Mother's Day

Knock knock.
Who's there?
Isabel.
Isabel who?
Isabel needed on my bike.
Oh that's an old one. That's as old as me.
But it made you laugh!
Who said I was laughing at you?
I just know.
Maybe I was. A bit.
And you'd light up another cigarette and take another sip of your beer and return to your favorite pastime of gazing out over the Devlin Street traffic and the vista of the valley clean all the way to West Ryde,
And you would be gone.
I could have sat there watching you all day. Sitting on the carpet pushing toy cars or hand painting an Airfix kit or playing with my prized Big Jim doll or reading books about telling the time and How The Snowies Were Made and learning about jobs long vanished such as steeplejacks and icemen.
You gave me that wonder, Ma. You gave me the gift of everything's going to work out and work out well somehow. You gave the gift of talking out of turn in a too-loud voice ensuring everyone remembers the occasion for lifetimes to come.
You gave us life and you gave us love.
You gave this much and much more besides and in return all I've given are the occasional pale remembrances and this stupid smile that appeared the day you brought me into the world.

Jean Isabel Connell nee McKee 1919-1998.

I wish I was a fisherman...

To you beautiful crazies in France.

"Remember your humanity, and forget the rest." - Albert Einstein. 9th July 1955.

I'm not that smart to pretend to know anything of nuance or subtlety. On the whole, I despise proselytisers - be they religious, political, entrepreneurial or cultural. And if we look at the net sum of my existence, I'm just a cheap blow-hard dabbler who, for the most part, knows very little about most things.
Which is why I have to chuckle at myself when I send out this imprecation to all of you readers in France. And that plea is this:
Please vote.
That's all.
Just vote.
I understand many, if not most of you are jaded by your politicians and, in fact, all politics and politicians the world over.  But as I've seen here in my own country (Australia), at times like this I have to remind myself that I AM the government. There's a part of me, of all of us, that is the best in each of those politicians - irrespective of their platforms and policies. After all, no monster is pure evil. And at the end of the day, I don't care if you hate Macron and love Le Pen, just get your arse out and vote.
Actually that's bullshit, I do care.  I can't stand this horseshit portmanteau/euphemism of alt-right. It's Fascism by any other name and although I have friends of every political persuasion just to ensure I'm still in with the non-bias confirmation brigades who wait silently in the wings to lynch me the moment I take one false step, I cannot for the life of me see how rationalising and exalting hate and ignorance, fear and greed can ever bring about any real and worthwhile change. If you want a world overrun with fuckwits like Trump and Putin, by all means, go for it.  If you want to revert to the romantic and insane delusion that you are a powerful empire a la Brexit, then yes, by all means run with the Le Pen oligarchy/autocracy. If you're so desperate for some kind of absolutism (which, let's be clear, is never anything democracy can bring to the table - democracy has no centre as can be understood on the whole. It never holds.  It just keeps burbling and bumbling forwards.  But fuck it, unlike the others, at least it IS moving forwards, blind and silly though it can be), then again run with who you feel will bring about such Pyrrhic triumphs.
But you will know what is right in your heart, whether I concur with you or not.  Otherwise you wouldn't go on reading the nonsense I write.
See?  Now I hate myself. My tawdry proselytising.
But irrespective of my small hopes, please get out and get to the ballot. You - all of you - are the guardians of one of the most inspirational countries in the world, in history.
My humble desire is that you hold your arms wide and embrace this rich guardianship so that France can remain in that worthwhile state of very ordinary and very human exaltation for boundless lifetimes to come.
Alright. I'll shut up in
3...
2...
1.

The power is measured by the pound or the fist...

Monsters all.

