Drunken Midgets

*



Big Night On The Town
drunk on the dark streets of some city,
it's night, you're lost, where's your
room?
you enter a bar to find yourself,
order scotch and water.
damned bar's sloppy wet, it soaks
part of one of your shirt
sleeves.
It's a clip joint-the scotch is weak.
you order a bottle of beer.
Madame Death walks up to you
wearing a dress.
she sits down, you buy her a
beer, she stinks of swamps, presses
a leg against you.
the bar tender sneers.
you've got him worried, he doesn't
know if you're a cop, a killer, a
madman or an
Idiot.
you ask for a vodka.
you pour the vodka into the top of
the beer bottle.
It's one a.m. In a dead cow world.
you ask her how much for head,
drink everything down, it tastes
like machine oil.

you leave Madame Death there,
you leave the sneering bartender
there.

you have remembered where
your room is.
the room with the full bottle of
wine on the dresser.
the room with the dance of the
roaches.
Perfection in the Star Turd
where love died
laughing.

Charles Bukowski



Of all the thousands of news stories he had done over the last quarter of a century, often it was the ones involving alcoholics he remembered the best. The woman with the two black eyes, crying pointlessly in the park, with the blokes hanging on. Or the time when he was sent out to do one of those summer reading features the Herald was always so fond of at the festive season. We were on the road for days. One of the projects was to follow around a circus for several days. We settled on the Ashtons, the patrician elders of the circus fraternity in Australia, their travelling show an elaborate operation. They were touring the small towns around Wagga Wagga, there in the dusty summer heat, the towns where nothing ever happened and the circus coming was a big event, where the shouts of children filled the air and families came down just to look at them setting up.

The elephants were tendered under the gum trees in the stifling heat, and rocked back and forth rhythmically in that sad obsessive behaviour of chained animals, back and forth, back and forth, there in the stifling Australian heat, thousands of miles from the lands their ancestors roamed. Nothing could look sadder than those hobbled elephants, unless it was the giant cats in the tiny cages, changing from one cage to another via the narrow channels of iron netting. We followed them, we absorbed them. And in the evenings we bought cartons of beer and sat with the workers drinking. The evil little drunken dwarf who always seemed to be there when cans were being handed out, befriended us, perhaps just as a regular source of alcohol, perhaps for conversation beyond the tiny group with which he constantly travelled, and was now permanently associated.

He was very intelligent, as alcoholics can be, and the conversations and the cans of beer went long into the night. If there was anything that could be said, anything he wanted to say, anything that would make his life easier; but that of course was not to be. He was short, that's for sure, barely more than a couple of feet tall; and had a twisted view on just about everything and everybody, from his bosses who lived in their grand caravans well away from the sides of the main tents. And there we heard every bit of bitter contempt this man held against the world, laughing at the bleak view of himself and everyone else. How would you like to be an object of ridicule and curiosity for the public to gawk at? How would you like to be me, trapped here, year after year. There is nowhere else for me.

He was always drunk, first thing in the morning, last thing at night. He was tiny and it didn't take many cans to get him going. We were from the city, a successful Sydney journalists and photograph, people with lives, careers, acclaim, fame, people with lovers to go home to. He slept in a narrow bunk with several others crammed into the sleeping quarters; dirty, dusty, smelly, cramped. This is my life, he said, and he looked out across the field at the failing light, watching the elephants rock back and forth, watching the dwarf reach for another can. If anything was to be believed, if anything was to mean anything anymore, then here in this fading scene, with the night's customers already beginning to queue, here it was.

There are always hierarchies, there are always winners and losers. He could feel the death and the smell of defeat already beginning to creep through his own bones. He went and bought another carton, keeping the receipt for expenses. Entertaining the locals. The stamps they always carried just in case: Thank you, call again. Rule one, the old soldiers had told him, never ever ever give back a single cent of your expenses. The cans popped all night. The dwarf got drunker and drunker. They ridiculed the government of the day, how little the politicians understood the lives ordinary people lived. He could hear failure and disease like other people could hear bird songs. The elephants rocked, the tigers stirred restlessly in their tiny cages, a young runaway helped with the chores, and the Ashtons themselves retired to their comfortably air conditioned caravans. He watched without comment as the dwarf stole several cans from the carton, and when he realised he had been observed just shrugged. I'm going to need them later, the drunken dwarf said. And he just shrugged; of course he would.



THE BIGGER STORY:

http://www.guardian.co.uk/world/2009/aug/20/afghanistan-voter-turnout

The classrooms serving as polling stations across the relatively secure and prosperous plains north of the Afghan capital were crammed full of people – but precious few of them were there to cast their vote.

Election workers and campaign observers milled about with little either to do or to observe. In one school in Kalakan, a solitary presidential ballot paper sat in the bottom of the translucent voting box reserved for a nearby community of Kuchi nomads.

An election observer from the Philippines, touring a patch of polling stations in full body armour, said not enough had been done to transport such people from their far-flung homes or to educate them on their rights.

If demand warranted it, officials were permitted to extend voting beyond 4pm, but at a mosque in a busy part of eastern Kabul the officer in charge was preparing to close down on time and start counting ballots. "We haven't seen anyone for an hour," he said.

Most of the usually choked routes in and out of Kabul were almost empty, but on one baking, unpaved road in Kapisa province we came across a group of 10 men halfway through their two-hour walk to their nearest polling station in a distant village surrounded by uncleared minefields.

"We wouldn't have come if it was not a holiday today," said Mohamed Rasoul, who does backbreaking work at the local gravel mines.

