inconsequential and picayune thru' history making and world shattering, get back on the wine and Trappist lager and Gauloise Blondes, eat healthily and far too well every day and shout and manically gesticulate for everything from the greeting of strangers to the finding of colourful bugs and insects through to CRISPR and the new eugenics and arms races.

And run into the ocean naked, drunk and pissing ourselves laughing every other afternoon because that's just how the rules work over there.

Such irrational fears hound me daily.

In the most beautiful ways.

Such a perfect day...

So it begins...

Early on I was told that I was related to both King Niall of Ireland and Robert the Bruce of Scotland.
For four and a half decades, I learned that I'd been mispronouncing Martin Scorcese's surname.
Most of my life I knew of the curious fact that somewhere in Western Australia, outer space is actually closer than the next town.
Since I was a young man, I was informed the word 'kangaroo' meant 'No idea what you're on about'.
At some point or other in my twenties I learned that handshakes were originally devised to expose concealed knives and weapons at meetings.
A few years back I learned that many parts of Russia legally classified beer as a soft drink.
And now I'm pondering the fact that Canada means village or town, Canberra means place to meet, kvinden is not the plural for queens in Danish and pineapples are really fused berries.
So much uselessness and usefulness crowding in all the time.
So much worth knowing and worth avoiding all knowledge of.
So much we know and don't know all around us, all the time.
Goddammit, i need my first cup of tea for the day.
Let
the
day
start.

Someone who cares...

Thank. Fuck. For. Cordial.

The feeling when you've got the kettle on and you're convinced it's too hot for a cup of tea but you've got the kettle on anyway and you grunt one moment, sigh the next for reasons that have nothing to do with age or infirmity or reality, and everything to do with your exhausted imagination and you put clothes on to get some food in from the supermarket and maybe catch a movie but you left with the food and without the movie and your hand burns from getting it stuck in the letterbox to clean out the junk mail and now your glasses are fogging up in the fiery watery air and thank god for the battered couch and Netflix otherwise your sanity would have surely gone the way of your whimsies and your hopes and your schemes and your dreams which is what you wanted all along anyway.

Yeah.

That one.

Cool water.

Children queuing at the cinema.

I do not like this child gambit.
I do not like it. Not one bit.
I thought that I would drive my car
up to the local cinema
And while away an hour or so
Engrossed in something. I don't know -
Perhaps some fine adventure fare
With aviators in the air
Or love. Or better, love and war
Although we've seen it all before
In times like these it's good to go
And find a decent picture show
To sit back with a screen romance
Or, if you like, some song and dance.
Dystopia, if you so choose,
To mirror life and nightly news!
To think alone, lost in the dark
And come across a thread or spark
That surely must invigorate
my moribund thoughts of late.
But as I said, I do not like
When on whim I take the hike
Up to the local movie house
(though who am I to rail and grouse?!)
And turn the corner just to find -
and here, some horror comes to mind -
A queue! Or more a serpentine
Excited, squealing strange design
Comprised of nothing less or more
Of children and their parents poor
Who suffer, waiting foot and hand
On every tyrant in the land
Beneath the height of three foot two
(But what's a guardian to do?)
Well you can have it! All of you
For I will not now join your queue!
I'll wait until the darkness comes
By then you'll be in bed, my chums.
I'll loiter at the candy shelf
And have the damned place to myself!

Put a peephole in my brain...

The good Laird.

Raised his blunderbuss to the sky
(the only thing he couldn't miss)
and proceeded to blast it to pieces with wanton cries of,
"Tek that, ye sassenach fanny flaps! What do ye ken o'me noo, ye bastarts!"
And a shy woman walked past.
Plain in her beauty and profoundly beautiful in her ordinariness and he threw the blunderbuss on to the manicured lawn and grabbed low at her, with red and maddened face, whispering,
"Garn!  Gimme a swatch o'yer quim!" (pinch, pinch) "Gie's a feel of yer fanny and ye can cop a glimpse o'me bawbag, ya hackit fuckin' boot!" (grope, grope)
And she hurried on
and in justified and fearful tears would later tell the world that would not believe
or would laugh
or would turn away in the first blush of embarrassment, muttering 'neath its breath,
"But he'll make such a grand laird.  Give the fiefdom exactly the shake up it needs."
But the good laird cared not about the woman nor the fiefdom,
nor due diligence, nor protocol, nor justice of the land, nor the sick, nor even the the tired and poor, huddled masses yearning to breathe free, even as they sat him in the Manor.
And as the crofters and the merchants and those in blue and those in white and those of the gilded avenue and those of the rusted cul de sacs and those purple in the face with indignation and those thoughtful and resentful of a world that had promised but had yet to deliver and those with employment and those without, wrapped the tartan over his pained and unstable legs
("...from carrying the weight of the world for all of a wee second or two, ye know. It was too much for the brave man-bairn. It really was..."),
tears welled in his tired, reddened eyes from all the toys he could not buy, all the sandpits he was not allowed to play in or demolish ("but Sire!  You are NOT the only sovereign!"),
all the fools who would spurn his company,
("Has the Laird not had his nappy nap this arvy? And why not?! The Laird needs his nap!", whispered a faithful munter - and were they ALL not munters in the Laird's eyes?!) and
the good Laird  cried, "Where did I leave that cannon!  I want my cannon!  BRING ME MY CANNON!!!
The afternoon is young and I've not had my way with this barren and joyless day yet!".
And the toadies approached one after the other with their elephant guns and their grouse guns and their twenty millimeters and forty millimeters and the dusty Whippets and Males and Females and M4A3s and Chieftains and Leopards and Abrams and T-60s pulled fresh from the lots of museums the scoured land over, and B-36 Peacemakers and B-52s and F-117s and B-2s and all toys befitting such an important post.
And for a while, the good Laird Donald contented himself with pressing the small yellow buttons that opened and closed the doors on the silos, drooling and smiling blissfully.
Thus the long night slowly approached
As the pipers played their last before the new day.
A long way off.

McCullers' smile vs The Electoral College results.

I’m weeping silently now.

And I have no idea why.

I saw the photo of Carson McCullers laughing and the tears felt impossible to hold back

So I started to silently weep

For my own shoddy vanities and fruitless pretensions.

For the wave of bullshit descending upon us all.

For the somehow-ill president elect (rediculous/unpresidented).

For auld Albion and the United States of America - soon to take their ungloved, ham hock fists and smash themselves to pieces as they have done again and again in paroxysms of identity lack.

For the gloating storm of self-styled patriots of all persuasions taking power here, taking power there. Puppets of whom?  Masters of whom? Lampoon judges of what travesties of law or justice? Scarce able to repent for the damage they will cause here and there before they, as with their mythologised and feared and fear-filled predecessors, pay visit to one another, shoot and poison and garrotte and denounce and torture and disappear one another and all others besides.
Briefly clutching and clinging to their small power before disappearing in a drying stain of misdirection and historical footnotes.

For the overtaxed and overworked everywhere.
For the replaced and the replaceable to come.

