Last Will and Testament

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Manhasset, site of the largest liquor store in New York State, was the only town on Long Island with a cocktail named after it (a Manhasset is a Manhattan, with more alcohol). The town's half-mile-long main drag, Plandome Road, was every drinker's street of dreams—bar after bar after bar. Many in Manhasset likened Plandome Road to a mythical country lane in Ireland, a gently winding procession of men and women brimming with whiskey and good cheer. Bars on Plandome Road were as numerous as stars on Hollywood's Walk of Fame, and we took a stubborn, eccentric pride in their number. When one man torched his bar on Plandome Road to collect the insurance, cops found him in another bar on Plandome Road and told him he was wanted for questioning. The man put a hand over his heart like a priest accused of burning a cross. “How could I,” he asked, “how could anyone—burn down a bar?”

J.R. Moelringer, The Tender Bar.

Could it have been a simple desire for alcohol? He couldn't believe it when he first saw it, a man standing up in front of a meeting, declaring himself to be an alcoholic. What the heck? Why would anyone humiliate themselves like that? What bastards, what psychological bullies, were the counsellors, to force someone into that position, to make a fool of themselves in public, supposedly for therapeutic purposes. Great shavings of the past were leaving him, in the frantic mist, in the ceaseless slideshow that was his brain, half-images half-stories forming and then dissolving in rapid succession, no point, in the end no point. The shadows had been flickering faster and faster, as if he too was on that mythical merry-go-round, as if the only hope lay in abandonment. As an oblivion seeker, that moment of pure abandonment was akin to a religious experience, the one point in the day when he was truly himself, a profound reordering of the neural networks.

Oh darling, speak to me, be kind. We don't want to remember the dead, not now, but they kept crowding in, insistent, demanding to be acknowledged. Jan was the most georgeous looking woman of them all, petite, a streak of white in her dark hair, indicating psychic abilities. They did read tarot cards and did feel the spirits flickering around them, feeding off their vulnerabilities as they chewed their jaws through the long nights, wired on duramines and playing endless rounds of 500, as if this was the most important moment that could possibly be. These were his university friends, the straight ones - if you discounted all the drugs - and he had already written stories about the death of their members; and the tolling bells had barely started. Bruce Benson, big, gawky, intelligent, funny, one of us, had overdosed before the years had even begun. We went one way and it killed people.

Now, in the lost country of the future, no one had thought of Bruce for decades, and his already elderly parents had long since gone to the grave. They had no idea what to do when their son went off the rails. He was shattered but there was too much to do. Death so early, a young man in his 20s, made no sense. His devestated parents cut a lonely figure at the funeral, and whenever he drove through those wealthy north shore suburbs around Turramurra he thought of him. That house of his high on the steep hills, the dripping damp of the environment. He was going to be a poet and he became a corpse. We carried the memory of Bruce with us, that little group, Jan, Tim, himself, later Jenny. It was astonishing that they were never breached, caught, taken up before the authorities and punished. Instead they followed an isolated, deadly path which increasingly alienated them from the outside world. They partied all night and slept all day.

Lou Reed permeated all their lives. That song, heroin, it's my wife and it's my life... Satellite of love. Hit me with a flower, you do it every hour. So why, then, were they dying, if they were such great social frontiersmen; such pioneers in new thought patterns, new ways of being. No straight person may enter here, the inner enclave. Michael Dransfield burned through the firmament and also died young. What could you say, what could you do? There wasn't any talking to us, no voice of sanity, no older, wiser person to give good counsel. We dealt out the cards and dealt out the pills, went shop lifting at the local Woolworths. He was concerned about the future but also the past, fearful its tender pain would swamp him, not just with the memories of being beaten which had so distorted his adult life, but would distract him from his core purpose. To create something beautiful.

