Here, There, Everywhere

These are the boys from 2UE and 2GB, the two most popular talkback stations in Sydney, with the girl from the Daily Tele in between. They're typical of the new breed of reporter, young, educated, clean cut, professional, good at their jobs. The old days when reporters were assumed to be drunken misfits who wandered into the job because they didn't belong anywhere else are long gone. Now they're all very nice, and what I guess I notice most, clean cut. They might sneak a cigarette, not even that most of the time. They're certainly not dashing down the pub in between filing their stories. Becoming a reporter isn't part of some doomed, tragic destiny; it's a career choice like any other.

This is in the park at the end of a street in Ultimo wherein a seige a man held the police at bay for 29 hours. I've been a bit riled the last 24 hours, for some reason or other, over the government's disgraceful whitewash of the despised Child Support Agency. It's the duplicity, the blatant dishonesty of this government, which disappoints me so. Not that the Opposition would be any better, worse probably, but that is not the point. It is a failure of democracy, a failure by self serving public servants to pay any credence to the people who pay their wages. I should be suprised? It's like being surprised when someone lies to me; it's ridiculous, but true.

Many of the same gang see each other at similar events all over Sydney, asbestos scare, we're all there, man dead in apartment for six months, his skeleton at the kitchen table, we're all there, interviewing the junky neighbours, swapping notes. Apartment block collapses into tunnel. Michelle Lesley, the model charged with ecstasy possession in Bali; returns to Australia. The country's richest man dies, we're all there, outside Kerry Packer's house, as if there was much to get in many of these situations. It's the stake outs that get boring. The absolute hopelessness of some of the scenarios. Four kids dead in burnt out house, drunken mother near by, the usual ratty defacto mouthing off. They've no idea, the smug pricks that run this country, how deeply spread the unease is; how difficult life is for many, how futile the struggle to stay on top. The fat cats couldn't care less. Our taxes pay the fat cats and everything gets worse. That everything works is the biggest lie. That the judiciary have ethics the biggest lie. That bureaucracies such as the Child Support Agency are not corrupt to the core the biggest whitewash. That's the world we've created. I never belonged. I don't belong now.

Silence in the Slipstream

I was trying to post a picture of helicopters in Iraq, but I'm still struggling with the technology. Condoleezza Rice just spent three days in Australia; and generally seemed to impress everyone, even if much of the country disagrees with her and her administration on Iraq. There were some demonstrators who got into a Sydney University Hall, surprising considering the level of security surrounding her, but otherwise most of it was dignified, all the appropriate gravitas. Instead this is a picture from our local park; which despite appearances is a very urban park, with the traffic choked City and Parramatta Roads on either side, and Sydney University on the other. It gets dark a little after five; and walking the dog then, it has that crunching feeling of isolation that all big cities can emanate in the middle of winter.

But we're laughing now. No more rehearsals for Grumpy Old Men. Much more positive. You seem so much happier, they said at the local cafe. I can't believe what I'm seeing, you're laughing. The best way forward was to say nothing. I used to play this game with myself as a kid, of seeing how many days I could go without speaking to anyone. It drove my parents mad. There in the green nightmare, the tiny bedroom, the steep funnel web infested bank that leapt up to the road; the screeching cicada heat in the summer.

I had decided to play the same game as an adult; and then started laughing. It was too ridiculous, painting over fractured thoughts; incoherencies. There were ways forward. The kids will be away for the school holidays. Sam is going to Vietnam; how exciting going to Vietnam for 14 days as a 15 year old. My father was a pilot and I still remember the excitement of those trips. The trick is to enjoy yourself; to laugh at things. Wishing for stability won't alter anything. The settling silence that was descending on all his actions had vanished, magically; and he thought now he could practice his own beliefs; "don't just make do, go for clear view", as the advertisement says.

Quiet As

This was the view in my street a bit more than two years ago, after the death of TJ Hickey. As the SMH reported: "TJ, 17, was impaled on a fence in the inner city suburb when he fell from his bike on February 14 2004. The local community said he was being chased by police at the time. His death became the catalyst for a riot. A coronial inquest found police were not responsible for the accident." It happened on a Sunday. Working a night shift, I had to report on the riot, and then couldn't get home. Went and stayed at Stephens.

It's all much quieter now; since the police moved into the TNT towers next to Redfern station. Their cameras are no doubt pointed down the Block and across the hotspots; and any trouble is promptly squashed. There's almost no one down the Block now, the area of land basically given to the Aboriginal Housing Company by then Prime Minister Gough Whitlam. Once the centre of urban aboriginal movement, radical, progressive, proud, whatever you want to call it, there are only 16 families left. It fell apart in the 1990s when heroin gripped the area, assisted by government tolerance, the location of a needle bus and health regulations which insisted that police could not conduct any activities which would discourage addicts. It became one of the biggest or the biggest heroin market in the city; an already beleaguered community inundated with the city's junkies; an unlovely mob, desperate, ill, ruthless; capable of anything. Kids crawled around in broken bottles while their mothers nodded off. A bloke with sores all over him passed out at our front door. We didn't want to touch him. We called the ambulance.

All this has changed. Every night there's a fire and they gather around, drinking, in off the train from Kempsey or Wilcannia or wherever, the remnants of once warring tribes in an entirely different place; the shock of invasion collectively experienced. But there aren't many of them and it's mostly harmless, down there in the dark. With the exception some weeks back of the rape of a woman by something like 15 men which turned the mood sour, so much for the noble savage. A drunken band of street alcoholics, their streams of invective still puncturing the night; but nothing like what it used to be. There isn't the same level of drunkenness, of out of control dereliction.

Once you'd regularly hear women in the street after they had been robbed. The Daily Telegraph ran a front page picture of an Asian woman being dragged across the road by her bag. These bags, sans cash, would often end in my backyard and if there was enough to make it worthwhile, licenses, keys, I would take them up the local cop shop. But of course there are still scenes, some hysterical in their bizarre twists. As I heard it, the other night three aboriginal women, drunk as skunks, were having a bit of a dingdong argument opposite the station while the police looked on. Then one of them passed out completely in the middle of the street. Eventually, furious with their non-responsive mate, they dragged her by the air across the street and dumped her at the feet of the coppers. "You look after her, you white c...s" they shouted, arguing with the police before heading off the to the RSL, leaving their friend unconscious in the street.