For everyone who has ever signed on to the alluring emptiness of predatory demagogues through all time.

For the impatient who want it all and want it all NOW! These are the poor, sick fools we all need to watch out for.  This will be the epochal evil inside each of us that we really have to guard against.

For those bloated-to-the-point-of-bursting with conviction and certainty.

For those starving and skeletal because they KNOW.  And in knowing, certainty for them is as far away as the planet Neptune.

For the world that I have helped to build in my invisible and wretched, sub-atomic fashion.

And for you,

The helpless onlookers and caretakers of this mire.

But if it’s okay with you, I’d like to gaze upon the smile of Carson McCullers a while longer.

At least until I stop weeping.

The clouds will make a daisy chain...

Heroes and otherwise.

When I was a kid, I had so many heroes.  Musicians, explorers, generals and soldiers, great aviators and car makers.
The Fogertys and Dylans and Zappas and Coopers and Lennons and McCartneys, the Alexanders and Boyingtons and Richtofens and Bradleys and Rommels and Slims and Auchinlecks, the Northrops and Vogts and Miles and De Havillands and Kartvelis, the Bugattis and Buccialis and Saoutchiks.
Then from my late teens on, the hero worship started to fall away.
I'm not sure what filled that particular vacuum. Possibly life itself.
The paying of bills.  The decisions I've made - wrong or right.
But yeah, life just sort of gets in the way.
And now as I look at my autumn years approaching, I think I'm going back to a state of hero worship.
This time, though, it's visionaries and people who genuinely try to make the world better - whatever that might mean.
Anthropologists, zoologists, psychologists and psychiatric and social philosophers, Utopian economists, philanthropists, scientists, the humanists of every persuasion.
I look around and think, "Am I too late? After all, as many as half of my childhood heroes contributed to the decimation of this world, if only in the smallest and seemingly most innocent of ways.
Are we all simply too late?"
Is this how it plays out epoch to epoch, zenith to zenith and finally nadir to nadir?
How strange life is.

Heathen.

Two of 'em...

Sitting at the lights this afternoon.
I was surprised to hear myself softly saying, "The anguish... The anguish".
No emotion. No inflection.
And my mind lazily turned to people I love and sometimes, just sometimes, love well.
And those I do not love at all.
And the light turned green and we crawled along and the light turned red.
And I thought of those I'd known who had died or disappeared.
Talented. Not talented. But inspiring all the same. Still.
A classical octet barely audible on the Mazda's one good speaker.
And the light turned green and I was lucky enough to make it through.
Try it some time. "The anguish. The anguish". Feels good coming out of the mouth.
Instead of the other places we hide it.
If you were expecting a punchline, my friends, I'm sorry I don't have one.
Sometimes that's just where the patient, deadly rip takes you.
_____

Last night I thoughtdreamed of Scott Dobson
Shoulder length Beatle bob dark hair and insolent eyes.
Tall for his age and skinny as hell with the world's laziest smile.
And we'd ride our boards under the flats where he lived in Eagle Street
And the sun was good and his mum was good and she wouldn't give us any food but she would stand on the balcony and applaud because Scott was a great rider.
A hero. Taking on Nick Ravenscroft and the Dwyer brothers at the old Top Ryde Regional Shopping Center car-park. Deadliest hill a skateboard ever rolled down.
He'd handstand it, top to bottom, to the loud applause of everyone. And he'd stand at the end and just smile lazily. Not say a word.
And the pretty, well kept apartment blocks surrounded something more beautiful than art; the Beaurepaire tyre centre.
We could've wasted days tearing down the hill that ran beside and behind it.
Scarfing and filthying our new jeans sitting in tyres as we rode down.
We were about the same age and I had to go away from that place for a while.
When I came back he and his mum had moved.
Broke my heart.
Found out years later that had he lived past sixteen, he would've taken on the world.
But it seems they didn't know as much about tumours back in the summer of nineteen seventy seven as they do now.

"Sie sind nicht ein Bürger. Sie sind kein Griechisch. Sie sind nicht harmonisch, oder der Meister selber. Sie sind ein Vogel im Sturm."
Hermann Hesse.

Gates of steel.

A pirate.

Memories clattering like scuffed, dog-eared cards.
A friend reminded me of an old drinking buddy (we'll call said drinking buddy, Wilf) in a conversation we shared the other night. Wilf would put away more bacardi than any sane human should ever conceivably be able to do. Last time we met, he spoke of hauling contraband from the continent back to Yorkshire and how a recent operation had still left him with at least one and a half lungs, all the while lighting up a Marlborough and giving me an aggrieved look for walking away from St Eeeeeeeeeurgh, the patron saint of alcoholics everywhere.
And the song in the hyperlink...
Wilf loved Bowie's Amsterdam more than just about anything in the world and we'd argue into the small hours at any pub that hadn't yet barred us about its merits and failings, as opposed to Brel's original. And we'd almost throw punches because I'd defended Brel's near-autistic gyrations (having seen a recording of his live performance on an old 16mm print somewhere or other) and Wilf abhorred Gallic displays of emotion of any kind. But instead of coming to blows, we'd just get punted and find another pub somewhere in the amber triangle of East Balmain, Leichhardt and the Cross that hadn't yet put us on their blacklist.
May this dispatch find you still leaving beautiful hells in your wake, my brother.

Amsterdam - Bowie

The drama queen and the storm.

I'll keep this brief because it's another one of those sad sack entries...
I've known, and more than likely still know quite a few, climate change deniers. Their arguments make me pull one of those puzzled smiles often used by comic actors to indicate they're never quite sure what they're hearing.
The deniers's arguments always tends to go something like the following:
  *  technology will save us,
  *  water and nature always find their own levels and it has nothing to do with us,
  *  humans can't conceivably impact their environment that strongly,
  *  you climate change supporters are always crying melodrama and chicken little (my personal favourite).
Melodrama and chicken little...
And now a nepotistic and extraordinarily ill-equipped con artist is about to become president of the USA and no one is more surprised than he, himself.
Melodrama and chicken little...
I don't know about you but I never said it would be the Furies. We never said it would be red buttons, dirty bombs and nuclear winters or even wall to wall tidal waves and earthquakes.
In fact, we barely said anything at all.
Not out of any particular fear or lack of spine or intestinal fortitude but rather, out of the mechanism that creates that peculiar half smile. The one that signifies that we can never be sure of the shit coming out of the deniers' mouths and the possibility those joshing and japing jesters might, in fact, be pulling our legs.
And the fun-loving deniers, so assured within their convictions, who call us doomsayers and pussies do that additional funny thing and cite the likes of Christopher Monckton and his oily and well-paid ilk.  And we laugh till the tears...
And again that smile.
So where am I going with all this?  With this cheap, well trodden and nausea-inducing sanctimony? What have I revealed in the diatribe and pouting and preening thus far?
Nowhere and nothing, I'm afraid.
But consider this...
Here in Melbourne, Australia, we went from 34 degrees Celsius to 19 degrees Celsius in approximately forty minutes on the Monday just gone (21/11/16).  This, in and of itself, is nothing new to Melbourne. What can I say?  It's a crazy place. What IS new, according to the media (no, not the Social Media, you kooky nutty, zany catz - the popular media! You know? The one with an agenda!), is today's report that the fatality count has now hit four and there have been 8500 people treated in the past 72 hours (three still critically ill) for this obscure phenomenon known as Thunderstorm Asthma.
All true, I'm afraid. Please see the hyperlink below.
They say it's the small things that count.
To our heartache and detriment we are starting to realise this and I wonder, as I sit in my Pharisaic and somehow insincere solitude, if we ever needed to.

