It isn’t impossible to share a poignant moment with any object irrespective of its degree of animation; accountants, travelling sales-persons, tram passengers, puppies or doorknobs are all quite common co-participants in intimate moments. In fact if my Father was an accountant it would help clarify the depth of our understanding. After all comes a time every July when you have to tell your accountant some pretty private stuff; hopes, dreams and off shore tax schemes.Regardless of this lack of saturated father son intimacy during formative years, the old man did occupy the Alpha Male role in the household, albeit by default. Within our family this status was bestowed upon any person who possessed the necessary skills to convincingly prepare a whole lamb for roasting over an open fire. A task which my father took to with some passion and not minor amounts of flair, running his fingers along the sweet smelling lamb carcass, preparing the butter and herbs that would be placed into its cavities, growing, harvesting and preparing the lemon that plugged the beasts rear orifice.

I recall a time when my father dared to move further up (or is it down) the food chain by attempting to hunt the animal that would adorn the Easter spit. If memory serves me correctly this pursuit involved standing around in a cold outer-suburban paddock for many hours spanning the course of an autumn day’s rapid transition from day to night. The long period of patience was ended by a gun shot, solitary and reverberating, its echoes punctuated by the cries of the wounded, followed immediately by an uncannily similar length of time spent in a fluorescent-lit outer-suburban emergency ward. My opportunity to indulge in the cornucopia of Australasian Posts that had been painstakingly amassed by the staff of this hospital was disturbed on the occasional occasion by my father lighting his perpetually ultimate Peter Stuyvesant and mumbling something about how stupid my soon to be right-big-toe-less uncle Tom is and what in the devil’s name had possessed him the day he gave him his consent to marry his sister.

I fell asleep at the nurse’s station and woke up in East Hawthorn in one of those “did I dream all that” moments, Uncle Tom’s limp suggests firmly, no.

Throughout my youth I spent a disproportionate amount of time staring at puzzled expressions on doctor’s faces. They would toss up the pros and cons of various strategic approaches for dealing with my particular condition. They would flash lights in my eyes whilst making me look in all sorts of directions and then act all surprised to discover that yes indeedy albinism does cause severe light sensitivity in the retina, those text books were right all along, who knew, egad!

This suffering wasn’t without its benefits however as it was during these visits that I developed character traits that help define who I am. These regular visits in the 70s gave me access to some of the more beautiful homes of old Melbourne. The now brutally subdivided and apartmentalised homes in East Melbourne and the top end of Collins Street. I got to press pull or yank the door chimes of many of these grand, dimly lit palaces and coming from our little East Hawthorn weatherboard really helped to max out the intimidation factor that something as simple as architecture could convey.  I would walk along corridors wide enough so that even with outstretched arms i couldn’t touch both walls, Grandfather clocks would mark time, creaky floorboards elaborate noted human presence beneath plush hall runners, dark, carved balustrades crawled along the sides of stairways and the walls were adorned paintings that weren’t backed by chipboard.

I had become quite skilled in determining which doorway led to the waiting room, office and reception and would discuss appointment details with the matronly assistants occupying these rooms. The size, layout and impact some of these places had on the landscape really struck a chord with me and continues to do so to this day.

On a more personal level, it was also during these visits that I developed the trademark smirk that tends to crawl across my face whenever I am presented with a theory, statement or council by-law which I feel is firmly grounded in moose kaka. This smirk was born in an East Melbourne ophthalmic surgeon’s office, me seated behind a big desk and he opposite flanked by two students, announcing that the reason I walk with my head bowed is because my nystagmus is less pronounced that way. Genius! I cried, not out loud of course. There I was thinking it had something to do with being able to see where I was going, give this man his own tartan!