The war over the future of the Block continues, with the NSW Government in the form of the generally disliked Frank Sartor, former Mayor of Sydney, trying to basically zone the area commercial, while the Aboriginal Housing Company's Pemulway Project, a mix of housing, an open air market, an aboriginal business college, all very progressive and empowering; compiled with some of the city's best architects on side. All ignored as the two dig their trenches and make their statements to the media. While defended as a "sacred place" for aboriginal people, a place they will never back down on, recently planning Minister Sartor, who has all the power, said was looking for "a presence for Aboriginal people in a sustainable way in the broader community of Redfern. When you can integrate them better -- not in a homogeneous sense but in a harmonious sense -- there are wins for everybody." Yes, well, that's why he's hated.

Media Watch:

International Herald Tribune:

BAGHDAD U.S.-led forces pressed on Friday with an offensive against suspected guerrilla targets near the north-central town of Samarra, witnesses said.
"Operation Swarmer" came as Iraq's deeply divided political leadership prepared to meet again, hoping to break a deadlock on forming a unity government that might avert civil war.
U.S. military officials said Thursday that the operation, involving 50 helicopters, was the biggest "air assault" since a similar airlift across Iraq just after the war in late April 2003. That operation was also conducted by the U.S. Army's 101st Airborne Division.
A U.S. military spokesman, Lieutenant Colonel Barry Johnson, said ... that 50 people had been detained and 30 remained in custody. The U.S. military usually describes insurgents as "terrorists," so Iraqis netted in the raids could have just been ordinary farmers from rural areas near Samarra.

A Working Port

The big house cleanup continues; finding old photos, getting organised; function without purpose. The bloke over the road has helped me get the scanner going. I've had it for two years but never been able to work out how to use it. Then the software dropped off the computer, something like that anyway. He was great. The technology still amazes me; just the fact that, like me, everyone on earth can have their own website for nothing. I don't even have a digital camera, just an old mobile phone. And like a lot of seprated blokes, I don't have much money, at a stage in life where it would really help. The computer's not bad, it can play Empire Earth and Age of Empires and all those other big games the kids like, but there are a lot of fancier computers out there. Yet here we are. Astonishing. And where the Information Age leads us in the next 20 years, it is hard to predict. Mobile phones would have seemed like science fiction when I was growing up.

This was the view out the window from where leader of the Opposition Kim Beazley was giving a speach on climate change. It was the day after former Opposition leader Simon Crean had trounced his factional enemy in a bitter and highly publicised by-election; unseemly for a former leader. From the imperial or was it foggy heights of leadership Beazley refused to intervene in the Victorian fight. Like much of the population he couldn't stand Crean. Those who knew him all said he was charming, but it didn't transmit. Whatever telegenic meant, Crean was the opposite. In victory, Crean acted as if he had just won the leadership; again. This was hyusterically reinforced when, after a crisis meeting between the two, with the wives present to dilute the intense awkwardness; when Beazley would happily have been anywhere else. Crean got into his white waiting limoousine; except it turned out to Beazley's. The4y kept the air conditioning running, just to reinforce the sound of our money vanishing.

He was like that this day. He just wanted to be somewhere else. The journalists couldn't have cared less what Beazley thought of climate change; when his enormous almost hour long fine sounding speach to something called the Leader's Forum, sponsored by one of the country's largest builders and developers took forever. He tried feebly to get the issue of climate change on the agenda; weren't we already tired of climate change? Albanese's release today suggested our failure to address climate change was hindering our campaign to stop whaling. And they wonder why they're in opposition; these issues your working Joe couldn't have cared less about.

There was a time when the phrase "working port" caught hold; a handy catch phrase to describe a nostalgia for a Sydney Harbour all but gone; the giant tourist cruisers, the James Cook, the Captain Phillip, their ample decks and kitchn galleys, taking two or three hundred at a time, a glistening, substantial money spinning machine; the polished deck, the gleaming white paint. Beazley had to be talked into walking through the media pack this day; something he normally thrives on; and was far too busy and important to answer the media's questions. So we all had to hang around for the coffee and sandwiches and that enormous speach. He held a presser on the renovated roof top; trying desperately and ridiculously to keep the focus on climate change. My half asked, unfinished question as Beazley pulled it all to a quick finish, "Is Crean guilty...?..." was played repeatedly on the news.

MEDIA WATCH:

From The Age:


THE first of a series of speeches designed to shore up dwindling American support for the war in Iraq, President George Bush has warned that the violence is likely to continue into the foreseeable future.
"I wish I could tell you that the violence is waning and that the road ahead is smooth," he said. "I cannot."
As the latest Gallup poll showed his approval rating at a record-low 36 per cent, a grim-looking Mr Bush pleaded for patience.

The Mail&Guardian

In the past 24 hours, police have found the bodies of at least 85 men killed by gunfire execution-style in a gruesome wave of apparent sectarian killing, the interior ministry said on Tuesday.They include at least 27 bodies stacked in a mass grave in an eastern Shi'ite neighbourhood.Much of the bloodshed -- the second wave of mass killings in Iraq since bombers destroyed an important Shi'ite shrine last month -- followed deadly weekend explosions in a teeming Shi'ite slum in which 58 people died and more than 200 were wounded.Iraq's interior ministry announced a ban on driving in Baghdad to coincide with the first meeting of Iraq's new Parliament on Thursday. The ban takes effect at 8pm on Wednesday and lasts until 4pm on Thursday.

Life's Changes

This is a picture of me and the kids circa 2000 maybe late nineties. Now they're teenagers; and it's hard to imagine how vividly they changed your life. Travelling was different. People relaxed and related to you; women, kids, everywhere.

Now it's high school and music and anything older than yesterday is daggy. I guess it was ever thus.

Some weeks are just frustrating; hundreds exposed to asbestos, into cyberspace, hundreds of retrenched maintenance workers, into cyberspace. With the bad comes the good. It shouldn't be the struggle that it sometimes is. Even now, he could hear the sound of passing traffic, the grinding sound at the end of days. 

