Hieronymous the Anonymous

In the now

It's Australia Day tomorrow and while I'm having the mandatory Oz day barbie my guests are my family for a wild change of pace. That's mum obviously, my sister, and her three kids.

There are enough family events through the year, not to mention random catch-ups and regular telephone conversations that it never really occurs to me to invite them over. To a degree that reflects the old adage, you choose your friends, but are stuck with your family. Well, I love my family, by and large, and am probably closer than most, but generally speaking I'd rather spend my leisure hours with my friends.

With that said I'm looking forward to tomorrow. I love a good BBQ, and I love to show-off. As usual I'll be cooking up a feast fit for the double the number of guests. I love seeing my niece and nephews too, like  any good uncle, and I share with my sister and mum the bond of a common history and language. We are family.

Time is running out and I'm conscious too that I want to make every moment count with mum. My options are limited. My sister shared quality time with her in Honolulu after Christmas, but that's not feasible for me. All I can do is be around and close, and take every opportunity to enjoy these times while we still have them.

On Saturday night mum has a 'celebration' of her life party. There are about 60 people in attendance fort cocktails, nibbles, dancing and the odd speech. It's very much a mum thing, something she'll love and revel in. I'll enjoy it - I like to be social - and I'll be glad for her.

It's funny to be thinking this way, but that's how it is. Everything, eventually, is finite.

Southside

Struggling today. It's not an hour into the working week and I feel like curling up into a ball and falling asleep again. It's days like this I feel most like one of the drones. Given free choice I'd be unconscious to the world. Why must I conform to the routines and schedules of the world? Why is it so unprofitable to be out of step? <End of rant>

I complain about the trials of the weekly schedule, yet I had weekend that conformed to a classic pattern. Pizza and beer for lunch Friday; after work drinks at World bar; then a short trip to St Kilda for vodka and more pizza sitting out doors at the Secret Garden on a balmy evening.

Saturday out early to take Rigby to a vet appointment in Glen Waverley, then the usual, some shopping, a load of washing, the newspapers read before heading out again.

Saturday night was Moonlight Cinema with the yoga teacher. It was a lovely evening. I loaded up with a bottle of bubbles and another of pinot, so cheese, some dips and some of my home made bresaola, then drove to the Botannical Gardens.

There were people everywhere and traffic searching for a place to park. I knew a spot and safely parked in one of the back streets before meeting up with the YT.

It's a great event this, though not necessarily ideal for the close watching of any movie. It was a lovely evening and we joined the crowd streaming into the park and found ourselves a small patch of free ground to spread our rug. There were people everywhere with picnic baskets full of goodies. I reckon at nights end there may have been 600 people or more in attendance.

We sat and drank our bubbles and talked while the sun slowly set over the distant peaks of the city. It was a beautiful scene, the sky blue and the city in the distance through the trees amid all this lush greenery. For some reason I was reminded of the movie Cloverfield, as if about to intrude upon this tranquil scene was some great Godzilla type beast.

Then the sun set. The bats flew overhead in the dying light in ever greater numbers, and then the movie began.

It was The Social Network, a well reviewed movie I enjoyed despite the occasional difficulty in discerning all the action through the outdoor speakers. It was a fascinating story about a fascinating phenomenon. Two things kept running through my mind as I watched it. I felt myself roused to greater aspirations, to do something wonderful or great or just simply big: why limit yourself? Why consider yourself an also ran when you don't even line up at the start?

The other was much more prosaic. I am building an intranet for work and my mind is saturated with it. I've read several books, conducted endless research online, and have completely and thoroughly immersed myself in the subject. I'm becoming a bit of an expert, though I'm a bit over it right now. In any case I have high expectations and am looking to incorporate many of the principles of social networking into my site. And so watching my mind ticked over looking at the beginning of all of this.

Yesterday I had one of my semi-regular massages before catching up with Becky for a drink. We ended up visiting the PA - The Prince Alfred - in Chapel Street, Richmond, re-opened finally after 3 years of doors closed.

The PA used to be one of my favourite drinking holes. I used to live nearby and would often find myself there before, and more often after, a match at the MCG. One of its great features was a beer garden where I spent many an hour with a beer, friends, and a counter meal. It's closure was sad and, I thought, a sign of the times.