Not all the practitioners I encountered during this time were similarly encumbered by cockheadedness. One particular GP approached my parents on the street one day, spoke to them briefly about the rather unorthodox spectacles I was strutting around in. When it became obvious that my parentals weren’t able to communicate effectively in his chosen language he wrote a brief note which was passed on to our family quack. This gentleman offered his services gratis, helped my parents with where to go and get free or government subsidised help and was able to speak to me about what I was, what it meant and what it would one day come to mean. He was an amazingly calming person, he commented and I would listen, he would suggest and I would ponder, he would tell me when it would hurt and it rarely did. He also helped convince my parents that I was in fact quite capable of living a normal life, (although I’m yet to prove this really).

All this background brings us to the morning of the day of one such visit to the government subsidised clinic. It was normal procedure for mum or my sister to accompany me to these visits.  They were normally long, drawn-out affairs involving several brief visits with various staff with different skills or responsibilities. There were numerous tests carried out with the aide of equipment that had to be either state of the art cutting edge technology or archaic museum curios, it’s rather difficult to make that call when you aren’t in the know.

On this particular day however, it was dad and not mum that would accompany me. I woke up at the usual time for a school day was enjoying another episode of the Thunderbirds when I was told that I didn’t have to go to school today because I had to go to the clinic. I sat at the kitchen table with mum, dad and my grandmother, the entire parental arsenal at my beck and call. They all looked unusually serious, but this meant that I was able to eat as many slices of toast as I wished with as many Kraft singles slices as the laws of physics enabled a skilled operator to balance atop them. Dad didn’t even mind when i chucked away the dry first slice, as was the custom during those ground breaking days of pre-sliced but not individually wrapped fake cheese.

I eventually did stop eating breakfast, and back in my bedroom I found a gift, a bright battery-operated red toy fire engine complete with expandable ladder and fireman holding a nozzle, there was no hose. I thought the gift a tad childish and would have preferred a book, but it was a gift from dad not mum and gifts from dad had to be used, pushed, climbed on, jumped on and eventually gifted on to a cousin who enjoyed gifts that required performance of these sorts of acts. The red engine was meticulously maintained for years, it survived for decades until my sister’s son decided to unleash its capabilities and show the world that it was in fact a new member of the “transformer” family.

Big breakfast, gifts, dad home from work, it was obvious that something big was happening our arrival at the offices of subsidised eyeball health in Kooyong didn’t seem out of the ordinary. They didn’t have a bottomless toaster service, we still had to wait well beyond the time we were told to arrive and I still had to go through the same series of tests in the same strange rooms with the same future retro machines. There was still lots of forms that I had to fill in and dad still pronounced the “e” in the word “little”. i considered the possibility, not for the first time, that the word little with the e articulated was in fact some technical medical term and dad had inadvertently given the professionals to which he had entrusted my care and well-being with misleading information. I was appalled by his reckless way of life.

Towards what would normally be the end of the visit I was shepherded into the room where the “and now cover your left eye” tests were normally carried out, where you got to wear the weird spectacles with the removable lenses and try and spot the difference between something incredibly blurry and something incredibly blurry, or have to correctly identify which way a letter “E” was pointing on a chart. I wasn’t put in the barber’s chair where the tests were normally carried out but sat at a desk at the far end of the room in front of a few small boxes. The boxes were opened to reveal a range of binoculars, some pocket sized some grand some military. An open window allowed me to use the binoculars to look around outside and learn how to focus and zoom in and out. The dreaded twisted E chart was flicked on and I was finally able to read the bottom line without having to sneak a look on the way into the room.

What appeared to me a simple event was in fact the culmination of much discussion as to how my education had been progressing and would go. The idea was that as I was moving along in school quite reasonably they had agreed to allow me to stay on at a “normal” state school at least until I finished primary school, with the aide of these binoculars and later are rather more stealthy monocular I was able to take part in class a great deal more than usual and also have to spend less time pestering the poor soul that I sat next to for details on what was being scrawled on blackboards. For years this role was held by my friend Brad Dickson, who upon reflection was doing a pretty sterling job reading out loud whatever the teacher was writing on the board for my benefit.

