On getting a haircut.

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

Annual leave.

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

Party.

This is not ...

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

I'll be your baby tonight.

A monster's centenary.

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

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

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

We can go to sleep.

David Montgomery's mum.

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

Your life and your life and my life.

IWD - 2018

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

She

And then there was the weekend when I forgot to practice guitar...

So I suppose this is a kind of milestone week for me. I don't often drag out the sanctimony to lovingly and shamelessly polish in the public domain but somehow I feel the need to document it and here and now is as good a place as any.
This week thirty years ago I'd been on a bender, initially with work colleagues, then an old drinking pal and his lass, some friends back in Chippendale, and finally back to the old drinking buddy and his missus. At the end of it all I realised with painful clarity that in certain aspects of my life, I was better off schlepping and striving rather than actually achieving. I must warn you now that the following may appear to be yet more cheap and ego-saturated grandiloquence.  But in fact I write it in the hope that someone out there may one day find themselves in similar circumstances and realise that they're not alone. That they too can, in fact, pull off mundane yet potentially life- or sanity-saving miracles.
***
FRIDAY NIGHT
I'd been working a solo afternoon shift as a laser print programmer.  The company I worked for, like many startups back then, was small and warmly familial - from the top of the firm down to the cleaners and binders.  Around seven in the evening, the secretary showed up and instructed me to shut up shop as I'd been invited to a party to celebrate a ... You know what?  Back then, I didn't give a fuck.  It could as easily have been a wake as, say, an anniversary.  To me it was all the same.  It was an excuse to get wasted, so I didn't need to be asked twice to pull down the roller doors.
Again, I'll refrain from naming names - not so much that I'll damn the innocent who footed the bill, as much as they would laugh at my self-aggrandising and patently false hyperbole.
At that party, I started in on a small tower of amphetamine (these were days of shared wealth, generosity and profound self indulgence, after all), a liter bottle of Stolly vodka, and to balance both, a few shots of Ouzo and a lip/sip/suck tournament of El Toro. Oh! And throughout the course of that evening, a few civilised lines of cocaine which like E, was just starting to make an impact in Australia. That took us through until the very small hours. I remember thinking how cool the neighbours were.  I was noisy as fuck.  My work colleagues even more so.  Yet no one complained, as far as I know.
These were the days before mobile phones, so I called up a mate on a landline, slurred the name of a pub by Central and hopped on my FT500 without telling anyone, for fear they try and stop the animal escaping.
I bump-parked the bike around by the Journo's Club off Regent Street and sat slowly drinking beer with my friends, trying it on with the tired barmaids, putting coins through the jukebox and playing pool until the morning light came. The Westminster Hotel as it was then known as, had some great songs on that jukebox and I was known to favour pubs that only played music I liked - preferably live - throughout all my years drinking.
***
SATURDAY.
My mate, having worked hard all week, was tired as the morning light oozed in through the pub windows but his missus, who could go harder than any of us even though she was 'the wrong side of forty', wanted to kick on down the Cross.  The Rex and Texas Tavern were early openers so we started there, drinking with the local denizens who all seemed to be knocking off work after a hard night doing burlesque or tricking over by the Siebel Townhouse. As I understand it, these places are all but pale shades of their former selves now but they were something to see in their prime. Every reject in town seemed to wash up at those two hotels and they all had stories that could hold me in thrall - drunk, sober or otherwise. My mate was putting away Bacardi and Cokes, his missus was big on G&Ts (very sensible given that the heat was already melting the streets) and I'd been given some kind of immunity to all effects of alcohol by the goey from the night before, so I was washing beers down with Red Label shots. The only real down side was that the goey felt like ants under my skin every time I stopped drinking and started thinking. A really dirty and shitty drug.
Throughout the afternoon, we went back to the Quay and enjoyed the cheap drinks at the Paragon and the Ship Inn before stumbling up past the Orient and into the Mercantile.
