21 Years Under Northcott.

I haven't blogged in months, no hot story to tell, except one of survival, under Northcott tenements, going crazy as ever. I've been in a manic flight of painting, all else thrown to the winds, my apartment a mess, just the canvas to get lost in, tubes of paint scattered all around. What a glorious painting I've done, it got me so high, like I've spewed colours in visionary ecstasy and I've called it "21 years Under Northcott". I've imagined painting it for years, the buildings looming over and weighing down upon us, the lively explosion of humanity with all its flaws and beauty, the terrible events of murders and suicides, saintly neighbours like Dolly amidst the sweet gardens and wandering pets, it's been like living in a Heironymous Bosch painting of paradise and hell. It's for my art show in September and I'm working till dawn every night, risking my health and sanity for my creative spirit, what else is life for but really getting into it?

My insomnia is killing me, I rarely get a good sleep as day people caterwaul at my door not giving a fuck about the fragility of night people and I have to stumble from my bed and poke my head out screaming for them to "shut up!" and "fuck off!" I'm one more deadbeat  madman among a raging mob of them at Northcott. My neighbour Cursula has been given little mercy over the state of her fire-trap hovel, an army of bureaucrats, social workers, friends and junkies squabble incessantly outside my door, she's been issued with an eviction notice even though she's tried hard to clear out the mounds of hoarded garbage.

Seventy van-loads of crap have been hauled away and still there's detritus piled up helter-skelter throughout her apartment. I hear her begging for more time, the bureaucrats snapping, the charity-workers clucking, her friends coaxing, each piece of crap having to be torn from her breast. The last straw for me was some junkie bitch screaming for Cursula to help her "get on" and when it was explained she was too worried about being evicted to bother with scoring drugs the scrag shrieked, "If you don't get me some fucking drugs I'll put a hex on you!"

I fell out of bed, yanked my door open and yelled, "Boil yourself in a cauldron of toil and trouble ya fucking witch, don't come around here laying hexes!" I went back to bed, phone off the hook to defeat the tele-marketers. Next I'm awakened by more shrieking, this time from the other end of the verandah, the "gay" couple are having their weekly brawl. Drony the Tooth Fairy and Dravid the Undertaker are at each others' throats, "You bastard, you're living here for free and you treat me like shit!" "You're nothing but a dirty pedophile, I hate the sight of you!" "Oh yeah, I'll get the cops to throw you out of here, cunt!" "Go on, get the cops, get 'em, see if I care!" Some old gronk from upstairs joined in the operatic wailing, "Shut the fuck up you rotten poofters. You're both fucking pedophiles!"

The shrieking went up seven notches in intensity. Drony yelled up the stairwell at the old gronk, "Yeah, well I saw you in the toilets with that fifteen year old boy so who are you to talk!" I can't help wondering what toilets they've all  been hanging around. There's a tsunami of hissing and spitting, then I heard another of my neighbours come out, Sandy the 55 year old alcoholic and she screamed for them to stop with the god-awful insults, they're offensive in the extreme. Dravid the Undertaker saw his chance to stand-over an easy victim and apparently chased her up the verandah and into Dolly's flat where the door was shut in his face. He banged away, abusing her, threatening to teach her a lesson for daring to criticize his very existence.

My blood boiled up my spine and out my eyes, I rushed to my door and leaped out, half-naked, to yell above his curses, "Oh, great form, threatening an old woman! That's all you're good for, ya weak bastard. Why don't you get out of Northcott, you're not on the lease yet you dare to bully us all. Everybody in the building hates you so why don't you just fuck off?!" He knew he'd been pinned, and by a bloke who wasn't afraid of him, and he ran back to Drony's flat, tossing over his shoulder, "You mind your own business!" I had to restrain myself from rushing after him and smashing him in his ugly face, I could give myself another heart attack from all this drama.