Ants in the Big City

Maybe they were right, whoever it was, Plato I think, who said we were all villagers at heart; that the ideal sized community was around 5,000. You got to know a large number; here in Sydney we get to know each other mostly out. It's not Melbourne, where as far as I know they're still big on dinner parties. The splashes of the harbour and the glittering, well catered functions on renovated modernist rooftops, didn't hide the fact that in the crushing crowds nobody knew anyone anymore. It was of no interest to anyone whether the person standing next to them lived or died. In the crush his own spirit was being crunched.

This was the morning, looking up from the road by the docks into renovated warehouses and cafes several floors up through glass; looking for somewhere that would take a credit card for breakfast because we had run out of cash; just being the working joes. Sydney was a city totally divided between those who had property and those who did not. On the north shore houses comfortably changed hands in the million dollar plus range, while the crushing crowds were often short of ready cash. The bills just kept on coming.

Iraq, where Australia is contribnting to the war effort, remains an absolute mess, on the edge of civil war. There hasn't been a terrorist attack in Sydney, although many think it is just a matter of time. Surprisingly the time has extended into the distance. Perhaps the raids have genuinely kept these things at bay. I need a tragedy in a lyrical landscape, get out of the office, he would say. But the gut wrenching tragedy of what he feared would come was something he hoped he would never have to face; not just the difficulties of reporting it, the gut wrenching horror of it all as people's lives are torn apart, there one minute and gone the next. 

PK

This is the former Prime Minister Paul Keating giving a speech on urban renewal at Sydney University at a conference called the Mayor's Forum. Sadly perhaps, he is best remembered for his line of invective. "You're nothing but a shiver looking for a spine to run up" was one of my favourites. He took over from his still pretty popular predecessor Bob Hawke after years of white anting. Like many of the disloyal, once he got to power he didn't know what to do with it; isolating in natural autocracy.

They were good years in some ways. At first the nation, or at least the left, well at least a few journalists, were captured by the blizzard of words, the fireworks that he promised. Dazzled by his own intelligence, the ideas whirled fruitlessly round and round, with a mounting contempt for the ordinary man. The people sensed it instinctively, and his approval ratings were always dismal, half the present Prime Minsiter's on a good day. The Zvegna suits, the knife edge suits, the well groomed face, the patrician nose, women loved him for a long time. Excuse me, Mr Keating, a female academic stammered, I agree with every word you said, could I just ask...?

The blokes were far more sceptical. Now everyone is more sceptical. As you got closer to the blizzard of words, the less the dreams were true. But in those years, with a young blonde partner and picture perfect young blonde children and a job that others regarded as having some cache, those benighted years, it didn't seem wrong that Keating lived in the big house and strutted the stage. The Domingo of Australian politics and the streams of dreams. The kids were young and I was off the eternal bar stool and all was right with the world; until it all fell apart.

Waiting For Reply

What's the mood? he asked, after the announcement that something like 400 maintenance workers at Qantas would be laid off. How would you feel, how would you cope, if you were told you wouldn't have a job in ten weeks time? The straggling heat. They knew exactly what they were doing. They followed the union delegate through a maze of side lines and parking stations, a short cut to the front entrance.They got the picture even before security woke up to what they were doing. Who owns it though? he asked, as the guards tossed them off the property; leaving them to stand at the entrance, talking to cars as they stopped at the lights.

He just wasn't sure how to negotiate anything anymore. Night time in Coogee. Glad it's Friday tomorrow. Want to go and see Capote. Loved In Cold Blood thirty years ago, God knows what I would think of it now. I interviewed Gore Vidal in London once. By this time I had got a bit blase about interviewing famous people and took along a couple of mates. He looked a bit surprised when he opened the door to us in his suite at the Connaught, I think it was, an enormously expensive London hotel. But despite the expense, the rooms were tiny and Vidal, a large man, seemed twice the size. Please don't be overwhelmed, he said grandly, as he swept us into the room.

He was a great story teller and seemed to enjoy meeting people from Australia, we were still exotic then, sincere, a long way away. The subject of Tangiers came up, and then Capote, somehow. He related the story in high, farcical detail. You know he looked like a Southern senator, in a green suit, he said, we hated each other. One day, after William Burroughs and Paul Bowles and the rest had made Tangiers famous, Capote declared he too was going to Tangiers. He arrived on a luxury liner with an enormous crowd waiting. But determined to ruin the moment, Vidal flew from Rome down to Tangiers and stood amongst the crowds on the dock. As Capote waved to the adoring and the curious and the cameras popped, his eyes lit upon his literary and social enemy. Vidal says it was worth the trip, just to see the look on his face. He got back on the plane and flew back to Rome.

Rocks

Rocks in the head some days; circling around the same mistakes. He went through all the motions, was prolific, or concise, as always; the surface froth of things. They were glorious days, stopping the car, getting out, walking in these extraordinary landscapes. Nothing to wonder why.

Only just starting to get on top of the bills. Things need to be more organised than they are. Been to Liverpool radio and back with a bloke who's an ex-rock musician who has just written a book called the Daddy Split Guide. He's very lively. Always in these crowded streets, endless traffic. A sound technician's nightmare. He wasn't going to surrender, not yet.

Different interests filtered around. That criticism they used to make of various authors, an emotional life like a dirty laundry basket; well how much was there these days? Eighty, sometimes ninety per cent of the people in various scenes seemed younger than him. It was like India, where something like half the population is under 25. These outposts into which he had ventured, he was no longer confident. The sweeping vistas could lead to ruin. Was it worth matching up for the sake of it? Was that where it all led, to where the core lay? Into the secret halls where he would never be himself again. Rocks in the head.

Through A Glass Darkly

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.

Always The One

You might as well shoot me as send me back to jail, he said after a 29 hour siege which saw the entire block closed off, residents evacuated, a pre-school closed down, a blitz of police and tactical response guys fully kitted out. Everyone in any potential line of fire was evacuated. The gun turned out to be a toy. These things were always hapenning in public housing blocks. This was in a third floor unit. The media were coralled in a park at the end of the street, out of the line of fire and therefore out of the line of sight. As the day wore on the cops became as bored as we were. He would have been out in July if he hadn't escaped last November.

In on petty charges; robbery, and subsequently, after his escape over a fence when he was helping with the cooking in minimum security. He wouldn't be in minimum security anymore. He wouldn't be getting out in July anymore. I could just imagine that day when he just said fuck it, I can't stand this anymore, and went over the fence. The lure was too strong. The needs too strong. The world had turned to glue and there was only one path.