That it re-opened then was great news for me. Arriving there yesterday in blazing sunshine we walked through the front bar, not dissimilar to before though a bit more elegant. Out the back there used to be a pavilion I always thought a bit incongruous, around which were arrayed long rustic tables with bench seats. The pavilion is gone now and against the far wall is now a bar.

There are more upmarket tables and sun umbrellas on tile paving. It seems a smaller area than previous, but that may be my imagination. As you would expect on a day like yesterday it was doing good business.

Back in the day the PA was a bit of a student pub - uni students and ex-private school types happy to let their hair down in convivial surroundings. It was laid back, relaxed, you'd often bump into someone and end up chatting about the footy or latest scandal. While I was not exactly of that mileue (though a private choolboy myself) I found it easy to slip into and the vibe easy and welcome to me.

I'm older now and maybe seeing things with older eyes, but while it retains some of the clientele it seems different - maybe it''s the same crowd older and more established? In any case there was a sense of casual affluence. I doubt there was anyone there who did not belong to upper middle class or above. Most of the men were dressed as I was, in shorts and casual shirt, a beer in their hand. Many of the women there wore high-heeled shoes with shorts - a look I hate - and it felt a little too cosy and self-satisfied.

I'm not sure why I should object to this. I fit in seamlessly. By and large I am a lot of what the crowd there represented. I don't know, I guess I just wish it was a little more ragged at the edges. I know people who hate going south of the river because they feel uncomfortable with the general polish (though technically, this is north of the river by about 200 metres). I've never had any problem rubbing shoulders either side of the river, but I am by general upbringing a southerner. It's never meant anything to me, but yesterday I felt it.

I'm sure my assessment is premature. There was nothing objectionable yesterday, and I'm guessing through the week and in footy season it will have all the spontaneiety and general rough and tumble of any good pub. It was okay yesterday, if a bit contrived, a little without soul. It's only been open again a little over a month and guess must find its groove.

Got the hand?

I went to the soccer the other night and was walking home a little after 10 when my phone rang. We'd had a decent meal sitting in the sunshine of the city square, as well as a few cold pints and a glass of wine before the game even begun. By the time I was walking home I was pleasantly weary and looking forward to winding for an hour or so before climbing into bed. Then my phone rang.

It was Donna. She had been to her first ever speed dating event the week before and had connected, she thought, with one guy in particular. As it turned out she was mutually agreeable with three guys, including the one she liked. Problem is that he had written to her saying he enjoyed meeting with her, but only wanted to be friends.

Donna was in a predictable tizz. She was upset and confused and searching for answers. Once more she felt rejected, and her expectations defeated. She wanted to know what this meant and what she should do from a 'male perspective'. Her inclination she told me was to send an email demanding to know what had happened, the tone veering from hectoring to sarcastic.

By this time I was home with Rigby jumping all over me. I rolled my eyes once more at the extreme reactions of Donna and attempted to put her straight.

She feared that she had put him off when the conversation veered to the topic of her ex, a subject she's always pretty vociferous about. That was a no-no I told her, and hardly likely to help, but the damage was done - learn from it. Absolutely no future in sending anything narky, or even asking for an explanation - it sounds weak and nothing to gain from it. Best to let it go altogether I told her, but if you have to respond then be cool with it - a single line, composed and in control.

It's never as easy as that with her. We probably spent the next 30 minutes going backwards and forwards over the same argument. Like a lot of women she agonises over every nuance of expression and possibility. What does that mean? Why did he leave his mobile number? Why did...? He was giving her the polite brush-off, that was that. He had the hand, and if she wanted to change anything she had to get it back.

She grudgingly agreed and when finally we disconnected I was exhausted by the perpetual to and fro. I went to bed.

At about 2am my phone tinged as it registered an incoming message. I was sleeping well and so picked it up. It was Whisky from KL, exasperated he said by the complexities of women. He went on to explain that he had knocked back an offer of sex from some woman and she had exploded. They had been friends for 7 years and now she threatened to have nothing more to do with him. Why were women like that?