Somewhere along the line, all three of us had been deliberately chundering so that by the time we got to the Merc and the loud, loud Irish band playing there, we were fine to start the whole love fest again.
The Merc was always an easy choice.  Guinness on tap with the occasional judicious Jameson to take the edge off.  The music and the dancing with strangers took care of the rest. Young and old, scabrous beer hounds and clean shaven tourists, would all magically sweat and sober up out on that dance floor, which pleased the pub owners immensely.  No hassle, no heartache. Just booze and dancing and laughter and half heard snatches of cutting insults and conversations.
Sunday morning came up to find me in the Cosmopolitan Cafe on Darlinghurst Road, ravenously attacking a big breakfast and hot black coffee and trying to stop my fucking hands from shaking constantly. I'd lost my friends at one of the numerous dance halls that dotted the landscape back then.
***
SUNDAY
I caught a cab back to Central and let out a loud yelp of joy because I'd forgotten about my bike sometime over the previous twenty four hours and was pleased as punch to see that it hadn't been nicked. I loved that bike.  But I loved getting pissed more, I think.
I rode out to a mate's place in North Ryde and spent the early part of the day standing around, passing tools and smoking and drinking his beers as he worked on his Commodore. But drinking and talking to mates as they worked on their cars bored the tits off me almost as much as working on cars had done when I had to make a living that way.  Once the beers were gone, I just started the bike and dropped in on my friends up in Ryde to see if they'd made it back from the Cross in one piece.
I needn't have worried.
They were back on the Bacardi and the gin.  And since they knew - they just KNEW - that I'd drop by, they had beer in the fridge as well as a small bottle of chilled Smirnoff waiting. As an aside, years later I would run into him.  He'd since gone back to England and was telling me about running pirate tobacco across the Channel in the mid 1990s.
As often happens when everyone is in their cups, an argument broke out.  In fact, if I'm to be honest, all three of us loved starting them, but this one got vicious and I remember glass being swept up as I slammed the door after me.  Most likely I'd said something deliberately insensitive and like the gutless fuck I could be, I figured it was more fun to run out while the blood flowed, rather than stick around to make things right.
The afternoon found me dropping in on friends in Chippendale. I bought some long necks around at the bottle shop on Abercrombie.  The old owner was jumpy as hell because they'd had a terrifying robbery the night before and I was too loud and I had that drunken snarl and loud, annoying nasal thing that bad and stupid drunks the world over get, so I guess I made the guy's day a little bit freakier.
So we drank the beers and smoked and watched a Dario Argento film into the night.  I was going to stick around and pass out in the kitchen but I was finally starting to crash on the speed and all else, so I set off back to my mate's place.  If nothing else, I had the vague intention of apologising for being an arsehole earlier in the day. As it transpires, they'd passed out not long after I left and my knocking had woken them up.  I was jittery as fuck and on the defensive, not knowing whether I'd be weaving and dodging the punches or whether we'd simply settle down over a nightcap before I'd pass out on the living room floor as I was often known to do.
The truth is, it came down to neither. The whole argument thing from earlier in the day had been forgotten and after a shit, shave and shower, the three of us went back over to Balmain to make the most of the summer evening's weather.  The Commercial in East Balmain, the London, the Cricketers' Arms, the Riverview, Dick's, the Exchange, the Cat and Fiddle, the S(m)ackville, the Bridge, the Lion, until we finally hit the Orange Grove.
Over that distance, over that many pubs, by the end of it, the word crawl was really no exaggeration.
Back then I got paid by the fortnight but over the course of those couple of days, I'd blown most of it - including the rent. At least, I had enough to fill the tank on the bike.
And enough to take the three of us back to the Westminster (soon to be renamed Sutherlands) where we nursed out spirits and our beers and our cigarettes and a couple of joints with the utmost care and love.
***
MONDAY AND HAPPILY EVER AFTER
I went straight from the pub to work the next day and riding across the harbour bridge in the morning light, I realised that something was at an end.  Had to be ended.
After a while, friends stopped coming around and conversations were awkwardly altered to suit when I dropped by.  Some exchanges became more stilted, laconic. Even more were over before they began.
And when it finally dawned on people that this wasn't simply a phase I was going through (which frankly surprised me, above all others), I suppose that side of me started to atrophy as  I realised that many, many people really do not do moderation at all well. Sadly, myself among them.
A week later I turned twenty five.

