Exploding Stars

This is a NASA image of an exploding star, apparently the biggest and brightest that has been seen in more than 400 years. The computer is moving very slowly and keeps jamming, adding to my already immense sense of frustration. The damn thing is not even aligning to the left properly and I don't know why it is doing that either. It's been one of those days, I just feel intensely uncomfortable; nothing is quite right, the soul grimy and worked over, my body feeling old, pains in the kidney.

I bashed out two stories at work today, one on kids keeping Australian bearded dragons as pets, the cutest picture of a kid with a lizard, sounds like it might not be getting a run; and the launch of the Greens election campaign.

The Greens launch was down at the New Theatre in King Street, Newtown, ironical in some small way because I had been there a couple of times recently, taking Henrietta down and trying to say to them that she was interested in the theatre and was there anything they could do, encourage her to hang around. All these things are is a matter of finding the right person at the right time, persistence, determination, but most of all, being in the right place at the right time.

There were times when we were cast adrift and couldn't explain what had happened, why there were pains in the neck and why nothing absolutely nothing gelled. The Greens were just classic, the whole event full of earnest healthy people so joyfully committed. I sat next to Jack Mundy, a hero of the left because he was a building unionist who launched the green bans on a couple of particular sites around Sydney, including from memory over on the north shore around the Shell Refinery. How you going, aging well? He asked. No, I replied, and fiddled determinedly with my phone. I knew I knew him but didn't put the name to the face at first, until the compulsory aboriginal ceremony at the beginning, the recognition of country which has become an essential part of many Australian functions, and an aboriginal chap went on about respecting our elders and the spirits of all the elders who had gone before, and the elders in our midst, including Jack Mundy, who was sitting there in the centre of the theatre. The place burst in to applause and the lights shone on us and I looked around to see where exactly he was, only to realise he was sitting right next to me and had been friendly because of the stories we had done in the past. I had a reputation, or used to have a a reputation, for being an old fashioned straight shooter, someone who you could trust in the media, who wasn't going to do you over, in a business where everyone was five minutes old; and so I was often greeted in friendly terms.

I wish I believed in things like they do, I said back at the office. They're so committed, so convinced they have grabbed the high moral ground. Climate change has been a gift to these people, they've all found something to believe in which sounds so wonderfully high minded and really doesn't require any more commitment than saying all the right things at all the right places. I used to be on the side of the sceptics, that it was just another mass hallucination by the left, but maybe, as the evidence mounts, they've got it right after all. I don't know. All I know is they've found something to believe in; and have adopted it with religious fervour. If you don't believe in combatting climate change as the greatest challenge to face us all; then you're clearly a moral moron.

Love Greens Stop Homophobia went the kaleidoscope of images; with the hip-hop soundtrack grunting "Green Solution" and the crowd waving their placards, No More Coal Mines. Vote for tomorrow, today, is their slogan. Will you vote for your children, asked the federal leader Bob Brown. It feels good to be amongst the Greens, people who are prepared to gift their own efforts to future generations. Oh if only I believed, in anything really. Once I grasped at the notion of falling, or exploding stories, as a way of describing all the gifted disaster prone friends who had fallen into disarray, died young, left me here as an accident careening unguided into the future; but even that was open to suspicion. The human capacity for delusion knows no bounds.