The shrinks at subsidised government health were concerned that if i continue to learn that way I will not develop certain critical aspects of learning and rely on sound rather than what vision I had, they were right, In meetings, lectures, social events, I normally don’t bother using my eyes to learn what is going on, ears can give you a great deal but my lack of the social protocol of using eyes to immerse yourself into a scenario, situation, conversation has made people feel that I am not interested or bored, when in fact I’m quite often the only person involved who is taking it all in.

I was admiring my new shiny gadgets in the front seat of dad’s Kingswood when he pulled over at Anderson reserve, a large park that runs along side the south eastern freeway at Glenferrie road. We would often head down here on weekends to watch one or two of my older cousins play soccer for Hawthorn Citizens, but pulling over today was odd. Dad came around to my side of the car and opened the door. I stepped out and walked out into the park using my binoculars to check out the details of the high tensile power lines that also make use of the reserve. I heard dad open the back window of the station wagon and walk towards me, i put down my goggles when I felt that he was nearby, turned around and saw him holding a kite. It was your typical V formation, 3 bits of dowel joined at the apex, it was the 70s so it was bright blue and yellow with a long red ribbon for a tail. It was of course home-made, I recognised components that I would see often in dad’s workshop, but it was bigger than me and had a nice big spool of white nylon secured by a big brass ring in front.

I ran around the park for a few minutes trying to get it off the ground, dad wouldn’t normally tolerate this level of non successful endeavour, but today he stood patiently holding the spool of nylon whilst his son who had to use binoculars to read the blackboard ran around in his shorts and dress shoes trying to predict which way the wind was blowing. Even the transition from giving me advice on techniques to employ for achieving lift-off to dad’s taking control of the kite in order to get it in the air was handled gracefully. It was a combination of waiting for mother nature, some minor adjustments to the kite’s aerodynamic qualities, some suggested by me, some suggested by dad, the rest by common sense and obvious measures needed to correct the errors of engineering that came together to help achieve flight. The kite was quite heavy and when the wind gusted i had to dig my heels into the grass to stop myself being dragged forward. Dad took the controls for a while, I stood under it and tried to jump up to touch its crinkly red tail.

The sound of the wind pushing against the kite’s skin and the strange ratting that the tail would emit when it was performing some sort of loop the loop or nose dive seemed to occupy a frequency range above the traffic noise. Dad’s hands would take hold of mine to teach me how to pull on the nylon to make the kite move up or down in the sky, I wondered where he learnt how to do that and why if he knows that why he doesn’t know how to fill in my deposit slip on my Commonwealth Bank passbook account.

Something was achieved that day, a boy and his dad and a kite, nothing new, nothing beyond the ordinary, but there is great pleasure in the mundane when you have been told that even that is out of reach. A man, full of hope thrust into a new world, with his son cast not quite in his image, gathering the pieces of what they can expect, cleaning them up a bit and presenting them to the world in a “we sure showed em today” way.

Time has no reason to offer us anything, time is a depository not a library, a drumbeat not a melody, an indexless flat file vault not a relational SQL queryable treasure trove of memories, it is time that is the true omnipotent being, not some needs-no-introduction, preceded by legend airborne dude with a beard and no second name.Time is now, it is so now that it is over by the time you start saying “now”. Time transcends the contemporary, it’s the heartbeat’s heartbeat. We can remember a time, long for a next time, live in a time, be about time, on time, overtime, double overtime, golden goal extra time, out of time. We can waste, kill, buy, count, tell, do or borrow time we can even make time. We can do all that whilst simultaneously maintaining absolutely no control over its passage.

Historians look back trying to learn time’s lessons and develop some logical order to use in predicting the future. Philosophers remain focused on the here and now documenting the bits that time doesn’t really care about but we feel are necessary to justify our status as thinking beasts. Mathematicians try to break time, or the rules it imposes on us in an effort to prove that at any point in time, time is the most important force in the universe that has been created by man and therefore doesn’t actually exist.

An atomic clock loses a second every few thousand years, If you had one on your kitchen wall it would take two hundred thousand years before you started missing the bus and thinking, best get the ladder out and set the time on that clock. If your kitchen wall had a clock that wasn’t working, it would be completely accurate twice a day, set it to 10 minutes before your bus is due and timetable variations aside you should never miss it.

