On the verge of the long weekend and I'm up for it. I may be an ardent republican, but this is one thing I can thank the queen for.
Bloody tired. It's been another busy week, but I think the most of it is that I'm forever thinking about something. I was out yesterday afternoon with a girl doing the midweek shopping and coffee thing - very rare for me - and I had to apologise for being distracted. I was thinking about things I had to do and say, things I had to organise, things I had forgotten to do and remembered I must. I really am under the pump with the variety of things I've set myself. I was glad yesterday when I could climb on board the homeward bound tram so that I could get back into it.
This weekend should be different. I generally give myself the weekend off, but have been known to do one thing or another. Not this one. I really need to rest and chill out. As it happens I'm going to my friends farm down Gippsland way, where I was meant to go at Easter. I heard the disturbing news that they're off the booze at the moment - huh?- but that won't stop me taking down a few bottles of my best red to coax them into joining me by the fire for a tipple or two. Otherwise I'll be eating well and sleeping in, doing a lot of reading, introducing Rigby to the cattle, going to the market and just taking it easy.
Just for the record, this is what I wrote the other day in my letter to the editor:
Sunday night I made the mistake of watching the latest instalment of The Kennedys on the ABC as JFK fought for the civil rights of southern Negroes and faced down Khrushchev during the Cuban Missile Crisis. I went to bed thinking that beliefs count, that courage is a virtue, and that noble reason still counts.
That night I dreamt. I dreamt we had politicians with ideals they were willing to fight for; I dreamt our leaders dared to lead, to do what was right rather than what was popular; and I dreamt our politicians were people of integrity, ideals and moral strength - people we could look up to, and trust. And then I woke up.
Sadly there had been no radical transformation of Australian politics overnight. The government remains as inept and rattled as ever, so lacking in authority that even the good it does is swept aside. If the government is like a trembling Chihuahua then the opposition is like a dumb, but violent pit bull that delights in inflicting terror and disharmony. It makes for good theatre, but is terrible for the future of the country.
There appears no such thing as authentic values any more. Our 'leaders' - those who track the latest poll results and take bad advice from out of touch advisors - have none of the nobility of purpose, nor sense of public service erstwhile leaders have possessed. Watching a fictional JFK in action may have made me dreamy, but isn’t every one of us crying out for leadership we can believe in?
We need from our government the courage of their convictions: belief rather than timidity, authority rather than compromise. The reality is that regardless of what they choose there will be dissent - that's the nature and beauty of democracy. As a people we don't expect to applaud everything the government does in our name, but will respect it if we believe the government is acting in good faith.
From the opposition we need much more than the self-serving and destructive behaviour they delight in. An opposition that opposes every policy initiative regardless of merit does nothing for political discourse in this country. Even out of power the opposition should stand for something (rather than simply against), and with the common purpose of making this a greater country.
How did we end up with such mediocrity? It's been a long time in the making and at the heart is a fear of losing, of compromising values to achieve or maintain power. Society to is to blame - we have ceased to expect any different from our politicians, and have quit asking the questions of them we should. In this the media has been complicit, largely going with the flow rather than against it. In place of analysis the tabloids give us catchy headlines and bigoted, ill-considered pieces passing as original thinking. Few and far between are the journalists really willing to call our politicians to account, and too few of us who are ready to listen when they do.
We need to demand more. I know I’ve had enough, and I know there are thousands more like me. If these are the politicians we deserve then it’s time we change our ways. We’ve let too much go, given pass marks to ordinary work and been too disinterested to point out the bleeding obvious: that our pollies aren't wearing a got a stitch between them. It’s time to make a difference.
It was 6 degrees when I got in the car last night. It was just on 10pm, I was in North Fitzroy, and I'd just come from a viewing of The Economics of Happiness in the small back cinema of a cool bar (Long Play) in St Georges road.
It was one of those small events you hear about through your network that sounds interesting enough to attend. It was organised by an acquaintance of mine to promote the worthy message of the movie. The day before the message had been given a kick along by an interview with the organisers published in the Age.
I arrived a little after 6 with beanie on head, said my hello's, got re-acquainted with others who had been away, paid my money and had time for a couple of excellent Sardinian beers before the movie started.
