AS IF IN AN INFINITE STORE

1500 Skies - random pic from mom's computer

As if, as if, we could see through everything. He returned to the toxic shores, and just as before, everything went haywire. Just as the boy in Equus had spiked out the eyes of the stable horses, so he spiked out the eyes of those who watched him. And then was pursued across the fetid kingdom, with no place to hide. Hunted from one place to another, the scandal of the blinding growing with each telling. They may have been wild dreams, the cruelty espoused, exposed, and there was no use telling anyone they had brought it upon themselves. He had once more become the hunted. There wasn't anything fair about it. Fairness didn't come into it. Vulnerability did. Just as jackels attacked the wounded, so they attacked the vulnerable, the elderly, the miserable, the heart broken. "I'm disturbed by this, Thailand is meant to be a welcoming country," a young man said in a stairwell in Patong.

But disturbed or not, there would be no intermission, no relief. A long spike, a distant place. He had never blinded humans before. From people he had no intention of ever seeing again. "The police there are unbelievably corrupt," he said to a drunken uncle on the lawn. As in: if the cap fits, wear it. There wasn't going to be any easy solution. Moving across space and time. Flashes of anger replaced by flashes of resilience. A toxic dream, a toxic place. Or not. He missed the visual tableaus, the crowded streets, the sense that anything could happen. He didn't miss the howling chorus of the apes, the easily seduced. The moo like menaces who crowded on every street corner. He didn't miss the infinite sense of longing that distorted everything he touched. And he most certainly didn't miss the derision, the nasty coating that came from everywhere.

Back here, he walked through avenues of the past. He had barely been in Australia for years, barely been amongst native English speakers for years, but again there was little to say, little to communicate. He had no great desire to say anything. His drunken uncle had never been the same since his first wife had died more than 45 years before; in a car accident which destroyed their lives. They had been a very dashing couple, a handsome pair. He had only been a boy then, staring in misery out the window of his parent's car. All was not lost, but it might as well have been. Back then he hadn't known how there was going to be any remorse, redemption, a way through. What a chorus, what a place.

Last night Des left his next wife on again; as he often did. "Have you two been drinking?" his mother asked in some rare display of innocence, or was it politeness. "You bet," Des said, or slurred words to that effect. Showing all the communality of the working class, except they didn't work. "Housos," after a successful television series, was the term. Bleak, suicidal, was the way he thought of the houses, the areas. Nothing to do, nowhere to go. The blinding of the vindictive bastards who had made his life hell was just a dream, a dream of parasites and lechers, of drunken police and corrupt government officers. They were dreams he wished would die off into another place; but kept returning. Because he wouldn't be here if he hadn't been there. Because nothing had made much sense at the time; and still did not. And perhaps because he could say what he wanted in the so-called "land of the free"; in a democracy which encouraged debate and disparate views; freedom of expression. Well that was the theory anyway. Doe like eyes stared at him wherever he went. And he could feel the spike and the blood on ghostly hands. And something which might easily have been regret.

THE BIGGER STORY:

https://news.google.com.au/nwshp?hl=en&tab=wn

President Obama says he's tired of the seemingly never-ending rounds of budget crises.

"When it comes to Congress paying its bills ... we cannot be a country that is lurching every two months or three months from crisis to crisis to crisis," Obama said in an interviewMonday with NPR's Steve Inskeep.

Yet that is precisely the situation the president finds himself in.

As of midnight Monday, much of the federal government is now shut down for the first time since 1996.

Members of Congress will face intense pressure to work out a deal — particularly with a debt ceiling limit set to be breached by midmonth.

Obama says he'll hold firm and not give in to House GOP demands that any budget package contain language delaying parts of his signature health care law, the Affordable Care Act, also known as Obamacare.

The president said he "shouldn't have to offer anything" in response.

"They're not doing me a favor by paying for things that have already been approved for the government to do," Obama told Inskeep. "That's part of their basic function of government; that's not doing me a favor."

http://www.theguardian.com/world/2013/oct/01/tony-abbott-asia-pacific

It was either the new face of Tony Abbott, or the familiar face of an Australian politician. Or perhaps it may be the naivety of Indonesians, most of whom still believe that in a democracy politicians actually carry out their most stringent campaign promises.

Either way, Abbott showed a different side on his high-profile visit toIndonesia on Monday. Gone was the boisterous opposition leader. In stepped a figure befitting a leader of the most advanced nation of the southern hemisphere. Infused with deference. Careful in his words, prudent in his mannerisms.

Abbott's first visit to Jakarta since taking office achieved little in substantive results, yet accomplished much by way of reinforcing a closer working relationship with his counterpart, President Susilo Bambang Yudhoyono.

It was, in essence, a foundation-laying visit. Not a problem-solving one. Some critics have even suggested it was diplomatic appeasement.

From an Indonesian perspective, it was a welcomed visit. Without spectacle, bereft of controversy.

Given the narrative which catapulted the Liberals to power, there was some suspense – no matter how unfounded – that during his visit Abbott would coarsely push the issue of people smuggling in the same way he claimed he would push boats back into the sea.

But we have all learnt something. Abbott has learnt there is a difference between the boisterous style of campaign rhetoric and the delicacies of high government.

The Indonesian people have also learnt they have nothing to dread from the new Australian leader, who showed appropriate tact during his visit. That Abbott comes from a generation of Australian leaders who appreciate the complexities of the giant archipelago to their north, in the manner of Keating, Howard, Gillard and Rudd – leaders who fathom that a quiet suggestion goes farther than a flamboyant warning.