Here is the news. Here is the future.

P.S. Please forgive the absence of a picture and a linked song this time around.

Hacksaw Ridge

Due to the local cinema being both cheap and excellent, I've probably caught more new flicks on the big screen over the past two years than I have in the past two decades. Mercifully we've had some great films in that time.
Trouble is - and I don't know if I'm alone here - I suspect this has resulted in a case of, often as not, outlining some kind of bombastic blog entry or FB scribbling for an imaginary audience in the never-ceasing delusional quest of self-aggrandisement.
Such is definitely the case with Hacksaw Ridge. I was judge and jury long before I even went this afternoon. If only for my own political and all too pompous and elitist reasons.
So why is it that I'm still asking myself, "Was it more than just a couple of hours of nu-school war porn?".
The bowel loosening viscera and horror is all there. The straight ahead Jobian tales of conviction and Sisyphean anguish are intact. As are all the obligatory tropes and characters. Was it even a good film? Or an important one? Truth is, I can't answer any of these questions. I can only say that in spite of it all, I'm of the mind that it really was something richer.
Just shy of twenty years ago, I went and saw Saving Private Ryan with Jake and his dad. Mister Jake was in Signals in the New Guinea campaign. Must have been nearly half an hour of silent waves of weeping after the flick before he could find his throat again. And then, to cover the tracks of the tears he added, "Of course WE (the Australian 6th and 7th Divisions) would have softened the defences up for a few days, not a few hours." And who was I to tell him that the movie was merely taking liberties for the sake of narrative? He was there and I wasn't. But in that half hour, he was a twenty year old kid again, shaken but perhaps finally vindicated. I learned later that that movie, for all its stereotypes, had freed up a lot of souls who had been emotionally crippled for over half their long and damaged lives, so more power to it.
I wonder then, if it's too optimistic to say that like Band of Brothers I suspect I see Hacksaw Ridge as a love letter to a courage and madness most of us should never hope or need to know.
Heartfelt hats off to all the local talent for making a war film like few others.

Fighting and falling...

There is no clear picture. Even the sound is muffled.

First up, this is purely a rant. Highly personal, at best garbled and of no intrinsic value outside my need for a catharsis.  With little or only marginal coherence and not one iota of new information to assuage, enlighten or ease the complex feelings of recent events. So please proceed with caution and at least one full shaker of salt.

***

I really don't give a fuck what people think my politics are.  If only for the reason that in the past I thought I'd had people pegged and smugly pigeonholed and they surprised me; either often as not with horror, or on the rare occasion with overwhelming humanist delight. Nor am I a skilled polemicist, orator or even debater. So had this been a live broadcast, I'd be the first to crumple into a foetal ball and weep till the auditorium needed life rafts.

I'm simply trying to come to terms with a sensation I get when I see warm, thoughtful, compassionate and through and through humanist people by the hordes self-flagellating over the win by that pale Berlusconi, Trump. Everyone I hold dear is gnashing their teeth, renting their garments and taking birch switches to their delicate 21st century skin in a public display of automutilation that unsettles me immensely. And not one of them has a right to do so.  It haunts me and I find it scary.  Every bit as scary as Trump and his cronies and formative nepotocracy. BECAUSE THOSE I LOVE HAVE DONE WHAT THEY THINK IS RIGHT WITH THE FACTS AS WE COLLECTIVELY UNDERSTAND THEM.

And I have a small voice inside me that screams, "THIS CUNT IS NOT ABOUT FACTS!  HIS VOTERS ARE NOT ABOUT FACTS! FACTS ONLY ADD FUEL TO THEIR APOCALYPTIC PYRE!".

And I really don't know if any of the above is true. But everywhere I look I can draw no other conclusion.  People don't vote in the Trumps, or the Mays or the Berlusconis or the Le Pens or the Haiders or even the Abbotts, based on any solid and workable facts.  (Let us not even dwell on Putin and his beloved Night Wolves).  These voters can't get behind global warming or bee deaths and colony collapse or plastic in the oceans or oil spills or extinction of fauna and flora.  Not because they're all bad or even stupid or that they vote against their best interests out of some misguided clanishness.  They base it on fundamental and fundamentally flawed syllogisms.  "I don't have a job - therefore Democrats/Labor/Labour/the Left/queers/Latinos/Blacks/Asians/Other/Other/Other are to blame!". They vote on a mood alone.  An ugly and insidious mood.  And even these preceding statements would have absolutely no meaning to them.

They don't blame the companies that ship the work overseas or the governments that offer historically unprecedented bargain prices for land to foreign powers (given the cultural displacement and resentment so often nested in any the economic or commercial dividends).  Should they?  Perhaps.  To a certain extent, yes. But to my mind, history is a profoundly uncaring monster. Please feel free to jump in and correct my often over-imaginative trains of thought but at the 1889 Exposition Universelle in Paris, assembly lines were set up in the Hall of Machinery to demonstrate the efficiency of the future.  The spire of the newly completed Eiffel Tower hinted at the spirit of the Indian summer of the belle epoch and the celebratory focus was fixed firmly on commerce and manufacturing. The future was coming and it would mean the death of the artisan. Indeed, if I recall rightly, there was a Craftman's Guild decree drafted and displayed that went to great lengths to point out that the future would benefit many but at what cost?

In short, if the Trump supporters or anyone else thinks that this boorish opportunist of a man is going to make America or any country strong and give them all employment, then they are delusional.  The landscape of work as we understand it is changing.  Potentially irrevocably. And the world leaders are every bit as powerless as the disenfranchised as the unemployed themselves. We have to start thinking of work in a vastly different light.  Even here in Australia where coal is our prime export, we live with this horrific cognitive dissonance  - on the one hand we are killing the planet and ourselves (to mention nothing of indigenous displacement) AND we somehow think this deadly gravy train will continue forever, or even for the foreseeable future. And we too have started to see the rumblings of the pained and blindly disenfranchised voters who also voted in an 'alt right' figurehead (albeit mild by comparison with Trump) who was mercifully knocked out of the prime-ministership in a mid-term leadership spill. Perhaps the only consolation in these - surely the strangest days for many, many decades.