I sighed lying there in the dark. This was the other side of the argument from earlier in the night. Tempted to give a glib response instead I gave him my opinion. Sex is something men do. We disconnect ourself from it. If we miss out it's generally no big deal - another bus will come along soon enough.

It's different for women. For most women most of the time there is an emotional commitment to sex. It is, in some sense, an expression in that moment of their feelings and emotions. When we reject the sex we implicitly reject them, or so it appears to them. For men sex is mostly physical; for women it's personal. This sense of rejection is deepened knowing that many men will fuck anything that moves - so what's wrong with me?

This morning I got a message from Donna. She had taken my advice and sent a cool and non-committal email to the man in question. Her first response was an excited "I've got the hand!" He had responded asking for more. Nothing intrigues a man more than a woman in control - and nothing deters a man more than a desperate woman.

Men can learn a lot from women, and vice versa. It is in our make-up as men that we almost always have the 'hand' early on even in a relationship - though it can change later. It is our nature to skim the surface initially, to avoid premature commitment and generally the more intimate emotions.

We should be better than that. But so to should women abstain from getting too caught up too soon, from feeling things too personally. That can come, but in the meantime there are only positives from being in command of your own feelings and expression. It'll draw more men that way than not, will fascinate many men and give a more equal relationship - as it should be.

Today Donna thinks I'm the oracle. Everything I said has been correct, but that's because I'm a man, the uber man in a lot of these respects (Donna believes in the event of a nuclear holocaust the cokroaches and my confidence will both survive), I think like a man and know how other men think. And I have that ruthless, hard-nosed way of thinking most men do in certain situations, black and white, it works or doesn't and move on if it doesn't.

Now Donna has that to, for now - and the man comes running.

Half gone

Walking around these days feeling half asleep. Been like this for about a week. I wonder if there is some health issue, or if it's something else. I think it's something else. I have a bit of congestion in my chest, but I don't think that's it. I reckon it's because of mum. I think the uncertainty at her prognosis and the ongoing discussion about all manner of things related to it is draining me. It's a kind of emotional exhaustion.

I really don't know what will happen, whether the moment comes next month or in six. It's a fact of life, but it means my mind is left open, exposed and unguarded not knowing what to believe and unwilling to commit to one scenario over another. It's a truth that for us watching and waiting and unable to do anything that some kind of mental adjustment is required. Ideally you can put those things in a box that can be put to one side as you go about your normal life. The uncertainty makes that impossible. The box is open and in the middle of the floor getting in your way.

Connected to that is the morbid talk that my mum seems to relish. She's a curious person my mother. She's quite insecure and needs to to be needed, needs attention and to feel that she is important. She has got in the habit of making demands on us to feed that need. There is little requirement of that now. She is dying and there is no need to embellish that: she is the centre of our attention.

It seems odd, but it seems at times as if she has separated herself from what is happening to her. She knows what's going to happen, no question of that, but at the same time as she makes arrangements it's as if she is planning for an event she is putting on for the rest of us. It may be her death, but it needs arranging.

I'm probably being a little churlish: these things need to be done. It's not so much that, it's the fervour to which she attends to these things that I find slightly disturbing. It's as if she enjoys it, though perhaps it's her way of coping.

For me I accept I need to contribute and so I listen and give my input and advice as she talks about her 'celebration' of her life event, and more so her funeral, how it will happen, who will talk, what they will say, what is said in her eulogy - which she was going to write. I was asked to read a passage from the bible, but declined. I'm an atheist, and while it would be hypocritical to read something I don't believe the worse sin would be insincerity at a time like this.

I feel churlish and I apologise for that. I should be more generous: these things need to be attended to. Attending to them though robs you of some vitality I think. I live my life, I go out, I laugh and play, much of life continues apace - but also part of me is elsewhere, left permanently on, leaking energy so that I am left like this, weary and wan.

A hard rain falling

There's a terribly sad story in the newspaper today about the Queensland floods. It's about a 13 year old boy and how he sacrificed himself for his 10 year old brother. It was brave, selfless act by a kid too young to have to deal with these things. As the floodwaters surged around him he refused the help of a rescuer urging him to take his brother instead. By the time they returned the flood had turned into a torrent and little Jordan Price was torn from the grasp of his rescuer and swept away with his mother to their death.

