I went over to see Tim at Bondi – he was housesitting this cool place – and we went for a swim on Bondi Beach at ten o’clock at night. It had been raining, the footprints on the sand were eroded and dimpled, the beach was almost empty; certainly there was nobody swimming. The sand was cold on our bare feet. We walked along the hard sand down by the water and I taught Tim how to spot rips, how you had to look for the dark water and the small, irregular and choppy waves. We walked along the shore looking for a good spot, and all the talk of rips made me nervous – what did I know of rips on Bondi Beach? It wasn’t like the beach I grew up on...
We found the spot that seemed best. Tim was reluctant – it wasn’t a particularly warm night – but I hadn’t been in the surf all summer. I took off my shirt and made my way in. The waves were gentle, there wasn’t much of an undercurrent, but the water was brisk – I went
weehee!, and
wowsers!, and
zip! I laughed hysterically from the shock of the cold. But it was, as they say, alright once you got in. Tim came in – my rip lesson had made him nervous, he was spotting rips everywhere with his new knowledge, it all looked to him sort of like what I’d described – the whole ocean was dark, all the surf irregular. We bodysurfed some waves, caught a couple of good ones – where the wave takes you, suddenly, and you go woosh off towards the shore – it was really nice to swim.
When we got out the air seemed suprisingly warm. Walking back, there were some disreputable looking teenagers in a huddle on the boardwalk, they made me smile, they reminded me of me. I said to Tim that I wasn’t sure about Bondi Beach – how it seemed somehow inauthentic to me, as if it was all dressed up to look like Bondi Beach. Tim said that was every landmark – he mentioned the Sydney Harbour Bridge – and I guess he had a point.
On Friday night I went into the city to see the final Candle Records show at the Metro, with Tahlia. In the bar area I looked around, and even though I knew nobody, everybody seemed slightly familiar, as if I’d seen them or their dopplegangers at other, similar shows. I tried to explain this to Tahlia, she didn’t understand.
“Look,” I said. “There’s the aging hipster in his thirties who’s going bald and has shaved his head. There he is again! There’s the fashionable Asian girl with the glasses and the scarf. There’s the guy with the brown jacket and the muttonchops.”
She started to understand.
“There’s the weedy guy with the buzz haircut that looks sort of like a butch lesbian,” I continued. Tahlia didn’t think there was such a type, or that this made any sense. “There’s the grey-haired guy with a rat’s tail!” I exclaimed, delighted. There is no such type, although unfortunately there was such a person. I was just being stupid.
We watched a few bands, then snuck a look at the running list and realized there was still four hours to go until The Lucksmiths, and we didn’t really want to see the bands in between. There’s only so much amiable folk-rock you can handle at one sitting, and four more hours of it was entirely too much. My back was hurting, Tahlia’s leg was hurting; we went out to the bar area and realized that while we would like to see the Lucksmiths, we couldn’t see ourselves lasting through all the bands in-between.
We tried to think of something else to do. I suggested we go to Time Zone and play air hockey (I love air hockey). We left the Metro and crossed the street, but Time Zone didn’t seem to be there anymore. We saw, back on the other side of the street, right next to the Metro, something called Galaxy World, and crossed the street again (I suppose this street-crossing will seem like arbitrary detail unless I mention that Tahlia was having difficulty making it across George Street in the time alloted by the little green man, due to her recently broken leg.)
Galaxy World was disapointing to me. I like video arcades, not so much for the coin operated video games as for the sheer thrill of the sensory overload. Galaxy World had that, but it didn’t have an air hockey table. To me this is against the spirit of video arcades – they traditionally have an old air hockey table shoved to the back somewhere, for dinosaurs like me. (There was a single pinball machine in one dark corner – unplugged, and with an out of order sign on it.) Instead they had puri machines – at least a dozen – and twenty or so skill testers. I couldn’t imagine why they needed so many skill testers. There was a giant skill tester, on which for five dollars a go you could try to manipulate the massive robot claw to retrieve for you a stuffed toy the size of a great dane.
I wasn’t tempted, but under other circumstances – when I’m not annoyed at them taking up space that could have been used for an air hockey table – I am something of a sucker for skill testers. I’ve never won anything on a skill tester, have never seen a prize in one that I’d even like to win, yet have wasted an embarrasing amount of money on them in my life. To those who doubt that skill testers actually test any skill, I say this: I once saw the King of the Skill Testers in action. He was at a suburban bowling alley, middle-aged and nothing much to look at. If his life had taken a different path he might have been a skilled surgeon. He had a young girl with him, a daughter or grandaughter, and for her he brought from a skill tester four small stuffed toys in four attempts. The girl wanted more, but through one squinted eye he sized up the lay of the remaining stuffed toys and declared with finality that none of them were in a gettable position. This man is something of a hero of mine. I would give a number of hard-earned skills to be casually brilliant at the skill tester – to nonchalantly step up to it and make the arthritic robot claw do my bidding.