The pigeons settled in a flock in front of us; behind the police and behind them the housing complex, sandwiched in a line between private housing. It was pretty rough, some of it, the liquid stream the only way we could find comfort, a trace of sanity. Others, renovated inner-city terraces. It would be nice to own a bit of Sydney, to find a community. Instead, over the fence and into the city and lost once more on the hunt; when the point of every day was narrowed to a tiny focus and there wasn't any way out. His destiny was a cruel one. They let him smoke as he was being arrested and carted off. You might as well shoot me; he shouted.

Troubled Skies

He was angry and he didn't know why. Wonder why this is the unhappiest place in Australia, you only have to look at the traffic jams every morning; the absolute incompetence of the town planners that has led to this state. Everyone hates the politicians now. They sit in their luxury cars and everyone else is jammed into buses and trains and long queues of cars. There was a grating sound in the car and a grating sound in his head. No word from Col. He was so sorry it had happened this way. There was never the right way for these things to work out. His head hurt and the tears kept welling up and he just felt damned irritable. Someone was always riding him, someone was riding him now. The only solution was to outlive the bastards.

It's been hot; muggy, and the sky was closing in, the traffic closing in; the colours closing in. There wasn't any justice in the way things worked. There wasn't any smooth path to an uncomplicated future. He could do the sea change just like that; but after divorce and bankruptcy and all the crap that had gone down; there wasn't the money to buy any dignity in old age.

I don't like to bother anybody at work, Col said, after standing outside my house all day. She wants to be a doctor, you've got to be kidding. He looked off his tree, standing there, staring out the window; time is a traveller, Tenterfield saddler; and the traffic and the humpy pumpy and the overwhelming frustration, if he could lash out, if he could break something, he would. None of it was worthwhile; none of it came close to being sensible. His angst merged into the dismal stretches of the city; they circled, looking for his point of vulnerability. He just pretended they didn't exist; that his life was not under threat; that nothing would change.

More and More

More and more it looks like the holiday was the right thing to do. More and more it looks like there is a price to pay, for those who dared to run completely against the stream. Col was down for a couple of days, well it was only meant to be one but turned into two through unfortunate circumstance; and he just looked haunted and not very well. I was a bit shocked by the whole thing, or disturbed anyway. It is like the arc of other people's lives dissecting your own. The kids weren't pleased to have him around, wanted him gone, particularly now he has lost his teeth in one great humiliation, and appears to them enormously, frighteningly eccentric. He said he was dying and he looked like it. I prodded him awake a couple of times because I thought he had stopped breathing.

Then by accident, when Henrietta was bustling him out the door, he forgot his money and everything else in the morning and waited outside the house in atrocious muggy heat all day for us to come home. You could have rung me, I said, I only work ten minutes away. I don't like to disturb people at work, he said. I didn't have anything much to do, it was a boring day, I remonstrated. But the deed was done. He slept all the next day, until after three o'clock. He just didn't look well, lying there. All the days of outrage and youth are gone. I want to die honourably of an Aids related disease, he said.

Death with the brotherhood. These things had been mirrored in this city a thousand times. He had only seen a few of them, in the weight of the grief, and that had been enough. There are the memorials in the star observer. The last issue a group took out a whole page for the tenth anniversary of the passing of some sunny faced long haired bloke. Most of the ones I had known had died complicated, addled, messy deaths. Secretive and unfortunate. We could telescope back to the good days; lay those over the current skeletons, the brain not working properly. Not everything was fine, but he wasn't going to roll over yet. He said goodbye, and the phones didn't answer after that. He didn't even know if he had made it back; or if he was in hospital; if this was the way it was going to end.

Pressure

There was a lot of pressure in his day to day life; snivelling into the carpet as he shook an editors hand, always wierd with authority figures; talent streaming out the fingers while the head thrombed; moving fast enough to get to work by 7.30am. Col is coming down tomorrow; after having been in hospital when they changed his medication and poisoned him; after he lost his teeth in the surf; completely embarrassing; after life churned out one too many indignities and all that was craven, all that was gone, came back to haunt him.

He remembered his loves; wished he had been more in the present, more there, when youth had stretched into the infinite. Instead of the sad dads of now; playing in the parks on Saturday, clutching themselves in neglected kitchens, living in the back of caravan parks, while the cavalcade of the self-satisfied, of over-paid public servants; of self-serving academics, of useful fools gleamed and laughed in expensive cars and expensive restaurants. None of it was fair. He didn't know why he scuttled away when they came near him; ignoring the opportunity to prove, well, that he was normal; that everything would be alright, that he was one of them.

None of them knew where it would end. The surprising beauty of the harbour; round bends, from cliff tops, in the Opera House precint, it was all part of Sydney he often forgot. He lived in the inner city suburb of Redfern, gentrifying slowly but still very rough around the edges; with the street alcoholics nearby keeping the nights alive; and work near Central, where the street alcoholics sit crowing along the sandstone walls. Got a cigarette? Got a dollar? There were cafes where almost no one went, yet somehow they continued to survive. And out there the city grew more bitter, more stressed; he could feel it, the pressures building up as the trendoids parroted their rosy version of reality while out there thousands of people's dreams were dashed against the wall every day. The Great Carr crash goes the logo in the Sydney Morning Herald at the moment, referring to the disastrous state the previous Premier Bob Carr left the state in. Today he declared, foolishly, like some overblown lying little child incapable of taking criticism, that he was proud to wear the moniker, it was his last great service to the Labor Party, to take the blame for his colleagues. What a ghastly charicature that man has become; while collecting $500,000 a year from Macquarie Bank, the bank which benefited so massively from infrastructure projects while he was Premier. Could it get more blatant? Could the Labor Party get any more corrupt?

Big City Dreaming

Another man in his sixties was found six months after his death in a housing department block called Joseph Banks, named after the settlement's first botanist. On the 15th floor of the towers of despair; or suicide towers as they are sometimes known. His skeleton just sitting at the table. A lot of people around there are off their heads in one way or another. The garbage smells at the front. It's not the place to end your days. Quiet. Reclusive man. Nobody wanted to intrude, to question where he might be.