Spirit

Melbourne en l'enfer.

He's all of six foot one.
Lean and distracted in this stupid heat, in those stupid drip dry slacks and button up shirt.
He called me and a couple at the ATM bastards. Unfortunately the couple got the last of the cash so I had to walk past him in the stupid heat to get to the next ATM.
You right, my friend?
Yeah.
He had great eyes. Clear and not wild. This surprised me.
I went and grabbed some money and when I came back he hadn't moved in the stupid heat.
Y'okay old timer? You need a feed or something?
NO, I'M JUST WAITING!
Cool.
You fucking cunt.
Be well old man.
It wasn't personal.
It seldom if ever is on days like this.
***
It's easy to make my day. Just be yourself.

Fuck you, buddy.

For H. on Australia Day.

A pair of brown eyes and a smile as bright as the sun
is what I remember most about you.
The smell of Hobbytex fabric paints and that strange crushed fabric you asked me to colour in.
"What are you doing?"
"Looking at the Big Jim catalogue that came with the van Mum bought me for Christmas."
"Come and help me colour in."
I came and helped, in spite of my selfishness.
Who knew that less than twenty years later I'd be holding your lifeless hand, my love.
Except, of course, every impotent onlooker - myself included.
You had a beautiful voice. 
By rights I know you must have gotten angry.
Less times, as I grow older, than I think you should have.
More times than was good for your health.
I wanted you to fight back for all the times I couldn't.
Your rich beautifully spoken voice that pushed the fears away,
at least until you finally succumbed to your own;
to those thrust upon you,
day in and married day out.
But I'll dwell no more upon that.
Decades later I'd inquire where you were originally from.  Where your people were from.
Up north, I would be told. The islands up north.
By my reckoning, that would make this day yours more than any soul I've known and loved in my life.
Just know, that for what it's worth, there are people who love you still and always.

Forever beautiful.

Fred Scuttle's dilemma

The corvid was trying to settle on the lamp post in the twenty seven degree heat. Feathers ruffling, shifting its rump first this way then that. It appeared to want to lose balance and tip one way and the other to ward off the tedium. *** There was a man; Allan Jones. Not the infamous not-so-crypto-fascist ageing shock jock, nor the all singing, all dancing actor of Marx Brothers fame, but another Allan Jones. I interviewed him for Networking Action For Actors up in Sydney long ago. He fitted the bill of the wandering rapscallion as he regaled the crowded room at the top of the Arthouse Hotel with tales of Hollywood union thuggery and life through the 1960s looking glass when the star system was not only alive and well, but also militantly exalted by patrician and pleb alike throughout the known world. *** The corvid saw the bug before I did and took off in pursuit. But the insect matched the corvid's every twist, every turn and avoided beak and claw with surprisingly alacrity. Avian ennui had given way to unmistakable agitation as the impudent little creature ran rings around the large bird in what should have been a dogfight with a foregone conclusion. *** For me, though, the tale that stood out the most was one event that occurred during Allan's tenure as set designer/stage manager for the Benny Hill show in the late sixties. Benny had wanted to do a slapstick sketch that he'd had in mind for some while with an old biplane. A pre-war De Havilland was sourced and Allan was tasked with playing chauffeur on what should have been a one day shoot. Benny was waiting outside his trendy Kensington home by the time Allan got there and they made their way in the early morning light to the airfield somewhere in Sussex. The plane took off, the cameras rolled, Fred Scuttle emerged from the make up van and everything, according to Allan, went smoothly and precisely to plan. Except it didn't. Take after take was recorded on film (Benny shunned the use of the cheaper, much more flexible format of video) and the costs of hiring the Gypsy Moth alone must have been extortionate even by the standards of the day. Benny wasn't happy; with the sound, with extraneous crew noises, with the lens flare on the playback, with the timing, with the height of the aircraft, with the costume, but mostly with his own flat performances. And so that day extended into a second day with identical results, which in turn gave way to a third day - again with nothing to show but frustration and dissatisfaction. The fourth day -a Thursday - was canned because of rain but Allan showed up on the Friday at the usual time for a day's work that was hopefully ("Dear God, please!!!") going to bear fruit. Benny, unusually, wasn't waiting on the footpath, so Allan alighted, walked up the steps and rapped on the door. Benny appeared, still in his pajamas, and offered Allan a cup of tea while he went up to get dressed. Allan was well aware that Benny invited no one into his rented house ever and now he came to see why. The only thing occupying the living room was an old fold out camp bed that seemingly doubled as a couch, and the only food in the cupboard besides a packet of loose leaf tea, were tins of potted meat and baked beans. One cup, one spoon, one knife, one fork on the drying rack. Allan was immediately reminded of the similar eccentricities of the composer Erik Satie. **** The corvid in its blind pursuit nearly swooped inadvertently into the windshield of a Toyota soft roader and a heartbeat later almost clipped its wing on the edge of the awning. I swear I could almost see the grim smile beneath the flying insect's proboscis as it bumbled off in the heat, free and none the worse for wear after the ordeal. **** Even after the final edit, Benny wasn't happy with any of it and the sketch died an ignominious and all but forgotten death on the cutting room floor.