Sandy called the cops and I heard them all jabbering accusations, 90 year old Dolly telling them how for years we've all been harassed by that undertaking bastard, but no one wanted to press charges so the cops left the unhappy gay couple with a word of warning not to cause anymore trouble. If we're lucky Dravid will pull his head in though the creep might be just biding his time before he seeks revenge with a sneaky arson attack, a match through an open window or lighter-fluid under the door. I live in dread yet figure I'll barbeque his balls in return if anything happens to any one of us.

I try as ever to sleep, glorious sleep, perchance to dream, and hate to get up to face a world where the poor and vulnerable are footballs for bullies and pollies to kick around. I've put up a new canvas to get stuck into, another hallucinogenic flight into colour and form, a re-envisioning of "The Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse", I can get lost in this manic creative dreaming, deep in the dark of the night, my vision of chaos a metaphor of the world outside, while trying to keep cool deep under Northcott.

Dags, Fags and Mags on Parade.

Enough vitriol and bitterness, there are many sweet, ecstatic moments in this old bugger's long travail. Though can you blame me for being a twisted sister, not only my life's work has gotten written out of legitimised histories, my very soul got sullied growing up as a homosexual in the fifties, sixties and seventies when me and mine were criminalised, made to seek out each other in toilets and dark parks, chased by cops and poofter bashers, denied good careers, safe abodes and worst of all, sustainable lovers.

And so in my looming dotage I decided to join MAG, mature aged gays, here in Sydney, a club of my peers who had survived the pogroms and fought the battles for equal rights and human dignity. It's wonderful in life, even in old age, to make new friends, and one such, Brian, encouraged to come along to the twice monthly meetings, where encouraging talks are given and a light meal is shared. When I first turned up I looked around at all the old queens, doddering about, pompadour hairdos above rheumy eyes, backs hunched and creaking along on walking sticks, wigs like dead cats and some looking like they'll keel over dead at any moment, and I thought, "What am I doing here? I don't belong with these camp old dags, I'm hip, I'm world traveled, I'm a happening artist." Then I realised if I looked in a mirror I wouldn't be so different, just another wrinkled, grey old poof whom society had tried to cast aside but who had the strength to get on top of the antipathetic tsunami, surf it, survive it, just like all my fellows at MAGs.

I'd joined late in the game, it has been going for twenty years, and politics has crept in and tarnished it's edges, MAG can't afford to go it alone and has to go under the aegis of ACON, health department bureaucrats who thru youth and careerism have little in common with us oldies, political correctness ever the watchword which often dampens the fun of proceedings. No naughty pictures on the WEB site, and as an all male domain a woman has to be present at every meeting to alleviate the gender bias. But the gang cruises along regardless and off we tottered to the 2012 Gay and Lesbian Mardi Gras Parade, most riding in a bus, and good job too as it rained on our parade and the septuagenarians might have caught their death of cold.

I got drenched marching in front of the bus, dressed like a dag in white shirt and silver lame vest, waving a cerise tinsel doodad. But oh how high I got storming up the golden mile, thousands of people screaming, whistling, cheering, hooting, I laughed with elation, white haired and proud to be a grey warrior, the advance-guard of the sexual-liberation movement. At the same time I felt intensely embarrassed, all those fucking eyes upon me in my crappy silver vest, me daring the world to shower opprobrium upon a sexually active old age pensioner! I noticed the young queens marching around me, dressed like harem princesses, beautiful and haughty, their eyes sliding off me as they took in my age, but they wouldn't be there so free to flaunt their naked twats if it wasn't for my brave kind, (I was after all one of the gutsy 300 who went on the first Gay Lib march way back in 1978 where we got the shit kicked out of us in Taylor Square by the cops.)