It was Dossie's funeral today, the kids great grandmother. She helped establish one of the north shore's leading funeral parlours and so her funeral was very nicely done. The Camelia Chapel, large pink and white camelias; no expense spared.

The kids featured prominently in the photographic presentation of her life; music, flowers, expensive cotton. She was a tough old bird, that's all I can say. Moving speaches from the son and grandchildren. Not religious, she wasn't a religious person.

Clammy heat, here in the summer. The days passing with no rewind mechanism. The Opera House precincts another world entirely, the different languages of the tourists; the expensive restaurants piled on top of each other. In the car on the way back from the job the others joked: we don't know our neighbours, I'm a recluse, the only time I talk to them is to tell them not to make so much noise. We're all going to die like that, a skeleton at a table. We all laughed.

A Clash of Cultures

Always on the border of great events. This was the memorial service for Kerry Bullmore Packer, Australia's richest man for as long as anyone could remember. A woman rolled down the tinted window of a brand new grey Audi and said to the demonstrators in plummy tones: "We don't want you here."

Just before she was arrested protestor Louise O'Shea, 25, describedKerry Packer as a ``fat scum bag''. ``Stick it to the idiots who thinkKerry Packer was worth mourning,'' she told a small crowd at theentrance to the Opera House. ``He died, that is one thing in hisfavour.''Police then moved in and removed the protestors microphone and sound system, claiming inappropriate language. In an efficient crackdown, police, including two officers on horseback, arrested eight of the protestors from a group calling itself the Kerry Packer Dis-memorial Collective, made up primarily of people fromthe Socialist Alliance and the Socialist Alternative.

Two women and six men were retained in police custody for several hours. They werecharged with offences including resisting arrest, failing to complywith police directions and hindering police. The group claimed the closing down of the protest was an attack on free speach. As a stream of expensive Mercedes, BMWs and Audis dropped off theirpassengers, the group waved placards such as ``Kerry Packer Lived OffOthers and Gave Us Nothing'', ``State Funerals 4 All Not Just TheRich'' and ``Tax Cheat Packer Dead At Last''.

One protestor, Duroyan Fertl, a 27-year-old law student, said he was offended that Prime Minister John Howard was using taxpayers money toprovide a memorial service for ``an individual who dedicated his life to exploiting other people, and avoiding tax, legally or illegally.The police response was over the top.''Before her arrest Louise O'Shea described the public funding of theservice as an ``atrocity''.

``Packer is getting a state fundedmemorial while Howard is attacking the working conditions of the verypeople who worked to create Kerry Packer's fortune,'' she said.

Comedy artist Marcel Cameron, 31, from the Socialist Alliance, said Packer was a modern day Ned Kelly. ``He stole from the poor to give tothe rich,'' he said.

They also said Howard wassending a message to all Australians glorifying the extravagantlifestyle of the corporate rich and promoting an unfair and unequalAustralian society.

Organiser Peter McGregor said he was offended by the idea that KerryPacker was a great Australian and that public money was being spent ona media extravaganza for the richest man in Australia. ``His life wasnot one I admired,'' he said. ``If Kerry Packer was a great AustralianI feel like burning the flag. The arrests were appalling. The guy dida lot in his life, he was a very capable capitalist, but I am anti-capitalist. We don't see him as a hero.

The protestors received almost no sympathy from passers by, with a number labelling their behaviour as disgusting.

Northcott

This is the public housing estate of Northcott in Surry Hills, just near where I work. Sometimes I would just go and stare at it, I'm not sure why, like a centrifugal force, misery piled on misery, the heroin deals being conducted at lightning speed at its base while the cop cars cruised the block and the mentally ill stared from their balconies or kitchen windows. Shortly after you would see them, they all looked like they had been out of jail for five minutes, dashing urgently along upstairs corridors; because nothing on earth was more important than getting inside into the privacy of someone's flat.

Northcott, said to be the largest public housing complex in the southern hemisphere, has just made the news again, because a man's body was found inside, in a flat with the door open. It had been there six months, through the stinking heat of a Sydney summer; and nobody had even bothered to check where the smell was coming from or why the door was open 24/7. The 62 year old was from Eastern Europe and police have been unable to locate any living relatives.

Alerted by the Northcott story and the mounting uncollected mail, some postal workers at Umima up north decided to check on the welfare of a 79-year-old woman. The police found her skeleton, and she too had been in her home dead for six months.

While the social workers parrot on about community.

I saw Bruce one day; his hagard, expressive face, pale, sick still, although I hadn't seen him since the late seventies, early eighties. I didn't rush to say hello; I didn't rush at all. I never understood the derelction to which they sank, the grotty rooms, the eternal waiting. Bereft over the departure of the latest boyfriend, overwhelmed by the angst of it all, whatever drove him, Bruce was the bloke who shot up fly spray and was never the same again.

I didn't follow him, not exactly, but I saw him later, outside Northcott, and it all fitted into place. He had that look of someone scuttling from their cave on the housing estates to the Centrelink office and back, desperate to be outside for as short a time as possible; desperate for money when there would never be enough; another life ruined while the politicians congratulated themselves on driving up the price of heroin to a point where people like Bruce resorted to all sorts of cheap pills and concoctions, all sorts of crime and dereliction; all to get a few moment's peace before the withdrawals and the depression set in again.

Artists Of The Floating World

This is James on the dam wall at Warragamba. We barely made it. These were the moments, here in the drowned valleys that surrounded Sydney, the water at one of its lowest levels; recovering from crisis to concern. Water was a problem for the government. The $1.3 billion desalination plant had gone down like a lead balloon. Once more Iemma was wrestling with the Carr legacy. It had all come floating down these valleys, the city that had always needed more water than it could get. The problems that were flowing down towards the Labour state government after a decade in power. Iemma was next to Scully, looking as buffed as ever, gleaming almost.

Years of low rainfall had done their work, with the treeline well exposed all up the drowned valley; the concrete walls sweeping impossibly way down. Had to do a story once on the so-called yhetti which had been spotted on a number of occasions in the area around the dam. There were always people who had gone wild in the hills, since convict days.

