The Long Road Back.

Two hours ago this phrase was rattling around in my head as I reflected on how unfit I was and how far I'd fallen since last I'd made "A run at the title". The title? Yes its just a Shenton Park boys way of saying that one is going to try and achieve something good, something big, something worth living for...(An ideal for living?) here I am again on the floor amongst the dust, the boxes and the daddy long-legs spiders. I'm unfit, overweight and broken-hearted. But I'm on the floor and doing abdominal crunches. I'm on the long road back. Gets me to thinking about the nature of victory and defeat. How it feels as though we are always cycling out of one and into the other. Yet I imagined when I dragged myself out of the gutter years ago that victory would be permanent. That I would be awarded some sort of endowment befitting the achievement. Mayhaps a throne to sit upon and long weekends in wan lamplight telling tales of victories and adventures ---but I see it doesn’t work like that and there is no end in sight and I’ve been knocked out, got up, back down again several times since I first took my run. So that I begin to get it now as I work through a beginners fitness program (so mild that it wouldn’t have raised my heart beat above 80 three years ago) I'm on the long road back and whilst it's disappointing that I'm having to fight the same fights I thought I'd already won, passed and defeated forever, I do take pride --alone in the humidity dank dreamless Melbourne summer, so wet it forgets itself and knows of no season but the one tomorrow and there is no tomorrow and tomorrow: birth, death, fall, stand, hope, loss blow the top off a mountain --lava rebuilds it or something new entirely and what I'm trying for here is that I get it now. There is no final victory but renewed struggle and if anything just a brief pause to look back and reflect then gird up and sally forth for there will surely be another battle with self... just beyond our vision, in the quiet gloom ahead.

Listening to: Jaan Pehechan Ho - Muhammad Rafi

Ashley Dad of the Year

Ashley,

If you have a scrap of decency left in your soul then you need to find a way to help E. Her mental torment and anguish is in no small part a direct consequence of your parenting.

E told me that R will not pay for her to have counseling. The obscenity of this is beyond measure.  You two earn enough money to help your only daughter.

Whatever wrongs you believe that E did you let me remind you of this: She was a child and then a teenager. You were the adult. The duty of care, the burden of moral responsibility is yours. You need to own up to the fact that you failed her as a father and the legacy of that failure is that she is now chronically depressed. She cuts herself, is on drugs to combat suicidal thoughts and most recently she starves herself and then vomits up the food.

I will further go on the record here and add that if you and R don’t find some way to help her and restore her sense of love and belonging in this world then she will die.  Mark these horrible words down for they may haunt you in the end.

Ecotone

So this is my first of hopefully many little letters to you penned in yr absence but with dear thought and embrace as if I could reach through space and time and shake you up. I said 'hopefully' but obviously I'd prefer to not be writing such letters  at all now that it’s too late for the post to ever reach you. Or maybe it does. We don't know. Maybe you’re reading this over my shoulder, but maybe not on this occasion as I'm writing this sitting on the toilet, a place where I do much of my best work.

7.29am and feeling pretty good despite self. It’s an overcast morning, the kind which you loved. There’s a fragrance in the air (Not in here but out there) not quite damp--but moisture in it, post-rain freshness…an optimism. That I'm still alive and you might well be. There has just been some sort of colossal misunderstanding.

(When staring out my Shoreditch window, not knowing what had happened --I knew enough to know that life would never be the same...so I paused for some time to reflect in the ecotone between the past and the future that awaited).

9.46am and I'm back again thinking of the Masters Ice Coffees and Coffee Chill highs. Mornings in Subiaco on Hensman road when West Australian iced coffee (The best in the country BTW) and cricket were all that really mattered to us...maybe a smoke or two and Southern Cross cricket game if the mood prevailed. That giddy laxative feeling in the stomach -- post Iced coffeed metabolic spike. Had one just now and thought of you old friend with my same old percolating stomach, adrenalised need to shit. Not pretty for you like writing about flowers and philosophy, (No flower like that flower what knew itself), but true daily true like showers (Dirty/clean) and dishes (That needed doing).

PS - My apologies but that’s all I wrote before this day ended

Wordless, Formless Love

There's found beauty in the mundanity if only we'd notice it. Look at the eye of the thing. Is there life there? Beyond the stars there's darkness and dust. It's unlikely we'll ever see it for ourselves nay some formless incarnation.

The accidental conjunction of art and the mundane spoke to me today--wordless, nameless love and a flat tyre on my rubbish truck.

The 112 Tram

Sitting in my truck alongside the Miller street tram line. Waiting for a coffee. Thinking of Max as I do so often and grinning on his move toward being the central theme of this blog. Thinking how he took the 112 to work. Staring out the window with tired, glum eyes. Wondering how it might end and how he could escape the cycle of the same routine, the same fatigue, the same view traming through and the gloom of another day gone on the return leg only to be sure the same again lay in store tomorrow and tomorrow. And I think of him that last night I saw him alive. He asked when I'd return. I told him I didn't know. Felt bad and added, "It'll be soon though man" 

It wasn't soon enough and and when I did return a year later it was for his funeral.