GOOD EVENING, VIEWERS!!!

He's leaving home.

We set off earlier than expected.
Not to get him out of the house at last but for a far more important reason; I wanted to catch the ten past six session for Three Billboards Outside etc.
So we quickly put this in a bag, that in the car, and took about the same amount of time again checking that he/we hadn't forgotten anything.
On the way to his new freedoms, we spoke of all manner of things starting with the idea of hubris as it relates to protecting lesser living entities, right through to the binomial hours of the shadow in Chinese astrology.
We arrived at his new freedom and quickly unpacked everything into the,
me: tiny room,
him: new adventure
and hopped back in the car hoping to avoid the beginning of the year peak hour traffic up around Carlton (I figured it would be a great send off to see a good movie with him for the last time in god knows how long).
And we almost made it too!
About two blocks from the cinema we hit bumper to bumper but even then we did not despair because we found pay parking in the next block and me out of shape and him out of shape ran and made it to the cinema smack on ten past six
Only to find two queues to the box office - both extending almost all the way out the main entrance.
We weren't alone in the idea of catching the flick.
I must confess it cost long moments in profound remorse and self flagellation to have to make do with the consolation prize of French Vanilla flans and Tiramisu at Brunetti's
but years from now, I think we'll both agree that no matter how great the movie may or may not be and no matter how many awards it may or may not garner, nothing and no one could touch those brilliant and precious minutes of Brunetti's heavenly morsels.
"Yes, can you put me through to the dentist please?
Two for bridgework with a side of sugar rushes."
Fly well and fair play, young man.

The adventure begins...

Perth 2017

Melbourne
Heading out to the airport in the early morning light. The whole city, the suburban weatherboards to the steel and glass skyscrapers, bathed in rose. Gracias a la vida, desde mi corazon.
Landing
Ah, Perth. Seems it was always destined to be a complicated relationship, wasn't it.
Fremantle
I'll tell you what's cool. What's cool is two old men in a beaten, though not defeated, Hyundai hooning through the wide roads and avenues and highways of Fremantle, belting out Seven and Seven Is, Psychotic Reaction, I Had Too Much To Dream Last Night, Alone Again Or.
And laughing till they're hoarse.
Yeah.
That
Is
Really
Fucking
Cool.
Kewdale
The names: Abernathy, Arthur, Belmont, Oaks, Stockdale, Acton, Towers, Scott, Kew... All and always leading back to Knutsford Avenue.
The middle aged European couple over the back on Arthur Street, slouching about their summer soaked front yard in matching his and hers fake tiger skin underwear.
Hey! You the kid who's always taking our almonds?
I dunno, maybe.
Well don't.
And after that I'd have to keep watch from the window of the caravan parked around the back of the house in which I lived, to make sure they'd gone out before stealing any more if their bitter, nearly ripe
almonds.
And Tomato Lake defying all conventional wisdom by actually being a lot larger and more scum covered than ever it was when we played there as kids.
These strange and stupid shards that keep sticking out, still cutting deep.
Yeah, Perth.
Like I said before. It's complicated.
Leaving.
Another double decker, another magnificent view. Pete, Jeannie, Rache, Jay, kids, and Helen and Brett for good measure: I love you. Thank you for every countless ordinary miracle and for teaching me that if you can adult with a modicum of dignity and a heartful of courage, then one day I too might succeed.