Although they were just a few hours' drive from the capital, rural values ruled – none of their wives or female family members would be voting, they said.

http://www.guardian.co.uk/world/2009/aug/19/bolivia-cocaine-bar-route-36

Tonight we have two types of cocaine; normal for 100 Bolivianos a gram, and strong cocaine for 150 [Bolivianos] a gram." The waiter has just finished taking our drink order of two rum-and-Cokes here in La Paz, Bolivia, and as everybody in this bar knows, he is now offering the main course. The bottled water is on the house.

The waiter arrives at the table, lowers the tray and places an empty black CD case in the middle of the table. Next to the CD case are two straws and two little black packets. He is so casual he might as well be delivering a sandwich and fries. And he has seen it all. "We had some Australians; they stayed here for four days. They would take turns sleeping and the only time they left was to go to the ATM," says Roberto, who has worked at Route 36 (in its various locations) for the last six months. Behind the bar, he goes back to casually slicing straws into neat 8cm lengths.

La Paz, Bolivia, at 3,900m above sea level – an altitude where even two flights of stairs makes your heart race like a hummingbird – is home to the most celebrated bar in all of South America: Route 36, the world's first cocaine lounge. I sit back to take in the scene – table after table of chatty young backpackers, many of whom are taking a gap year, awaiting a new job or simply escaping the northern hemisphere for the delights of South America, which, for many it seems, include cocaine.

"Since they are an after-hours club and serve cocaine the neighbours tend to complain pretty fast. So they move all the time. Maybe if they are lucky they last three months in the same place, but often it is just two weeks. Route 36 is a movable feast," says a Bolivian newspaper editor who asked not to be named. "One day it is in one zone and then it pops up in another area. Certainly it is the most famous among the backpacker crowd but there are several other places that are offering cocaine as well. Because Route 36 changes addresses so much there is a lot of confusion about how many cocaine bars are out there."

This new trend of 'cocaine tourism' can be put down to a combination of Bolivia's notoriously corrupt public officials, the chaotic "anything goes" attitude of La Paz, and the national example of President Evo Morales, himself a coca grower. (Coca is the leaf, and cocaine is the highly manufactured and refined powder.) Morales has diligently fought for the rights of coca growers and tossed the US Drug Enforcement Agency (DEA) out of Bolivia. While he has said he will crack down on cocaine production, he appears to be swimming against the current. In early July, the largest ever cocaine factory was discovered in eastern Bolivia. Capable of producing 100kg a day, the lab was run by Colombians and provided the latest evidence that Bolivia is now home to sophisticated cocaine laboratories. The lab was the fourth large facility to be found in Bolivia this year.

http://www.google.com/hostednews/ap/article/ALeqM5jh9MXUrDOqTD3P6uA4nf-Gj32kZQD9A6OFKO0

BUENA PARK, Calif. — The search for a reality TV contestant wanted for questioning in the death of his ex-wife shifted to his native Canada on Thursday as police said he apparently slipped across the border after driving and boating more than 1,000 miles from Southern California.

A car and empty boat trailer belonging to Ryan Alexander Jenkins, 32, were found at a marina in the remote northwest Washington town of Blaine, and authorities believe from there he may have simply walked into Canada. Police want to question Jenkins after the nude body of his ex-wife, a former model, was found stuffed in a suitcase and left in a trash bin in Buena Park.

Whatcom County Sheriff's deputies received a report Wednesday that a man matching Jenkins' description arrived by boat at Point Roberts, Wash., about 10 miles from Blaine at the tip of a peninsula. The point is reachable by land only from Canada.

Canadian Public Safety Minister Peter Van Loan said police agencies across Canada are on the lookout for Jenkins.

Jenkins is from Calgary, Alberta, about 600 miles east of Point Roberts. Acting Calgary Police Chief Al Redford said a fugitive apprehension unit is checking with Jenkins' connections and associates in the city.

Jenkins was a contestant on the VH1 reality TV show "Megan Wants a Millionaire." Police said he is a "person of interest" in the death of Jasmine Fiore, 28, a former model whose strangled body was found over the weekend.

After taping for the VH1 series finished, Jenkins met Fiore in Las Vegas casino in March and the two soon got married, said Fiore's mother, Lisa Lepore.

But in May, "they had a big blowout," Lepore said. "She had the marriage annulled."

Blowing In The Cold Wind

*



Consummation Of Grief

I even hear the mountains
the way they laugh
up and down their blue sides
and down in the water
the fish cry
and the water
is their tears.
I listen to the water
on nights I drink away
and the sadness becomes so great
I hear it in my clock
it becomes knobs upon my dresser
it becomes paper on the floor
it becomes a shoehorn
a laundry ticket
it becomes
cigarette smoke
climbing a chapel of dark vines. . .
it matters little
very little love is not so bad
or very little life
what counts
is waiting on walls
I was born for this
I was born to hustle roses down the avenues of the dead.

Charles Bukowski




Blowing in the cold wind at the back of that desolate farm, heralding nothing but cold sprinkles from a stormy sky to settle the dust, was an old sheet of paper he chased across the parched fields. The End Of Sydney, it announced, and he realised it was an old flyer for a party he had held back in the 1980s. Some might have pointed out to him that just because he was leaving, he was heading off to London to live for a while, that it didn't mean the city wasn't going to keep on going. But he airily dismissed any attempts to rein in his grandiosity; for he knew where the world was shaking and what meant what. He invited everybody he knew; and hundreds turned to crash the party. It was a great success, humungeous. He had taken some of the crystal pains of acid that were around at that time, White Light, they might have been called, and he stood next to the fireplace greeting guests, but basically abdocating all the normal roles of host.