At this point, you could well expect me to holler from the village bellfry, "Blame the bosses! Down with Capitalist pigs!".  I can't.  I like money.  Wish I had more of it, in spite of the fact that it's a limited resource like all else and it goes on doing as much harm as good, in so many quarters. We can name names, we can come down from the blind mantle of history and post name 'n shame faces, addresses, emails on any and every social media weapon of choice.  Yeah, we could do that. After all, each outing would clearly indicate that these wreckers are culpable at every level, to every degree. And we, the proud commentariat and clickbaiting 'netigentsia could gaze out over the wreckage, waving our flag just like Napoleon at Lodi and sigh at the job well done and make sage, stern and sonorous rumblings on all that has yet to be achieved.  But I believe in the rule of law, strangely enough.  And when the law fails, I have a near-Mencian belief in the essential decency of people. So no, this is not the direction I am pursuing.  Nor is it a healthy use of time for anyone I can think of, short of any obfuscating, opportunistic, dollar store ideologue.  I think I mentioned Trump earlier, though.

My contention is that these Trumpsters and any folks, decent or otherwise, on the right or even remotely seduced by the alt right, need other humans for the failings of humanity.  For their own failings, even.  They're scared.  They're in pain. So the idea of blaming computers, roboticisation and technology could not, does not and will not make sense to them.  Because how can the internet, this abstracted mass of ones and zeros, HTML, Java, IP and VLAN addressing, server farm high availability accessing switches, LAN/WAN/WiFi/VOIP and Cloud redundancy fight back?

But, as intimated by that guild decree in 1889, nobody could foresee in short order the leaps and bounds (and consequent fallout at every level imaginable) made with this golden age of (neo-) Fordism and the future does indeed now appear to belong to only two discernible industries: coding and service. Trades and manufacture - as well as natural resources - will still be here, though mainly to support the companies, entities and conduits who are ancillary to the age of automation, as will the workforce that comprise the bulk of said technologies.  But it appears to me that this is the real heart and schism of the societal civil war now being waged. Skin colour, gender, language, lifestyle and religious preference are not the issues. The ongoing lie of free time is.

Or am I making too much of the perceived intrinsic value of the day job?

As an Australian, I am loath to praise the American voting structure. I much prefer our own, with its inherent and often parochial imperfections. A highly modified and compulsory  (though, many might argue, only marginally evolved) Westminster bicameral infrastructure, where we can keep a close eye on all the crooks and cheaters, swindlers, pork barellers and gerrymanderers in one safe place - and occasionally get a useful bill through after much deliberation and backroom testosteronal dick swinging and knife fighting. Add to all of this the strange pride we take in being a country rejected so wholeheartedly by our motherland and our inherent mistrust of guns and God, and you get a more complete picture of why this comically sanctimonious exceptionalism exists, save for a small though ever expanding and contracting amorphous mass of noisy and often violent neo-Cons and would be Nazis. Hardly what anyone could call patriotism in any demagogic sense and for that I'm grateful. But we do love America.  Most people the world over do.  This mythic idea of safe harbour. Of progress. Of the confluence of individual and community. Of making the most impossible odds play in your favour and the most unworldly of dreams come true. So much brilliance - I suspect in spite of, rather than because of the 'roid rage that currently passes for a Protestant Work Ethic.

And it is this love that saddens us at some level, I believe.  Post World War Two, and especially from Reagan onwards, we feel hurt by this capricious, imperious near-mythical lump of land that regulates so much of the globe's daily life, when a person is voted in to the highest position of power in the free world and they are clearly unsuited for the role.  Or worse, they are completely unsuited AND they are a documented thuggish, misogynist, racist fuckwit.  Like Trump.

And there's every possibility he will break (or attempt to sever) the bindings of NATO and possible the lesser Pac-rim and ANZUS treaties too. And those with acute hearing in America will be able to divine the screams and wailings of us apologists and appeasers who once loved and defended at the very least, the idea of the U.S. with as much vigour as any native-born, in our own tepid and foreign ways.

Or possibly he and his nepotocracy will be brought to heel by the IRS and the Supreme Court before too much lasting damage is done.

And although I'm seldom the one to be accused of pissing on anyone's parade, I think as long as we go on forfeiting our independence to the codists and adherents of automation, it clearly feels as though it's only a matter of time before this level of politics is the rule rather than the rare and toxic exception. Or conversely, in the true spirit of progress, whenever we get to these nadirs of conviction and clarity, perhaps it's actually more of a sign that those of us with any heart, compassion or even common-sense have not yet gone far enough.

I wish I could sign off on a higher note but as of this minute, the jury is still out.

Jaysus fucking wept.  After three and a half decades in the IT game, I have finally touched the Luddite within.

9/11/16

And the afternoon rolled slowly on
and I saw but didn't want to see but knew I must.
And Cam cooked up some fish we bought and washed it down with a red wine
While I made myself another interminable cup of tea in the dirty, oversized mug.
All the comforts of home and hearth
but somehow the whole world has changed
And we could almost hear the tears from the one corner. Almost smell the smug from the other.
And we played a card game in which the rules are constantly changing and the heroes are fatefully disempowered or outright discarded before a winner can be declared
And so many evil things can win
in so many evil ways.
The only difference is that here, in this house in this little corner of the world that is not far enough from everywhere,
we laughed.
We laughed loudly
because the fiddle is packed away
And the fire department won't touch this one.

Something that is gone...

Reverence.

I often dream of this strange little chapel. We'd pass it daily when we were working out at Blayney a couple of years ago. We had to stand in the fields around it for hours on end ensuring the bovines, ovines and equines didn't chew our transmission lines.

I would look at this shed and try to imagine the local farmers and miners who might worship here in all manner of weather. And the pastor who might have been tasked to tend the disparate flock, with their irreconcilable differences, generally resolved by a punch up at the Saturday night pissups in Orange or Bathurst and sheepishly absolved the next morning in this small sanctum.

I know nothing of worship outside my own selfish pursuits but this rusting corrugated shed took me back to possibly the only time I got 'it'. A mud brick and lime affair in Azille in France. I was staying with a friend who insisted on showing me what Catholicism meant to him. From the outside, that strange church looked like another of any one of hundreds of buildings in the fortress town that had been partially destroyed and mostly rebuilt for generation after generation through over a millennium of conflict.

Yet inside, you could look at the cracked walls and the hand-hewn pews and the rafters above, blackened by over a thousand years of locally crafted thuribles and you could SEE the hopes and desires and prayers - both answered and unanswered - of those remarkably ordinary and courageous people.

Later we walked to the outskirts of the town where my friend showed me the earthen remains of the wide moat and looked at me and said with a smile, "Now we'll let any barbarian in."

Who needs friends.

Of worship...

Starfucker dream #20371.

I was at a Talking Heads gig and it was cold and grey and I was naked as the day I was born. The security guards were pursuing me but not for indecency or anything like that but because they disagreed with a quip I'd made about turtles at the turnstiles.
Talking Heads only played bluegrass throughout the set which left everyone in a bit of a culturally disconnected fug but everyone remained respectful, if a little stilted on the applause, nonetheless.
After the set I sat between Harrison and Byrne discussing many things but as it is with most dreams, it felt as though three very distinct and altogether unrelated conversations were taking place simultaneously. In one of the many awkwardly quiet moments, I asked if I could try out Jerry Harrison's Roland guitar synth. And he said, "Not dressed like that, you fucking can't."
I was disappointed, to say the least.
After the feast, someone kindly lent me a paisley shift they happened to have spare in their backpack. They'd sown a strange little pocket into an awkward point over the right shoulder blade. I managed to extricate what looked like tens of thousands of dollars from it and offered to hand it back but they simply replied, "Keep it. You look as though you'll buy some nice things."