Lay Down.

Today's portrait of the landscape.

You're out walking, driving. Sitting. Unfamiliar places or familiar but seen at last. Bus stops, train stations, the inevitable eatery.
It dawns on you that you're bleeding, diminished
yet you feel stronger than you can ever recall feeling. A new delirium.
Everyone around you. Everyone.
Everyone you see.
The swaddled newborn next to you looking unfocused in your direction, at the mother, at the others.
The care lines. The mottled hands. The pink hands. All colours. Everyone. All sexes and predilections and convictions. All proclivities. All of them.
Everyone.
For this little forever you are the least interesting thing to have existed. They are all so much more important and intriguing than you will ever be.
Everyone
else.
Smiling, laughing. The inaudible conversations. The too audible ones. They walk dogs. They push strollers. At least one happy, indeterminate creature they had on a leash had only three legs.
Crows feet. Gestures, sullen and wild. Serious eyes. Wetted lips and rising and falling throats. Skin rough and smooth, receding hairlines, loose skin and taut through times of abundance and otherwise. Unconscious scratching and unwarranted and nervous hahaing. All this and everything else besides.
Never mind that these are days of thin money. Never mind the decided lack of exuberance flowing over everything. Never mind the lousy weather.
Or the vagaries of life rising slowly up from within, or around the corner the phone calls filled with hobbling and heartbreaking news.
All the terrors and triumphs of your life have leached away because of every person you see until you are left
with nothing.
And slowly it dawns on the small part of you remaining, that you have pulled off history's greatest disappearance
yet again.

Fade into you.

Concert

I was reminiscing with my brother and I recalled the first concert he ever took me to.
There was Copperwine, the La Di Das (who would later play in the assembly hall at my high school, around the same time as the unknown outfit AC/DC), Billy Thorpe and the Aztecs, Johnny Farnham, Spectrum (or the Indelible Murcteps as they were then known, I think), and Johnny Farnham among others. My brother doesn't remember any of it but I distinctly recall someone pegging a bottle of beer at Johnny Farnham halfway through his version of Glen Campbell's Visions of Sugarplums and young Johnny F, ever the polite one, stopped only to gently chide, "That's not very nice!" before continuing.
Who knows. Maybe after all these years it was wishful thinking on my part (although looking back, I'd never consider Johnny Farnham to be high on my list of remembrances, nice though he's known to be) but I remember that damned missile and I remember the afternoon light and the noise. St Leonards Park 1971, maybe? Or possibly one of those bigger freeby gigs further west. Or maybe, as previously stated, I've been bullshitting so long, I can no longer sort truth from fantasy.

Sugarplums

Darker.

You stare and stare.
And the page gets no darker and you think back on the week, a brother who had a touch and go experience, a friend traumatised by a breakup, other friends battling cancer. And you try to be there or at least be around as a brother, as a friend, and you're somehow haunted by the possibility that you were never particularly skilled at either.
You think on remembrance. On eleventh hours of eleventh days of eleventh months
and the page gets no darker
and in particular you recall the interview with a 3 RAR soldier who spoke of the terror of the Battle of the Apple Orchard in late 1950. He described with pride how it is now cited as a classical tactical fallback in military manuals across the world. He described adventures that swung wildly between visceral horror and insane hilarity and how he never wanted to hear another chime or whistle or bell again because that was how the northern armies (foolishly) announced every major assault so even in the dark, all you had to do was point and shoot at the clamour, with devastating and senseless effect.
He goes on to describe a successful counterattack on a ridge because the Chinese and North Korean troops had overrun their position in the caves the UN Allies had settled into. The counterattack was not part of any grand strategy, it was simply because the RAR troops were royally fucked off as they'd spent so long setting up their still to make the shit Core 10 (as the Yanks liked to call it because they seemed to have trouble pronouncing the name Corio, where this horror with a whiskey label had been churned out to poison the masses for decades) somehow potable.
And we laughed then as I looked into the man's eyes and he was there in a happy moment in hell.
And I foolishly asked, "So it wasn't all bad then?"
And the laughter vanished in the blink of an eye
and he said, "It was worse."
And for the only time in my life I understood in my own shallow and savage and stupid way how people never come back.