On George Street, again, the kids in from the suburbs were out, the girls in short skirts and too much makeup, the boys in various ethnic uniforms of the night. I tried to think of something to do, difficult because Tahlia couldn’t walk very far. I spied a monorail station and suggested we take a ride. I like the monorail, even though it’s ridiculous, even though it goes nowhere useful and costs too much. Still, you can ride it for as long as you like on a single token. So we caught the lift up to the monorail station. The ticket attendant seemed delighted to see us, as if we were the first people to ride the monorail all night. We caught the monorail and rode it for a while in its giant pointless loop, looking out through the windows and into first floor offices and restaraunts, which is the Great Thing that nobody appreciates about the monorail: it is an informal tour of the first floors of the city centre.
We got off at Town Hall. Still obsessed by air hockey, I got this sudden delusion that there used to be a Time Zone by the police station and Alexander's. I left Tahlia momentarily and went looking for it, but there was no Time Zone – no police station, no Alexander's. It’s been a while since I used to work in the city centre, things have changed.
By the bus station an African busking group was singing Amazing Grace – there was this very small, fat and strange-looking homeless woman, maybe in her sixties, her breasts nearly coming out of her yellow top, who sat on a bus seat – she was so tiny her legs didn’t reach the ground – and she listened to them with her heavy-lidded eyes half-closed. In a novel, I’d never dare have the busking group be singing Amazing Grace, but that is what they sang.
*
There is about the city, now, on certain afternoons and in the magic hour, a feeling of autumn, it is there in the way the light hits the sandstone buildings, and there sometimes on days with clear skies and cool unhumid air. I am looking forward to Autumn, it is my favourite season in Sydney.
I’ve been reading the
Summary for Policymakers of the First Part of the Fourth Assessment Report of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (catchy title). There is some good news in it – Antarctica isn’t getting hotter, apparently. Also, in the language of the report, “it is
very unlikely that the MOC [meridional overturning circulation of the Atlantic Ocean] will undergo a large abrupt transition in the twenty-first century”. In other words, the Gulf Stream is not going to spontaneously shut down a la
The Day After Tomorrow. This is as close as the report comes to cracking a joke. It could slow down by twenty-five percent, though, even in one of their more optimistic scenarios – A1B, which imagines a world of “increased social and cultural interactions, with a substantial reduction in regional differences in per capita income”. Wouldn’t that be nice? However the cooling of the North Atlantic by the reduced Gulf Stream will be more than offset by increases due to global warming.
The various future scenarios were my favourite part of the report - possibly because they’re the most imaginative part of it, and they got me imagining. The world of B1 sounds alright to me: “rapid change in economic structures toward a service and information economy, with reductions in material intensity and the introduction of clean and resource efficient technologies. The emphasis is on global solutions to economic, social and evironmental sustainability, including improved equity”. But my money would be on scenario A2: “a very heterogenous world. The underlying theme is self reliance and preservation of local identities ... Economic growth is primarily regionally oriented and per capita economic growth and technological change more fragmented and slower than other storylines.”
It’s worth reading the report: it’s not too hard to follow, and a lot of the comments in the media have nothing to do with anything in the report, which is factual and quantified throughout. My favourite dumb reaction – apart from a
hilarious indirect quote that the Sydney Morning Herald attributed to Environment Minister Malcolm Turnbull, that “people needed to learn how to adapt to hotter temperatures” – has been our Australian of the Year, Tim Flannery, who
says that "Three degrees will be a disaster for all life on Earth. We will lose somewhere between two out of every 10 and six out of every 10 species living on the planet at that level of warming." I would love to know where he got these numbers from, I think he's pulled them out of his ass. I’ve given Tim Flannery the benefit of the doubt up until now, because he’s on the right side and his heart is in the right place, but he’s either deliberately scaremongering or he’s a very bad scientist. Six out of ten species disapearing due to three degrees of global warming is absurd. The
Cretaceous extinction only took out fifty percent of the world’s species, and it needed an asteroid ten kilometres wide and a dust cloud that blocked the sun for a few years and stopped all photosynthesis.
Not that a sudden rise in average temperature and a vastly altered rainfall pattern is going to be good for species biodiversity. Species occupying highly specific niches, with limited geographic distribution, will be in a lot of trouble – but then they always are, when global temperatures change. As for us, old H sapiens, who I’m parochial enough to care about most – I don’t think we’re going to go extinct, at least not because of global warming. The report notes that 125,000 years ago sea levels were likely 4 to 6 metres higher than at present, and temperatures 3-5 degrees warmer. (Somebody tell Tim Flannery). Homo sapiens was doing alright for itself back then – that's about when we left Africa for the first time.