After the presser and the huddle of politicians and the waiting cars, the local members, the water bureaucrats, the press secretary, after they left we went up to the Warragamba shops and had a pie and a drink in the shade, opposite the school, in green where it looked like nothing could go wrong. One day the rant just went into overdrive, he gave everybody the benefit of his views; till he calmed down and wished he hadn't even gone out the door that day. He could lapse into the slipstream at any moment. Saw Memoirs of a Geisha, which I liked but I'm easily pleased. The geisha is not a concubine. They are living works of art. They are the artists of the floating world. Apparently if you've read the book you're not going to like it so much. The kids great grandmother Dossy has died at the age of 90 and the funeral is on Tuesday. She was a tough old bird. Not sure she liked me very much but I never held that against her.

The Unhappiest Place In Australia

It's official, Sydney is the unhappiest place in Australia, according to a recent survey. They wrote the cannon, now they have to sing the tune; but it comes as no surprise that Sydney is the most distressed, stressed miserable and unhappy place in the country. Everyone comments how much worse it has got; a snakepit of snarling yuppies who all think they deserve to have made so much money on property; legions mortgaged to the hilt; rotten jobs, rotten traffic. It's barely worth going anywhere anymore; we get home and lock the door and just tell the whole world to get lost. In the muffled entrance to the Packer compound pictured above, the staff come and go; but for the rest of Sydney, just surviving has become a struggle.

Here's from the ABC: "Western Australians are fairly grumpy; those in inner Sydney are the most disgruntled of all, but the residents of one of the poorest areas of Queensland are the happiest Australians.These are some of the results of a survey by a Deakin University Professor which compares the well-being of people in Australia's 150 federal electorates.The Queensland seat of Wide Bay, one of the nation's poorest electorates, has come out on top, and at the bottom is the inner Sydney seat of Grayndler."

The news that Sydney is the unhappiest place in Australia comes as no surprise to to many of us who have lived here and are older than about 25, as no one seems to be anymore. The glittering city is no more, except for the very rich. For some of us the city was a bohemian paradise, Amsterdam by the sea, beacon of excitement, promising fantastic career opportunities and a great social life: a non-stop party against a backdrop of beautiful beaches and friendlylocals. Now most of us spend our days dreaming how to escape.

Sydney is a very difficult town to live in. Ourpoliticians just don't understand how deep the anger is out there. In their chauffer-driven limousines and on their outlandishly highsalaries they have no idea how impossible life has become for ordinaryworking people. If you've got a couple of kids, you're on an average wage and you've got the typical hefty Sydney mortgage, then your life has become hopelessly dispiriting. You can't afford to go out. You can't possiblyafford to stop working, to take time for yourself. When I see all those tollways, where people are basically paying to sit in traffic jams every morning, I'm amazed there aren't more incidents of road rage. The anger out there is very deep."

Like every other Sydneysider I resent paying taxes to prop up hapless bureaucracies and smug politicians. I'm in my fifties and I still work every day. But allaround me I see people who are getting paid to sit on their backsides, who get public housing and transport subsidies, free medical care. Round here they even get free lunches at the local church. But becauseI work and stand on my own two feet I get absolutely nothing. It is no surprise that two 14-year-oldgirls allegedly killed a disabled taxi driver earlier this month. No one cares about anyone else anymore. I know it's atouchy subject, but the government has deliberately promoted the transformation of the city I used to love into ethnic ghettoes. Cronulla was a good example of what we can expect in the future as aresult of these policies.

Nothing works anymore, testament to decades of bureaucratic and political incompetence. Local councils are invariably a farce. ,Just getting around Sydney is so unpleasant; the trains are appalling, the traffic unbearable.

Loops and Sparkles

This is a picture of our Lord Mayor Clover Moore, generally regarded as one of the city's greater fruit loops. She is seen as a truly hopeless mayor. Here she is being ushered down the steps of the Sydney Town Hall at the beginning of proceedings to launch the annual Chinese New Year march, part of a fortnight's celebrations to mark the event; one of the biggest outside of Hong Kong and China. Despite her impeccable left wing credentials, shortly after this picture was taken she is settled into the back of that ultimate symbol of Sydney capitalism, a black Mercedes Benz convertable. Mercedes were one of the sponsors, although car owners of the city have absolutely nothing to thank Clover for.She would be better off as mayor of Byron Bay, an upmarket hippy slash alternative haven 1000 kilometres to the north, than as Mayor of a city like Sydney. She is also, controversially, the member for Bligh, supposedly filling both roles. She is better suited as a representative for Bligh, an electorate with huge amounts of public housing, the gay capital of Australia, and with minority problems in enough array to keep any PC guardian happy for years. She wears these atrocious chokers which are meant to be some older woman fashion statement; and are just ridiculous. Once I thought she had courage and flair and sympathy for all the wild boys of Sydney; now I think nothing of the kind.

The debate on multiculturalism continues to run apace; in newspapers, on talkback. Three Labor MPs in Queensland have broken rank with the left and with the Queensland state government, questioning in an extremely well written piece why millions of dollars of public money are being poured into a policy which undermines the mainstream culture and destroys the cohesion of the broader community. Which is creating the very prejudice, narrow mindedness and violence which it was meant to eradicate. Typical of this disgusting bureaucratic public service class were all the sneers at the old Australia, the Australia a generation of soldiers had been foolish enough to fight for, and die for. It's about time these questions were asked; and asked baldly, risking the usual Stalinesque denunciation by the luvvies of racism against anybody who dares to disagree with them. We are plagued with the half-educated; the Useful Fools; so many utterly incapable of thinking outside the square; parroting their first year university courses. I can remember the excitement in anthropology when it was decreed that all cultures were equally valid; a revalation, supposedly, when we had always believed that our own Western culture was the pinnacle of civilisation.

But the endless claptrap of tolerance had in itself become a tyranny. The people were excluded from the debate, because the so-called elites had entirely marshalled the public discourse; particularly in print and at the ABC where they were most comfortable. He was irritated by all of them. The week had passed at last and he couldn't have been more relieved. Col was supposed to show up today and didn't; and his phones were off. I half suspected; as he had said he was going to pay me back some of the money the holiday had cost. I should of known, well I half-suspected; and if I was in this state; if the world had been that cruel; if my own dissolution had reached such an advanced stage; if I had lost my teeth in the surf and was too embarrassed to go outside; maybe I would have done the same. The quiet reserves that could have been ours, the Amsterdam cafes; the world that we had embraced with such gusto; the memories of John Bygate and Lyn Hapgood and Richard Trevaskis and people no one else but us would even remember; we would make the dash in secret and yes, forget to pay a bill, even to an old friend. His craven heart was happier now; a shift; he didn't know why. Perhaps it was just the kids being back and things settling down; after a prolonged hand-over of chaos; watching a train wreck disappearing over the horizon. He didn't care; he wouldn't care; he uttered sympathetic noises and wished he could reverse the progress of time. Swiftly, he became more accomplished; did the jobs quickly, batted the balls back across the court so fast they could barely be seen. And if survival was not a victory, to him it felt exactly that.

