I got punched in the head by a drunk aboroginie, I stock laundry detergent at a grocery store from 9pm to 5am, spend my free time dancing in the streets and playing a celtic harp with a gypsy-dreadlocked brit who recieves signals from aliens. Wither that or eating Vietnamese soup with a cross eyed Japanese copy-paste artist, I'm at home with my control freak Lebanese landlord and two fawning beauties from India and Pakistan. Who needs to travel the world when you live in Melbourne.
Grey days are just as grey - silver bells of prior lives chime and fade through the stone-chambered cathedral of my airy mind. It turns out not where, but who you're with that really matters.
Emptiness of muchness - quite a quandry
hatching my blasphemous plans to undue
the writting on the wall
in crimson and blue
Melbourne is multiethnic but in a pure way - not a blended brown of perverted cultures and skin deep ethnicity. People here work to accomodate foreign culture, to keep it rich and living and to enjoy eachothers differances. There is less pressure to Australianize than there is to Americanize. Yet racism burns the hearts of drunk train passangers on the Frankston line (a nefarious train route, full of junkies, from city center to the veritable warzone of "Frankstanistan"). Try your best not to get sucked in to "political" rants by the violent hag, burning with hatred and resentment, who curses all races and even the lives of her own children. All of life's problems are clearly someone else's fault, the only step to addiction recovery is acceptance, public announcements that one is an addict will gain you respect, anger spices words with an eloquent ring that convinces even the dullest and most unimaginative college graduate: these are a few lessons I learned on the 7:16 express.
Knife threats usher from a roguish baghead towards a city funded film crew making a 'documentary' on the real people of the metro and what they think - unfortunately they found them and they think in steaming stinklines of B.O. and wretched withdrawal. His pitbull, claiming a whole row of seats is "a seeing eye dog - so (he) can kill you in the dark".
A cocky head scratcher gives sporadic hugs to shaking passengers announcing that he is having a baby - with a woman he is currently taking a train away from at express rate - a child that will never know a father because he is moving across the continent tomorrow to avoid "a life (he) can't control".
A gang of Aboriginals, run by a matriarchal queen bee, sit on a dark corner in the centre of the polished glass city. She sends a thug to rob and attack a group of three strolling friends - a thug too drunk to remember what he is doing - he punches one in the head then goes and sits back down with the jabbering mob.
So the sunshine meets the shadows as drugs blot out the light emanating from the richness of diversity. And the halogen days hum to reruns of Christmas carols as 9pm to 5am crawls along through aisles 8 and 9.
