Recovering Instincts

Henrietta with her cousin in Lismore and me with the one of Penny's kids Adam.


"Midlife is perhaps the lsat opportunity to shape your fate before you have to accept it, a phase when you are suddenly taunted by the lives unlived because you can still, though only just, try to live them, a time when you can still become what you might have been. Equally, it's the last time when you are troubled by a pretty face - another path not taken - before you can look on pretty faces with equanimity, not as bearing a diret message to you, but to other, younger folk.

"Midlife is a last chance to keep your word with the 10-year-old you once were, who looked forward at life and made a pact with the future. You wake up in middle age to feel you have drifted. Amid a solid family, spouse and job, you might feel a kind of awakening, though possibly a delusional one fueled by chemistry. The feeling might haunt you into one last eruptive attempt at realighnment.

"What, then, would be the right road?"


Melik Kaylan.


There were so many adventures, the trickling currents; and now, with two teenagers in the house, his origins were masked and the life he had lived, the trauma he had experienced at the same age, kept coming back to him. He had not been warned of the consequence, of the path taken, and faces kept looming, or popping, out of memory. Andrew McSwann, yesterday, who overdosed and woke up dead, or more precisely she, woke up dead next to him. What was that about? It was only a moment when they lost control; when the perfect life they had built for themselves; the multiple partners, the long wild nights, the best of everyting, it wasn't so long since they were here, and I went to visit them, even after I had started to sober up. I thought they were my friends, and they vanished off the face of the planet. She followed him within a matter of months. Nobody was surprised. I last saw him, lurking with intent, at the public phone boxes near the Newtown post office; the scurrying damp wind at our feet.

His professional life became more chaotic in the final years; as happened to us all. Places would take him on, he was a wonderfully talented man, and within months he would be at loggerheads with the management over style, or money, or shifts; and he would storm off self-righteously. Although they were both gay, or both, anyway, slept around, they had married, a full traditional ceremony, they owned their cute little terrace in Camperdown together, and it was always stylish and clean. She left work after she had an affair with one of the girl security guards, beautiful, intense, the girls together, made for each other with their short hair and jagged but beautiful faces, boyish, kind of, but together they had that look, made for each other. The universe had colluded to bring them together. And then something went haywire with the secuirty guard, they were caught making love in the library, whether by the security guards or cameras I could never quite ascertain, and things began to spiral out of control. The security guard suicided and my friend, she who dared to be different, who would show up for work with multi-coloured hair and stare everyone in the face, was heartbroken. And Andrew, long suffering Andrew who had stood by her through everything, got back into the gear and his job was in jeopardy.

And then one day, they were down in Melbourne for some reason, escaping Sydney I presume, our crowd was always going somewhere to escape Sydney, she told him she was leaving him. After all they had been through together. Those wonderful nights when they would stock up with all the right chemicals and party through to dawn in the famous gay parties of the era, the dance clubs, the dance parties, the primal nights when they combined with the infinite, when the music was everything and there was wild drug fuelled sex in the heart of it all, when everything worked and the time, the land, the zeitgeist, it was all theirs. And then it wasn't. She threatened to leave, she couldn't have meant it, she couldn't have survived without him, and she woke up with him dead next to her, a letter, I can't live without you, and an overpowering grief that meant she was never the same again. They went to a twelve step meeting once, sneered at the God stuff, and were gone, wreathed in rationalisation and non-understanding.

The ignominious nature of their death meant there was no funeral. The only trace they left were accidental memories. I walked past the neat little terrace they used to own the other day; I had always liked it, with its aura of exclusion and taste, and now it, too, has become someone elses memory. It was sold in the downward spiral; and the traces are so rare. I met an old friend of theirs last year, during the election campaign, she was working for a Labor politician, of course, and she reminded me we had met at their house, many years ago. And we both agreed, as everyone had agreed, on the tragedy of it all, the terrible waste of talent. They were my best friends, she said. I know, I said, I loved them. And that was it, gone in the pipes, entirely washed away; all for what, for nought. Some people just weren't meant to grow old.

THE BIGGER STORY:

http://ap.google.com/article/ALeqM5isOFwdbq0tsqatW6vJpkDRTI1gMgD8UKV1M80

AP

Obama Says GOP Will Have Dirt on Clinton

By NEDRA PICKLER

CHICAGO (AP) — Sen. Barack Obama predicted Wednesday that Republicans will have a dump truck full of dirt to unload on Hillary Rodham Clinton if the former first lady wins the Democratic presidential nomination, and said he offers the party its best hope of winning the White House this fall.

At a news conference on the morning after Super Tuesday, Obama offered some pointed advice to members of Congress and other party leaders who will attend the national convention this summer as delegates not chosen in primaries or caucuses.

He said that if he winds up winning more delegates in voting than the former first lady, they "would have to think long and hard about how they approach the nomination when the people they claim to represent have said, 'Obama's our guy,'" he said.

The Illinois senator won primaries and caucuses in 13 states on Tuesday, while Clinton won eight and American Samoa. Obama and Clinton were in a tight race in New Mexico.

Obama said he had won a majority of the 1,681 delegates at stake, although The Associated Press tally showed several hundred yet to be allocated.

Asked about Clinton's recent comment that she would not allow herself to be victimized by the type of Swift Boat-style attacks that were leveled against Sen. John Kerry in the 2004 race, Obama said he had been vetted by his opponent in the nominating campaign.

"I have to just respond by saying that the Clinton research operation is about as good as anybody's out there," he said.

"I assure you that having engaged in a contest against them for the last year that they've pulled out all the stops. And you know I think what is absolutely true is whoever the Democratic nominee is the Republicans will go after them. The notion that somehow Senator Clinton is going to be immune from attack or there's not a whole dump truck they can't back up in a match between her and John McCain is just not true."


http://afp.google.com/article/ALeqM5gicA0LgwJ45n5qhW8jCL17NriXWw


Obama, Clinton line up new battles after Super Tuesday

7 hours ago

WASHINGTON (AFP) — The marathon White House race Wednesday headed to new battlegrounds, with Hillary Clinton's Democratic duel with Barack Obama wide open, and Republican John McCain coasting towards victory.

The Super Tuesday nationwide nominating showdown was once seen as the moment when party nominees would be crowned, yet, on the Democratic side at least it solved little, as Clinton and Obama slogged out a split decision.

Clinton, 60, won the three biggest prizes, California, her home state of New York and Massachusetts by handy margins, checking an Obama surge by capturing eight states, keeping alive her quest to be the first woman president.

But Senator Obama won more states, 13, including his own patch of Illinois, battlegrounds Connecticut and Missouri, and Georgia by a landslide. New Mexico was Wednesday still too close to call.

The rivals geared up for a grinding war of attrition in a flurry of looming nominating contests, for delegates doled out by states on a proportional basis.

The Clinton team even raised the possibility that the race could drag on until the party's nominating convention in August.

"It is likely that neither side will ever come out to a large lead in delegates," said campaign communications chief Howard Wolfson.

"And so for all of those who wish for a battle that goes to the convention, in terms of neither side definitively wrapping this up, you could be looking at that here," he said.

A Real Clear Politics running count had Clinton on 900 delegates, not yet half of the 2,025 she needs to capture the nomination. Obama, bidding to be the first black president, was close behind with 824.