I've been in that parade in all variations, walking, dancing, sitting, pushing the gay disabled in a wheelchair, even riding in my own float, and tonight was another joy, to be old, to be happy, to have contributed, to be accomplished, yeah life can sometimes be grand, scintillating even. I know I've railed against the GLBT Mardi Gras previously, that's because it's been long overtaken by power-mongers, money-grubbers and star-fuckers, and oh yeah, heterosexuals, it's not even to have the GLBT title anymore, and then there was my ire over my friend getting punched in the guts a few years ago by a security guard for daring to peep over the VIP fence. But I really wanted to march with the oldies, to show the screaming hordes we were still around, that "we are the champions"and it sure was a buzz.

The Legend of Toby Zoates (?!)

Just a few of the artworks/gigs I was involved with in the late '70s, early '80s.






































































In the last year I've been amazed and stoked to meet various people at events or on the streets who have lauded my non-career as an artist, telling me I'm a legend. For someone who has been totally broke, at times starving in the proverbial garret and always ignominious, it is quite bemusing to be told I'm a legend in inner-city Sydney. I don't quite believe it as mostly I've been fucked over, beaten, given up, fatigued and delegated to the dust. But a legend is exactly what I've worked tirelessly for 35 years to achieve, like an underground guerilla artist slashing Z for Zorro, Zapata, Zippie the Pinhead on all the walls of Sydney when I pasted up my posters. I've eschewed entering contests like the Archibald, Suleiman or Wynn prizes, rarely giving interviews and trying zealously not to have my photo taken so I don't become public property and a fame whore. All of it about not climbing the shit-heap of a society which tortures and murders the poor for profit, I worked very hard at not selling out. In my jaundiced eye this rebellious attitude is the only viable way of producing cool art in an irrational, cruel world.

Last weekend I participated in a show in Woolloomooloo entitled 'The Future is Known" inspired by a Russian expression, "the future is known, it's the past that's always changing". It was to be "an opportunity to re-remember the past anew, to bring together some of those fragments into a temporary present that will again feed and change the past... to remember a city and state of mind... Darlinghurst, W'loo and Sydney in the 1980s." My rave here is in furtherance of that idea, my side of the story, for the record.

The organiser of the show, Madelaine Preston, was kind enough to exhibit my "Darling It Hurtz" poster and my Super 8 film of the same name, she even used a photo of the wall mural both artworks were based on as the front cover for her exhibition catalogue/brochure. And when I attended I was chuffed to have a woman approach me and tell me yet again I am a legend. Then I read the manifesto and was somewhat pissed off. Talk about retelling the past, every fuckwit non-talent has his/her own ego to trumpet, desperate for fame, and thus revise history.

Some guy named Rob Miller wrote a poetic peon for the brochure titled 'Darlinghurst Daze' in which he gives a long list of people, venues and events from the times, every deadbeat including John Howard gets a mention, but it studiously avoids me, though I put on a hundred gigs as attested to by the artworks above. This I accept as par for the course as Sydney is a gladiator's arena when it comes to competitiveness and I only ever got kicked in the teeth by wannabe trendoids.

What really got my goat was the clanger in his list of happening artists, "Super 8 film was synonymous with the person of Gary Warner" as that arsehole was mostly synonymous with elbowing his way into the Super 8 film group, taking it over and only promoting his own type of obtuse, meaningless abstract crap. I'd been showing my cinema verite/vox populi Super 8 at gigs for years before he invaded from Brisbane, and years after he fled back to Brisbane. I was especially involved with the Sydney Super 8 film festival but once he took over I was excluded. Then he crawled into the Aust Film Commission and got the job of handing out the grant money to Super 8 film makers and when I applied for money to finish and make a print of "Darling It Hurtz" he coldly knocked me back, basically telling me to fuck off and die.

I had to write a letter to the Film Commissioners informing them Mr. Warner was a know-nothing twerp and that "Darling It Hurtz" would long outlive his pathetic bureaucratic career. They invited me in and gave me a cheque under the table, over his dead body. The film has been shown countless times ever since, used as a resource for several documentaries, (the latest being on Paul Kelly's life) and was indeed a telling part of "The Future is Known" exhibition representing the times of inner-city Sydney in the '80s, the people, buildings, bands and venues as no other documentary has quite done. But if it was up to Mr. Warner (Bros.) it would never have seen the light of day, I can only imagine because of his overweening ambition and sheer jealousy that I was out there doing it. (His crappy films are totally forgotten.)