Masters of war.

Saturday 28 October 2017.

They couldn't have measured much over five foot apiece. The dutiful daughter with clear skin and haunted eyes holding the unsteady hands of her mother, well into her seventies.
Stopping every few yards to allow the older woman to catch her breath. They didn't talk, they didn't smile.
The mother sat down a couple of chairs down and swatted feebly at her hair as if to brush the nuisance sunlight away. She indicated to her daughter who knelt on the footpath to rub her mother's calf.
Presently the mother rose and they continued their promenade.
A tall woman in her late 50s ordered a pot of tea further down. Her sunglasses dark so I had no way to determine where or upon whom she was casting her calm gaze.
The young waitress helped me make up my mind because the nuisance sunlight kept driving any clear thoughts out of my head.
A tall man with a cane, his left foot twisted inwards, ushered his large family into the cafe as a couple sat at the table next to mine.
This couple looked handsome, in spite of her lime green coat, in spite of his ornate Tyrolean hat with its ridiculous feather.
A cappuccino for me and ummm. She points to a cake in the window. All of this to the waitress.
The old man gently waves his hand. He's alright, thanks.
I told you, I come here often, Alex. I was here the other day. No, Monday. No. What day is it?
I don't know either in this moment, in this sunshine.
Her sunglasses are enormous and hair is jet black and she looks confident, as does he with the tufts of white hair screaming out from beneath the hat.
I'm not sure what else they have to do with the house but it's looking good, you must admit. I'm starting to feel better about it all.
The waitress brings out a flan, all custard and gelatine and colourful fruit, and coffee.
I realise I'm smiling and I don't know why.
The woman has fast reflexes. Her hand darts out and grabs the waitress's hand.
We're all slightly alarmed, I realise.
These. Such lovely nails.
The young waitress: Are you Italian? It's just that I'm Italian and that's the first thing we say every single time.
Can you tell me how you do these?
They last for about six weeks and then you can peel them off.
What are you laughing at?
This last to me.
I'm not.
I am,
I stammer.
I'm laughing at this -
This very special, very ordinary moment.
The old woman laughs.
The best kinds of moments, she says.
How could I even try to make them understand that I was drunk from it all before the nuisance sun went away again.


This perfect day.

Is the water rising or am I sinking?

