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| Courtesy Crowd Appreciation Society |
In the dark, in silken dreams, in crowds long passed, in demons walking, in the assembled crowds outside his house chanting "buffalo, buffalo", places that haunted him still, darkness that enveloped everything, an isolation beyond reach, these were the people he had reached out to embrace; and had the worst time of his life. They couldn't have been crueller or more distant, or more invasive, sarcastiic, nasty, abusive. They harrassed him morning noon and night, and so he acted in ways to annoy them, and got lonelier and lonelier with each passing day. And went through his own nightmare of the soul.
They had moved on to newer, warmer bodies. He lived in the aftermath. There was everything to live for, and nothing. He couldn't stand what had happened, and remained haunted. Nasty thing for one gay man to do to another, one of the voices said. I couldn't believe how upset he was. Yes, in the isolating climate he had crashed and burned; with the jackels snapping at his heels and the derision growing at every turn. No one had reached out. No one had even said hello. And while they fed him poison, coureying it to his door, he grew more insane, less stable, and therefore more vulnerable. And nothing stopped, nothing stopped.
Why this happened he had no idea. The strange twists of circumstance and the fevered brow. The horror that had been his and there; that had taken clasps from the sky and fastened them around his throat; who still twirled through dreams as if they would never let go; and watched as others aged and died. Karma comes back quickly in this part of the world; the saying goes. And maybe it did. And maybe life was of so little consequence that they rose and fell like mushrooms on a forest floor, there one instant and gone the next, off doing sex shows and taking customers while he pottered around the house, waiting, waiting for what? For a brief illusion to envelop him, but nothing enveloped him. And all was gone.
There are some people in life you will always miss, he told a friend. And that was all. These things were cast on a barren sea. The police were so utterly corrupt he could not see how the country functioned. The journalists, willing to fan xenophobia, were so dishonest it was impossible to see how anyone could have faith in them.
And then he left, just like that.
And they pursued, just like that.
For what, to ridicule kindness? To seek his death.
Every move they made backfired, but they would not stop. They became so predictable they tore every fabric of who he once was away; and he fell into the mud.
If you lie down with dogs you get up with fleas, his old mentor intoned.
Well it was one way to look at it; a little harsh. But these distant fingers that crawled out through the ether still, there would be no remiss. There was no way back.
THE BIGGER STORY
U.S. naval forces are moving closer to Syria as President Barack Obama considers military options for responding to the alleged use of chemical weapons by the Assad government. The president emphasized that a quick intervention in the Syrian civil war was problematic, given the international considerations that should precede a military strike.
The White House said the president would meet Saturday with his national security team to consider possible next steps by the United States. Officials say once the facts are clear, Obama will make a decision about how to proceed.
Defense Secretary Chuck Hagel declined to discuss any specific force movements while saying that Obama had asked the Pentagon to prepare military options for Syria. U.S. defense officials told The Associated Press that the Navy had sent a fourth warship armed with ballistic missiles into the eastern Mediterranean Sea but without immediate orders for any missile launch into Syria.
U.S. Navy ships are capable of a variety of military action, including launching Tomahawk cruise missiles, as they did against Libya in 2011 as part of an international action that led to the overthrow of the Libyan government.
"The Defense Department has a responsibility to provide the president with options for contingencies, and that requires positioning our forces, positioning our assets, to be able to carry out different options — whatever options the president might choose," Hagel told reporters traveling with him to Asia.
Hagel said the U.S. is coordinating with the international community to determine "what exactly did happen" near Damascus earlier this week. According to reports, a chemical attack in a suburb of the capital killed at least 100 people. It would be the most heinous use of chemical weapons since Iraqi leader Saddam Hussein gassed thousands of Kurds in the town of Halabja in 1988.
Hagel left little doubt that he thinks the attack in Syria involved chemical weapons, although he stressed there is not yet a final answer. In discussing the matter, he said, "it appears to be what happened — use of chemical weapons."
Kevin Rudd faces a fight to avoid becoming the third prime minister in the nation's history to lose his own seat.
A second poll in a week has shown Mr Rudd narrowly trailing his Liberal National Party opponent, Bill Glasson, in Griffith, prompting the Prime Minister to declare he was campaigning as hard as he could.
Long-serving prime minister John Howard lost his Sydney seat of Bennelong to Labor's Maxine McKew as part of the Ruddslide in 2007, the first time an Australian PM had lost his own electorate since Stanley Bruce in 1929.
A Newspoll published by Saturday suggested Dr Glasson was leading Mr Rudd by 52 per cent to 48 per cent on a two-party-preferred basis. The poll was reportedly based on a sample of 500 voters in Griffith, in Brisbane's south.
It mirrored a Guardian Lonergan poll of 958 Griffith voters on Wednesday night that put Dr Glasson ahead of Mr Rudd 52 per cent to 48 per cent after preferences, with a stated margin of error of 4 per cent.
Mr Rudd attracted 58.5 per cent of the vote after preferences at the 2010 election.
Latest polling suggests Queensland will not provide the big boost that Labor had hoped for with Mr Rudd's return to the leadership. The party also faces losses in western Sydney.
Nationally, the latest Fairfax-Nielsen poll shows Mr Abbott's Coalition is poised to win the election in two weeks' time with a lead of 53 per cent to 47 per cent on a two-party-preferred basis.
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