Time doesn’t listen, it has already heard what you are about to say.

On this late November night, returning home from yet another evening in one of the local small town watering holes the rain fell more heavily than what I had now been led to believe was normal for this time of year. Tonight like most nights over the last 10 days or so I was walking Mieke back to her apartment, we were drinking beer, smoking unreasonable numbers of cigarettes and no doubt amusing ourselves with the habits of the locals.
Mieke was a chain smoking Dutch girl, diminutive but with an attitude that made her look 6 feet tall, her head was topped with a fire engine red mane that she regularly threatened to shape into a Mohawk, deep down i Knew she could do just that with little notice.

We were two of the foreigners that descend on this particular Marchese small town pretending to be interested in learning Italian, although this was no doubt important to us, we each had additional items on our to-do list. Mieke had returned to check the reality of some promises made my a local Italian boy, and his inability to remember her face, let alone her name and his weapons grade set of oaths had let her down severely. I as always was there to experience life, to make up for lost time.

Tonight was different because it so happened to be the night after our first kiss, delivered at the doorstop of Mieke’s apartment approximately 24 hours prior. A simple lingering contact of lips, with fingertips entwined on the door frame. It was delivered like a reward, like some kind of milestone highlight on a project manager’s workflow timeline, our linked fingers letting me know that I had reach a key point but her free hand pushing into my chest was also telling me quite clearly that there was more work to be done and resources should be allocated accordingly.

The walk back to her place would take about 10 minutes, enough time for all the characters involved to have an arc, a story, a beginning, middle and end. We walked side by side, close enough to ensure that our arms would bump far too regularly, she would drift a few steps behind when the footpath become too narrow. Her shoes, or more correctly her left boot had developed a squeak some time during the evening, the sound was augmented by water splashing with each puddled step. Her pace remained steady, the pace of a person who was walking through rain they had anticipated and adequately prepared for. I walked erratically, not wanting to increase the pace but ducking under any available shelter, trees, bus stops, canopies, my scarf now merely serving to distribute the rain evenly across my back and neck.

Mieke took great pleasure in watching me jump between slithers of shelter but once satisfied that I had been drenched offered me half of her umbrella. I moved beneath it taking the handle from her grasp, the difference in our height meant that I had to huddle in to stop the rain from angling in and soaking her.

We paused to admire the absurdity of us reflected in the windows of a closed supermarket. I moved my arm across her shoulder perhaps purely for the purposes of balance and when we managed to synchronise our steps discovered that we were able to walk in a reasonably straight line, the only entrants in some experimental wet weather three-legged sporting event.

My fingers moved across her shoulder, around the point where her hair met the fur lining her collar and then to the piece of neck below her ear. She didn’t respond, her stride didn’t change pace or direction, her eyes didn’t turn towards or away from mine, she treated the moment as a simple mechanical exchange just as anybody would have, anybody other than the man allegedly directing the arm’s movements.

Over the next few moments, my face hunkered down into my chest, umbrella pulled down against us angled towards the direction the wind was blowing from, within the few cubic inches of relatively breezeless space created by us fighting the forces of nature I managed to sneak a few glimpses of the raindrops making their way down some strands of her hair. The streetlamps and lights from occasional passing cars reflected its brilliant red into my eyes, and despite the vast number of cigarettes we consumed that night I could still smell her hair, the strawberry of her often applied lip gloss, the warmth emanating from her fur lined neck, the sweet smell of autumn rain, German beer and skin bracing itself against the cold only an inch away.

I sensed some sort of movement, she turned herself inwards pushing her face closer to my chest. This may have been pure survival instinct but I was so keen to be with her that I was more than willing to interpret the lack of any negative body language as the possibility of positive. This shift of her weight, even if it was only millimetres was an invitation already several days past the RSVP date, stuck to the door of the fridge with a magnet, purchased on impulse at a service station.