He was too far gone. The grog flowed and everybody bought more. The rooms were packed. Dean, Dean he could have so easily loved and had happily shared this place with for months, was overwhelmed, drunk, everyone was drunk, and the crowds kept coming. Keith, sick sick Keith who was already on his sharp decline into an eternal Housing Commission life, one leg shorter than the other, taunted him over his predilictions, his love of amphetamines, taunted him for no good reason while the world went whack whack whack in the crystal light and he could never understand why, why taunt a fellow traveller. There had been so many good parties. There had been so much mirth, so much defiance of the mainstream, so much clarity in an unclear world. Oh to be young, only once, he thought, if only once again, no wonder they sold their souls for eternal youth.

But it was not to be and he reached down to pick up the piece of paper, which had become lodged against a thorn bush. Out to the back was the collection of derlict cars the neighbour had collected over eons of family life. Nearby were the houses of his neighbours, unemployed men with wives who kept popping out babies and so they had to do nothing but drink and smoke and bong on and pass their eternal days pottering around their humble homes. They rarely went anywhere. They rarely did any work. He had asked several of them to help him unload the truck but somehow or other they were all too busy just then. Maybe another day mate. The government stimulus packages had made them lazy. The generous welfare from the babies meant they didn't have to work. It was cheap rent and nothing happened here; unless someone got more pissed than usual. It was clear he was going to hell in a hand basket and none of his dreams would ever come true.

This was the barren waste on which he had been abandoned, and the curdled little dwarf inside, drunk, misshappen, very funny, bitter as, well that little dwarf was just going to have to wait a little bit longer before he had his time in the sun. He bundled the bit of paper under a box. Oh God how lonely he had felt, way back then, way back now, withddrawal sweats shivering through him in what seemed like the firswt time in years. This was the price to pay, he thought as he talked absently to the dog and fed the pigs the neighbours kept in his shed. How bored they must be, stuck in that shed all day, everyday, with the only interuption the daily feed from the neighbours, when they remembered. It wasn't ever going to be Christmas again. As he walked up the road the kangaroos jumped out of the way.

Bruce was sitting on his verandah and invited him in for a cup of coffee. He was caretaking two adjoining houses, and was talking of moving on. Why leave here? he asked. It's nice. Try living in Sydney. Nothing happens here mate, nothing. It's a small village. Fart and they all know about it. He drank the instant coffee but nothing could warm his ancient bones. He just kept on shivering. I've got a hangover, Bruce declared, as if this might be news. Went to the pub? For a few. Bloody hangovers. It'll pass. I'm moving on, to the coast, where it's warm, where things are happening. Where there's gorgeous babes on the beach. Nothing happens here. Nothing. I tell you, nothing's happened since you were last here.

Maybe that's a good thing. Try living here full time; then you'd see. There was nothing to see but shreds of paper blowing across frozen fields, old party invitations, old scraps of uncompleted books, just old scraps that for some reason he had never thrown out. The winter sun sank quickly and the cold settled ever more deeply into the frost hollow. He hunched over the fire but it did no good. Some days may be meant to be joined, others were simply meant to be endured. That was all he could muster. He put another log on the fire and the flame flared briefly. He could heara the sound of the pub drifting down from up the street. Nothing could make a difference now.



http://www.news.com.au/heraldsun/story/0,21985,25955508-5005961,00.html

FEDERAL parliament is expected to sign off on a huge boost to renewable energy today.

The Government and the Opposition agreed on the Renewable Energy Target (RET) scheme yesterday.

The scheme will be put to a vote in the Senate toay, then it needs to go back to the House of Representatives for final approval, which is also expected today.

The RET will see 20 per cent of electricity come from renewable sources by 2020.

http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/south_asia/8210624.stm

Security forces in Afghanistan are on high alert on the eve of the country's presidential election, which the Taliban have vowed to disrupt.

Some 300,000 Afghan and foreign troops will be deployed to protect the 17 million voters at 6,969 polling sites.

President Hamid Karzai has urged Afghans to turn out to vote "for the country's stability, for the country's peace, for the country's progress".

Earlier, troops killed three suspected militants who attacked a bank in Kabul.

The government meanwhile came under severe criticism for ordering a ban on the media reporting violence on election day.

The United Nations has asked for the ban to be lifted, saying the Afghan constitution guarantees a free press. Some journalists have reported being harassed and beaten by security forces.

On Tuesday, more than 20 people were killed in attacks across the country, including a suicide bombing in the capital.

http://english.aljazeera.net/news/middleeast/2009/08/2009819162711218741.html

An all-out attack on the Iraqi government came in the form of a series of powerful assaults that hit central Baghdad, the Iraqi capital.

The attacks raise a number of questions, among them who had the capacity to carry out the co-ordinated attacks and was the US right to pull out of Iraq's cities when it did?

As Baghdad reels from its bloodiest day this year, experts and journalists consider who might have been behind the attacks and what their motives might have been.

Mosab Jasim, Al Jazeera English producer in Baghdad

Jasim: It would be really difficult to enter the Green Zone with a truck filled with explosives
In my experience, getting inside the Green Zone to cover media activity is not easy.

First of all, you have to get at least two or three badges that allow you inside. Then, you have to cross through at least two or three security checkpoints, which are at least 600m outside of the Green Zone. At these checkpoints, you get searched, and after you pass through them, you are allowed on to the street that leads to the Green Zone and, from there, there is a final checkpoint and that's when you've finally arrived.

So it would be really difficult to bring in a truck filled with explosives unless it was co-ordinated from inside the Green Zone. Obtaining a badge means you've gone through all the clearance procedures. The bombers who were able to put the truck inside the area of the Green Zone had gone through all the necessary security measures and once they were cleared, they also received the badges which gave them access into the area.

I spoke to our police source in Baghdad and he was telling me that his sources said an attack would occur every three minutes from each other, exactly timed. He said the attacks had nothing to do with sectarian violence, but that they were something very well organised and co-ordinated.

