full throttle bliss

The year has tilted into Summer. It’s been 30+ degrees all long weekend here in Sydney.

I know our planet is spinning like a top at a kid’s party, wobbling towards the skirting board at the edge of the universe, but it feels a bit early for all this. Nevertheless I unplugged the heaters and carried them up to the loft. I dusted off the fans and carried them down.

I wore shorts and drank beer.

When the shorts got too hot I gardened in my underwear and drank water.

When the underwear got too hot I got nude and lay in the hammock and drank red wine. Probably a mistake. I dozed and dreamed across decades. Mosquitoes bit my balls. Red wine stained my chest. I woke up and it wasn’t 1978.

I watched the football finals. AFL: shithouse. Another year ruined by the piss and poo Hawthorn football club. Niggardly, nasty rubbish. NRL: magnificent. What astonishing drama. Untether the Sydney Opera House and let it float out to sea as a bingo hall. All you need is grass and grunt and no script. That was superb.

The Wallabies beat the fat blokes of England! That was a great start to yesterday.

We went out to lunch In Caringbah, cooked and served by magnificent May M. in her nineties. A friend returned from France after tending to her dying mother. New neighbours moved in across the street. Wallington said they were having sex on their upstairs deck when she came to bed. Good on them. You’ve got to move into a new house.

Today Currawongs ate mulberries from the tree in the back garden and rainbow lorikeets bathed in the bird bath. The rocket lettuce has gone to glorious yellow seed. The garden grows so fast you can see it move. I’m reading Captain Matchbox And Beyond: the music and mayhem of Mic and Jim Conway. Maybe that’s why I was dreaming of 1978?

Since making whoopee became all the rage it’s even got into the old birdcage.

Don’t stop the world. I don’t want to get off.

Earthly Delights

It’s March already. It’s Wednesday already. I feel like I should be out Christmas shopping in case I miss the sales.

Who knows where the time goes, or why it decided to speed up. Maybe time has a new car, a new ISP, a new lover, maybe it lost control on the planet’s curve and we’re in a spin. The sunsets are still nice. I’ve been up on the balcony tonight looking at orange sands blown across a pale blue beach.

It made me think of Bob Dylan and his agonised plea to Sara:
I laid on the dunes I looked at the sky
when the children were babies and played on the beach…

I know time is inexorable and generally I plug into the learned, relentless beauty of it all. Right now it feels hard.

Dad has been staying with us. He’s 86 years old, patriarch of a family of ten, now far flung, and grandkids galore. He walks with a stick. This big man. He remains cheerful, good humoured (I learned whatever humour I have from him) but he’s old.

My wonderful Mum died in 2007.

On the day Dad arrived last week Wallington learned on Facebook that a colleague and friend had taken his own life. He suffered depression. He was tired of being tired, he said. On Facebook. His funeral is on Friday

The world is connected and disconnected. Atomised and always. Changing.

All this occurs under the grim template of the impending execution of two young Australian men by firing squad on an island in Indonesia. Convicted of smuggling heroin they are sentenced to death. It’s the law in Indonesia. The law is a blunt instrument.

Time swells and breaks like the sea. It comes and goes, roars and flattens.

I was having lunch yesterday in a park and I saw some small blue flowers in a green lawn, dappled by sunlight through the trees. It was so beautiful and present and vivid. Live now. Love now.

Back to Dylan – though his plea is hopeless:
Don’t ever leave me, don’t ever go.