I believe, some day we'll live in a world without love.

Scribbles on a strangely normal liar's past.

There weren't many daisies outside the encyclopedia. We had dandelions and clovers, come spring and summer. Eastview Avenue kids down at Kent Road creek made ropes of 'em because we felt necklaces were pointless.
Leeches were perfectly safe to handle, as long as they were turned inside out on twigs the right way to ward off other kids in our patch of the creek.
The penny bunger should never be held in one's hand at detonation point. The tuppenny bunger was generally kept in the same category until Kerry and I stole one from my brother, lit it and threw it into the reeds. When it didn't go off, I went and fetched the cracker and held it aloft, proclaiming, "Here it - BANG!!!" So no. The penny bunger would take one's hand off. The tuppenny would simply leave your hand numb for a week.
Cigarettes were only to be enjoyed at the ghost pipes in Santa Rosa park, as the chances of being busted by someone's parents definitely diminished the satisfaction quotient.
Chalcedony was a word and a semi-precious stone you definitely did not share with your school friends. This is true of Galena, the mention of Moh's Scale, Toluene, igneous formations and Obsidian. The one time it was tried over in my primary school in Perth led to blood between an English or Scots kid - Stewart - and myself. Equal amounts of blood.
The Eastwood Odeon took twenty five minutes to walk to from my old man's girlfriend's house in the Dundas valley. My Sis and I timed it on her new watch when we went and saw the Batman film. The one with Bat Shark repellent. That stuff must've been deadly on an unparalleled scale because to this day I've never heard of an extant bat shark.
Sneaking in to see American Graffiti eight times at the Picadilly in Perth garnered me much awe and respect amongst my peers at ten years of age.
The ticket for the Temeraire Ferry to Rottnest Island was $11.60 return when I was eleven. I ran away from Knutsford Ave. Slept under the old Thompson's Wharf for the night, got very cold and very hungry. Caught the ferry back the next day. No-one noticed I'd gone which saved me a hiding. I still wonder why I didn't simply purchase a one way ticket.
Girl's perfume burned beautifully. I demonstrated this when I stole some from my sister and set fire to a puddle on the lino of her bedroom floor.
Metho took care of centipedes, funnel webs and from what the adults whispered, Billy Argue up the road.
My primary school in Sydney was a block away from 'the nuthouse' where my Ma worked. The proximity of these two places had me thinking for years that they were all fundamentally part of the same thing.
Catching Echidnas in garbage bins was immeasurably more fun than doing a 5k run in the hinterland of Cloverdale Public School.
Growing up was, still is and - I suspect - always will be a lot more elusive than most people would have us believe.

We knee skinned it you and me we knee skinned that river red

Clinton.

One for the choir in the echo chamber...
I've had a couple of mates contact me in private, of late, ranting about Clinton. So I'll put this out there, hopefully for the last time, to ward off any further ulcer-inducing, headfucking dialogues. Why are we concerned from twelve thousand miles away? It's simple. All politics is compromise because no two people are alike, let alone any two families, households, streets, suburbs, states, nations... You get the picture. Everyone is fighting with one hand tied behind their back. So what happens in the States affects everyone in the west, the east, the north and the south.
Clinton? I like her. I want her in. I loved Gillard and I have deep respect for Clinton that may grow or it may not. But she will get in. The avalanche of anti-Clinton stuff is for the most part veiled sexism of the most derisive and populist order. Seriously, you look at your partners and think shit like that? Fuck off. "No, I'm not! I wouldn't care if she WAS a man! She's the antichrist and her track record parallels that of Elizabeth Bathory, Genghis Khan and Alan Greenspan combined!'"
You're awfully focused exclusively on her in ways that I've never known you to be in all our years of friendship - even for the (war) criminals, lackeys and Wall Street flunkies we've had here in Oz over recent decades. Are you sure you're not just a little, teeny-weeny bit scared of some healthy and long overdue pussy-power? "But she's a criminal and a Wall Street drudge." So are you if you trace your paycheque and leisure time activities back far enough. So am I. Show me a better way. An historical entity where we are free to ride our high horses and live in our unblemished glass houses? But I must warn you, if any fucker mentions Auroville or any of its lath and plaster analogues, please kill me now.
Trump. He's a despicable prick. Possibly with a coke addiction if the debate was anything to run with. As with Abbott, you're not betting against Labor, you're betting for Abbott. The same goes for the whole Clinton/Trump thing. And if that's your bag, then so be it but if it's not...?
And finally, "But I thought you were a Sanders man!"
No sooner would Sanders be in than every daft, whiney twat would be pegging stones at him too because skeletons. Because that nasty word compromise again. And because- Well? Because real world. Sanders is an idea. The best of Sanders is the best of us. The best of Clinton. The best, perhaps, even of Trump. And Sanders may yet see the light of day. But if not him, the idea is good and robust and will break through eventually.
So again, I ask, don't. Please. Just don't. Not with me, leastwise. You're better than that. Fuck it, we all are.
Time for a cup of tea and a lay down.

Stop your sobbing.

The Facebook Years #3 - The Dove

Watched a dove holding its own today
Pecking and scrabbling on the footpath
A couple of common mynahs swooped and gangstered the bird.
It ignored 'em at first but suddenly switched tactics and started charging them - hell for leather.
Only time I've ever felt sorry for mynah birds. They shit me.
Then, for round two, a big raven came down to see what the ruckus was about.
The adrenaline must've been up because the dove just went that as well.
Helluva free for all.
Then the cops arrived, spoiling everything. The avians all scattered when they saw the flashing lights.
The law asked me if I'd seen anything but as in the past when these things occurred, I told 'em nothing.

Tough love

The Facebook years #2 - The bath.