Aqil al-Saffar, former deputy minister of national security in Iraq

Life was normal and it is still normal in Iraq after these blasts. I say this on so many occasions and now the government is trying to do their best to implement better security and build-up our security forces, but the foreign countries meddling with our regime, some of them Arab, are trying to interfere with our security situation and stop us from improving the situation here.

We are still in the process of building our security forces and I would say we have reached a good percentage of building our security but, maybe, it will take us months, or towards the end of this year until we have a safer Iraq. Up until now, I am satisfied, and people here are quite satisfied, with the way things are moving along.

Seen Better Days: The Envy of Others

*



It goes a little something like this

In my shoes my toes are busted,
My kitchen says my bread is molded,
I got a good job at the dollar store,
One foot in the hole, one foot gettin' deeper,
with a broken mirror and a blown out speaker
And I ain't got much else to lose.
I'm faded, flat busted;
I've been jaded I've been dusted.
I know that I've seen better days.
One foot in the hole, one foot gettin' deeper,
Crank it to eleven, blow another speaker and
I ain't got, I ain't got much to loose
'Cause

(Chorus)
I've seen better days I've been star of many plays
I've seen better days and the bottom drops out.
I've seen better days I've been star of many plays
I've seen better days and the bottom drops out.

Now My cup's filled up with five buck wine
I find myself here all the time
Another rip in the glass another chip in my tooth
Rained on I've been stained on
Found another goat I tried to put the blame on
And now I'm steppin on all the cracks
So I guess there ain't no use
'Cause

(Chorus)
I've seen better days I've been star of many plays
I've seen better days and the bottom drops out.
I've seen better days I've been star of many plays
I've seen better days and the bottom drops out.

Woman: "Do you like my gucci bag?"

That's beautiful, beautiful

Check it check it check it out,

I'm bent like glass second hand like glory,
Missed the bus but I'm in no hurry,
Molasses fast no business born,
One foot in the hole, one foot getting deeper,
Crank it to eleven, blow another speaker and
I aint got i aint got much to lose
'Cause

(Chorus)
I've seen better days I've been star of many plays
I've seen better days and the bottom drops out.
I've seen better days I've been star of many plays
I've seen better days,
I've seen better days,
I know that i've seen better days,
(the bottom drops out)
I've been the star, of so many plays,
(and the bottom drops out)
Walked on the edge with that hobo way.
(the bottom drops out)
'Cause I know I know that I've seen better days
(and the bottom drops out)

Now I'm real thirsty...




In every faded bar, in every glance of young blood, in the dark passes for which we were so blessed, in the Commonwealth of nations and the glances at handsome young men, at the envied lives of others, young, fresh, optimistic, happy, healthy, they were everywhere, coating the street, taunting him. The city is no longer yours. Nothing belongs to you anymore. You are the centre of nothing, a wastrel on the edges of space, caught in the gaps between reality and unreality, between fantasy and truth, everything gone, his stomach in turmoil, his heart full of lost loves and dreadful reproach, for everything had gone wrong, everything, and now was not the time to do anything but endure. He waited for his lift. He heard the passing minutes creaking in the walls. He faded in and out of consciousness but knew that all was not well, in his sickly spirit, in his sweaty flesh, in the depression that cloaked his every thought, every move.

So it was that he looked up from the gutter and envied everyone who passed, the lives of others, fabulous, self confident, comfortable in their daily routines. He looked up and couldn't see anything but other people going about their duties with and air of self-confidence he could never display, not now, not since he took the wrong turn so many years ago and lay now, dying, in the park so close to where he used to work. We stood at the turning point, the therapeutic phrase went, and he could remember it clearly, that turning point, the last turning point of so many, before he took the dive and became nothing but another of the city's derelicts. You know why you write so well about those people, Malcolm Brown at the Herald had said, because you're half-way there yourself. And so it was that haunting phrases passed in and out of his consciousness, and when he talked to the Mission Beat worker, he said curious things that made him wonder: who was this guy?

But he had seen it all before, crossing back and forth across the great divide, tears flowing down their faces as they scuttled off into their hiding places with bottles of cheap plonk, everything has failed. "I never wanted it," the woman said, with astonishing clarity. "I never wanted it." He knew exactly of what she spoke. There were days he didn't know whether he wanted it either, the normal life, the comfortable routines, comfortable inside his own skin, comfortable in the company of others. He had felt so at odds, A Mood Apart, as the book is called, that he had been comfortable with the idea of always feeling different, of never fitting in, of being out of sorts with the world at large. You're the saddest person I've ever seen, what is it, someone commented, and it was just another phrase in a string of humiliations, make way, wide load, that emphasised time and again: he wasn't the person he used to be.

It wasn't the same anymore, and age sat badly on all of them. There could be no way forward. There could be nothing that would make a different. I've dropped. You will die. I don't want to go to detox baby, no, no, no. And the sweat poured out of him unceremoniously, because he couldn't get enough booze inside him to keep the demons at bay, he couldn't stop the withdrawals of decades taking over his soul, he couldn't shatter his way into wakefulness, or pass through the thin divide into normal consciousness. He couldn't say: hey, I'm happy now. He couldn't march his way through the quagmire, or ask for blessings, or be renounced. He couldn't say hello, how are you, and smile in a welcoming way. He couldn't be a proud person proud of his achievements, proud of his children, proud of his station in life. He could see the spikes of grass close up. He could feel the dribble coming out of his mouth. He could smell the taste of vomit and he could see blood on his hands, although he didn't know whether it was his or someone elses.