What a brave boy. There's a picture of him, a bright, good looking boy with all the world in front of him. He looks so like my nephew Reid that I stop to consider the infinite possibilities of a harsh world.

The good news is I guess that the peak of the floodwaters was lower than the worse fears. Still it is remarkable situation. I said the other day that this is like no flood I can recall anywhere in the world, and I stay by that. If it were in Europe the devastation would be supreme. In Queensland the flood encompasses a population of several million; in Europe it would be hundreds of millions across an area covering most of western Europe.

I have never seen such a violent flood either. The tsunami of water on Monday swept all before it. Cars have been left high in trees; houses washed away, trees uprooted. Most remarkably I think is that the flood, which began in the rural areas, has come to the city. I can't think of any other city in the world so impacted by floodwater.

Brisbane is a good sized, developed city. It has been virtually powerless as the floodwaters flowed downstream and the Brisbane river broke it's banks. Having lived there a few years ago I tried to imagine how it might be, but couldn't conceive of it. Then on one of the news reports I spotted the cafe on the corner of my office back then sandbagged and the floodwaters lapping at it. It had gone so far...

Where I lived once was one of the areas identified as being likely inundated. I lived maybe 70 metres from the river, though on a slope that might have prevented major flooding. On the third floor I'd have been safe, but marooned in my apartment and possibly without electricity it would be an eerie and other-wordly experience.

Strange to think such an urban metropolis can be so effected, yet it is so. The city is a ghost town, people stay home or have been evacuated to higher ground, and for many homes electricity was cut. And for many others there homes were swallowed up by the water.

Hopefully the worst is behind them now. The rain has eased. There will be much devastation in it's wake, a lot of re-building  to be done. They say the impact of this is great than Katrina on New Orleans. They say that it should wipe a full percentage point off the national GDP.

Here in Melbourne the rain pours down and in the country there are floods and homes threatened. The scale is much smaller, and yet there is a surreal aspect to all of this: what on earth is happening to the world?

Most of us have been glued to the TV which gives 24 hour coverage to the unfolding tragedy in Queensland across two stations. Despite the violence of the flood there is a slow-motion inevitably about the course of events. We watch while the emergency services do what they do and others act to mitigate against the worst possibilities. It fills the heart with sadness and a renewed sense of our copmmon and shared humanity. I feel my eyes fill with tears again and again, and through it all feel a sense of pride and affection for those people hanging in there, uncomplaining and helping each other out.

The Queenslanders are a tough bunch and they'll endure through this hardship and months of hard work ahead. What will be hard though is the tough task of recovering the dead. So far the figure stands at 14, but the number is bound to go higher. You only have to think of Jordan Price to feel the tragedy of this.

Related articles

• Australia faces rebuild of 'postwar proportions' (msnbc.msn.com)
• Brisbane battles flood devastation as death toll rises (cnn.com)

Face it down

I had business in Fitzroy yesterday. I was early and had about 20 minutes to kill. To my surprise I found myself thinking about dropping by my old workplace.

I have occasionally been invited to go in on a Friday night and have a drink just like I used to. That's never been an option for me. Another friend and former colleague has suggested I catch up with some of the crew, but that too was never going to happen.

Truth is I'm all over what happened to me there, and in many ways I've gone from strength to strength since leaving. I'm not bitter about anything, and retain fond memories of many people there. Well and good, except when I think of the company I remember the bitter last days I experienced there.

In the last month or so I felt terribly isolated, but also terribly in focus. I felt as if a spotlight followed me wherever I went. I was convinced that people spoke about me behind my back, and that I was the subject of gossip, rumour and innuendo, as well as a good dose of character assassination. I felt exposed and unloved, unfairly so. It was a terribly uncomfortable feeling. I said nothing though, I maintained my dignity as well as I could and looked to the future.

I've never had another experience close to that, and so it remains with me to this day - complicated of course, and eternally linked to the girl there.

