Keeping Up

Keeping up. These posts are still going up out of chronological order because I put a batch of five photographs up at the same time, trying to speed up the process. It's new technology, well new for me and indeed new for everybody. Rapid adapters, or adopters. I've got a 250 word column to do for the local rag, the South Sydney Herald, which is due on the 23rd but which I should really bash out as soon as possible. I've done other stuff for them over time, but they don't pay and essentially it's against my principles to write for nothing, this blog excluded. I think if you write for nothing for all these greedy and exploitative community rags, then they just take you for granted. They pay the printers, they pay the editors, they just don't pay the writers. And of course you get what you pay for.

Our paths are clogged by a stream of stray thoughts; fear of being a wanker, fright at the thought of a mistake.

It's 4.08am and already I am off and running, the ideas and projects queuing up for attention. I need to get the voice recognition software working on this machine. There is so much to do. I'm negotiating to get paid $10,000 to finish a book I started on family law reform in Australia called Chaos at the Crossroads. I sat down and started writing it almost two years ago; and then ran out of steam. I would bash it out in the early hours of the morning after I finished work when I was on the night shifts - get home at midnight and run out of steam sometime before sunrise.
It was a lonely enterprise. I was incensed by what had happened, but was entirely alone in my obsession. Working the night shift while the kids were over at their mom's, I had discovered that there were all sorts of people up at that hour; working on the internet. But at the end of the day it was a lonely obsession nonetheless.

It's been up on the web unfinished ever since and the Shared Parenting Council of Australia is now negotiating to get it finished. I've always wanted to complete it; that gnawing feeling when something is half complete. It's a long way from Pai, where the fingers stopped flying and each day was a calm offering. I have to be at Observatory Hill near the Bridge by 7.30am for a day of wonder, chaos and crowds; dodging cliches, leaning down to people in wheel chairs; asking them to croak their reminiscences of what it was like to walk across this very same bridge 75 years ago. How many cars have driven across since? The population on the other side was all of 15,000 people. I lived once in a tiny little room in an Allen's private hotel at Kirribilli and walk across the bridge to work. There was so much to say. And today, in professional mode, I'll be walking across it again. There isn't going to be a disaster after all. There's just so much to do.

THE BIGGEST STORY:

ABC:

350 Iraqis poisoned in chlorine bomb attacks
At least 350 Iraqi civilians needed hospital treatment after insurgents detonated three trucks filled with toxic chlorine gas, killing two policemen, the US military says.
The attacks were carried out on Friday afternoon, two of them just south of the town of Fallujah and one north-east of the nearby city of Ramadi, both hotbeds of Al-Qaeda militants in the Anbar province.
"Approximately 350 Iraqi civilians and six coalition force members were treated for chlorine gas exposure," said Lieutenant Roger Hollenbeck of the US-led Multinational Division West, based in Ramadi.
Iraqi state television reported that at least six people were killed in the blasts, but the US military could initially only confirm the deaths of two Iraqi policemen in the second explosion, in Ameriyah, outside Fallujah.
"Coalition forces confirmed that the Ameriyah citizens exposed to the chlorine were treated locally for symptoms ranging from minor skin and lung irritation to vomiting," Lieutenant Hollenbeck said in a statement.
In each attack a suicide bomber detonated a vehicle packed with explosives and gas canisters near police and civilian targets.