Nobody in the world wants to know me when I drink, nobody, he heard the kid say, and he welcomed the way forward and he talked in circles about everything that had happened. It was hard. It was desperately hard. He didn't know why he had had to make things so damn difficult, but he had. And so he bought grace and tiny moments of time, tiny slivers when he was the person he once was and he could see clearly his own position, there, prostrate in the park, dirty, smelly, sick, broken. They nodded patronisingly when he told them he used to be a journalist, he used to be a real person, and they smiled at the fantasies these old codgers could come up with; and he could see the high flickering light on the top of the sky scrapers, calling him, calling him, it's time to leave this place, it's time to leave this body, it's time to leave this plane. Have a better go next time, if there is a next time, if this isn't the end of the cycle. You will never remember the ruin you made of this one. You will start again; and destroy another life all over again with self indulgence and despair. And so he lifted his head up out of the grass, wiped the spittle out of his mouth, brushed the dust from his eyes and looked up: take me now, he whispered, take me now.



THE BIGGER STORY:

http://www.abc.net.au/news/stories/2009/08/14/2655546.htm?section=justin

Efforts to recover the bodies of the 13 people who died in a plane crash near the Kokoda Track are due to resume this morning, after bad weather stalled the recovery process yesterday.

An Australian helicopter was unable to winch a group of victim identification specialists from the Australian Federal Police into the crash site yesterday.

Nine Australians were among the 13 people killed when a small chartered plane crashed en route to Kokoda from Port Moresby on Tuesday.

PNG's civil aviation authority says the remains of three people have been removed from the wreckage, and they remain at the crash site.

It is hoped that the construction of a temporary helipad near the crash site will speed up the recovery and investigation process today.

Foreign Affairs Minister Stephen Smith said yesterday the identification and recovery process will be complicated.

"We will continue to be ... in close and regular contact with the families, as we do everything that we can to make this very difficult time for them as smooth as is humanly possible," he said.

"They are now forced to wait some time before their loved ones are returned to them."

http://www.canberratimes.com.au/news/national/national/general/climate-ripe-for-an-early-election/1595853.aspx

Australians have moved a step closer to an early federal election after the Senate yesterday rejected Bills to set up an emissions trading scheme.

As expected, the Opposition, Greens, Family First senator Steve Fielding and Independent senator Nick Xenophon scuttled the legislation described as ''very difficult and contentious'' by Prime Minister Kevin Rudd.

The Federal Government will re-introduce the Bills in three months' time and will be forced to negotiate with their political opponents or the crossbenchers to pass the legislation. If the Senate rejects the Bills a second time, MrRudd will be handed the trigger to call an early election fought on the environment.

Yesterday, Mr Rudd blasted the Opposition for voting against the Bills to set up an emissions trading scheme centrepiece of the plan to tackle climate change.

''They are absolutely demonstrating themselves as being prisoners of the past, prisoners of their own internal party disunity,'' Mr Rudd said.

''The Liberal Party prisoners of the past on climate change, prisoners of their own party disunity on climate change are therefore placing the nation's future at risk. Rather than marking this day as one when the nation actually grasped its future, those opposite have chosen instead to consign Australia to the past.''

Opposition Leader Malcolm Turnbull said they had put forward some ''very constructive suggestions'' to make the scheme ''greener, cheaper and smarter''.

But these were dismissed by Climate Change Minister Penny Wong, whose refusal to negotiate displayed ''pedantic bloody-mindedness [and] stubbornness''.

The Opposition would develop amendments in the coming months. But Opposition Senate leader Nick Minchin warned it would be ''reckless and irresponsible'' to pass the legislation before the outcomes of global climate talks in Copenhagen in December and negotiations on the US Bill.

http://www.abc.net.au/news/stories/2009/08/14/2655529.htm?section=justin

The UN Security Council has approved a watered-down statement about the continued detention of Burma's democracy campaigner Aung San Suu Kyi.

The council has unanimously agreed to express its "serious concern" about the conviction and sentencing of Aung San Suu Kyi.

But an earlier draft statement had called for the "condemnation" of her treatment.

UN Security Council president John Sawers tried to explain why the statement has been toned down.

"I think we all know that different members of the Security Council have different views on the situation there [and] elsewhere," he said.

The statement also does not specifically call for the release of Aung San Suu Kyi.

How Wrong He Was

*



The straight shots of Jack Daniels went down like velvet and he knew soon enough he would be pissed, gloriously pissed, at last at one with the universe. Alcoholism was a spiritual disease, they declared, and he had been blessed with infinite longing all his life. From that first cherry brandy and lemonade the girls sneaked out to him from a nightclub, because he was too young to drink legally, and he drank it quickly and felt as he had never felt before, at one with the world, a unified person, sane, gloriously sane, triumphant, exultant. Alive. Normie Rowe was playing down the road and the next night he went with the little gang from the hotel he had fallen into, from the Stella del Mare, or whatever it was called. And it seemed like the whole world was moving on its axis, and all was well.

There had always been a clicking point, the drink where he knew that beyond this one there would be no recourse, no memory, no regret, just glorious black out. He sought the point in the early hours, when he didn't care what happened to him next. He didn't care. He didn't laugh. He knew there would be a hangover and even that, vicious as they increasingly were, was a price worth paying for the beauty of oblivion. He was shattered to the very soul. He was dark in his precepts, in his reaches, in the hours before dawn. After a night at the clubs, he loved to have a coffee and a brandy and a strong cigarette in one of the cosy little medieval bars in the backstreets of Madrid. He thought everything was wonderful and everything would last forever. There would be no regrets. There would be no price to pay.

