Rumours of my demise, etc. In fact, April has been Novel Writing Month in Debville. It has progressed well, but slowly, & left me in a state in between hopelessness & optimism. What is this state called? Perhaps 'normality'.

I am back.

In news, this: a joint venture by Mission Australia and realestate.com.au to raise money for the homeless. Click on the link below to donate a dollar to Housing for the Homeless.

www.housesforthehomelesscom.au

As usual, I am torn. In the words of Lee Stringer, it's presumptuous to assume the homeless need homes. Perhaps what they need is more complicated than that. Perhaps more simple.

Do we, of the middle-class, internet-surfing world, really think we have all the answers, for everyone?

This is one of the few answers I have for the right now. Click the link, give a dollar. Why not?

This is how Lee Stringer began to write. He lay in a crawl space underneath Grand Central Terminal, groping about for anything long and thin. At last his hand fell upon a wooden, dowel-like instrument. He thrust it into his crack pipe, and before long had freed up the last smokable resin. He lit up, and ''success, love, orgasm, omnipotence, immortality,'' as he describes the effect of the drug, were once again his. One parched, drugless day he was reduced to staring at the long, wooden thing, and noticed it was a pencil.
-- Kurt Vonnegut

As one friend of mine attempts to corner the market on lurid personal Xmas photos (thank god for the hat), I decide to play it safe with this photo of a typical 30 degree day in Martin Place, pre-Xmas.

Xmas in Martin Place

Note, however, the absence of blue sky. Sydney. Is. HUMID this year.

After I took this photo I found a cheerful homeless guy sitting by the Commonwealth Bank and wearing a Santa hat. I thought about paying him to model some of that holiday cheer, but I dunno, he seemed a little incommunicado & I wasn't sure how to handle the transaction. He did wish me Merry Xmas, though, as I dropped him some coins. All in all, this Xmas has seemed like a happy one for most people I've passed. From the tinsel-crazed bus drivers to the homeless guy near the bank to the crazy dude in the safari suit who stands in front of Parliament House (he had to re-do all his signs when we got ourselves a new Prime Minister) to the people at the supermarket today who let a confused woman usurp their position in the queue ('It's Christmas!' they told her, but she scuttled away again, her sights set on a higher goal -- and shorter queue). It's been a happy & peaceful winding down to a busy ol' year.

So let me wish a Merry Xmas to those who celebrate, happy holidays to those you get 'em, an adequate Festivus to my fellow Seinfeld fans, & peace for everyone.

And to all, a good-night!

It's hot and stormy in Sydney. Over the past twelve months the city has turned into the tropics. Muggy days give way to storms, if we're lucky. Gardens take off in unpredictable ways (ie. not just the weeds thrive), water restrictions are not *quite* lifted, but people have hope.

Everywhere we're leaving our doors open (security grilles still in place) to capture some of the balmy evening air. I am no different. The door is open, I'm in the kitchen making salad because it's too hot for anything else.

My neighbour appears, calling out like a crazy person, "Is anybody home?"

This may not sound like a crazy person in prose, but my neighbour makes a lot of stuff sound crazy in person.

My neighbour calls me to my open door & I stare cautiously through the grille.

"I'm distraught," he says.

I wonder whether he means drunk, since he's smiling kinda sheepishly (and you get to see that expression so rarely outside of Famous Five books), but he seems largely ok, just crazy.

"Why might that be?" I ask, not entirely convinced this is a problem that needs to come to my door.

"My chicken has flown over the fence and is in your backyard."

"Your chicken?" I say. This, indeed, is the innercity. An unlikely place for chickens, and I am doing a second check to see if he is drunk. But, again, crazy. He offers no explanation so I fetch the keys. "Your *chicken*?!" I say again.

Naturally my (crazy) neighbour is distraught because he assumes my cat will attack the chicken, seizing the life from its fragile body and casting it aside like a used and dirty thing. He does not, however, understand my cat, for she is known locally as the Nerd of the Cat World, and it is not unknown for birdlife to -- unkindly, I think -- DIVEBOMB my cat as she sits on my roof.

Besides which, having seen a giant bird in the backyard, my cat has already fled into the house and up the stairs to the bedroom, with a look of 'what tha, birds that are larger than cats, cats driven out of their own backyards, THE WORLD HAS TURNED UPSIDE DOWN'. She is, in other words, safely occupied.