Rob Miller mentions that a lot of this remarkable art of the '80s was post-punk rebellious, but anything truly anti-authoritarian gets wiped, the status quo can't handle it, and he himself has seen fit to write me out of history as have many another desperate fame-whores in tall poppy cutting Sydney. When the Tin Sheds crew got their catalogue printed up for the National Gallery Canberra show "Walls Sometimes Speak - Poster Art in Australia" my hundreds of works weren't included though they've got 17 of them buried in the Gallery's dungeon somewhere.

(eg. There's a full page print of a poster for a Japanese radio show in the catalogue, Godzilla attacking the Centrepoint Tower with some Japanese youths in the foreground, all done in fleuros. I was just finishing my silkscreen print of my "Thief of Sydney" poster at the Tin Sheds workshop when Rick Tanaka, the Japanese DJ, walked in and eyeballed my work. It had a Celtic dragon wrapped around the Centrepoint Tower in a post-nuclear holocaust dystopian Sydney, all fleuro with heavy black outlines, and Rick's eyeballs popped, "I want a poster just like that!" he exclaimed. Only I didn't get offered the job, it was given to a member of the Earthworks Collective, which I wasn't, and it got pride of place in the catalogue while my poster was excluded, possibly because it was anti-uranium and the govt. was busy flogging the poison. Such is reality and history.)

My mural from the Woolloomooloo Mural project has disappeared though Marilyn Fairskye's many ugly photograph-traced murals, faded to arsewipe blotches, are still in-situ because after all she's a professor now and gets to judge the Archibald prize. And my hard-won technique of roto-scoping and dissolves between animation and live-action film, with the design of a head eating crap, stuff flying out the ears and circling like thoughts above, got stolen from my studio while I was in mid-production by a plagiarist named Hobart Hughs for a video clip for that boring band "Mad as Cut Snakes", he based his academic career and arty non-fame on it and I got relegated to an also ran, (I was stupid enough to let him in the door so it was my fault.) To reiterate, fame and fortune, as the "grand artist", has most desperados willing to sell their grandmothers to the glue-factory, and they'll quickly trample a nobody like me, no worries.

The winners always revise history and let's face it, the conservative capitalist neo-fascists have been winning since the post-punks of the '80s, running wars, stealing from the workers and the poor. But written records still exist, at the Aust Film Commission, at Colour Film Labs, at the National Gallery of Canberra, in the newspapers. But best of all is folklore, word of mouth, urban myth, the peoples' history will always out, I'm not worried about posterity, or even fame and fortune, I get by, I travel the world, dance by the Arabian Sea, really live instead of climbing a bureaucracy to make sure me and my friends get the kudos. Yet it seems I did indeed create "the legend of Toby Zoates", (not even my real name) for that's what many people tell me. I actually put my soul where my mouth was and got arrested many times for my political beliefs and I bet no-talent anarcho-pretenders hate me for this as well. Fuck 'em all. I want to live NOW, and I sure got myself a life and not chasing a career with a brief-case and mobile phone ever stuck to my ear, sucking up to the grey-faced milk-sop bureaucrats who hand out the money and cushy jobs.

Everyone's afraid of death, and dying as a nobody, not leaving even a ripple on the pond, being meaningless in this vast VOID. Why give a shit? Is fame worth selling your soul for, to vacuous consumer capitalism, or trampling on others? To LIVE, fully in the moment, that's the rub, fuck posterity!

(Yeah yeah, I'm a legend in my own toilet-break and a walking contradiction, all this blather is blowing my own trumpet, as if I'm a sucker for the cult of celebrity along with every other dickhead. But I've never sought power to hand out the money and jobs, never plagiarised or pushed anyone out of the way to get ahead. I've hung in the underground, with only the Internet as my right of reply. Great art is a joke, half the masterpieces in the world's collections are forgeries, the other half will go up in smoke when the bombs rain down.)