I grew up believing you got out of the madness by manufacturing your own.
And they bought it with some derision, some torment and some reluctance.
I heard tell on many occasions you had the snot kicked out of you but still you did not serve.
I'm married now with a new born son, you would say.
I cannot hear in that ear, you said. (This because you had perforated your own eardrum with a pencil and in my books that takes some small courage for a coward).
Your brother went off to Africa with the 9th and stayed stock still under the stinking, unrecognisable remains of human beings whose uniforms were the same colour as his own while the enemy slowly passed, gloating and terrified as he himself had been mere days before.  In this sanity-rending manner he saved his body, but as with all else about war, I cannot for a second imagine what it cost him inside himself.
And although he would see little of the viciousness of shot, shit and shell, yet another brother would lose the little a young man can know of himself in the interminable deluges of New Guinea.
While you were daily subjected to the ordeals of avoiding an honest day's work and grubbing through the less famed battles of  Annandale and Leichhardt, Darlinghurst, Glebe and Rozelle. Grifting and stealing and wheedling and scamming where you could, keeping a razor in your pocket, just as you had done as a boy, as a teen (for let's face it, you were ancient by the age of twenty two, just as your daughters and sons after you would be).
So many things I was told, never to learn if they were true or not.
Ah well,
I'm old now and past caring and I only know that I didn't like you as you lived
But at least with the going down of the sun and in the morning,
I will remember them.
Very differently to how I remember you.
And not so very differently at all.

Wail

A harbour memory.

Twelve years ago, I had a job as a one man helpdesk for a small insurance firm right next to Luna Park. The pay was so poor, I remember sitting in Bradfield Park debating whether I could afford a pie or a vanilla slice.  Judiciously. I chose the vanilla slice and spent my lunch hour sitting on the grass, gumming up the pages of a volume on Alexander the Great I was wolfing down, and feeling that perfectly strange Sydney autumn air on my face.
I wonder what the person who now owns that book with those stuck-together pages must think of me?

Under the bridge...

Orange

I keep looking at the current crop of conservative parties around the world and I hear Tricky Dicky and crinkly haired Henry whispering, in conspiratorial tones, that hackneyed chestnut:
RN:  "Hank. Just tell Zhou Enlai that I'll do it.  I mean I've drunk the fucking Kool Aid, man.  He thought Rolling Thunder was a shit storm?  Well tell that motherfucker, I'm gonna exhume the bones of Emperor MacArthur and go fucking NUCLEAR on that stupid tonsure of his!"
HK:  "Will do, Dick.  Hey!  Why don't we leak it to the press. I've got it!  We'll call it the Madman Theory!"
RN: "Yes!  First we take out Giap and those northern bastards and then we take back north of the 38th parallel. Then scare the crap out of Enlai and then we rollllllllll across that motherfucking Yalu like a tidal wave."
Exeunt our antiheroes chuckling with mirth.

And now it has devolved into this - the Complete Dickhead Theory, aided by the Teflon Paradigm and the Sleight Of Hand Hypothesis.
And New Yorkers will sit around holding up Bic lighters against the growing darkness, singing Francis Farmer Will Have Her Revenge On Seattle.
God, I need my morning cup of tea right about now.

Orange

and in the trail of innocent blood, the flood of unanswered questions.

Does music stop the fuckwits with their poor life choices, the cruise missiles, the lies - so outrageously huge we just seem to drop to our knees and swallow 'em wholesale, the delusions and excesses of conviction, creed, culture and loneliness, the swerving trucks and the owning of weapons of mass and granular destruction?
Is music the pathetically frivolous and whimsical lagnappe doled out to friends, enemies and strangers alike in order to get everyone off the case, off the trail, off the cloud, off the scent, out of one's hair, out of one's heart, out of one's house and (up to and including) out of one's life?
Can music change a mind, a stream of thought, a synaptic/sodium response, a way of life, a conviction, tenets of religion, culture or philosophy, drug abuse patterns, emotional abuse patterns, physical abuse patterns, self-harm patterns, behavioural or even physiological shortcomings, voting behaviours, world views, how you treat the person seated or standing next to you right now, your life or mine?
Probably not.
But
then
again
...

Stop the world...

Battle hymn.

Today. Today...
Today is the day of dragging out leads. Of dialling dials and spending sweat- inducing hours tweaking tweaks. Today is the day of FX sends and returns. It is the day of 18 feet cables. Today is the day of Epiphone SG and Les Paul knock-offs and Rickenbacker 381s and 620s, the day of the Warmoth and the Strat.
Today is the day of 12 strings and six; nylon and steel.
Today is a time filled with tubes and solid states.
Distortions, modulations, compressions, delays and reverberations will fill this day.
Today is the day of the whammy bar.
Today I will fail and I will succeed because I've no idea what I'm doing.
I've done it all before at least a million times, with bloodied and broken fingertips, and still I have absolutely no clue on how to fight.
But I am armed and I am armoured.
Let this war begin again.

When I was old.