So I accompany my neighbour out the back door and, sure enough, there's a large, healthy-looking hen (or, in local parlance, 'chook'), complete with cluck, taking up most of the space in my innercity (again, I stress) 'backyard'. It turns out you can rent them. We go to investigate, the neighbour and I (not the cat, of course), & it's then I discover that my neighbour is not only crazy, he's afraid of chooks.

This leaves me, fearless innercity indie woman, in singlet top and with the scent of fresh parsley on my hands (it's all clean living in this city), calmly stalking the chook.

"Maybe you grab it by it's legs?" my neighbour suggests. But I don't, I grab it gently across its shoulders in order to hold its wings folded to its sides.

"My grandmother had chooks," I explain to an astonished (crazy) neighbour. I don't go on to say I never touched the dreaded things, but I did observe my grandmother on her daily rounds & obviously something's paid off. That and the fact her roast chook dinners are a fond highlight of my childhood.

So I release the unharmed bird over the fence & fail to get any clear idea from my neighbour whether, in fact, he needs a higher cage in case the adventurous little pre-stuffing-and-roasting pet tries it again, coming over the fence to confront the vast innercity aspects of my 'backyard'. I mean, this is the INNERCITY, fer chrissake, what is with having LIVE CHICKENS in your backyard?

My neighbour promises me that if the birds or their smell get on my nerves, he will gladly & almost gratefully send them back. They are, after all, rented.

8.5 weeks of the post-gallbladder lifestyle, & I admit I don't feel so good. Apart from the preternatural tiredness, there is the unspecific malaise that has lead me, finally, to take the advice of someone who has done this trip before.

Most notably, I was advised to start taking Swedish Bitters.

Bitters tastes like nothing that should ever be swallowed. It's made, I've ascertained, from the ink of old pens found in abandoned school yards, boiled down and then mixed with diluted arsenic 'for flavour'. It leaves a sensation in the mouth as if you've swallowed a medium sized table top, pushing its way into the cells of your cheeks and sending you momentarily synesthetic.

It is terrible, rotten stuff, and should never be touched. UNLESS you have a liver that's struggling to keep up with its new responsibilities. Because actually it does remove the spatial grittines of a sluggish digestive system -- which is both good news and bad.

Of possibly more interest, the homeless guy by the Anglican church was there again this week, in my old stomping ground. Still as a statue, a green checked blanket on his knees, hands clasped in conciliation and resting in his lap. I visited my old workplace this week, after hours, and found a shell of a place. I thought I'd feel ... something. For the good times & the not-so-great. But my old desk, though evidently occupied, looked empty. And the desk I had before that one was dank, stuck through with the rubbish of a job someone hated (they must've, to have made such a mess, filled the spot with grimy bits of paper and personal accoutrement). It looked ... done. The whole place was done. And old and empty and new.

Sometimes, it's actually better if you go back. To find a place that has -- to your relief -- left you behind.

1. A peaceful demonstration through the centre of Sydney went off without incident. I saw a Channel 7 newsreporter ask one demonstrator if she could 'understand' why the government might fear violence from an APEC demonstration. She answered no, and went on to give a reasoned defence of her argument -- which did not touch on why demonstrators might 'understandably' expect violence from their governments.

2. George W. Bush referring to the meeting as the OPEC.

3. APEC headlines sharing first page with articles about how Australian Dame Joan Sutherland launched the career of Pavarotti internationally by flying him to Australia to perform. In case you missed it, Pavarotti, Australia, extremely closely and importantly linked.

4. Horse flu undermining the potential efforts of our mounted police, ending up in at least one officer driving a police bus -- directly into someone's BMW.

5. The Chaser team managing to drive through police security for several blocks with one of them dressed as Osama Bin Laden. Upon their arrest, police refer to the security measures as 'successful'.

6. Asked to come up with the 'quintessential' spirit of Australia (which, in itself, sounds like the kind of impossible task they assign as initiation into a cult), someone came up with Drizabone jackets, with lapels that 'reflected the colours of the environment'. It's impossible to complete such a task without delving into sentimentality, of course, and I won't even comment on the fact that steel-grey was missing from the palette of environmental colours (the blue of the sky and water, the green of the land, blah, blah, blah). I just wonder why it's us smaller countries that end up trying to do such strange, simplified tasks. If they had the meeting in America, would the attendees all dress up like cowboys & proclaim their allegiance to the wildness of a long-absent frontier? Would they dress in stereotypes of other cultures to pay homage to multi-culturalism? Or would they leave such hokey ideas aside as inevitably serving no one & signifying nothing?

