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