How wrong he was. "If you want to go up you have to go down," Jenny used to say. Everything had a price. There was a consequence for every act. Do good be good be rewarded. Do crime pay the time. And now, in his 50s, there was a price to pay for everything. Each mark was a wonder. Each blessing a crime. Every indulgence held a price. He had to pay, he had to pay, in tears and pain and discomfort, for all his sins, for all his indulgent despair, for all his drug fuelled melancholy. It wasn't right, it wasn't fair. His motives had been good. He hadn't realised the price was so high. He hadn't realised what he was doing to himself. And he marched forward, sheets of transparent pain flying every which way, and the gloss and the shivers and the counting pain, it had all come time to pay.

Pay the piper, pay the price, come hither and let me cast eyes across your tight firm body, a flash of desire in the winter sun, a flowering peach tree in amongst the historic old houses, the crumbling back yards, the homes that wreaked of stories never told, secrets never revealed, love never consumated. Because he was scattered to the four winds now; and he had done it all entirely to himself. So he went back to the program and back to the forgiving past; and his fingers flew across keyboards but it never told the story, not really, of all the aching loss and terrible chaos that had troubled his chaotic heart. Each box told a story. One random page almost blew away in the wind; p87, As Yet Untitled, which told of his hitch hiking across the frozen plains of Canada.

Even then, he realised, when he could barely have been more than 19 or 20, he was infinitely sad, infinitely lonely, kissed by an eternal longing. He lay awake at night listening to others making love. Even then he was fascinated by alcoholics and oblivion seekers, and naturally attracted to them, utlimately frustrated and finally betrayed by that which draws us. He stood at the turning point. There were only a few years left. He could take one path or he could take the other. He could drown in his own alcohol fuelled melancholy, he could go to the grave with a dozen incomplete masterpieces cluttering old drawers, filling old boxes. Or he could stay sober and triumph, and be productive, perhaps even happy. Suicide wasn't an option, not at this age, there wasn't enough time left anyway. And so he played and he partied, he took the high road and the low road, and finally, humiliated by his own obsessions, he crawled back through the doors of yet another psychic rehab, ready to repent.

Redemption

*




The streets were already busy in the pre-dawn. There was an element of flight, he couldn't deny that. The ceilings in the kitchen and bathroom had collapsed, the plumbing was off line and suddenly he was homeless. Sam was at his grandmother's and Henrietta at school. The house was a bombshell, dust everywhere, Craig from nextdoor busily working. If everything he had ever believed in turned out to be a romantic falsehood, as was appearing very likely, even so life offered new turmoils; and he was forced to go. There seemed no other alternative. Everything was an inclusivfe madness. Everything was being swept clean. He loaded old boxes on to the back of the truck they hadd hired from Balmain Rentals. The heating doesn't work but worse, it blows a constant stream of cold air. It's freezing. He became frozen in a way he hadn't been since last in Europe, years ago now. He hadn't expected life to unfold here, children, a stable job.

Thank you for my courage, thank you for my decency, went the chant, andd that was it now, everything being swept away. Some of the boxes hadn't been opened since he last moved to Redfern around New Year in 2001. Then it was a fresh start, now it was a rut, a comfotable rut. So many of the boxes, unsorted in the last hasty move, and the one before that, and before that, related to the days before Google Docs and easy storage, before word processing, before the technology allowed everyone in the world to have a website like this for free. In those old old days there was a thing called paper, and if you made too many mistakes on a page you would have to retype it. He couldn't go on living in the twilight zone, one foot in one camp, one in the father. One half way to heaven and one half way to hell. He couldn't stand the hypocrisy anymore. He couldn't stanad to be around high functioning, intelligent, professional people one minute; and nodding in agreement at the abyss the next.

So he packed the boxes one after the other after the other. He caught sight of things he had long forgot. The flyer for Writers in the Park, which was held at the Harold Park Hotel, an infamous entertainment pub of the era. For a period the event was a great success. Somehow or other, he had been friends with some of the organisers, he had ended up in the role of videoing it. Bron provided the video camera and all the equipment, as he provided so many things in that era, up there in his apartment overlooking what is now Darling Harbour, a glistening modern place in absolute contrast to what was then. So pissed some nights, exhausted by lifestyle issues, he would begin to nod off over the camera. One day a poet was going on about "sleep, sleep" and then the whole room noticed him passed out of the video equipment and began to laugh. Well that was what it was like. There was always laughter, there was always insanity.

There was the book, Writers in the Park, which was a collection of writings from people who had appeared there. He had written the introduction, told the whole story of how it came to be that a string of the best known writers of the era, from David Malouf to Frank Hardy, came to that pub opposite the greyhound races. Of how a whole of group of people gave of their time and energy to make it possible. He hadn't seen that cover in years, or even thought of it. Eventually he had sold the tapes to the Mitchell Library for several thousand dollars.There had been debate for years other their ultimate resting place. The state public library seemed the only decent place.
Twenty years. Thousands of years had passed inside his skull. Kissed with infinite longing, every day was an eternity. Yet here it was, the detritus of years, decades, of the days before computers, being loaded on to the back of a cage truck and sent off to the country, where they and the couches will gather spiders and dust, perhaps never even to be properly filed.