My last post may have alarmed many of you but I can say without an iota of doubt that the bath was jolly good. Much better than many FB food pics I've seen, in fact. Although why anyone would want to bathe in food is beyond me. Still and all, I do have many fine friends who are into that sort of thing... But that's for another time. Onwards with 'Tales from the bathtub', then!
So I was seven eighths submerged in the bath just now, surreptitiously appreciating the magnificent fifty year old form before my eyes. Well, the knees anyway. And frankly they were indistinguishable from the Radox suds. So we'll meet halfway and say that I was admiring with no small amount of cordial and critical eye the lithe, muscular, vaguely humanoid form of Adonis before me when (for no other reason that I'd been inadvertently sniffing petrol from the mower earlier in the day) it occurred to me that Anthony Robbins and his dream mongering clones may well be onto something.
Peut-être there is a cosmic determinism at work. My curiosity piqued, I ebbed until my ears were well below the suds and water line to hear only my murmuring heart and sibilating breath. It was in that instant - with the ghost of Basho upon me - I realised that I was womb-wrapped once again and that when I emerged newborn, the world would be fresh and new! Correlative and contingent to this and still abusing the Robbins logic, as it were, I would also mysteriously have won the Lotto to the tune of forty three million dollars and simultaneously find myself having to turn away any number of celebrities and sirens because, 'Scorcese is screaming for the screenplay I promised him and I'm already two weeks overdue and when am I going to find time in my jet-setting life to star in his remake of 'Night of the Hunter'.
Well I needn't tell you, dear reader, that I emerged from that bath with my mind overflowing with all manner of earthly delights and wrinkled like my grandmother (my body -not my mind). Mention too should be made of the unmentionable matter covering me from chiseled head to cutesy little toe that deserves no further attention in these august and manly circles. So newborn I surely was! Could it all be true?!
Alas, however, that is as far as the cosmic joke played out because here I sit once again. A beloved mock turtle to the many, an idiot to most, typing my foolish and whimsical daydreams and laying my twisted DNA bare to the masses.
Let me simply end by uttering the wise words of somebody or other (possibly a doppleganger who, like me, also happened to escape the pathetic clutches of of the Scientologists in Castlereigh Street);
Fuck Anthony Robbins. Fuck him, fuck him and fuck him.
Or to put it more civilly, determinism schmismism.
Yours in modest sincerity,
No Relation (No relation)

Far away...

Yet ANOTHER starfucking dream.

Another starfucker dream...
I was playing opposite Robert De Niro in a spy thriller and it was a grueling day's work on a location shoot in shit weather. A grip or runner called the great one an old fart and I defended Mister De Niro by cautiously walking up to the young clown, putting up my dukes like a 19th century woodcut figure and uttering, "If you keep up that malicious tone young man, I shall have to hit you. You have a violent and dangerous tongue!".
The guy laughed, so I struck and to my complete surprise knocked the bastard out cold.
Robert De Niro, replete with grizzled grey beard and rheumy eyes shuffled over and said, "You really didn't have to do that", to which I replied that, "In fact, I did. For no man nor woman shall have their dignity lowered in my presence".
And then it occurred to me, so I blurted out, "Fuck! I'm working with ROBERT DE NIRO!".
He looked back at me as if thunderstruck by an epiphany.
His eyes went wider than mine and he yelled, "Fuck! I'm working with -!"
And then I woke up.
This one's for you, Bobby Milk.

Remembering Goodfellas.

The Monogram Cherry Bomb

So the story goes something like this...
I was top of the class for Spelling in third class. That's no large boast, given how utterly useless I was at everything else. Miss Kearney was a twenty something dark haired siren and every cell of my eight year old body was disturbingly in love with her laughing eyes. So when she announced that I, together with Barbara McLeod (Nth. Ryde primary kids: disambiguation needed, please), was to receive a gift of our own choosing, little old me was over the moon. Not only had this temptress from the grown-up world genuinely been paying attention to my valiant, slobbering efforts throughout the year, but she was about to reward me for something that seemed kind of dumb.
So far, so rosy.
The rub arose, however, due to me being poorly or carted off to other states and kept out of school for much of that year (1971 for all you budding museum curators). In those days, textbooks were leased from the school and in North Ryde Public School, they were the inviolate and impenetrable domain of a World War Two veteran with a perpetual scowl and glasspaper rasp of a voice, who had lost two fingers in some far-flung soldiering hell: Mister Doyle. Better known to staff and students alike as Deserthead due to his bald pate.
In one of my prolonged absences, some of the classroom thugs had removed my textbooks from my flip top desk. What became of the books? That timeless Gallic utterance, "Who can say?", springs to mind. All I know is they were never to be seen again.
All things conspiring deathwards, Blind Freddie should just about be able to see where all of this is heading by now...
The day we were to receive the prizes was also the day I was to receive six of the best from Deserthead's favourite lead tipped cane for so cravenly pilfering his textbooks.
"But I didn't -
Well, where are they? -
They were -
They ARE NO LONGER in your desk (pause to let the unspeakable implications sink in). And you tell me they're not at home. And, by law, I must believe you. Ergo you stole them for a purpose or purposes unknown that to my eyes WILL have dire consequences for this entire nation - nay PLANET!"
Should I go to school and receive the prize as well as the cuts?
No.
No, I should not. It all seemed just too cruel and unjust. Existential at eight.
And there my love affair with wagging began. My illustrious times spent shirking responsibility of any kind can be sourced back to that fateful overcast day in mid October all those years ago and to this very minute I feel absolutely no compunction for having done what I did that day.
Some time ago, I relayed this long and tedious anecdote to a friend here at work who is moving on to greener pastures and a living wage today. We've shared many fine engineering-type adventures and he has saved my bacon and made my moribund skillset shine (or at the very least, toned back the patina of tarnish) more times than I care to remember.
So Jason Terante, thank you. For your friendship, your good and mindful counsel, for your great and ever-growing engineering skills and for this wonderful gift of a model.
Today, you have made me the happiest eight year old in the world.

Those were the days, my friend.

Old conversations, enduring aphorisms...

I spent Sunday thru' Tuesday night with Pat and Pam - Simon's mum and aunt respectively. I gabbed and gabbed, making stuff up when all else failed. Tales of heroism and insight - tall and patently fraudulent, every last word of it all.
On the rare occasions I'd stop to draw breath, they'd interject with brilliant tales of their own lives. And in sporadic fits of lucidity I could only sit rapt. They were army brats throughout the 40s and 50s. Moved about all over the world with their career Royal Engineer father. Nairobi, Germany, Singapore and the Malay Peninsula. And although their father was tasked with building bridges - literal and cultural - in a final heroic effort to prop up the tattered vestiges of the war-ravaged, crumbling Empire, they always ended up being in the wrong spot at the wrong time. The time of the Mau Maus. The time of the Communist insurgents. The time of the disorganised and resentful vigilantes of every nation. And, conversely, the time of the Economic Miracle.
In my teens, Pat once shared an anecdote that I've never quite let go of. Held sacred throughout my life, in fact. By the early 1950s she'd been in Kenya long enough to be considered just another street urchin playing with little more than rusted and broken barrel hoops and sticks with everyone else and whereas the right age (ie. NOT adult) mattered more than life and honour, skin colour and country of birth mattered not one damn.
And the tourists would come. The ageing couples. The lesser dignitaries of every shade. The corporals of industry that would, in years and decades to come, achieve something approaching respect and captaincy in their short-lived and sometimes prosperous fiefdoms. The demobbed and disillusioned survivors of the long, terrible conflict. The new castes of proselytisers and missionaries of every creed. And from all of their mouths, nothing but complaint. The dirty rooms, the filthy streets, the appalling food, the grubbing locals, the stench, the chaos, the terrifying and possibly affected insouciance of the natives who would - according to every Briton of worth - enterprisingly steal every last penny given half a chance.
And the children would secretly laugh at the florid, indignant faces and the pale, translucent skin that burned within an hour of exposure to the sun, and the blustering, arrogant voices of the men and the braying, imperious accents of the women.
And all the while, this young grime-covered tomboy wanted to scream, "BUT YOU'RE IN AFRICA!!!".
These few words and every conceivable permutation thereof, have followed me all my days. And when my workaday mornings or bouts of moribund self-importance run the risk of blending into beige and wasted nothings, there lives in me an urchin that never fails to scream, "But you're here!"
Because I have been and I have known people who were so badly at war with themselves, their lives, the bodies and the days they inhabit, the streets they walk and the poor facsimiles of lives they have forged for themselves or settled for, who will never know. They have no here. They have no Africa. Or, in their hubris and foolishness, they have spared no effort to dissociate and erase themselves from these hallowed places.