7. As thousands of Sydney-siders avoided the city, it was unaccustomedly easier to get a seat on the bus.

This morning I was buzzed by an F17 (I presume) and a chopper. I walked past the bins of Martin Place, colourfully attired in black plastic bags and police tape (I like to pretend every one of them contains a miniature homicide -- like a snow globe). I saw police in cars, on foot and yes, with bikes.

I've heard if you spot George Bush's motorcade (I'm not sure if it's the real 'cade or the fake one, and whether George sits in the 'reality based' one or feels more naturally at home in the 'Cade of Falsity and Fakeness) -- anyway, if you spot the motorcade, look up. Look up into the windows and rooftops & you'll also be able to spot the snipers artfully positioned like streaks of black paint in an otherwise realistic landscape. Real or fake, I'm not sure. The snipers.

This morning I heard two men shouting. They were having a regular conversation, but they were shouting and they were striding down each side of the road.

"I wouldn't go down south, mate, they arrest a fella if you're black down there."
"I'm not going down there."
"Don't go down there, mate!"

This morning a blind man tapped the girl behind me on the shoulder. We were all waiting at the lights and the girl behind me must've turned because then the girl beside me turned and so, domino-effect, I turned. We're all standing there in the wind, freezing, the two tall nordic girls behind me with their hair fanning out brightly in the wind.

And the blind man said, "Excuse me, I'm blind -- as you see," he held aloft his cane, an old fashioned wooden one with a split handle, "but I can still see your hair shining."

We laughed, then we hung back to let the blind man cross the road first. I suppose this was respect though actually it felt like wonder.

Very early in the morning a woman is standing in front of a store on the big shopping street, waiting. I know who she is and what she's waiting for but I am too far away to help. A bum slouches toward her with his head down. She goes over to him and speaks. He looks up while she asks him to help. She is very short and every day must unlock the door to her store. The problem is the door has two locks-- one at the very top, one at the bottom. She is too small to reach the one at the top and must always ask a passerby to take the key and unlock it for her. She's asked me several times and is always very pleasant about it. Moving towards them now I watch the bum turn the key up top and then hand it back to the woman. She smiles and thanks him profusely. He walks away towards me smiling and moving much differently than minutes before-- with purpose now, a man who's asked to do things, a man who deserves thanks.
-- jonathancarroll

For those who've been asking, he was there again today, in his customary position in front of the Presbyterian Church (like he never left). His dark blue blanket was stretched from his lap to the milk crate in front of him so he looked like larvae. And on the milk crate was the beat-up old tray for his collection of coins.

I guessed that last bit. From the bus window I couldn't see the tray. I don't walk those streets anymore (lately the past has been catching up with me).

He was resting one elbow on his knee and in his raised hand was a cigarette. His hair was longer, pushing from the sides of his head in pepper and grey.

He was looking philosophical and I was feeling philosophical, having composed in my head that morning on the bus a thesis entitled Loneliness: Unfinished.

As usual he was implacable. It must be my imagination that finds camaraderie in his solitary solidity. He is perfectly at ease (how can he be?), he is perfectly whole (isn't everyone, from the outside?), he is perfectly still. Still. ( And still there. )

Tonight, saw Ian McDonald used as a pick-up.

Night. The bus. Enter the quiet, bookish boy with the soft skin, neat hair and trimmed beard. Brown. Head down, he stalks the bus aisle, coming to a stop at the very last standing position at the very back of the bus. Near me.

I'm sitting so that his book is in line with my hair line, I guess, but it's thick enough I can't see the cover. What I do is catch a glimpse of the name Ian McDonald on the top of a page. I crane my neck entirely, I realise later, unselfconsciously, trying to see *which* Ian McDonald he has. It's a pretty thick book, & I've got a hunch --

But I'm stymied by the blonde in black-&-white, who spies something I'm trying to discern: the image on the front cover.

"Ganesha," she says with a smile.

