I woke up screaming, had to wrench myself into the world of so-called reality, like I was stuck halfway in the viscous sludge of confused waking consciousness. In the dream I'd found myself trapped on a railway station to Nowheresville, everybody I asked for directions ignored me, fled me, nobody knew the name of the place we were stuck at. As a last resort I thought I might simply walk out of there but from the last platform all I could see was empty countryside disappearing into a fog of infinity, there was nowhere to go. Trains pulled in and out of distant platforms but I wasn't quick enough to catch them, lost souls drifted around me but no one could help me or even befriend me, we were all lost.
I recalled all those souls with "locked in" syndrome, those disabled from birth, like in the TV docos about the "abandoned children of Bulgaria", blind and unloved, dumped in a hospit on the edge of nowhere, eternally rocking backwards and forwards, slowly dying. I wondered, "where do they go to, deep in their heads? A better place, a heaven of the Mind, another time-stream where they live out glorious adventures?" In my dream it felt like I'd gone to the waystation where such lost souls waited out their lives, to eventually be shipped off to parallel universes, and I was one of them, and as they reached out to claim me as one of their own, I woke up screaming in horror.
Considering all the bad things happening in this world, I'm not so bad off. The State here in Auz takes better care of it's 'disabled' than most places but only just. I had the operation on my purulent leg cancelled for the second time, too many patients had flooded into the hospital the night before, no room or money for me, I could wait endlessly or die, no matter that as a seventh generation Australian every-thing in the country is mine by right of inheritance, and I should be taken care of, but I'm kidding myself, it was all stolen from my ancestors as the country got invaded and built up, and in the world wars and the Great Depression between them. These are my mad thoughts while I wait, wait, wait for my leg to be healed so I can walk out of here, flee, perhaps to the Aussie outback where my ancestors come from, to sleep under the stars like a swaggie, no money but kind of free.
I've drifted back to that Lifeboat for Losers Cafe, the Piccolo Bar and am over my grudge against Vittorio. He can't help himself, everything good and bad washes over him, a wind-up Replicant he just carries on slaving, slaving, making coffee, ad nauseum. What a life! Like a pussycat born and enclosed in a zoo, he's never really gone anywhere, never really had a lover or a good fuck, never rock'n'rolled or tranced out in ecstasy, never climbed a mountain or surfed an uncontrollable sea, shit! Just coffee and more coffee and lots of lunatic hellos to the flotsam of the Cross.
I have to have affection and compassion for the old hobgoblin, he's a stalwart, always there, the doorman to a level of Dante's Pick-your-low Purgatory, abandon all hope ye who enter here, until the great god Entropy claims him and he drops dead from fatigue and becomes a distant memory, the fate of all things, people and places. Roslyn Street on the Cross is undergoing more transmogrification, old Barons Pub has now gone and some new, post-mod monstrosity is growing like geometric fungus from the dust but, in the desperate hurly-burl of the trendy nightclubs filling the back-lanes around that construction site, who cares about the past? It's today and tomorrow you have to get your guts in a knot about!
And incarcerated in Northcott Housing Ghetto I wait out "the end of days." (Cyclones, earthquakes, tornadoes, hurricanes, the north pole melting, wars, terrorist attacks, drug zombies, child killers, religious maniacs promoting cannibalism, it's all here now!) Maybe from my demonic text you can tell I've been reading Cormac McCarthy, he's addictive, for pessimists, realists and lovers who know death and loss is the sad poetry of life, I can't put him down, his art consoles me. Like in his latest novel, "The Road", post-appocalyptic desolation and humanity on the brink of extinction, have we already arrived at that misanthropic scenario?
Polly the Pyro puts yet another match to the mountain of garbage near my front door and I shudder as the flames explode and the zombies rush to and fro, hollering for more human flesh to feed the fires. Let me out of here! While I wait for my escape it's best I sleep and dream, conquering a far-fetched space-opera of some non-future, living an exciting life virtually, anything's better than the big Nothing.
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anarcho-queer, rock and roll punter and mystic adventurer in Australia and
India of the 1950s, ‘60s and ‘70s.