Every reckless daughter, every fated son...

Of spirit and serpent.

The woman took the large, unadorned plastic container from the man's hands as wavelets licked at their running shoes. The younger man stood back on a higher ledge away from the lapping of the receding tide. He sipped a bottle of beer and watched on.
She knelt and tipped the contents into the water. It settled on the brine-kissed rock. On the leaves of kelp exposed to the golden afternoon sunlight. Onto the hissing foam. And as the sea lazily rolled back in, the ashy water ran over their feet and soaked their shoes and socks through. After some persistent shaking, the contents were dispersed and the woman took the man's hand and rose without noise, without sorrow.
The three of them looked at each other but possibly barely saw the faces of the others for the thoughts and the imaginings coursing through their minds on this stark occasion.
The men wiped away silent tears. The woman smiled.
Now holding hands, now resting arms on shoulders, the three made their way back to dry land. Far from final shorelines. Further from the loss of a loved one.

*****

Coming over the rise into Sutton Forest I saw the fattest rainbow.
Colours to rival Damballah, vigilance to rival that of the Rainbow Serpent and greedier than even Midgard's sentinel. For a second I felt it would swallow the sky or collapse in the attempt.
There may or not be a successful shot in the camera but I won't know this until I get home to Camille tonight.
In the meanwhile, take all my mock turtle meanderings with the smallest pinch of salt.

(For Simon)

Free now...

July 26th, 1919.

 July 26th, 1919. A child is born in a terrace house in Day Street, Leichhardt. The parents name her Jean Isabel. A few blocks away on Parramatta Road, Model T Fords were just starting to fight it out with the trams here in Australia.
 In the ensuing decades, she will go on to have many adventures, many children and many more heartaches. She will refrain from drinking and smoking tobacco until she marries in her early twenties. At which point another, larger war will begin that will forever change the fabric of the relatively genteel landscape she had known. That global war would end in 1945. The peace so desperately sought by the broken twentieth century world even now has not been fully realised. The marriage would end in 1965. In her heart, the peace Jean Isabel (a thoroughly 20th century woman) so desperately needed would not find its way to her in her lifetime.
But she inspired, she cajoled, she pleaded and punished, she led and acquiesced, she brutalised and nurtured, encouraged and derided, she wilfully ignored and occasionally meddled, she loved with boundless tenderness, she snarled and screamed like a banshee when she was in her cups, she failed miserably and succeeded with mad abandon.
She mothered as mothers always have, as mothers always will.
And at 1 AM on the 26th July, seventy nine years later, she would draw her last breath with most of her strange, fragmented children around her. Each one beautiful and unique and hopelessly individual in their strengths and modest successes, each one virtually interchangable and identical in there frailties and crimes.
And so, some 97 years after your birth, some 18 years after your passing, I send my love and thoughts to you, Ma.

Jaysus, how you loved this song...

The shattered dream of Montgomery Clift.

Your damned forehead. I don't like it one bit.
But it's the only one I've got and anyway -
Ah, stop it. That's probably not even a real Brooklyn accent. Nebraska, right?
And you're hangdog, man. Stop with the whole hangdog thing.
It's my thing.
Your thing is simpering, Monty. You fucking simper.
...Do not.
See?!
But Borgnine keeps beating the shit out of me.
Ah, Borgnine's alright. He's just acting out. He's normally a really sweet guy. It's Sinatra ya gotta watch out for. He's real nice to your face but he's a careerist if ever I met one.
Were Lancaster and Gardner really caught banging down on the beach?
Who cares. There's that whole fucking hangdog thing again. I think you looked your best when Tracy was giving you his steely stare in the dock at Nuremberg, even if you were all fucked up in your private hell by then, but what do I know?
...
Well, I heard Monty Clift got gunned down by his own team making his way back to the beach without so much as a single bugle to play Reveille.
But I guess that's just the way dreams always play out through all places, through all eternity.


Joe about Monty.

2 yrs on.

I tried out for a band at Taren Point. All the way there, I was neurotic and hung over and I kept muttering. To you, to the windscreen, to the passing motorists, but mostly to you.
I didn't want to play too loud (on account of the hangover).
What if I sounded too much like everyone else?
What if I sound nothing like everyone else in all the worst possible ways?
"What the fuck are you muttering?"
"I'm just antsy."
"Well stop it. You're shitting me."
"But what if -?"
"Fuck it. Just do the songs. You know the songs. Do the songs. Or do you want to - We can turn back right now, if you like." (This on that rare occasion when you were older brother and me the kid).
"We're almost there. Let's get it over with."
"Then shut up and listen to THIS."
And it'd be A Farewell to Kings or Exit... Stage Left or Tinsel Town Rebellion or One Size Fits All or Head Injuries or Place Without A Postcard.
After the audition, I hopped back in the car. You were one of the most impatient souls I'd ever met but never on those occasions. You were Buddha in those moments.
"How'd it go?"
"The drummer said I destroyed Friday On My Mind. I don't know if that's a good thing or a bad thing. Is 'destroyed' a compliment these days?"
"Probably not. But fuck it. You came, you gave it all, you left 'em confused. Not bad for a day's effort. Want an ouzo and coke?"
You had an answer for everything.

Like our lives...

The Facebook years #1 (The Bushman's Blowie)

I was going to talk to you all about the near-full moon silvering the endless pastures last night. But frankly, I would rather briefly touch upon the Bushman's Blowie. An art I'm still coming to terms with, I'm galled to admit. Gloop drying down my salt and pepper goatee, awaiting the stares and subtle hand gestures of everyone I meet, hours later. BUT we're not here to talk about me.
We're here to talk about the finest Bushman's Blowie I ever did see...
In the late 70s I was tooling about, riding skateboards down at the Sydney Opera House with some other reprobates, when along the northern promenade a dignified couple in their late sixties leisurely appeared. It must have been intermission for the Berlioz or Shostakovitch recital because they were discussing the merits of the horn section with some animated yet knowing gravitas; she resplendent in a full length green silk creation and him in some Italian finery.
As we skated past, she stopped the conversation mid-sentence saying, "Excuse me, dear." And with one finger pressed to her nostril, proceeded to emit a substantial amount of gloog and snoodge from her other one. With consummate aplomb he turned away until she had finished this curious ablution whereby they resumed their discussion on the finer things in life.
For me, it was love at first sight.

Ein kleine mucous musik.

The rain.