She's carrying a black leather jacket and her skin shines, it just shines. Her hair is carefully curled and it shines, too. I'd even call her sexy, though it's harder for me to gauge sexiness in a woman, hard enough to find in a man often times. (She said, wryly.) The blonde, she's on a bus heading out of town right after 7pm. She's going the wrong way, looking for a good time, dressed like that.

"Ah, yes," says the bookish boy.

The blonde begins to talk about Ganesha and his significance and the significance of the other image on the cover and then she stops.

"But you're trying to read it, I'm so sorry to be explaining," she says.

She can talk and smile and breathe and smile and smile and smile. Even I'm mesmerised.

"No, no, please. Explain away," says the boy in studious tones.

So I hear all the blonde knows about the figures on the cover, and then I hear the boy explain what's *inside* the cover, & how a certain figure is actually 'the god of quick-e-marts". And the blonde says, "I'm sorry, I don't know what that is." The boy explains, with reference to The Simpsons, and the girl laughs like he's hilarious or like maybe it's The Simpsons that are hilarious. Whichever. The boy mentions a city in the book and the girl knows all about it -- and here is where I'm *really* impressed -- the girl knows all about it because "the friends I'm living with just came back from there."

Oh ho ho, man! She's good. She even managed to work in the fact that she was living with friends, implying both a) she's single & b) she's desirable as a housemate. Hell, where do you go to learn skills like that?

I'm about to ask her out myself when my stop arrives & I have to make the most awkward exit from a bus I've made in about -- well, Sydney buses, what a freaking mess -- several months, lifting my bag over the heads of resistant passengers and briefly contemplating homicide when one huge-arsed bitch stalls, swollen like a blowfly, in the very middle of the aisle.

I squeeze off the bus, ejected like toothpaste from the split seam of a metal tube, & I pause at the pedestrian crossing. I'm full of amazement at how unexpected life can be, how sometimes life just offers itself up to you, belly-first, and insists you scratch it until its leg starts pistoning. I'm thrilled, actually. I'm immensely cheered. In my head I'm composing the rest of the story for these two unlikely lovers, picturing the home they'll make and the kinds of dinner parties they'll host. I'm grinning at the traffic and I turn briefly to look over my shoulder for no good reason and -- it's the smallest things you regret sometimes, you know, like that time you turned to look over your shoulder for no good reason -- and there's the boy with the beard and the book, head down, ambling towards the pedestrian crossing behind me. Reading.

Reading his book. That. Idiot. And I want to tell him he's an IDIOT. I don't care if he had to travel an hour past his stop and then back again, didn't he want to see how my story ended? Didn't he want to know about the dinner parties and the way she built a stylish, black-&-white home which he filled top to tail with books? Didn't he want to catch the mystery that sent that woman pinwheeling into his book cover? Didn't he wonder how it was a stranger on a bus could be so willing to talk about -- of all the crazy things -- quick-e-marts and gods? Didn't he want, right now, to get back on that bus and say, "Fancy meeting you here, what a one-in-a-million, what a lucky break to find each other in the chaos of this cluttered world, as if I'd ever let a chance like that go!" Huh? My god, didn't he?

But no, he was still reading his book, somnolent as a bumble bee in the heat.

I was so full of words I think he caught me staring and caught, on the tip of my tongue, an impatient query about the book or the woman or the bus or his level of cognitive ability. But I bit back, figuring he'd earned enough praise and unanticipated adventure from the universe for his choice of novel. Let him alone. Let him disappear back into his quick-e-mart world of gods and gorgeous women. And eh, in the end, head-down as he crossed the road, book held to his face, how could I blame him for that choice when I'd made so many both more and much less brave?

Must be a bloody good book, River of Gods. We should probably all read it. Probably on buses. So we can act like gods.

The broken guys, the sleazy/creepy ones, the lost, the haunted, the aimless.
-- jonathancarroll

I'm beginning to fit right into Martin Place, with its mix of suited gentry, bankers, brokers, television representatives, tiny-thin women in tiny-thin shoes. Designed to hobble, those shoes, designed to lead the way but not follow.

And then the others, the ones not quite so uniform, but uniform in their way. The tourists in clothes that seem rumpled, bland and random, but were no doubt carefully chosen (and carefully packed) for their portability and matchability and overall inoffensiveness (if the tourists are other than Australian tourists, bless 'em).

