Averse to Reason

This is Sammy and his friend Todd at Central Station, probably on Sam's 16th birthday. I have to do the Driver Qualification Test to finally get off my Ps so he can drive. You have to have a fully qualified driver when you're on your Ls. He has been driving around with Suzy, and loves it of course. I lost my licence over parking fines, $10,000 worth in fact, not all of which were mine, in a classic circle only Sydney could devise. We were living in Riley Street, Darlinghurst, when Sammy came home from the hospital. He was much beloved by the gay boys who ran the trendy cafe come eaterie on the corner called Dov. He was tiny, and I used to take him out for breakfast every morning.

We were one of those couples, having a baby wasn't going to change our lifestyle. Sammy had seen Silence of the Lambies before he was one month old. We ended up with a screaming little bundle. Where we went a riot followed. Then wiser heads stepped in and said, he's just a baby. He wants to be at home in his bassinet. And suddenly a kind of calm enveloped our lives. Suzy had been doing her last shift at the youth refuge before taking three weeks off for the birth when she went into Labor. It was Mardi Gras night. It was the best, really, that Sydney had to offer; unique unto itself. The ugliest blokes, they all beamed. They'd all gotten off. It was a community duty; well more than that...

If anything was unsettling me at the moment it was the vivid violence of Altered Carbon; where torture, the burning off of legs elongated through sleeve after sleeve, efficiently produced insanity. It was a florid kind of violence on an Earth saturated in tetra meth, centuries old personalities that seemed far from here. In the here and now they were good kids; I don't know how it turned out so well.