There was a man with his kombi and this was in another lifetime,
as with every other laboured and tedious imagining of mine.
The man appeared kind as he stopped and gave me a lift in a snow-littered place called Enfield in a country called England
and I thanked him as I hopped in without paying too much attention to his face (which could have been any face in any country) or anything else about him in the pre-dawn darkness because I was tired and I couldn't sleep in the bus shelter because it let the sleet through and I was hungry but I had tobacco.
As we set off towards Chelmsford, I asked if he minded if I smoked because like everyone back then, we all had to smoke in cars because it was law. Or should have been, according to anyone who smoked and he said no, so I started to roll up, thinking he meant what he didn't mean at all.
And the next no had all the exclamation of a sharp razor blade.
I mumbled an apology because I was tired and so on and so forth as he said, "The tobacco industry is one of the many hands of world Jewry."
And I nodded lamely because a) he was hissing into my deaf ear and, b) I was etc. etc. etc.
"Did you hear what I said?"
"No, sorry. So I can't smoke?"
"I told you you can't. It's the Rothschilds. The bastards are behind it all. American money. How else do you account for Israel?!"
I was about to respond that I couldn't account for myself 6 hours ago let alone a country a thousand miles away that I knew nothing about.
But it was his kombi and I was stupid for warmth and sleetlessness.
He leaned across and flung open the glovebox and this, to be completely honest, scared the shit out of me.
Guns flashed through my mind.
Knives.
Scissors.
Anything that involved my blood or my lost and lifeless corpse.
But it was a tightly bunched clump of folded A4 sheets with what appeared to be badly mimeoed text and pictures.
All of it a trash testimony to antisemitism courtesy of this cockney kombi driver and his desert-headed, cousin-fucking cohorts kicking heads and soup tins back around the estates.
He was smashing sheet after sheet into my chest as I tried to make sure I lost none of the tobacco that I was still trying to push back into my pouch.
Our time'll come and we'll kill and blah blah fucking blah.
Hate, you say? You, you dumb cunt, you don't know what hate means!
Kike this and Jew that and
god
knows
what
else.
That glovebox appeared to be a bottomless pit of tacky pamphlets and his NHS mouth seemed to be an endless spewhole of bone-headed vitriol.
So we settled into a routine - him spouting to his well and truly captive audience and me internalising my newfound mantra of, "Who poisoned you?! Who poisoned you?! Who poisoned you?!"
with the occasional interjection of, "This is my stop up ahead," and "That was my stop back there".
And, "I'LL LET YOU OUT WHEN I'M FUCKING READY!"
And the flat countryside rolled past and this would be my last day on earth and his ugly face would be the last human thing I ever saw and
suddenly he stopped.
Nowhere. Ploughed, sodden fields. No houses.
Just
nowhere.
___

"Get out."
I did. I seemed to have heard him just fine first time around on this final occasion.
He didn't even lean across to shut the door. He just took off trusting impetus to do the job.
And the last thing I saw were the stickers on the tailgate.
I'm a boy scout leader.
St George.
Proud to be English
Ah well, you know this story already. I've told it to you in a million not so subtle variations.
...
But it all brings me to today and the comments on the news reports as the biggest mass shooting in America unfolds for the entire horrified world to see.
Murderous fools wrapped in their unshaken, despotic convictions defending and playing apologist for other murderous fools and we - the normal and the broken alike - go on holding our breath and waiting.
For nothing to happen once again.
With every beat of my fear-filled heart, I wish it weren't so
but the mantra in my head hasn't changed a solitary syllable.

Weeping.

This strange attraction.

  
  Like everyone else, these past few years have seen me acting increasingly wierded out about Ophiocordyceps unilateralis - or as we all love to call it, the zombie fungus. We've pored over the pictures of ants and spiders after this insidious little sweetheart has wended its way through the viscera and nervous system of its unfortunate host. We've all made the right eeeurgh-type sounds and had those little alarm bells going off all over our limbic systems and corpus callosums, sending a macabre frisson to every fiber of our beings.

  And I suspect that for the first time we are starting to appreciate God and how and why he died.  By dint of necessity, we forcibly ripped the veil of anthropomorphism away from our collective face and gingerly placed what was left under the microscope.  Us humans get the toxoplasmosis gondii from our pet cats and everything else down the pyramid gets entomopathogens such as ophiocordyceps unilateralis.  It reminds me of Julian Barrett's performance in Garth Merenghi's Darkplace (see link below).  It's just so absurd to me that we have the posturing of autarchs and demagogues around the world destroying by seemingly fair means or foul all the good that democracy has brought us and I, like most others, appear only to be able to sit around gnashing my teeth and renting my garments.

  But the real threat is not the Scylla of the flag wavers and the fascists, the patriots and jingoists, the zealots and the firebrands, the tinpot would-be world leaders such as Trump and Putin and Kim Jong Un and Netanyahu and May and Assad and Maduro and... The well seems bottomless at the moment, doesn't it?  No. The threat that increasingly gets me thinking, is the Charybdis of Ophy and its entomo family. And lover, I ain't talkin' about what awaits us in the winter years when our infirm bones cannae move so very fast.  