The very occasional homeless person or crazy person. Like the guy who stands in front of Parliament House in something akin to a safari suit and hat. As if he's game hunting. Standing there with a 12-foot tall banner on a makeshift flagpole. Every few weeks his banner proclaims a different concern. Paedophiles in Parliament one week. Wentworth Hospital Hates The Poor another. In thick black paint. It's the thickness of the paint that makes me think he's right. Or crazy.

(Always on his sign are more words of rage beneath the heading, but the illogic or is it the horror of what he says means I can't remember more than one line, not more than the first line. My brain refuses to digest it.)

I'm beginning to fit right in.

I know this because twice today I was asked directions. I must look like I know what I'm doing or where I'm going. Both times by old, squat people who walked a lot more slowly than me. I'm beginning, I suppose, to fit right in.

(Sometimes being lost isn't as bad as being found.)

I realise I wear the same darks as everybody else. I realise I dress the same, have probably the same implacable face with the same quick, strong gaze as everybody else. We're all trying to see around corners. We're all chasing our next meal, in our own ways. We're all here.

Sunlight brings out the craziness in everyone. People sit, in their suits, on the concrete steps of the MLC Centre eating sandwiches from lunchboxes and pulling their hair away from their faces and expensive sunglasses, rolls of flesh sticking out from under their shirts. We are an ugly race, I've often thought, but glorious in our ugliness, proud of our shamelessness. (I learned long ago to be accepting of intolerance.) But yet I still sit upright, still suck in my stomach to avoid the threat of gargoyle-like curves in my spine or thick rolls of skin pushing out from my waist. Our ability to accessorise, someone said, is what separates us from the animals. Like many of us, I crave and resent that separation.

I'm beginning, as I say, to fit right in.

Wanting to remember what it was like to feel lonely, I went into a busy cafe at lunchtime and ordered an iced coffee. The absence of an actual meal, plus the fact I rarely drink coffee anymore, added to the feeling of being out-of-joint. I pulled out my notebook and used it as a shield while I studied the crowd. Animated, I thought. Loud. Strange. Mildly irritating. I tried to decide whether it was a mark of maturity or immaturity that I prefer the life *outside* my head now.

The homeless guy plays sudoku.

Someone gave him a book of sudoku and he occasionally moves from the steps of the presbyterian church with its outdoor charms (and in this maddening, constant rain seeking to drown the world, who can blame him), to the bright foyer of the catholic church.

The catholic church is an ugly thing, like a bunker. It has straight up-&-down cement pillars, and a massive Jesus that hangs across the front, arms spread for flight. Jesus is green. Photosynthesising in the sun, he rests his chin on his right shoulder and looks down to his pegged feet and the street below. His gaze is filled with pity. For his feet or for us, the homeless guy, the cold, passing crowd -- who can say.

The homeless guy plays sudoku. He is oblivious to Jesus, the copper-green gaze lost on him. Once, on a cold cold evening, sun setting pale, warmless yellow across churches and other buildings alike, I saw the homeless guy enter a nearby bottleshop. Grinning. Hand in pocket, fingering change collected during the day or days. I didn't blame him. I went home and had a scotch that night and toasted my unknown brethren, buying what? buying fruity lexia or some other cask concoction to keep him warm.

I admit I envy him, when the weight of the unknown hangs over me in a posture of flight, I envy him his ability to ignore it, to focus in, to find satisfaction in a pocket full of change and the startled gaze of a bottleshop attendant. I wish my wants were so simple. But I've fallen somewhere along the way and when I got up, I was bruised and I still carry those bruises as something that needs to be addressed. Somehow. Not sure how.

I envy him, because I am heavy and can't lift my arms for flight, can't stand light on the earth anymore. Can't not be borne down to the ground with all the things weighing on my mind. Can't avoid the selfishness of my envy, to have warmth and security and a roof away from rain, and yet the desire to trade it all in to find out what I really want or what I can really bear, to find simplicity. And how complex is life, really? Food, shelter, breath, reason, meaning, possibility, no, no, now it's getting complicated all over again.

If all I had was one book, I would read only that, one bottle, I would drink only that, one game, I would play only that, one choice, I would make only that.