Of course things are a little different now – there’s five billion people, and we live where the water is. This is what the report doesn’t have, what I don’t understand, and what I can’t really imagine – what happens when the world gets warmer, when the sea levels rise, when the crops don’t grow where they used to? Obviously, you don’t want to be living in Venice, or on a coral atoll, but I can’t imagine whether it’s something we will gradually adjust to, or whether it will be a root cause for wars, famines, population migrations, and the end of civilization as we know it. Hopefully the report of Working Group II in April will enlighten me on some of these matters. Like most people, just the thought that we’ve fucked up the atmosphere so badly that it is having these effects scares me, and makes me think we should do something in a hurry. Although, I suppose, we still haven’t altered the atmosphere as much as
cyanobacteria did a few billion years ago. Good thing they did, too: they made all that oxygen.
The other thing I’ve been reading is a book written by an anonymous Russian peasant, called
The Way of the Pilgrim. It is the book Franny is reading in the eponymous short story by J D Salinger I was talking about a couple of blog entries ago. It advocates continuous prayer. Why am I reading it? Because it sounded interesting when Franny talked about it, and because I have 20,000 books, and one of the nice things about this is that occasionally you will read a reference to something you think you might like to read, and then you discover that you already own it. I was pretty optimistic that we'd have this one – we own
a lot of Christian dogma.
It’s quite a charming little book, although I doubt I’ll finish it. It has made me think about prayer, though, which being a fairly sceptical agnostic is not something I’ve ever thought about much. The sort of prayer this book advocates is a kind of ceaseless mantra that has a lot in common (as Franny points out) with chants and meditations from Buddhism and other religions. But it has also made me think about traditional prayer, and I wonder if it is something we miss when we abandon religion. Not the communication with a supernatural God - more the routine of putting one’s thoughts and hopes in order and expressing them in a sincere and penitent fashion. There might be value in that. Of course it made me think of what I’m doing on this blog at the moment – I already thought of it as a sort of penance, but I think it might be also be a kind of secular prayer. (Wow, this whole paragraph seemed a lot more profound in my head than it does when I type it).
I don't want to give the impression that I’m being entirely cerebral and meditative and generally wonderful at the moment. Tim (who by the way has just written a
terrific blog entry that is both more interesting, and shorter, than this one) said my blog, at the moment, is like somebody putting things together. I think he meant in terms of writing, but it's also true in terms of life. I feel a lot better than I did towards the end of last year (when I thought I was feeling good, but was actually a little manic and crazed – it happens that way sometimes). But I still don't think the humours are
totally in alignment. If I was a medieval doctor, I would diagnose myself as a little choleric. A definate excess of yellow bile – how did they treat that, anyway? Specifically:
The other day I nearly got in a fistfight with the postman. The post, at work, is usually delivered by a nice woman, with whom I share a running joke – we joke about whether I have bills, or cheques. In truth this joke got a little old for me about eighteen months ago, but the post lady seems to enjoy it, and she’s nice, so I have a little chuckle with her about it when she brings the mail. Occasionally, though, she is off, and then the post is delivered by an evil little munchkin who doesn’t like me, and whom I don’t like. The point of contention is this – both Plup, and the assholes upstairs, are at number 83. The regular post lady gives me my mail, and puts the neighbours mail in their mailslot. The evil munchkin refuses to do this. He give it all to me. I have explained to him many times than the Chinese names, and strange electronics companies, are next door, but he takes no notice.
The other day I was standing out the front of the shop and the munchkin came up and thrust a letter at me. I quickly glanced at it and saw it was for an electronics company. I made no move to take the envelope from him.
“Not ours,” I said.
“You’re 83, aren’t you?” he said – aggressively.
“We’re not Electrocomputing,” I said.
“Well, take it and write that out,” he said.
I was standing in front of the neighbours’ door, which has a slot in it marked letters. I pointed to it. “It goes right there,” I said.
At this point the munchkin reached past me and tossed the envelope into my shop, then moved on towards the next place.
“God, you’re a dickhead,” I said, not particularly quietly.
He came back. He got right up close to my face. “What did you say?”
“I said you’re a
dickhead,” I said, emphasising the last word and clearly enunciating both syllables.