Twenty years. That's how long ago it was. Kim O'Brien was one of the central characters, and if there were flaws in the character, flaws in the glass, it came from his own low moral standards and practising alcoholism, as every day turned into a pissed disaster and friendships slowly collapsed, because no one could bear the ever grasping tactics of an ever grasping addict. Cue financial chaos. Always needy. Always melancholy. Always in despair. Sickening crap and he just swept it away, into boxes, into bags, into the truck and go go go. Finally the day was getting warmer. Major, the dog ahd been fed and was sleeping comfortably in front of the fire at Toni Smith's house, Toni who he had known since universtiy days and he dropped round for breakfast on a Sunday morning, as was his want. All was lost, but he didn't believe that anymore, nothing but trite melodrama; there was hope in the wind and in the sun glittering on the leaves, in the sound of birds and blue sky, in sensory overload and a comforting fire, bringing him back to Earth; and every onwards.




http://www.booksandcollectibles.com.au/dump/Gotcha_By_The_Books/books-0013/8114.html

"Writers in the Park: the book 1985-86 Christie, Carol; O'Brien, Kim (eds)

8114 Sydney FAB Press 1986 1st Edition paperback b&w photos 8vo 104pp Very Good A collection of the work considered most representative of The Harold Park Readings by Australian poets and writers; mostly poetry and performance poetry; work by Rodriguez, Hewett, Komninos, Shapcott, Beveridge, Duggan, Viidikas, Dorothy Porter, and many more; this copy has one small lightly worn spot to fep, endpapers foxed, o.w. Very Good. ISBN: 1-86252-686-9 $17.00AUD

http://www.jamesgriffin.com.au/photos.htm

Spoken Word Performance at Writers in the Park. 1986, Harold Park Hotel, Sydney.

http://news.google.com/newspapers?nid=1301&dat=19890825&id=1jcRAAAAIBAJ&sjid=7OcDAAAAIBAJ&pg=4776,3470169

Advertisement.

http://www.smh.com.au/news/good-living/popular-pub-rises-again/2007/07/18/1184559828846.html

The Harold Park Hotel will be hardly recognisable to patrons who were locked in there in the '80s to hear One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest author Ken Kesey read while drug dealers tried to break in with axes.

The one-time Sydney entertainment institution was trendily refurbished for Wednesday night's reopening party.

The Glebe hotel opposite the paceway hosted some of the world's top comedy acts and writers in the '80s and '90s and many of Sydney's up-and-coming bands.

English comic Ben Elton performed there and Hollywood star Robin Williams dropped in for one or two impromptu slots. Australian authors Peter Carey and Thomas Keneally spoke there.

Comedian Akmal once described the Harold Park as "the best venue ever".

"Not only did the Harold Park have a great atmosphere but it also attracted a very intelligent, respectful audience. It gave the opportunity to performers whose style did not suit the aggressive vibe of a typical Sydney pub, such as Andrew Denton, Stephen Abbott [The Sandman], Paul Livingstone [Flacco], Bob Downe and Mikey Robins."

Former licensee Simon Morgan said he sold and closed the pub in 1999 because Leichhardt Council refused to extend his licence to midnight. The pub will now stay open until midnight on Friday and Saturday nights.

The hotel was sold with an approved development application for serviced apartments behind the hotel, and it was presumed the pub would stay closed. It was a sad time in Sydney's entertainment scene, with many pubs closing their doors to live entertainment and embracing poker machines.

The site went through a number of hands before ending up with developers Barton Corporation - Bob Barton and his sons John and Jeff - in 2004.

"We're gonna turn [the Harold Park Hotel] back into the way it was," John Barton, 36, said.

Comedians Chris Franklin, Pizza star Tahir and Footy Show regular Mick Meredith have already performed at the pub's free Tuesday night comedy, and Barton said there were plans to also bring back the pub's other nights, including Writers in the Park, Politics in the Pub and Poetry in the Park.

But his motives for trying to restore the pub to its glory days aren't altruistic.

"We like cash flow," he said. "The pub's got a lot of potential. There's not many hotels you can buy that come with that sort of name. The majority people know the Comedy Club. Last Tuesday we packed it out."

The pub also hosts covers bands and plan to increase the number of poker machines from eight to 18.

That probably won't please Whitlams frontman Tim Freedman, who played a residency there in 1986 with his band Penguins on Safari and later had a hit with Blow Up the Pokies.

"I remember being down there one night when [left-wing author] Frank Hardie was speaking and the cops came for his parking fines," Freedman said. "Everyone surrounded the paddy wagon not knowing that Frank should have paid his fines. It wasn't two fines; it was $3000 worth."

Oblivion Seekers

*



And so, as he passed out of consciousness and into the gutter, the office workers stepped over him as if he didn't exist. They were all the same, these carrion birds, these creatures from another planet, another place, the office workers. They bore no resemblance to him, there was no reflection of his life. They might as well have been another species. He looked up, phasing in and out, but none stopped. Except an old queen. They always stopped. Are you alright? the man asked. And he slurred his words. He wasn't alright, he hadn't been alright for a long time. He was as smashed as he could get, destroying his own consciousness. He didn't want to be awake. He didn't want to feel anything. He came stumbling around the corner, and saw himself, already dead, rising out of the gutter, helped by the gay guy who had stopped out of concern, or maybe he just liked a bit of rough trade. Are you alright, the man repeated, and he stumbled into him, unable to stand up straight.

I'm a bit pissed, he said. I can see that, the man said. And after a short period, the offer came. Do you want to come back to my place, you can have some coffee, sober up. And so it was as it always was, a shower, a blow job and $20, that's the sort of kid he was, crazy as. Nothing stopped. Nothing ended. He was caught in a downward spiral and had already hit rock bottom before he had barely begun, dashing across the thin red line as if it was non-existent. He was entranced by the underworld, the gangsters he met around the Cross, the underground gay scene, anything that was hidden, subterfuge being his natural order. He didn't know where it would end. He didn't understand what was happening. He didn't understand why his heart ached, awfully, always. There was no end to the agony and yet he had only just begun.

No one could see through this turmoil, no one could touch his heart. And so he dusted himself off and climbed back into his old clothes and made his way down yet another suburban street, not knowing where he was going or where he would end up. These strange days were an ample curse. He couldn't go back to his parents house, not to the frozen war and the belts and the harsh anger always directed at him. Briefly, before he started renting the tiny room in the private hotel by the water, he was homeless. He sped all night and drank all day. He was under age and it was hard to get alcohol, but he managed one way and another. Standing in the street swaying, hiding in corners and watching the trammelling traffic, secretive, frightened, completely alone. He didn't know why God had cursed him so. He couldn't find a way out. He sat at the bar and let the men buy him drinks. He could drink most of them under the table anyway. It wasn't the beginning of a dark time, he was already in its midst.