It was a great surprise to find myself contemplating a visit - and pretty bold too, considering. There was an incident about 2 years ago walking down the street I found a bunch of senior staff from there approaching - my ex-boss and HR - and they shunned me. I shrugged my shoulders at the time, but realised the depth of unreasoned antipathy towards me. Why would I willingly go back and put my head back in the lions mouth?

Good question. Despite what happened two years ago I can't help but believe I thought it worse than it was. When you feel persecuted you jump at shadows. It wasn't pretty, that's for sure, but was it really as bad as all that?

The other reason is more basic: I feel like walking in and looking them in the eye. Here I am, I've done okay regardless, what do you have to say?

And maybe I just want to lance that boil.

I didn't end up doing it yesterday, but might do at some point. It strikes me as something healthy. I recall some motivational guru stating we should attempt to do something we don't want to do every day. We've all got the things we should do, but dread. This is one of those, and to my surprise I'm just about ready to give it a go.

 

These times

I don't know how many of you have seen the quite awesome footage of the 'tsunami' of floodwater hitting Toowoomba (http://www.theage.com.au/environment/weather/at-least-eight-dead-72-missing-as-inland-tsunami-hits-queensland-towns-20110111-19ldz.html). It's like watching a river in flood, but actually it's the main streets of Toowoomba as the wall of water (up to 8 metres high!)  tosses cars around like children's toys and carries away a house in one instance at least. Inevitably there must be a human cost as well, and it could be pretty serious - 8 confirmed dead now, but 72 missing.

I was guilty of thinking the Queensland floods were less serious than they are. Floods are part of our lot, just as drought and bushfire. Watching the footage of the countryside and Queensland towns swamped in water was impressive without being terrifying. The economic cost is huge and the area affected - as big as France and Germany combined - pretty remarkable. And yet.

There is no yet now. I should have known better and I feel culpable now for not doing so. The worst of floods normally subside within a week at the most - it has been 2 weeks now and it is getting worse. This is the wet season, the season of cyclones, so who knows where or how it wil end.

The real cost is the devastation to people's lives. Many have lost everything, home and livelihood. Now there is the human cost, which is certain to climb much higher.

This is a national tragedy. It will take a lot of work to recover from this, and much can never be recovered. We live in strange times - national tragedies seem to have become a regular event.

Our hearts are with our Queensland friends.

http://www.theage.com.au/photogallery/environment/weather/fatal-wave-of-water-hits-toowoomba/20110111-19li1.html?selectedImage=2

A world without mum

Mum thinks she will be dead by the end of February. She returned from holiday on Friday. She struggled while she was away, feeling a definite deterioration in her health. My sister, who went with her, noted it as well. Now mum is convinced that the end is nigh. I tell her not to jump to any conclusions; wait to talk to the doctor; live for now, not for what might be. She is almost settled in her thinking though. There is an unfussed resignation to her.

I continue to think she has longer than that, as I have from the start. What if I'm wrong though? What if she's right?

This is what I have to face now. I'd conditioned myself to a date somewhere out in the future. Now I have to adjust that, and my mind starts to spin. It feels real all of a sudden, and unreal at the same time. And I think if it's true then I have to make this time count. I need to be there for her, and for me. Something awful is going to happen that I have no control over, but I need to get some sense of acceptance of it - not closure. I need to steel myself, and need to resolve as much as I can, need to be ready for the moment and the world beyond, a world without mum.

 

When we were teens too

With nothing on the box last night I watched a DVD I picked up on my travels through Asia last year. The DVD was Say Anything, a 'classic' of the late eighties I bought out of some kind of misty nostalgia.

I probably hadn't seen it for 20 years, so it was interesting to watch it again after all this time. There was much in it that had me recalling my own youth. I may live in the here and now, but my formative years were the eighties. The fashion, the music, much of the attitude, ugly as much of it was, was also very familiar to me. Like it or lump it I lived a lot of that life.

That accounts for much of the cult popularity of the movie. I don't know if they still make the teen movies of this ilk anymore. Back then it was a bit of an industry, led by John Hughes, but the likes of Cameron Crowe and others cut their teeth on this genre (Pretty in Pink, The Breakfast Club, Fast Times at Ridgemont High, The Sure Thing, Some Kind of Wonderful, Ferris Bueller's Day Off even the Porkies movies for God's sake).