Well hello, my friend.
It's been quite some while and you sound good - your tattoo against my roof.
I lay awake at this stupid hour before the light and hear your every drop.
And I think back on impossible and forgotten nights where I would huddle in bus shelters and under stairwells, between buildings and beneath hedgerows, occasionally in an unlocked car and, as sometimes fortune would have it, in a stranger's house
seeking to avoid your frozen embrace.
And I have hated you in ways that only the lost and the stupid and the desperate to survive can hate.
But not now, rain.
Now, I have my three blankets, a roof over me, food in my stomach and two more hours before the terror of another working day.

Let it come down...

Attention.

There's only one thing that people respect.
It threads through the entire history of humankind and binds all that we hold in exaltation.
We don't talk about it.  I haven't seen it touted by the celebrities nor the commentariat.
Maybe the motivational speakers go on at length about it.
But who listens to them?
We throw hosannas at it all:
Inspiration
Genius
Love
Cooperation
Individualism
Courage
Imagination
Truth
Grit
Spine
Compassion
Whimsy
Gravitas.
But it's all shit.
In the entire history of our species there's only one thing in the narrative that again and again indicates what we genuinely revere -
Concentration.
That's it.
From the artists to the thinkers to the fighters to the architects to the leaders to the famed to the obscure to the immediate to the untouchable to the wise to the game-changers to the revolutionaries to the prudent.
Focus.
And now I wanted to write about the cerebral equivalent of the thousand yard stare getting us all to where we are today.
But I've lost interest.

I'm talking to you and I hope you're concentrating...

In the future...

 Late last year I caught wind of an experiment in Utrecht, the Netherlands, involving a set basic income for everyone. Having been in the IT game in one capacity or another since the late 80s and watching with increasingly sweaty palms as my pension years loom, with nothing to show for my labours, other than some guitars and moldy words, I found this idea engrossing.

  Some time back I hadn't been able to find anything near permanent employment, living up in the Blue Mountains outside Sydney. I started a small mowing business which allowed some seasonal recurring work and I'd also chase up my agent at that point for whatever acting work I could find (most often reenactment work for Netflix and Fox shows) but for the best part of 2013/2014, my partner and I were really struggling to make the rent and bills and the best the employment agencies could offer was a soulful look of sympathy and the occasional cup of tea and biscuits. I quickly realised that one of the few areas of employment growth in the country is in the job agency sector itself.  As fine and sincere as the employees may be, it appeared to me to be one of the best and most profitable private sector rorts to get involved with.  The only overheads, outside the paltry wage served to the overburdened staff, were in teabags, instant coffee, plastic kettles, ratty sofas and Glen 20 disinfectant (these last two items for the narrow hall that functions as a waiting room in such establishments). The actual government subsidies, on the other hand, are enormous!  So well done, unregulated free market!  You go, you good thing!

  How then, you may ask, am I able to so flagrantly pontificate to you, and at you, now?

  It's simple.  After tiring of my twenty four months out in the metaphorical wilderness, I begged for my old job back and got it. At a substantial pay reduction. So at least I'm making amends on the bills accrued and the friendships damaged, and again I'm relatively fearless when it comes to putting food on the table and keeping a roof over our heads.

  The one thing, though... The one consistent rage that drove me through that dark time was the fact that my track record is unimpeachable.  My Protestant work ethic is as intact now as it was when I was fifteen and starting out in the workforce. Yet I could find no work.  I worked and reworked my resume for more than half a dozen employment agencies, with each returning their two cents worth with the most valueless and disingenuous mendacity I think I've ever witnessed.  Each one, in their infinite wisdom  would return an email or a phone call with variations on the following, "You have a GREAT wealth of experience across a broad swath of the IT sector.  But you should lose this paragraph and that one and really emphasise this and this."  I should mention that no two agencies could agree on which skills/history/paragraphs should be excised and which should be included or emphasised.

  This brings me to the Utrecht experiment.  I am keeping a keen eye on it.  Rutger Bregman, I believe, is one of the architects of this daring adventure and when I learned last month that he'd released a slender volume entitled, "Utopia for Realists", I immediately bought the Ebook and gobbled its contents up within a couple of days. (In case you didn't notice, the fact that I can afford to purchase and run my Ipad, let alone buy books through the Kindle app allows me to subtly demonstrate my consumer privilege and permits my quiet yet persistent middle class arrogance of old to come rising up like the proverbial tarnished phoenix for the first time in what feels like forever).

  I learned about Speenhamland and the bread shortages of 1795. I learned of the Canadian Mincome trials in the late 60s and even Nixon's remarkable efforts around 1970.

 One sentiment I feel obliged to echo, from not only Utopia for Realists but other treatises of a similar ilk that I've struggled through is this; living below the poverty line does NOT, as most right wing and conservative pundits fearfully and trenchantly advocate, mean for a second that you're a fifth rate citizen or human being.  It does not dole scum nor junkiedom make.  It is not a crime.  It has nothing to do with being lazy or being imbued with or informed by a weak work ethic (I've been a slacker all my life.  I've worked my fucking arse off to be a slacker!). It is not about, nor has it ever been, the dole bludging hydra of yore. Nor is it even a connotation of some sinister illness.

   In fact, this marginalisation is on the insidious and slow march due to automation, robiticisation and my old favourite, unchecked hypercapitalism. Soon enough - within two or three generations, it's fair to estimate - many and possibly most of us will be feeling the effects of these (perhaps necessary, certainly unstoppable) evils.  We may even fall into one of the many marginalised categories now emerging, ourselves.

  The ONLY thing that living below the poverty line means is this: YOU SIMPLY DO NOT HAVE ENOUGH MONEY TO GET BY.  Shock and horror, huh? One of the most surprising and recurring metrics from the trials of the past is this: once people obtained an assured and fixed amount of money coming in, a large percentage of them started their own businesses, be they cottage industries or market gardens. All within the course of the first few months. Because they could now AFFORD to have a shot at their dreams.  And many of those dreams revolved around being successful! Commerce appears to be in our DNA.  And so the strange flowers grew.

  When faced with these assured uncertainties just on the horizon, the whole Utrecht (and now I believe not only other Dutch cities but also Denmark and Finland are joining the ranks) thing makes good sense.

D'ye not agree, mo chara?

The experiment continues (some further reading)

Beam me up, Scotty.

Cam.

I laboured long, fine words for you. I scraped and pared till they now few, In all good hope may comfort you From all that you're experiencing. From all the hurt you're going through.

Together we have seen much more Than start and end of peace and war Of war and peace. Of all we knew. From all that we're experiencing. From all the hurt we're going through.

I languish in your company Do little else that pleases me And watch the fires burn deep in you. The flames you're now experiencing. The flames that you're now screaming through.

To test the sane. To trial the mad. Throw every virtue that we had Deceived by days and nights untrue. The madness you're experiencing The dreadful hurt you're going through.

The day will come when you'll awake So fearful - for the bitter ache Has gone and left you born anew! No more the pain that scars and rends No more the hurt you once lived through.

Sou Nou Yergon