And so he opened his mouth and could see the slurred words coming out. No, I'm fine. No, I'm not alright. Where am I? What am I doing here? You've passed out in the gutter, the man said. All he could think of was what happened to the bottle, had he finished it already, would this bloke have alcohol back at his flat? He told these stories years later; and they sounded so humorous, so forlorn, the lost child, but there was no pity for what once was; in a brutal place, in a brutal time. The smart BMWs and Mercedes were parked along the Darlinghurst streets. Wealthy people ate in the restaurants. A group of middle aged men gathered for a meal, drinking water, in recovery, gossiping to each other. He felt infinitely alone, infinitely different, and knew it was self indulgent. Humans were much the same, wherever they came from, whatever had happened.

If only he could be spared the worst of it. If only he didn't have to face up to these brutal truths. If only he could hug tight the love, the flesh of another. And instead they all gazed at him as if he was some freak from the zoo, and he felt intensely self conscious. Only a thin membrane separated the sober world from that other, darker slipstream, the liquid intensity of the other world. It called him constantly. He could see the bars shining in the dark, the fabulous strangers, the international guests, and he knew, before the money ran out, he could join them and pretend, just for the evening, just for the moment, to be a normal, successful, happy, integrated person with a fascinating job and a string of successes behind him, with all the daily commitments of a real, connected person. Oh how he longed for a different space. And just for a moment, he could feel the fabric of things, once more glorious, the night large, the restaurants full, the strangers disappearing down alleys; and knew that while he not be right with the world right now, there was hope. He might not always be the lunatic stranger, the oblivion seeker, the shattered, disconsolate soul.

This Too Will Pass

*



He couldn't be more devestated, just by the act of living. Simple, incomplete, the eternal yearning that masked his fate. God meant you to die a street alcoholic, living out those final years in Belmore Park, nearby the newspaper offices where he had worked most of his life; at various times making something of a name for hismelf. It was all so cruel, but destiny could not be defied. He coujldn't mask his own yearning, for oblivion, for love, by the shocking empathy they called the soldier, his own demise. So when he walked past the bar on the way to the meeting, and the desire to drink hit him like a sledge hammer, like a log being swung into the side of his head, he was completely taken aback. He knew he was off the air, had been for hours, but the vividness of his desire was something new.

There were tourists and sales reps and the interesting looking middle class all sitting around the bar, already lit up as the last light of the day fled, and he just wanted to be in there amongst them, ordering another beer, talking to total strangers, becoming immersed in the tales of others. Because he had none of his own left to tell; he would instead drape himself in the lives of others; and in this case, in the lives of complete strangers, both to himself and to the city. Random strangers, random acts of kindness. The Americans would talk in their loud voices about the things familiar to them, Obama, how terrible Bush was, or how misunderstood, depending on their poliitcal persuasion. And he would introduce them to the best local beers; and tell stories about being a journalist, and wash his own misery down a sinkhole of fabulousness, until all was well.

But all was not well; and his deeply dysfunctional brain longed for oblivion. Not for nothing oblivion seeking had been his primary goal for so many years. And now, frighteningly sober, he did not know where to turn. He kept thinking of Ben, always Ben, throughout this period of days when he had dived so spectacularly off the air, Ben, former NSW Premier Bob Carr's old press secretary. They had been great mates, although they met in the latter days when they were trying to stay sober, and Ben was bouncing in and out of detoxes and nothing was well in his life; the tiny apartment, the stuffed up relationships, the music CDs meant to indicate taste. And Ben had drunk himself to death just like that, not a bad feat for a man in his 30s still relatively healthy. But he could not stop; did not want to stop; and the rivers of enthusiasm and ignorance and intelligence and spirited conversations that were their times together; well he didn't know why it ended so quickly. Another death. Another dead alcoholic.

And so the bastard magistrates pound on from the bench: I see no hope, I see nothing but a long history of drugs, alcohol and dishonesty. And these brutal bastards always dictate the terms; always rule the rust and determine the outcome; while the rest of us slither from one pole to the next, uncertain of ourselves and our place in the world. Perhaps it was that uncertainty he had liked about Ben the most. All the ego had been deflated out of him; and when he admitted he had been drinking turps because he couldn't afford normal alcohol, then here, he knew, was a genuine problem, a terminal soul in acute decline, flirting with death as he drank himself into oblivion. He didn't mean to die, but equally he didn't want to stay sober. And so they marched forward; but there was nowhere to go. And he left him in that scrappy little nondescript inner-city apartment for the last time, thinking all was well. He'd said he would go back to detox, back to meetings, back to life. And the next he knew he was dead.

And he'd had everything. The good job, as the Premier's press secretary, better paying than most of the reporting jobs available, interesting, if you were interested in being near the seat of power. So smart. His knowledge burbled across streams; smart references to books, political events, characters of the right. And then he was dead. And there was nothing anybody could do. Nothing anybody could say. No meeting he could be dragged along to, no remorse he could feel, no madness he could absolve. And that was how it ended, not with a bang but a whimper. And so he walked past the bar with its shiny lights and happy looking people, its air of celebration, and went off to the meeting and sat in the hall and thought: this is therapy, how could this possibly be therapy? And all was lost, and Ben was lost, and he didn't drink; and was deeply unhappy. This too will pass, someone said, when he tried to explain the depth and complexity of his latest despair.


Kinkumber, NSW, Australia.