I've got a show coming up in September at Damian Minton's Annex in Redfern, (if the Machiavellian artsholes don't interfere and stop it), wherein I will show 35 years of my work, posters and paintings, absolute proof that I did indeed LIVE IT to the MAX.

On the Road In India.

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1) Mad Main Bazaar in New Delhi where one can immediately get lost in the crowd.
2) The bastard money changer who on day one ripped me of $100. I gave him ten one hundred dollar notes and he cleverly palmed one and told me I only gave him 9 notes.
3) The Ganges River at Rishikesh, my Shangri-la.
4) There's no Medicare or disability pension for cripples in India, they become beggars and/or saddhus and are at the mercy of us passer-bys.
5) The cable bridge at the magic town of Uttarkashi, half-way to Gangotri, source of the Ganges. I love this town, really relax and chill out there.
6) My non-friend Balu on a good day, when Dr. Jeckyl over-rides Mr. Hyde. Here he is helping a peasant woman take her grass-cuttings back to town.
7) The hot-springs of Gangonani, just before Gangotri, where you can relax in a hot tank, out-flow from Siva's pituitary supposedly, still it got me high.
8) My favourite temple in all the world, dedicated to the Nature Spirit, cool for an atheist like me. I walked around it 7 times and hoped for a good year in 2012.
9) The anthropomorphised image of the Nature Spirit. I thank my lucky stars I make it here, difficult to get to all the way from Auz, from sheer willpower I made it.
10) The endless man-made lake formed from the damming of the Ganges River at Tehri. For years I cruised alongside the river but the old roads and villages are now under water and one now travels far above it.
11) Sunset deep in the foothills of the Himalayas where I was invited for a traditional Hindu wedding at the bride's family village.
12) Me and the village women watching the Hindu wedding ceremony.
13) The blessing of the cow at the wedding, essential for future prosperity and fertility.
14) My favourite chai-shop on the beach at Goa.
15) Sunset over the Arabian Sea in Goa, a place I found it hard to tear myself away from.
16) Night lights in Mumbai, a city still in the doldrums from the terrorist attacks.
17) The Gokul, the best pub in all of India and just about the only lively spot for non-Bollywood stars in all Mumbai.
18) The Lodhi Gardens in New Delhi, 14th century tombs and palaces where I relaxed many days for free with no pedlars, beggars, hustlers to hassle me.
19) Every day somewhere in India is a religious parade, this time Sikhs in medieval garb taking over the Main Bazaar in New Delhi.
20) Humayun's Tomb at New Delhi, one of the most magnificent monuments in the world where I sat in awe and read the Moghul Emperor's life story in the gardens.
21) One of my spirit guide animals, the Indian Rhino, at the Delhi Zoo. They came over to pose for me as if they knew they were special to me. Saying goodbye to them, I said goodbye to India, this time round.

Manu of the Mountains.

I left Mughal Delhi behind me with some relief, saddened to hear 14 Eunuchs had died in a fire at a community hall. Because their families had disowned them, only their fellow Hijra, (trannies), came to claim their bodies. Many of them were old and couldn't outrun the flames and it was their young chelas, (acolytes), who they belonged to. I was surprised to note that many of them were previously Muslims.











Though I was happy to be on that
infinite dusty Indian highway , I got the heebie-jeebies as the bus trundled through Haridwar, Gateway to the Gods, where at the city's famous temple, Harki Padi, a week previously, their had been a stampede during evening Pujah, prayers, and 20 women and children had been trampled to death. The prayer group had been trying to overcome rampant sexism and empower the women by letting them lead the prayers for once, and that's why most of the deaths were female.
With 1200 million people life and death are writ so large it tears one's eyeballs out at every step, and for all the immense wealth piling up in India many poor flock from miles around when free food is to be given away, they'll squat and wait patiently for hours, patience is an Indian necessity.