The movie was okay. There's not much I can argue with in terms of desired outcomes, and I'm broadly sympathetic to the general tenor of the movie. Having said that I think it was a tad simplistic - hard to avoid in a movie of that length - and perhaps pilgerised the message at times by confusing cause and effect and making so much of it either/or. From an intellectual standpoint that was disappointing - I'm happy to be convinced, but I want well reasoned arguments backed up with hard facts.
Maybe I'm nit-picking. What the movie did highlight well is some of the utterly ridiculous practices that globalisation - the culprit of the film - has made possible: like English apples being sent to South Africa for waxing before being returned to the UK. Or the seemingly common practice where a country imports something on the one hand while it is exporting the same good elsewhere. One struggles to see the sense in that. And of course the social impact of globalisation, the damage to the environment, the homogenisation of society, the wastage.
Still, by my take globalisation isn't the real issue. And in fact it's not something that is about to be wound back regardless of the best intentions. It's a complex picture, but I think the real issue is regulation, or more particularly, de-regulation (a sexy word in many circles).
Mike Moore put out a movie a few years back about how the American middle class had been basically betrayed by the American government and greedy corporations. Putting aside the emotive slant of the argument, the issue then, as it is so often, is the ridiculous dismantling of worthy and intelligent regulations. The fact of the matter is that if the regulations had remained then the credit crunch, if it had happened at all, would have been minor. Which was the case in Oz, where strong and sensible regulations remain despite the financial markets being significantly freed up.
That's the crux of it really: the sensible mix of free market economics with intelligent regulations to maintain the checks and balances necessary for a civilised society. And that applies, I think, to globalisation also. In an unfettered market all sorts of exploitation and nonsense will occur. Some regulation is required to control that, but I am also of the belief that markets find their own level. People react, as it was shown in last nights movie, and take things into their own hands - and the market must respond to that.
Like I said, I'm broadly sympathetic to much that was argued. And in many ways the rants I've been guilty of lately aren't unrelated to the arguments last night, so it's surprising I'm so ambivalent. I'm not really, it's just I think that I've stepped back and reminded myself that things happen for a reason. Globalisation isn't the problem, it is the corruption of it is that is the problem, and that in itself is a symptom of something else. Just as the behaviour I complain of is the symptom of some deeper issue. Ultimately movies like this come and go, catching onto the latest slogan, be it globalisation, sustainability, materialism, consumerism, global warming, and so on. These are all very valid concerns and should be addressed - but the chicken and the egg is too often confused.
Anyway, enough of that.
Afterwards settled down for a few glasses of wine, some dinner with some new acquaintances, and a general chat about everything. We were all pretty much the same there - independent, left leaning, somewhat passionate, educated, intelligent mix of small business owners, entrepreneurs and concerned citizens. What John Howard would have dismissively described as the elites. So be it. In terms of the movie it's pretty much preaching to the converted, but I guess they must start somewhere.
Watching The Kennedys on TV is not doing much for my peace of mind. This week we saw JFK sort out civil rights down south before taking on Khrushchev during the Cuban Missile Crisis. Pretty absorbing stuff, and uplifting in a way too. Unfortunately most uppers have a downer following somewhere closely, and this no different.
You only have to watch a program like this to understand how far the polity has degenerated, in Australia at least. Anyhow it motivated me to pen a diatribe to the Age protesting at the state of our political society. I've had two pieces previously published, but doubt this one will follow - for one it exceeds their maximum letter length by double. Still, good to get off my chest for the moment.
I have an open mind on much which seems esoteric or unlikely. There are skeptics and believers both by nature and I fall somewhere in between. I take very little on faith, but I am also prepared to reserve judgement until I find evidence one way or another to lead me to a conclusion.
After all these years I'm yet to fully resolve an opinion on the supernatural. In general I want to believe, if only because the existence of the supernatural makes life so much more interesting. I'd love to spend a night in a haunted house just to experience it, part of me thinks it would be groovy if vampires really existed (which, sadly, I doubt), and my thoughts on zombies are well known. What about life after death?