Skipping Stones

This is a picture of William with the kids. They're looking through old copies of the Guinness Book of Records, having a great laugh, the biggest ever person, the biggest feet on a living person, that sort of stuff. William is a Professor of Japanese at the University of Sydney. Not many anglos in Australia speak Japanese, much less teach it. His father was in the Second World War and he grew up with stories of the war; thus, for some odd reason, beginning his fascination.

It's been a long week already; what with all the various ructions that have been going on. It's probably not fair to post them, much as I would sometimes like. These were the long battles; things that would never be written, at least not now; not in the instant living memory of things; not with kids and conflict and a past better forgot. The story over Muslim cartoons keeps on going. Yesterday I spent in a suburb I, and probably 99 per cent of the rest of Sydney, had never heard of; a place called Leonay; named after Leo Buring, a famous Australian wine maker who had vineyards along the edge of the Nepean river, and his wife Nay. Attempts to change the name of the suburb failed. They all acted like they had died and gone to heaven. The centre of the suburb was the golf course. Healthy women in their sixties strode around the golf course, had lunch in the club. They had no idea how lucky they were. The rest of us work; the heat just kept coming at us; the phone kept ringing; there would never be any peace.

Suzy's car ran off the road on her way back to Moree and she made the local Moree champion today; a Moree woman who's car had run off the road at a flyover and ended up on the train tracks. The car was a right off; a brand new car which had irked me, and is now gone anyway. And it looks like the insurance won't be valid; just like the other car we totalled. Thank God the kids weren't in it. They'll turn 14 and 15 in the next few months; and I've got a couple of strapping teenagers on my hand. Parenting For Character; rings the title of the book. A lot of days I just finish work and feel exhausted; but at least I work. The top 40 per cent of the country is supporting the bottom 60 per cent, and the Howard government, a so-called conservative government, has been as assiduous a distributor of wealth away from those who earn it as anybody else. The entire Howard social policy was dreamed up by Centrelink bureaucrats; and the massive incompetence at the top continues to astound me. At my age I've seen them all come and go, the left and the right, and it's impossible to say that one is any worse than the other. They're all absolutely hopeless as far as I'm concerned. I resent paying taxes; so someone else can send their kids to private school, so someone else can afford private health insurance; so someone else can get a first home buyers grant; so someone else can have their rent subsidised and sit round doing nothing while I go to work. Like the rest of the country, I'm absolutely sick of the entire bloody farce. 

Ice

Here's the Australian Federal Police with 46 kilograms of Ice they busted out of a speedboat brought into Australia from Canada. It was the largest ever seizure from Canada and the fifth largest seizure of Ice in the country's history. Two sleeps to Christmas, goes the joke. Overtaking ecstasy as Sydney's most popular party drug. Can be smoked rather than shot, adding to its broad appeal. Felt grimy after I got home, ratty in the head. Can't be in this room anymore, he thought, as he bolted from his chair. Just too much. They loved to parade their wares. Did any of this do anybody any good? Did the war on drugs do anything but keep coppers and lawyers and politicians in power and employment?

You could see them sometimes, the little groups of bewildered junkies; wandering the streets at the hour when everybody else was having their morning coffees. Bewildered, because they weren't used to be up all night; weren't used, in a way, to even being conscious; certainly not to feeling any pain. And there they were, scattered to the four winds; moving from housing department flat to another; the secret codes, the walls that kept them going; encased; not harmless; ratting on each other; but more than that, just ratty in the head. And utterly bewildered.

The flats were a mess. The good times were good. Kilo after kilo. Customs had no previous intelligence. They selected the container because it came up suspicious on a number of indicaters. The story said it was by chance; and they weren't happy. Words I had never written. Words I could never defend. They were there at the Stonewall at 3am, and they were there in the Cross at 6am, and the younger and more financial of them were in every trendy club in town. He missed Richard; who had died years ago now; he had been such a handsome boy; he had been such enormous fun. And he had outlived them all, and would continue to go on outliving them all. The pains were random and insignificant. The stories weren't the ones he had expected but they were all there. The criss crossed alley ways of the news floors; the treacherous talentless little pricks that surfaced in the surf and just kept bobbing. He didn't care anymore. The slip stream was glorious; had been glorious; and all the Ice in the world would never make any difference to that. If only he could go back; if only he could do it all over again. 

Multicultural Tyranny

This is a picture of Kayser Trad, once a spokesman for the Australian Mufti, now more of a self-styled spokesman for the Lebanese community in Australia. The backdrop is Maroubra, which saw some of the tensions spilling over from Cronulla at the end of last year. Once again the whole debate is on, with the Danish embassies burning in the middle east, with the placards declaring that Europe will bow down to the mujahadeen. I remember as a kid, we were fascinated by the local Greek grocer, because he was from somewhere else, had things, like garlic, in his shop, that we weren't used to. That was the Australia of old. Then the bureaucrats came up with multiculturalism and Australia has never been the same since. Its meant to be a measure of progressiveness, how much you embrace multiculturalism. Any hint of disbelief marked you as a neanderthal racist. Any suggest that the immigration policies in this country have been completely insane, have already lead to massive social dislocation and ghettoisation of half the city, are pooh poohed as signs of your unreconstructed, clearly unintelligent self.

Yet in all these suburbs, filled now with women with headscarves and people who barely speak any English at all, who have no allegiance to the country, gangsters and the sons of gangsters, precursors to the mobs who will roam the city's streets, are remnant populations horrified at what their suburbs have become. We're not allowed to say these things. As the Danish have discovered, there's much you're not allowed to say anymore. All day, yet again, talkback was dominated by the muslim debate; talkback of course being one of the only venues where people can say what they really think. Many of us are sick of the hijacking of the entire public discourse for a cause foisted upon an unsuspecting population by left wing intellectuals who will die; unable to sip their chardonnay any longer, in comfortable old age homes with never a regret, never a shiver of self doubt. If in the end the world did not fit their theories; that was the fault of the plebs.