On the road to Gangotri, source of the Ganges River, we found an ashram belonging to a mystic named Pilot Baba, (yes, he was once an airline pilot), he has a huge Russian following who built this vision for him and he now lives in Russia.















































































At last we broke through civilization's gates and was flying up into the high Himalayas, those magnificent mountains of mystics who have meditated there for thousands of years. As we drove through the jungle I noticed forest rangers walking the road with rifles slung over their shoulders. A rogue elephant had killed 5 people in the last few months, only recently dragging one poor fellow off his scooter and crushing him. They were hoping to tranquilise the brute and then shift him to a far-off jungle where human encroachment will not infuriate him as much. he's getting some animal revenge on so much human predation I guess. I wished him well as we cruised on by.













(Manu and I at the magic Temple to Nature.)













Up, up we flew, towards the snow-capped crags on the back of a golden motorbike, round hairpin bends and into hurtling traffic, monstrous jeeps that jostled us aside, through streams and over rock-slides, places where no road existed at all, an extreme sojourn so exhilarating it was worth any danger. We passed marvelous temples, the architecture of folklore, and a line-up of gods so manifold there seemed one for every person alive. We rode above the Ganges River turned into an endless lake by the Tehri Dam and yet again I pondered upon my youth when I did wander the valley paths and medieval villages with my mentor Compassion and beloved friend Serenity way back in the '70s, now all drowned beneath the turquoise waters.

We crossed the cable bridge into grungy, romantic Uttarkashi, town of my dreams, where I cream in my jeans, who all year I yearn for and always return for a night by her streams. But Time cascades on making all an illusion and I have to let go, next day we zoomed to Gangonani, with its huge tank filled by a hot-spring, supposedly the fountain erupting from Siva’s head, a healing embrace for my sore bones no matter the mythology.

It was at this small village clinging to the mountains side that I first met Manu, maybe seven years ago. He was from a tiny village 7 kms down the road called Buki but he hung about Gangonani most days hoping to find work with the passing tourists, offering to guide them to Gormukh, a site at the foot of the Glacier that is the source of the Ganges. He stepped forward from the crowd of ignorant peasant boys speaking fluent English when nobody for 70 kms could speak a word of it. He was honest, sincere and sweet natured and we became friends instantly.

He could never find enough interesting work to occupy his inquiring spirit, he felt he had greater potential than just toiling in the fields as his forefathers had done, he was made for bigger things but he knew not what. He was bored and restless, he’d outgrown Buki Village and knew there was a greater world out there, below the mountains yet had no means to attain it. Every year he told me his mind grew more clouded, his spirit more depressed, he was losing hope that there could be any future for such a misfit as he. I tried to give him pep-talks, encourage him to go down to the plains and take on the world, no matter the hardships but it seemed beyond him. I suggested he could turn his family farm into a miracle of modernity and eco-friendliness, his despondency found it a banal idea.

I brought him books that talked of the history of the world and might open his horizons, he ended up throwing them in the river, they hurt his brain with their difficult words and mind-bending concepts. There is no Medicare in the mountains, no shrinks with their anti-depressants and no money to pay for it, just priests and shamans whom he eschewed as backwoods mumbo-jumbo. Last year when I left I asked him what he wanted me to bring him next time I came and he requested dark sun-glasses, a very simple gift.

He became unpopular at Gangonani hot-springs for cracking onto the foreign tourists and taking the custom away from the locals, they were jealous of his language skills and thought him too big for his boots. This year he had a fight with the fat, gronky hotel owner, he must have beat the old grouch up for the police were called and he was put in some mountain jail for two months to cool his heels. I’ve never known anyone to come out of an Indian jail the better for it, it destroys the little spirit and stamina they might have harbored going in. I had great fears for Manu’s health and said so to my motorbike companion as we arrived at the hot-springs. Usually Manu was waiting there at the chai-shops, ready to greet any arriving tourists but this time he was nowhere to be seen.