  I'm talking about my personal morbid fear that perhaps we've already been compelled by these microscopic horrors since before we climbed out of the slimy pond. Perhaps, in my whimsical musings, we'll one day discover the answer to the eternal accusation, "Why do you always have to act like a...?!".  For many, a shocking epiphany that we are of the world, not on it. 

  I'm going to start intravenous infusions of spirulina and filtered warm water immediately because I, for one, do not relish the prospect of our fungal overlord invasion, in order to get my symbiotic thrills.


  In any case, I bet you won't look at mushrooms quite the same way anymore.

The Lord moves in mysterious ways...

Sword.

We couldn't have been six or seven and we had to stay awake through scripture lessons with Mister Towel.
I kid you not. That was his name.  Or was it Trowel?  Either way it was a silly name and it matched his bald Ibis-wrinkle pate and neck to perfection.
And none of us could follow his quavering, vehement logic so instead we all copied Greg Quigley's lead and cut our double ended erasers in half and drew the outlines of a sports car along the side of the half-rubbers.
Towel/Trowel was lost in his rapture.  He never much noticed all the kids pushing eraser hotrods all over their desks - the more adventurous ones even making soft, farty exhaust notes through their lips.
Looking back, it may just have been an age thing. If I had to take a stab at it now, I'd say he was approaching seventy and his high, reedy voice was just starting to lose any sonorous command it may have once held.
Now he was just an old scripture teacher who talked about moneylenders ("Is that like the Bank of New South Wales, Sir? Did they need bank books, Mister Towel/Trowel?") or the parting of the Red Sea ("Can we try that next time our parents take us up to Woy Woy, Sir?  Do you need a special tool or weapon like a ray gun?").
Week in, week out he would talk about this desiccated, dusty world, seemingly dreamed up by an individual or individuals in the throes of heat stroke or delirium long since cured by the new sciences, and read a book out loud about the people who inhabited it. But we were a lost cause before it began.
We were the age of plastic, Mattel, Milton Bradley, Mousetrap, Green Ghost (those radium plastic ghosts!), The Herculoids, Action Man, Big Jim, Barbie, Matchbox, Airfix, Hotwheels, Gilligan's Island, The Champions, George Reeves as Superman, Cool McCool (My pop the cop), The Phantom Agents, SSP racers, Get Smart, The Outer Limits, The Twilight Zone, Friday Night Creature Feature, Scanlens Bubblegum Cards, Columbines and triple bill matinees on Saturday, Tommy Leonetti, White City Saturday Roller Derby, Castlereigh Drag Strip for those with older brothers and sisters, 45s on scratchy portable record players ("Double trouble, I don't know what to do...").
And yes, cigarettes.
I forget who it was but someone suggested you stare at the evenly perforated classroom ceiling until your eyes crossed just a little bit. Et voila! A 3D ceiling would appear as an endless array of small holes started to overlap and swirl around each other. What passed for magic eye pictures in the late nineteen sixties.
And then one day everything changed.
Greg Quigley had somehow managed to separate the chassis from the body on his Red Line Paddy Wagon.  Not only that, he'd somehow acquired a pair of sidecutter pliers and cut the axles on the Hotwheels car with perfect equidistance.
And Towel/Trowel was softly speaking with his maker and hero who always seemed to hover a good two or three feet above his eye line (and Mister Towel/Trowel was nothing, if not very tall) and passionately inveigling us to join in a rousing verse or two of 'Draw your sword!  Raise your sword!  In the name of our great Lord!...".  What person or institution in their right mind would inculcate children of six to sing battle hymns so filled with blood and misery?  We are never so near the Crusades as when we're too young to understand them.
And Towel/Trowel hardly noticed the children barely moving their lips.
All eyes were now on Greg Quigley as, with immense concentration, he gently pressed the red lined Hotwheels axles into what, just yesterday, had been but a poor facsimile of a beautiful rubber sports car.
As the fourth wheel was pressed in with a showman's flourish, Greg smiled a wry smile and nodded, more to himself than anyone in that room.
He set it down for the first cautious test run across the desk and we realised - every last one of us -  with a slow, dawning clarity that a new age of rapture was upon us.

Hot Wheels.