The streets have been burning, the flags, the wild crowds; the placards threatening another 9/11 on the people of Europe, all this, the fascism and the fury, are suddenly startling the complacent, placid view that everyone had of this; that only morons would question the state religion of multiculturalism. Well listen to the static and tell me that it's working; this thing imposed and propagandised with millions upon millions of dollars of public money in a determined will to undermine the mainstream culture; adopted by the half-educated, the useful fools, as Marx called them, the school teachers, the bureaucrats, the journalists. Tell me the genie's not out of the bottle.

Here's some of the latest coverage from CBS:

Islamic fury over the cartoons of Prophet Muhammad spilled violently into the streets of Afghanistan, where protesters vented their anger against America. Police gunned down at least four people, some as they tried to storm a U.S. military base. Thousands more joined increasingly violent demonstrations across the world, including in Somalia where stampeding protesters killed a teenage boy. For the first time, a small but unruly protest flared up in Iran, where about 200 demonstrators threw stones at the Austrian Embassy, while in Paris, a newspaper which published the caricatures last week, evacuated its office during a bomb scare. The European Union issued stern reminders to 18 Arab and other Muslim countries that they must protect foreign embassies. British Prime Minister Tony Blair also criticized attacks on people of Denmark, where the cartoons were first published, and other Europeans as "completely unacceptable," CBS News radio correspondent Larry Miller reports. "The attacks on the citizens of Denmark and people of the European community were completely unacceptable, as is the behavior of some of the demonstrators in London over the past few days," Blair said in a statement read by his spokesman. "The police shall have our full support in respect of any action they wish to take with respect to upholding the law, so we understand the difficult situation they were facing." Lebanon apologized to Denmark one day after protesters set fire to a building housing the Danish mission in Beirut. The attack "harmed Lebanon's reputation and its civilized image," Lebanese Information Minister Ghazi Aridi said.

Emotional, He Gasped

The past kept coming back, the nightmare against green, but these things weren't happening now. There were very entertaining nights to be had, there in the slipstream. He said something witty and they laughed, or pretended to laugh, there in the park. There were people who appeared and disappeared and he was uncertain whether they were watching him or not. The group was fast. They laughed. Went and saw Brokeback again. The first time was 10.15am and there were aging gay couples, bald; or one old queen with his Thai boyfriend. The next time I went it was 1.15pm and most girls, straight girls, some with boyfriends in tow.

The week was full of death, a 53 year old taxi driver bashed to death by two 14 year olds. Everyone expressed shock; but people have been writing about the disintegration of the under class for years. There's no more manufacturing, no local shop, no local church, mostly. There's always a Centrelink office and a bottle shop. Everyone said what a lonely man he was, what a miserable life he lived, after the breakdown of his marriage. He worked 12 hour days. Visitors rarely if ever came to the granny flat at the back of the red brick house. A man with a fetid breath relayed how he felt sorry for him. The taxi drivers on the Arthur Street rank at Cabramatta all expressed concern for their own safety; sadness at the man's demise. He had been robbed several times, he had just gone back to work after a stroke, he had lost the use of one arm, he had been through a marriage breakup. He shouldn't have been driving, one man said. It's the department's fault for letting him.

We were so taudry in the slipstream, in corners piled high, wasted; the launch of a thousand pleasures. Their faces told of everything, the Red Bull and Vodka drinks; well kissy kissy. There were other deaths. A 22 month old child was mauled by her family's dingo cross pet; which had come into the house. Animal behaviourists said the baby was probably crying, and this provoked a predatory response in the animal. Her father found her at 4am. It is impossible to imagine; these appalling, private tragedies, linked through the threads of words and work. And there was the arrest of a man in Nelson, New Zealand, on the Janelle Patton case; the frenzied stabbing attack which had rivetted Australia and torn the remote Island of Norfolk apart with suspicion and paranoia. He looked almost normal, twitching in the winds; Norfolk Island was the worst of all the Australian penal colonies; founded in pain and blood and misery and complete brutality. The man is facing extradition proceedings back to Norfolk, where he will be the first person tried for murder on the island in more than a hundred years.

Before The Plague

We danced all night, stumbled from one outrageous scene to the next, called in that instance not just to each otherbutto the universe at large, watching the sunrise over the limpid beauties of the harbour, and were proud, hey destined, there on the dance floor. He never thought he would grow old, or older He never thought there would be an end to the brilliant discoveries, to the turning faces as he walked into a room, to the infinite longing that was all part of the doom laden air. I don't know what you're normally like, the man said, and drunk, as he always was at that hour of the morning in those long lost days, he had a moment of clarity that he could remember all these years later.

The tensions had shifted, between the hunted and the hunter and the boys cruising each other. Sex was so easy, so instant, so fast and if not exactly meaningless so far from being tied to any sense of permanence or commitment or even affection, that now they virtually humped on the dance floor, swivelling their hips, bending over in an endless come on. Even the old ones, and there were so few old ones, they had all been wiped out by the plague, but even the old ones seemed to get all the attention they needed, through walls, through dark corners, in late night grapplings.

The smell of cigarettes permeated his clothes. He was sick of staying home late. He couldn't sleep in the fetid heat which continued to grip the city, which continued to make him sweat. The soundtrack of Brokeback Mountain played in his head, the poignant notes, and everyone he watched seemed multi-layered, as if they were only brief representations of this time and place; and other stories, their entire stories, could be told here. He watched some young queen, hanging out with the trannies, doing his bit on the dance floor and he felt like saying: you will drink for another 20 years. You will become fat and lonely and remember this, perhaps even this night, as your good times. He had always loved them, the multiple postures, the intrigue, the feeling of the infinite washing through the room, the splintered light in the dawn, the collapsing buildings calling him back to a primeval state from whence he had come, from where they had all come. At work, greeted like a long lost friend, he pretended to be normal; but in his head, in his ceaseless searching, in the long restless sleepless nights, he was only just beginning to find any sense of normalicy at all. If only he had been so sane, if only he had stopped to enjoy himself, all those years ago.