Being an atheist I don't believe in heaven or hell, though I'd like to. Right now I generally believe that once you die you moulder in the ground and that's pretty well it. That's hardly an attractive proposition and so I'm open to a convincing reason to believe there is some kind of life after death. I don't see being an atheist as incompatible to that belief. I just need more reason to support it.
I do believe there is, as they say, more in heaven and earth than we can see. I believe that we have greater powers than we commonly use, whether they be simple intuition or some kind of foresight. Of course once you start down that track it opens up whole raft of suppositions and questions, few of which I'm capable of answering. My belief in this instance is based on my experience - enough has occurred in my life to make me wondere. At times I have experienced an uncommon insight that leads me along a path before deserting me. I cannot explain, but nor can I dismiss - so I am left wondering.
Yesterday I saw a medium. It wasn't my plan to do so. My mum had arranged with my sister yo have one visit her at home. I was busy with work and saw no reason to be there, but mum insisted. Once there I thought I would simply support mum and no more. In the way of these things though I found myself sitting across from this guy while he communicated with the spirit world on my behalf.
I'm not about to go into what he told me. Much of it was relevant and all of it interesting. There were things that made sense, and insights that resonated strongly with me. Does that make it real? No, not necessarily, but it doesn't sisprove it either. There are things I was told I will now wait to see if they transpire. One in particular is a good test - he described to me a girl I would get with. He told me her name and described her appearance and personality to me. Funnily enough I know a girl of that name, and like her (as she does me I think). And she fits the desrcription perfectly, right down to her fashion choices. October.
Afterwards I chatted to him about his gift, fascinated. He was a young guy a little over 30 I would guess. He explained how when he was a kid he would hear voices he couldn't explain. It troubled his mother greatly. Over time he came to understand and appreciate the gift he had been given. He said he hears voices all the time, to the point he must tune out. It's like he's a conduit to another world. He doesn't see the spirits ciommunicating through him except occasionally as an energy source. Mostly they are at his back talking to him.
Upon further questioning he explained there are different levels in the afterlife which correspond roughly with how enlightened we were in life. Karma exists he said, and affects how we'll come back - if there are lessons to be learned, or penance to be done. He's a believer and pasionate about what he does. Whatever I might believe I'm sure he's no fraud.
What am I left to believe then? Time will be the judge on that I guess. Whether it's connected or not, after seeing him I felt drained flat, and had one of my very few headaches.
Since mum got sick I've got in the habit of calling her every day. I call to see how she is, how she is feeling, I call to re-establish that connection, and I call to coax and encourage as her health wanes, and sometimes her spirit. It has become a ritual, something that she looks forward to and expects. When for some reason I get caught up in things and my call is delayed I worry that mum will be concerned - she is that sort of person. It is now part of the pattern.
Of course it is the far greater pattern that sometime in the next 12 months will be torn asunder. Mum will go and everything associated with her will become memory, not living fact. It is hard to believe as I so often assert, yet deep inside me I feel there is a part of me attempting to come to terms with this every day.
Occasionally little flashes of this come to the surface. It's quite regular really, much more so than what I write here. They are complex feelings with many different elements, but there is one element I think more than any other that presses hardest upon me. It surprises me a little, and perhaps I am a little embarassed by it because it is not so much about mum as what she represents. In that way it is a lot more about me.
The insight returns to me weekly: when mum goes then a whole world goes with her. It's the world as I see it though, a very personal perspective mine alone; that the world contained within mum also departs us only makes the tragedy deeper: gone forever.
I have a multitude of memories connected in my mind by the people in them. It's hard not to look back and think in terms of 'eras', blocks of time often years long when my life moved within a distinct circle of people and activities. You recall the times and the happy memories, look back with fondness at the people you shared them with. It seems impossible that they could ever end - but they do.
In my life mum is the last remaining survivor other than myself and my sister from one such era. You don't realise it at the time, but later you understand how important to your life these eras - patterns of people and activities and conversations - really are. They sort of hold your life together, they give it shape, perhaps even purpose.