We put our bags in at the wooden-chalet hotel and then drove back to Buki to see if we could get word to him through the old men that sat hunched over their brazier in the chai-shop there. We mentioned his name and they said he was finished, gone, dead, having committed suicide by drinking poison only three days previously. I couldn’t believe it, three lousy days too late, if I’d left a week earlier I might have picked his spirits up, with more pep-talk and the dark sunglasses he so desired. I stared down at the ancient cable-bridge that led over the nascent Ganges to the path that wound up over the mountain to his primitive village, a column of smoke issued from the place and I sadly imagined it to be the left-over haze from his funereal pyre. The old men of Buki shook their heads and indicated that his mind had gone, there was nothing to be done about it.

The next day we cruised all the way to Gangotri, sacred pilgrimage town lying below a stupendous snow-capped peak named Siva Lingam from whence the Ganges River flowed. We paid our respects at the great temple but I wanted to avoid getting caught up in any rituals as I don’t believe in them, find them tedious and time consuming, night was setting in, we were freezing and I wanted to get back down the mountain to the hot-springs. But this old Baba roped us in, promising us hot chai as he led us across the river to the small mandir he was in charge of where he made a great show of lighting up a chillum and shouting up to the gods. Before I could say no he’d opened up his little temple and proceeded to bless us with red tilak on our foreheads, water on our heads and manna in our mouths. His particular god was Hanuman, the monkey cohort of Lord Rama and thus I got a blessing from what I take to be the spirit of my evolutionary forebears, we’ve all still got millions of years of ape-men in us, and only seven thousand years of civilization.

Hanuman symbolizes strength, courage, loyalty and cleverness, all attributes I would need on my Indian idyll, he is the guardian of bachelors and protector from ghosts, which suits a queer adventurer like me just fine. I don’t believe in the reality of any gods but positive vibes and meaningful metaphors can’t hurt any. We thankfully said our goodbyes and cruised off back down the crumbling mountain road, passing a small herd of wild Himalayan mountain goats on the way. Not far off is a town called Dirauli and there built into a pit is a primeval temple to Nature, my favourite temple in all the world and to which I give myself a challenge to visit every year, if I can make it there I can make it anywhere. No God, no Master, no Intelligent Designer, just an awesome natural phenomenon that is Life and consciousness emerging from the quantum flux of this expanding Universe.

I had visited this temple with Manu some years previously, it seemed to lift his spirits as it did mine, to walk seven times around it and pray to the Universe, of which we were a conscious part, that It would take us to Its heart in safety, love and ongoing hope. It was not to be for Manu but it continues to be so for me. I’ve reached the miraculous age of 62 after countless hardships, it’s not easy being a ignominious queer pauper libertarian pagan adventurer cyber-punk artist, I’ve contemplated suicide throughout my life’s long journey, grand Oblivion always looking over my left shoulder, the promise of it reassuring enough not to need it.

The world can be such a sad, destructive place, especially in India, the newspapers tell me Jihadi Mujahidine are massing in Pakistan and India and we foreign tourists are “sitting ducks” for their pathological hatred. Yet India counters death with a great verve for life and this energises me and gets me surfing the wave of chaos ebulliently. After all, I'm a baby-boomer from Auz and as such am very privileged, far better off than maybe 7 billion other souls wrestling with their existence on this planet.

I was so depressed when I arrived in India this time round I thought surely this would be my last adventure, somewhere amidst the snow-caps of the Himalayas I would do myself in, I feel so tired and dead-beat I just can’t go on. Sweet Manu did it for me, and I have to carry on for him, till the very end, wherever that may be. I can't say I won't finish my life tomorrow, chaos may take over and do me in, but for NOW I will persist, I am still Alive, miraculously Alive. This story is in Manu's memory, for few will know that he also once lived and was Alive.