the way there

the way back

anzac day, high street

'what's this, a crime scene, is it?'

'yeah. i take photos of crime scenes with my mobile.'

joe's organics

new car. well not new, but from 1993 and not 1983. i drive it home from camberwell with both hands clamped on the wheel, thinking about geography, the cover note on my insurance and how bright lights are when you look into them.

stop off to get some organic bubbles and veggies for dinner. joe asks me if there is some reason to celebrate. ordinarily, there's no special reason for bubbles. but tonight ... maybe my grin betrays me. the same grin as with Nessie, and she ended up parched, smoking, towed and scrapped after three weeks and 400,000kms.

so joe says, 'i wish someone had told me this when i first started to drive. you must look in the distance as well as in front of you.' He repeats it over and over in different ways. 

i'm pawing the potatoes. thumbing the tomatoes. i repeat after him each time, the same way i nod when people give directions, hoping they'll stop talking soon so i can work it out myself. someone else taught me that. i pay. he donates a bunch of goddamn mouldy bananas that'll have to be baked before they liquify, and takes me out on the street. i have the box in arms, and he is pointing at the traffic lights about three blocks away. they're green. 

'you see?' he says, making a sweeping gesture that forces me to take in the entire horizon. victoria street northcote and everything above and beyond it. 'look at what's close, but also at what's far away.'

i go home, cook up the tomatoes, watch the last of madmen series three and fight with my girlfriend.

greek easter

made in reservoir

thornbury to croxton

an analogue TV falls face down in the cooch,

near a chair with the wicker kicked out of it

sick of each other, the watcher and the watched

futons and inner springs commingle in a stack

cottage cheese spills from a plastic milk bottle

saying come back to bed, we fixed you a warm drink

flirting on mitchell

An old man shuffles along the footpath, pressed beige pants hoisted high on his belly, tufts of chest hair peeping over a white singlet.

He's gently waving a giant net, like one for catching butterflies or something the BFG would find useful in the place where all dreams is beginning.

'Come on, come on,' he coos softly, just out of swishing distance. His half-hearted comb over swirls in the smoggy vapour. There are fires burning somewhere in the state.

A little bird, uneasy in the big wide Brunswick, permits the courtship.

seagull on wellington

carlton walking frame

sugar on wheels

I gave my last $20 to a taxi driver and asked him to take two-thirds of a lemon meringue pie to Hanover. it's too late and i'm too drunk to drive. Geo was going to haggle the driver down on price, but i met his eye and asked him to make sure it got there. people are hungry, you know. but maybe he is too.

it takes muscle, what with wrestling the ghosts of old meringue makers who peer into this 1850s Fitzroy kitchen. tut tutting as my cornflower glugs and then goes sloppy. Lemon too tart. Pastry stuck to the dish. And keep whipping that meringue chunder. more. that's not a peak ... they put all that sugar in it to give you the energy to keep going with the hand whipping.

hanover called. it got there.

thornbury hardware shop

'I need castors for my bed.'

'How many?'

'I dunno.'

'Well, a bed you buy in the shop'd have four castors. How much weight you putting on it?'

'Not much, but I feel like it needs more than four.'

'Well, four should hold a couple of people at a hundred or so kilos, give or take. If you're gonna have more than two people in your bed who weigh more than that, I'd say you'd be in trouble.'

'Reckon you'd have more to worry about than the castors ... I'll take nine.'

alphabet

'Your alphabet was wrong, Roy. Wrong. You have a good memory. Don't waste it.'

Closing time at the Gem

'So i wake up naked, in bed, with my fists clenched like this, right ... thinking, "ok, i'm still alive, ok good." So i get up, and step in a puddle of water.''

'Wee?'

'Nah, a puddle of water, and I keep going out through the house to the car. the door is open and on the driver's seat there's a ten dollar note and my phone. Ok? Weird.'

'Yeah, like when you wake up and you can taste McDonalds, but you got no memory of eating it.'

'Yeah, kind of.

little skull caps

i saw a man in a tshirt with lungs on it today, like it reminded him how to breathe.

the other day, a young kid, kind of dumpy, in a skeleton hoodie.

little skull caps for my bike tubes and a skull-shaped rear light; manni gave them to me when we were breaking up and i lost my shit on smith street when they went missing or got nicked, whichever.

it's the neo-renaissance.

instead of staring at the skull by candlelight in an old painting and wondering who we are, we are wearing our skeletons on the outside.

breaking ourselves down, like that will make sense of this life. and if that doesn't work, then at least we're making our own mortality public.

like it helps to share it.