Well things barely kept pace, fine once, gaps between, spirits soaring; all things were looming into a fine entrance. He couldn't have mastered the words so quickly if he hadn't been a local, at home anywhere, telling us what they knew to be true; black cheerful faces and mirrors everywhere. He could talk any talk, walk any walk. The desire to drink was lifted from me, they cried ecstatically, and he didn't believe a word of it.
There's been another wierd week of things inter-connecting, Martin and the former Prime Minister Paul Keating; Martin in his new role as policy adviser to one of Sydney's largest western councils; mini-empires in themselves, over 400 staff. Organising a Mayor's forum where PK was one of the star turns. What a spiel. Astonishingly arrogant. These people were a million miles from the people they supposedly represented.
The city was a patchwork quilt and he had long ago given up any hope of embracing it. The city he had once loved was no longer his. It's been Mardi Gras week and the streets have been crowded, very active. Out and proud. Well hung declared one lad's t-shirt. The empires were parasitic. There was no reason to embrace the mood. He hadn't been to a Mardi Gras in years. He took the kids once, when they were about five; but even though lots of other parents did it was barely worth the effort; with the impossible crowds, impossibility of finding a parking spot; the march towards the party impossible with kids in tow. Now they were tweenagers and too impossibly aware of everything to want to go to a gay mardi gras, even though they've grown up in the middle of Sydney. I read to them every night when they were growing up, and Sammy wouldn't read a book if his life depended on it. Well there you go. They danced in the distance and he could barely hear them; it was that long ago.
At other times and in other forms; that had been the way of it.
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