But I've made a choice that leads to more and more choice, more and more decisions, and sometimes I regret only that.

The Spidey-loving bum in front of the Church is still playing with his book of sudoku.

Because when I did the backpacking thing ten years ago, I was busy gulping down the world. I didn't record stuff very well. Also, some of my journals went missing in the mail. (One day, I anticipate, they'll show up smelling of the ocean, smeared by strange fingers, & I can reclaim the girl who lost them. I like her less than the woman I've become, but I feel for her more.)

So I have photos and photos which are images only to me by now, post-modern, almost surreal, and they have become iconic in my life though their meaning to the greater world is something different and more or something different and less than I understand. Now and then the world throws a piece back at me, & I remember or realise it for the first time.

Had you asked me, 'Ever seen Prague Castle?' I wouldn't have even been sure. Until I saw Ellen's photo of this sculpture, and realised yes, my god, I've been there, but I don't remember how or when. I don't even remember taking my own photo, but it's there in an album and in my mind's eye, in a collection of anonymous photos of places and things that shone or spoke, and seemed to do so only for me while I went and threw myself at the universe.

The bronze weight of Death on the bronze back of the human supplicant (bowed but unbroken) was instantly recognisable -- even after I'd accidentally skimmed over those famous stained glass windows. (Then I remembered L., my long lost travel buddy, saying "And as we were sitting there the sun came out and the place glowed just glowed, it was amazing, my photos will be completely blurred but I don't care." L., it's been ten years and I'm beginning to mourn all over again for what's been lost in between.)

We walked the hill, because we were backpackers and poor, N. & I, and I photographed Prague all the way. It's one of my favourite cities, one of those rare places where I found myself choosing the window I wanted to live behind, the bar I'd visit regularly, the market, the take-away shop where I would eat. Part of me still keeps that whole plan tucked away, and when things go really wrong or when things go really right, I think about running back there. I want, somehow, to recover the immortality I left behind. I want to be an artist on the Charles Bridge, I want to haunt a garrett in the centre of town. Part of me does, I think, part of me does those things. The hunger I feel is the soul searching for the pieces of itself that were lost, thrown or given away, gifted to the world in my mad flight across and through its core.

The church, for some days now, has been sporting a sign outside the front. It says, with a certain amount of levity:

St Burnabas: We're still on fire for Jesus!

This morning someone had written Eternity on the Church board out the front. You know, Eternity. Sydney-siders will know what I mean, & it's only when I go looking for a link for that word, Eternity, that I remember the word in Sydney belongs to a dead homeless guy. And today I am feeling a little homeless, so it makes me stop.

Two nights ago: Firefighters were called to the 148-year-old church, on the corner of Mountain Street and Broadway, about 3.30am (AEST) after the fire broke out in the building and neighbouring hall.

On my way to work I saw it, yesterday. I am not christian, nor am I easily lead anymore, but a burned out church, its corrugated iron roof twisted like used tissues, well, it gives you pause. There's something eery to a burned-up shell with the smoke still rising, and it's first thing in the morning and you're about to get on a bus. And here's a question entirely unrelated: why does making yourself vulnerable to someone feel so much like taking? Why is it like asking them for something; something you're not able to provide for yourself?

Maybe it's not so unrelated. That's what a savaged church does. It makes you want to say 'I'm sorry' & then work out what it is you're sorry for later. Or perhaps that's just failed catholics like me.

Yes, it's *that* church, St Barnabas, the one that used to have the war of words with the pub across the road (the pub is now a cafe & the church, the church, guys, it's burned down, the facade hangs like a loose tooth across the darkness inside).

At St Barnabas Church is a sign that reads: "You have nothing that God did not give you.'' Across the road at the Broadway Hotel is another sign that reads: "I know I have nothing, but I'm not sure who gave it to me."
(From the same SMH article)

At the website (cos, yes, churches can have websites), it says, "The LORD giveth and the LORD taketh away." Well, he sure does that. I'm not sure why he needs his whole name in upper case. Perhaps it makes it easier for him to hear it. LORD, says the church. WHAT? says the lord. IT STINGS, OH LORD! OH, HOW IT BURNS!

Weird.

Also weird, at the website, the motto of St Barney's is: gripped by the love of Christ. That's such a strange image. GRIPPED. Savage. Fierce. Like heat, fierce like fire. LORD? says the church. WHAT? says the lord. NOT SO TIGHT, OH LORD!