My mother naturally transcends every era of my life, but she belongs within them also. The particular era I think of though - my mother happily re-married to a man I loved also (and still miss), and the many adventures we had - seems the most central, or consistently present, of the last 20 years of my life. I am tinged with sadness every time I am touched by the knowledge than when mum goes all of that is the past dead and buried, never to be again. She is the last thread. I lose her, and I lose much more.
So it is with life. As I am always at pains to remind myself the wheel turns inexorably onwards. Everything passes, everything changes, things will come and then be passed by. Proust wrote a whole set of books on it. It is understandable to mourn the passing of things dear to you, and that is still to properly come for me. It's worth remembering though the transience of what we do and feel and experience, and life itself, and appreciate while we can what it and what it means to us. Once gone it will never come to us again.
I'm embarassed to admit that I wake up most days with Rigby on the bed beside me. When I go to bed I let him lounge on the covers while I read, but when lights are out he's supposed to get down, and he knows it. Generally he'll sleep on his mattress by the bed, though I suspect he will occasionally mosey down to the lounge and sleep on the couch.
In the wee hours of the night he'll present himself by the bed. He'll stand there sending telepathic messages until I open my eyes and invite him to join me - which he'll generally do in one single, happy bound - or I'll tell him no, whereupon he'll go off for a while only to repeat the gesture half an hour later.
Obviously there are times I don't wake and he makes an executive decision to join me. Sometimes I get the sense of that, his now good sized frame often pressing against me. You're not at your best and brightest early on - I'm not anyway. Experience tells me that I'm in such a fugue that my resistance is mostly token. Given the choice of mounting an argument and going back to sleep I'll do the latter. In the same way I might sense another body beside me, might in some dim and distant way realise that it's the mutt, but somehow that's where the connections generally end. We'll swap sides like an old couple, he accommodating me, me barely aware of him. Occasionally though a message get's through, hello I think, he's not meant to be there. And so I'll rouse myself sufficiently to let him know it's time to get down. He knows, and with a regretetful glance over his shoulder he'll return to his bed.
Funny though, he's always back beside me by morning again.
Well justified outrage this week after a 4 Corners report into the treatment of Australian cattle exported to Indonesia. Putting aside the irony that these cattle are heading for the cooking pot regardless, as a so-called 'civilised' nation we should demand better treatment, or refuse to do business with the Indonesians.
It's nice to see pretty much the whole country up in arms about this - no-one likes cruelty to animals - but there is a bitter irony wonderfully expressed by Tandberg in one of his cartoons during the week.
Sad. Quite happy, the rank and file, to either refuse entry to asylum seekers, lock them up, or to ship them off elsewhere, while they wring their hands over livestock exported for slaughter elsewhere. I don't mean to belittle the cause of animal rights; it just seems a tad perverse when human rights - actual people without home and generally fleeing a miserable existence - get very short thrift.
Interesting to see the Liberal immigration minister, Scott Morrison, come late to the party. Pity he has the credibilty of a snake oil salesman, and the morality. He's the sort of low-life opportunist typical of the Libs today. It's not about the refugees - he's already proved he cares nothing for them. They're a political football that he, and too many of his colleagues, like to kick around. They're not people, they're headlines. We have tabloid journalism; we also have tabloid politics.
Did I ever tell the story about the time I tried to sign-up to eHarmony? I'm a bit of a test junkie and I was intrigued by the notion that they could personality match me to the right woman based on our test results. In actual fact I was - and remain - a bit of a sceptic, and was less interested in finding my mate than seeing what the tests said about me.
So one Saturday afternoon I sat down in front of my PC and for an hour studiously completed the exhaustive list of questions designed to illuminate just who H is. That's when it became odd.
Sure enough I got a bunch of reports back giving insights into different aspects of my personality. I can't remember what they said, but although I was a tad surprised in places I was generally in agreement with what they pronounced, for good and bad. Then I got anm email from eHarmony. Quite amazingly they pronounced they could register me with them as I did not fit into any one of their categories (or words to that effect).
I was flabbergasted. I'm the first, and occasionally the only person to think I'm pretty unique, but this was taking it too far. I didn't know whether to be insulted or flattered. Did it mean I didn't exist? Did it mean I was in my own category of one? How can it be that others have not recorded similar results as me?