I think she said something, what I mean is, she definitely said something but my brain was so engrossed in interpreting physical communication that she could have said “take me” or “get off my foot” and I couldn’t have heard.

The sound broke the camel’s back of my concentration, my arm slipped from her shoulder, falling like the limb of a decaying tree between us. This triggered my stupid stupid legs to move a few inches away from her. I made some stupid joke, sang some stupid line from some stupid song or something just to try and appear that I was still calm, she laughed, smiled looked up at me with the “you had me you meat head” eyes, the moment had gone, we left it sitting on a park bench ten metres behind us shaking its fist at me.

There are many kinds of fear, fear of being misunderstood, fear of rejection, fear of failure, but the fear that decided my actions that night was the fear of “what now?” that moment when you achieve some goal, major or minor and have to make a choice as to where everything now goes, what is right or wrong, what is fair or what is exploitation, what is passion or what is pure sport.

There’s a fine line between laziness and standing up for your rights to be inactive.

Doing nothing is a peaceful and private form of anarchy, laziness is a product of your lifestyle or environment.

She’s been reappearing in my thoughts a lot lately, not unusual for a retrospective kind of bloke like me. But even though it’s been 5 years since I saw her and 6 since we had anything that could have been described as a relationship, I think I am understanding what went wrong and why it was mostly my fault.

Some people live their life in reverse, starting out all mature and responsible and gradually becoming more childish and random as they get older.. if they are rich they are referred to as eccentric, if they aren’t they usually jump off a cliff. With the various twists and turns I’ve managed to perform on my life over the last 10 years I’m beginning to believe that I am one of those people. (bank account is still at a reasonable level so don’t worry this isn’t a suicide note, call the cops not)

Sometimes being good, solid and dependable isn’t enough. In fact in many cases it is the worst thing you can do. Ilidko and I got together when she was 20, i was 27, she was stunning, naive but smart, aside from the usual set of insecurities about mother’s was reasonably secure. She transplanted her life and attached her future to me. A sound choice at the time, i was moving up, had a plan and the wheels spinning along its path. She loved me, I certainly loved her, we started off happy, really happy, I’d buy her a rubber chicken for her birthday and she thought it was the greatest gift ever bestowed upon a mortal. (if that’s not happy i don’t know what happy is)

After 3 years or so, things started to fade. That solid dependability, that need to be serious and lead had gradually choked the spontaneity out of the relationship, she was young and needed to do young things and make some massively stupid mistakes, i removed that right from her life by planning everything and always being there. As a result she had to plan her mistakes more meticulously, make them more grand to ensure that the ramifications were irreparable.

With the aide of a work colleague’s penis she eventually achieved this, twisting my respect for her into a profound and beautifully constructed contempt that still wells up within me from time to time. I had no idea why she did it at the time, i couldn’t understand why she didn’t just pack her stuff and go if she wasn’t happy, after all its what I would have done.. it would have been the sensible thing to do.

Looking back from here, i can see that the foundation and support I thought I was providing her, was in fact a complete house and land package, complete with an Ikea Catalog interior, it was the complete package, it didn’t allow for input, even though part of my self-appointed role was to ensure that she was an “equal partner” in the relationship, My efforts to do so had already been corrupted by the deeper need within me to “do the right thing”.

Passion isn’t just for the bedroom, in fact it should only get there after it has been applied to other elements of your life. It should permeate what you do and who you are. Part of being passionate is allowing for randomness and spontaneity, it factors in a likelihood for error and cherishes them when they occur as they inevitably lead to new experience and self discovery. I stripped this from Ildiko, and that’s why she left, not cos she didn’t love me, not because she didn’t want to share her life me, not because she found a better option, but because she had no option.

And the irony that I have to deal with is of course that now, today, I spend most of my life avoiding routine and allowing myself to float on a current of ideas.Aint life grand?

Over the past few months I have been attempting to convince myself and those around me that I am capable of performing repetitive tasks for financial reward, although I had been relatively successful with this, this charade came to an end yesterday when me and those that aren’t me came to an disagreement regarding how much of that reward i should receive for performance of said tasks.