I am in a strange humour tonight, I wager. I blame that damn dracula1897.

Still. I have a strange sense of loss about that place, not because I ever even stood inside the thing. Mainly because former Minister of St B's, Robert Forsyth (now Anglican Bishop of South Sydney), saved me from an evangelist one time. The evangelist, who was a friend of mine, dragged me to a lecture & at that lecture, Forsyth presided & he said, 'You don't become a Christian in order to get into Heaven. You become a Christian to thank God for what he's already done for you.'

Leaving aside what it is god -- sorry, God -- has & has not done (giveth! and taketh away!), I liked it. I liked the idea that Forsythe was living a life of gratitude, not guilt. He said, 'you are already forgiven'. Well, I'm paraphrasing, it was about 16 years ago, but you get the idea. Christianity is not a way into heaven, it's a way of thanking g-- God -- for Heaven.

I felt calmed & moved & reassured by the lecture.

And then my friend turned to me & said, 'Well, I hope you were listening because if you don't accept Jesus into your life, you're going to burn in hell for eternity.'

Eternity. It's a long time to be homeless.

And I never really spoke to that friend again. Not because I decided to cut him out of my life (like the man GRIPPED by lunacy that he clearly was), but because I laughed, and when I laughed *he* cut me out of *his* life.

For which I am grateful.

Context: a kitchen, twenty floors above street level, wide windows capturing a city skyline. Outside it's a crisp, winter's day; windy. Down below, people are moving about clutching scarves and coats to their necks, bending forward into the wind. Except for the tourists, who flaunt their foreign status by wearing t-shirts and sunglasses. Also down on the street is a homeless guy, but you guessed that already, right?

Inside, above, a stranger, a woman. Her toast is cooking & while it does, she stares apparently mesmerised by the unfolding of the day beneath and around her. Perhaps she's looking for that homeless guy. She's a nondescript woman, nameless, blank-faced, possibly hungover, almost certainly daydreaming. She notes, not for the first time, the wide empty spaces that rooftops offer & she thinks about running. Running, just running. Space always makes her think of running.

Enter: R., a charming south american gentleman with a bright smile.

R. to woman: "OK, that's the second time I've caught you staring out that window in a week, you can't tell me you weren't thinking of jumping this time!"

Woman, snapping back to reality: "All right! I *was* thinking of jumping. But only because you planted that idea in my head in the first place!"

They both laugh.

Conversation moves on to the important matters of the day. Like, where's the paper towel kept now? Its continued absence seems a wry symbol, for the two of them, of the speed of change in their lives, the baffling absences that have marked the climb to maturity, the incorrigible corruption of the world. They find themselves standing in a place at once familiar and unfamiliar, where something has been shifted & abandoned. They relate to that, it seems, or one of them does.

In recent years, a darkness has crawled across this spot. Not just the shade of the new office block across the road, but a darker thing, more ominous. In the space of three minutes, they discuss several ideas (based largely around paper towel) and two names, both of which belong to the vast army of Those Who Have Left. Gone, liberated or disposed of, depending on your interpretation -- but not forgotten, their shadows stretching longer now they're no longer there. The word 'remember' comes up a lot.

'I remember when I worked in the desk closest to the kitchen,' says R.

He goes on to explain the better understanding he possessed then, of all things related to the kitchen. He leaves in search of paper towel, & returns with something that doesn't quite fit the paper towel dispenser & the woman, the stranger, stops herself from one of her ridiculous philosophical statements. Like 'we none of us fit in this place anymore', or 'nothing's quite right now, have you noticed that? nothing quite adds up right now'.

Because it's morning, & it's beautiful here, & the kitchen is a light-hearted place. If you want to be sombre, you need a room with a door you can shut. You can't be sombre in the light of a kitchen, over the matter of some goddamn paper towel, for chrissake, it's not normal. It's not normal! Whatever that is.

The results from yesterday's poll are in, & apparently several of you think I may, myself, have an interesting life, though I'm probably lying. Yes.