Is there any equivalent of this movie genre these days? Or has society moved on so that this genrre has been blurred and merged into a variety of genre's that encapsulates everything from Harry Potter to Twilight?

Most of my generation would have a nostalgic memories of these movies because they were reflective of us at a particular point of time. That generation is now approaching middle age, is living in very different times and facing challenges only vaguely dreamt about back in the day.

I watched last night with a combination of curiosity and impatience. Conditioned to the uber paced movies of today this felt slow. And though I identified as always with John Cusack - who is the everyman of my generation - I could not get into it as I did then. It was not foreign, but simply of another time and different stage of life. The hopes and romantic dreams of the times have been superceded by the realities of adulthood. What we watched once and saw as emblematic of our times and aspirations now appear as fond and slightly naive dreams tinged in sepia.

That's life I guess, and no real surprise. We have moved on, times have changed, and the movies that were part of the fabric of our common youth are unknown to our teen equivalents today, ancient history in the world of the new millenium.

 

 

What you remember

Memories are like scraps of paper blown randomly across your way by the breeze. Every so often a headline catches your eye before the wind picks it up again and sends it on its way.

It's as random as that mostly, though sometimes the memories are fed by the events of your life. Things happen, the scraps of paper come from the one place, connected in some way by a common thread. It's as if some archivist in your mind works silently and secretly picking up the cues and feeding back the disparate but linked moments of a barely remembered past.

I think much less about mum's situation than I did a month or two ago, though there is a constant awareness that at some point the end will come. For now I have managed an uneasy adjustment to the situation. While I think less, I remember more. As if knowing that soon there will be no more new memories my mind has sought out the old and dusty one's.

It's strange what you remember. You might think that particular occasions are recalled. Key moments in your shared life. But no, not yet, not for me anyway. I recall figments, truly scraps of memories as if torn from larger memories. They come unexpectedly, passing through my mind much as a piece of old newspaper might blow across the street. Sometimes I might linger over these memories, curious again, my foot on the corner of the paper to prevent it blowing away. And then I move on and the wind does its work.

I recalled my mother of the seventies when I was a boy. I remembered in general the parties my parents would have in our home in Lower Plenty, how the Conolly's and the Holton's would visit for a raucous night of free-spirited enjoyment, the wine and beer flowing, Barry White, Neil Diamond (Hot August Night), the Bee Gees playing, and the ribald laughter of the men. We kids, now all grown up and responsible, had our own party which was fun then and fun remembering. I recall mum in all of this, most particularly I remember how she was, an attractive, vibrant woman, her hair permed stylishly in the fashion of the day, the born hostess in her very element.

Another memory comes to me. This one is very prosaic, so much so that you wonder how it can be recalled now, why, in fact, it was stored away in the first instance. There it is nonetheless, and you find something fond in the very ordinariness of the memory: of queuing up in a technical book shop with all these mother's with their children looking to source the school years book list. That was somewhere in the city, and though I can't say where I can close my eyes and can picture the scene.

How does this make me feel? Sad, predictably, though not necessarily in the way you would think. Back then I was dependent on my mum, and I her much loved son. I was held within the warm routine of family, though I took hardly any notice of that. I had a close relationship with my mum.

The relationship must, I guess, change and mature as you yourself mature and become independent. To some degree the shoe is on the other foot. Mum is not dependent upon me, but she leans hard, and did so even before her illness. I'm happy for that to be the case, but in recalling this hatful of old memories I am wistful for what I have lost, lost whether she lives or dies.

We were closer once; our relationship was different; I wish she was as she was then, and not is as she is now. She probably thinks the same of me. What I feel then is regret. Things always change, we lose a little, we gain a little. I'm not sure how possible it is to hold onto some of these things: is it just time that makes them slip from your grasp?

Mum is dying, and that's hard. She has been good with it, but if I am to be selfish and self-indulgent for a moment I wish she was that vibrant woman of yesteryear still. I miss her to a poignant degree. She exists only in those scrap of memories now.