I went off in a huff. That was it, eHarmony was shite.
Having established how distinctive my psychology is I can now make the same claim about my physical self.
For most of my adult life I've been possessed of a non-standard build. Not unique maybe, but not run of the mill either. For a lot of years buying a suit generally meant selecting a good sized jacket and matching it with a pair of trousers one size down (when they allowed it). Even then some additional adjusting was generally required.
I've always had big shoulders and chest. Even at my least fit they've been a good bit bigger than my waist. At my fittest the difference is pretty decent, but in recent times it has started to become quite silly.
I've had a problem for a while with business shirts. I like to wear the fitted shirts rather than the old fashioned boxy types. Mostly that's good except I've discovered they can be pretty tight in the forearms. My forearms are pretty big these days and now my biceps, always pretty handy, have swelled to the size of grapefruits. More than not my arms feel pretty tightly constrained.
It doesn't stop there. My recent personal training has made my chest 'prouder' if that makes sense. I fit in the shirt if it's the right size, but my chest stands out. More difficult in suits unfortunately.
I tried on a suit the other day and realised times have moved by me. I seem to have the choice between getting a suit jacket snug to the fit and which just buttons up (awkwardly), or a jacket that buttons up properly but is a bit boxy. Generally I take the fisrt option - I rarely button my jacket up anyway - but it's not entirely satisfactory.
I put the suit back in the rack and left the store, realising that the only real option for me these days is to go tailor made. That's what I am now, tailor made man. (That doesn't mean I'm in super shape - I'm not - I just have a particular build.) Now if only I could get that for my psychology too...
I went out last Friday night to catch up with friends for drinks and dinner. That's a pretty normal event in my life, but last Friday there were a couple of things that made it a little different.
We started at Collins Quarter, which once upon a time used to be Doc Martins. One way or another there's been a bar there for 15 years or more. It's a great venue, a front bar that opens out into a broad courtyard serviced by the back bar and a cosy area upstairs from it. Back in the day when it was Docs tradition was every Friday night they would barbecue sausages in the courtyard for patrons to eat in slices of fresh bread. It was one of my regular haunts at one stage - when I worked at Vic Super and Shell - and I had many a hot snag on a sultry and decadent Friday night.
I was a younger man then, though, I guess, haven't really changed that much since - maybe I'm a little less wild. I've been to both incarnations of the bar many times over the years and remembering that standing there on Friday night it suddenly struck me that was the venue I'd 'picked up' more successfully than any other. That was definitive, but thinking back it seemed pretty likely.
Back in the day I recall many a depraved evening shared with similar minded people. You're young and pretty, you have booze in your system, lust in your heart and the sky seems a pretty inadequate limit. I had forgotten most of it, but much came back: pashing with girls I knew, or girls I didn't. Ardent, innuendo laden flirtation that flared often into insistent passion. Man, I felt awfully nostalgic remembering. I reckon I picked maybe 6-8 girls from there over the years and took them home.
We went to dinner afterwards. We went to another similarly full of nostalgic memory for me: Lucattini's.
I must have first gone to Lucattini's 25 years ago. It would have been with dad and his wife, a favourite restaurant of theirs. I remember a waiter and a short, round waiter, both Italian, both a lot of fun. Over the years I've been back many times, but often with a big break in between. At some point the fat waiter disappeared; now the tall waiter has similarly gone: 25 years is a long time.
The restaurant is at the end of a small laneway off Little Bourke street. It's unpretentious, but comfortable. The food is fine without being exceptional. In truth it's not as good as it used to be, but it remains one of those Italian family restaurants that engender loyalty and fond memories in its patrons.
The meal we had was fine. At the end of it Cheeseboy and I both asked for the Zabaglione. It's not on the memory, but I've always had it there, and we two once had a splendid night there topped off by the delicious dessert.
Of course said the waiter, and soon we were both eating from parfait glasses the warm, liquid, Marsala laden custard. We went to pay and he waved us off - it wasn't on the menu after all - but we tipped him $20 nonetheless. Worth every cent.
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