My second-hand book dealing mentor was standing next to me and he said “Hey!” – I think to both of us. We glared at each other and he walked off. I was ready to go, though. A couple of years ago I decided that I should get myself into a fistfight if a suitable opportunity arose. It’s a male rite-of-passage that I feel I should experience. Ever since, I’ve been kind of on the lookout for some not-too physically superior jerk who might be pushed into throwing a punch at me.
It’s a slightly different resolution to one I made back in high school – at a not particularly wonderful point in my life – that I wouldn’t let myself be bullied, and that it was better to get beaten up than feel intimidated and ashamed. When I’ve discussed this with people they are often surprised that I haven’t been in lots of fights – they seem to think I have a smart mouth – but then up until I made my (only semi-serious) resolution a couple of years ago I never went looking to get hit; I just refused to be intimidated, and was quite content to use whatever verbal skills I have to extricate myself from situations. The truth is I’ve only ever been hit once – and I didn’t hit back. It’s something I’ve always regretted.
(Amanda, I don't have red balloons in trees, but I have me in trees. Anyway, it was what suggested itself.)
One of the small frustrations of my childhood was that I never had a decent treehouse. It was something I wanted very much. I wanted the treehouse of every American TV sitcom – an enclosed structure, high in a tree, a place in which a secret club might meet and from whence they might issue forth to solve crimes. (I never had the secret club, either; the influence here was more Enid Blyton, Hardy Boys, The Three Investigators. When I was twelve, though, I did start a detective agency with a friend. We solved our first case, too. It was the Mystery of the Missing Textas, and we were paid ten cents by the grateful client when he was reunited with his textas. I don’t remember how we solved it, exactly, but it was nothing sophisticated. I think we just went through the stuff of the kids in our class we thought likely to be texta thieves, until we found the missing items. Unfortunately we were not so succesful on our next two cases, which stayed unsolved. Even more frustrating to me, and probably more instrumental in the folding of our detective agency, was that we were not once drawn ever-deeper into a web of intrigue and adventure. Not once were we kidnapped by smugglers.)
When I was five, when my family lived in the Blue Mountains, the place next to us had a half-decent treehouse. It was close to our driveway. It was only a platform, but it was pretty high up a eucalyptus, and to get into it you had to climb a ladder made from sections of a plank hammered into the trunk. My older brother and sisters were allowed to go up it, but I wasn’t.
At the same house my older brother built me a sort-of treehouse – perhaps because I wanted one. The place backed onto bush, which adjoined the national park. One day I saw trees falling over in the bush. I got my trusty toy wheelbarrow (I had a trusty toy wheelbarrow) and pushed it into the bush to investigate, and found my brother cutting down trees to create this treehouse. It wasn’t much of a treehouse, though – just a sort of cubic frame, open and on the ground, made from logs. I used to go into the bush and sit in it, though. It fell down one winter, before we moved. (My memories of this time, incidentally, and of the bush at the back of our house, are wild and improbable, though they’re quite clear memories. I remember myself as wandering long distances through the bush. I remember knowing secret pathways, remember that there was a patch of rainforest I knew how to get to. Obviously, this can’t be right – I don’t believe my parents would have allowed a five year old to go wandering off alone into a massive national park. I asked my mother about this once – she said she didn’t believe I was ever allowed to go much out of sight. No doubt it is a question of a child’s scale. The world is large when you’re a child.)
At my grandmother’s house (not the place described in the beach blog entry - my other grandmother), there was a great climbing tree, and for years my cousin, my younger brother and I were “building a tree house” in it. It would have been a good tree for a treehouse, but mostly we just climbed around in it. I think the main problem here was lack of lumber – that, and tools, and any basic knowledge of carpentry.
And the houses I lived in subsequently, as I got older and might have been able to at least make an attempt at a treehouse – they never had the trees for it. They had thin gumtrees, or rubbery jacarandas. Nothing with a flat fork of branches, a little way up – which is what you need for a decent treehouse.
I don’t know where I’ll be ten or twenty years from now. But I have some idea of where I’d like to be, and it’s not what I felt I wanted ten years ago. I still want to be a succesful writer, but the idea of fame, or of being the biggest selling writer of all time, or the best regarded writer since Shakespeare (I actually put that on my form when I applied to get into Creative Writing at university, where it asked for your writerly ambitions. God, what a dickhead I was...) doesn’t hold the appeal for me it once did. I’d settle for just being good. And my ambitions these days are far more domestic, too – I think I’d like to be married, I’d like to have kids, and a nice place. And I want to say this: should I be lucky enough to have those things come to pass, and if I have any say in it at all, the nice place will have somewhere on it a tree with a flat fork of branches, a little way up. And in it I’ll build a treehouse, an American sit-com treehouse, for my children. I imagine I’d do a lot of things to make that happen; for that, I’d learn carpentry.