Several more of you, though, find yourselves more interested in the homeless guy. You know, the one who likes Spiderman, & who lives in front of the church across the road. Of course you are! A man so free of ties that even his beloved Spiderman blanket has been lost many, many months ago, and he does not grieve. What's one more loss, after all, when life is so intent on handing out so many. And yet, how self-contained he seems, how compact his existence, how cheerful is his abandonment.

For whatever reason, I've noticed more homeless people in the area lately. Perhaps it's just that my eyes are opened, the scales that fell from them some time ago safely ensconced in a pocket for later use. Perhaps it has something to do with the pristine shopping centre, its cloud-white floors a clarion call to those of us struggling with the mundanities of the physical world. The idea, however brief, that we traverse heaven as we seek to fill our shopping baskets or our bellies, why, how surreal to be able to entertain the fantasy even for a second, a minute. The ice cream shop is gone now, the butcher's has shut down, both leaving gaps like missing teeth. Who is fit to trade in Heaven?

But the homeless guy, *the* guy, he's been quiet. This morning he was up early, clearing away what stuff he'd had to leave out in last night's rain. The way he fussed about that concrete spot reminded me of the way my grandmother would work in her kitchen: all industry and care and something indefinably spiritual, though she would deny it (and I mean both my grandmothers, both giant souls who held entire houses aloft with their might). A kind of ritual of the everyday that I've accidentally or genetically appropriated myself, many times, in many ways.

Beside the wall was another shape, a green synthetic larva of a sleeping bag with a spill of lank hair from the top. There've been a couple of teenagers hanging out with him lately. He doesn't mind. Takes it in his stride. Yesterday, from the window, I watched a delivery guy push his trolley around the Spidey bum's furnishings (such as they are) with a familiarity that fitted my own. There is no doubt the homeless guy isn't really homeless.

But today, today, as he cleared his space and set his house in order, the guy, the bum was wearing a bright red hawaiian shirt with white flowers. Beside him was a cask of Sunnyvale Fruity Lexia, the box opened from the top. I wondered -- of course I did -- I wondered why he opened it from the top, why he didn't use the nozzle & its corresponding perforations. Was he, like me, always befuddled by the mathematical puzzle of the cask wine nozzle? Did he, instead, like the feel of the bright silver bladder (like a bloated human organ) in his hands? Did he like to imagine he was drinking from a teat when he swallowed his Fruity Lexia, suckling at a giant wolf with his brother, Romulus? Or was it simply that in a life without glassware, drinking from a bladder is easier than drinking from a box? (Requiring, as it does, a certain dramatic arching of the neck, a certain strength in the upper arms and dexterity in the hands.)

How quickly the mundane and the sublime change place. How much of life is all about the details, the details, the details, of getting by, the distant worry of getting ahead, the ache of getting behind. How little of life is about the meaning, faith, hope. ("It's exhausting," I said to a friend, "to keep having hope and losing hope, I'm too tired." She replied, "I'm impressed you still have any at all." I told her, "Maybe this time I'm really giving up. Then at least I can rest." So it goes.)

How impossible to get into heaven when you need a wallet to live there, else Security won't let you sleep.

On the hill in the gap between Central Station and George St, there's a patch of land not big enough to be called a park. It used to hold myriad dirty native plants trapped out of place in the centre of town. I figured them as native because of their ugly, pointy leaves and their ability to, unpredictably, shoot up bright flowers like fireworks.

Last night in Spring air that was warm like warm milk, I found the plants had been removed and in the suddenly-flat space left behind was lawn. Simple mow-your-own lawn. Which means one thing: the giant rats that lived in the spot outside Central are gone. I'm not sure how they got rid of the rats but, since they were the size of small ponies, I assume trucks were involved. I wonder whether they burned or poisoned or chased or hunted them out, those fearless untamable *rats*, keen-eyed and Kingly and curious.

Further along the city in the thick twilight, I noticed the giant Bendon billboard with its supine model in underwear had been replaced. Instead, a massive Calvin Klein couple wrapped around one another, glossy locks of hair falling against each other's smooth skin. In the heat of the Spring evening (air warm now like a warm body around and against me), I noticed a million moths at the billboard, flapping into the light and landing on the exposed couple like stinging, flapping acne, bruising their starving faces and undoing what careful airbrushing had carefully done. Dozens of brave acne moths making their statement in the night, before falling to join fallen comrades in the street below.

Love and death, I thought, with satisfaction. Exactly so.