So once again I found myself in that space that I had occupied with some happiness between November 2002 and June 2006, no steady income, no communicable goals, no responsibilities that cant be taken care of blindfolded… but it all feels just a little different know, although I’m well aware that you aren’t surprised that I don’t really understand why it feels a little different.I am hoping that the reasonable amount of routine and discipline I let creep back into my life will create some sort of spark that will keep me away from the non productive aspects of what I was doing before. I’m hoping it will help push some of those ideas to places that exists outside of moleskine pipe-dreams.

There are people around me too now, some of them i like “a lot” and many of them inspire me to get off my ass to do something other than pay for the next bottle of red (occasionally).

Let me know how it all goes will ya?

I sit at the kitchen table after the mothers day lunch clutter has been cleared, mum is as per usual busying herself in the kitchen, Dad is also comfortable in his particular role of being sprawled out on the couch in some state of sleep. Mum produces a platter, a large cake considering there are only four of us and several small meringues.

“What did you get your mother for mothers day?” My father asks,
“Chocolates..” i reply after a slightly too long pause.
“Chocolates..” he says with a well prepared tone of disappointment “chocolates, she gave birth to you, grew you into a man and you get her chocolates? you should be ashamed of yourself”.

My dad is right I should be, but not because of the mothers day gift, more likely due to the fact that I spent as much on a bag of chocolate coated raspberries to eat on the tram ride over to mum’s as i did on the gift i gave her. And please dont think i was buying provisions for a long train ride, i caught the tram from camberwell junction to warrigal road… it’s about 12 stops. I thought it best to conceal my shame by making something up.

“I baked her this cake” I added winking across the table at my mother, who had probably sensed that this conversation although pleasant at the moment could turn into a slug fest of worthiness as it has so many times before.

“what.. the cake i baked this morning?” my sister adds from the next room. I smile to myself, trapped at every turn. “Well i was going to take her photo!”, carrying around a camera everywhere all of a sudden becomes a real positive. A smile explodes across my mother’s face, “really? let me get changed” she dashes off and seconds later i hear the creak of her hand me down wardrobe door, one of the sounds i used to hear when my parents were trying not to wake me during those early morning starts.

“a photograph, wow” dad tosses at me, “careful you dont spend any money or anything” and as predicted i reply with “wel i’ve been trained well”. Normally this would launch us into a dont talk to me about values contest, but we let it slide,.. happy mothers day.

Mum emerges having done herself up and stands somewhere where she believes is a good place for a photo, i wait at the kitchen table until she has sufficiently lost interest in her pose to come back and start doing normal stuff. She eventually complies, sits back down and looks at me in the “you aren’t really going to take my photo are you” kind of way.

I’m holding the camera in a way that people who know how to use cameras do when they are adjusted technical things like ap-er-ture and shu-tter speed, once i remove the lens cap my technical prowess tank is dry. Whilst this faux pro move is being performed, my mother actually starts to resemble herself, i lift the camera aim and shoot.

“what .. is that it?” she says, “here? .. like this?”
“why not”
“take a proper photo of your mum, with the flowers and things” dad suggests, firmly.
“so.. what did you really get me” mum asks
” 2 kilos of okra” I mutter, she replies in the traditional manner which has been used in response to this comment since i was first taught of its hilarity.

Im rather excited to announce that I am taking part in an exhibition of photographs, there are 19 photographers, all members of the Melbourne flickr group exhibiting.

The exhibition runs from wednesday 24 May - Sunday 11 June

At: 69 Smith Street Gallery (69 Smith Street Fitzroy)

Gallery is open wed-sun 11am - 5pm

The official opening is on Saturday 27th May 2006 from 3pm-6pm.

Entry is free, if you cant make it to the opening, I will be gallery sitting on Wednesday afternoons during the exhibition, it would be great to see you all there.

(please feel free to pass this on to anybody who may be interested)

(a pdf version of the flyer is available here)

for the curious here are the pics that I am exhibiting