So all vale to Bruce Benson, to all the lost memories, to the friendship we had so intently, the recognition of kindred spirits in the wild laughter of the party, their endless party. And then he introduced Kim to Jenny, and all was lost in a welfare lather of speed and lost opportunity, hopes, dreams, complex plans which never led to fruition. But as they stayed up all night, talking, communing with each other, playing cards, he could feel the planet shifting slowly on its axis, the giant machine, and knew that destiny had touched him on the shoulder. You will be my guide, you will set an example. And the day it all ended was the day Jan died, leaving two young children and a devestated husband. There in that house at Balmain where we had all lived together, the gay boys downstairs, the family up the top. He had never been happier, the London nearby, space invaders on the machines. Eery day he could he went there and got drunk, worshipping at its knees, oh salvation, oh drunken hope, be mine, for nothing is more important than this moment, nothing more profound than the complexities which bound us together.

THE BIGGER STORY:

http://www.theage.com.au/environment/the-gore-effect-20090713-diqw.html

Al Gore captivates audiences even as he foresees a dire future, but is the inconvenient truth that he is preaching to the converted? Adam Morton reports.

AS MOST of Melbourne slept, business leaders, politicians and green campaigners queued on a Docklands wharf in the pre-dawn cold yesterday to hear a man say what he has said many times before.

Notionally, they were there for the launch of Safe Climate Australia — an apolitical organisation that hopes to plan a future without greenhouse gas emissions. But few braved the chill to hear about a new non-government organisation, no matter how impressive.

They were there to hear Al Gore, in Melbourne for a whistlestop 30 hours of training climate activists and delivering his well-honed message. Those hoping for insight into global negotiations on a new climate deal, or an intervention into the Australian climate change debate, would have been disappointed. In its place they got a practised summary of the climate problem, and hope that a solution is within grasp.

"We can see that we are standing in front of a fork in the road," Gore said. We can take one of two different directions. "We can say to the scientists, 'We don't want to listen to you. We would prefer to seek out the 1 or 2 per cent of the naysayers who stand against this growing and building consensus.' If we continue on that path it leads towards a catastrophic outcome. It is difficult to ignore that the cyclones are getting stronger, that the fires are getting bigger, that the sea level is rising, that the refugees are beginning to move from places they have long called home.

"So what should we do? We should respond not only to the danger, but also to the opportunity, because we face this crisis at a moment when the world is in an economic crisis as well, and the economists tell us the obvious response is to find opportunities to invest sensibly in the building of new infrastructure that can make our countries stronger and put people to work and give them money that they can spend to get the economy moving again."

Beyond the content there was the charisma; the intangible pull of a celebrity who is famous for what he does, not who he is, and is renowned as an inspiring speaker.

For the hosts — Safe Climate Australia — his presence transformed an earnest gathering of the usual green suspects into an A-list environmental event. "There are not many things you get out of bed that early on a Monday morning for," says Mark Lister, group manager corporate affairs with Szencorp, a designer of environmentally friendly commercial buildings. "Having some people who know some people who know Al Gore is very, very helpful and it makes a big difference because people look to opinion leaders like him … Having someone like that endorse what you're doing speaks volumes."

http://www.theage.com.au/environment/climate-change-most-dangerous-threat-ever-says-gore-20090713-dhwx.html

Former US vice-president Al Gore has told a Melbourne breakfast that climate change is both the most dangerous threat and the greatest opportunity that civilisation has faced.

Calling on community leaders to take a stand, Mr Gore said the projections of climate change due to rising greenhouse gas emissions had worsened through four reports by the United Nations' Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, yet political leaders had so far failed to act.

"We can see that we are standing in front of a fork in the road. We can take one of two different directions," he said.

"We can say to the scientists, `we don't want to listen to you. We would prefer to seek out the one or two per cent of the naysayers who stand against this growing and building consensus'.

"If we continue on that path it leads to a catastrophic outcome. It is difficult to ignore that the cyclones are getting stronger, that the fires are getting bigger, that the sea level is rising, that the refugees are beginning to move from places they have long called home."

He called on the 1000 community leaders at the breakfast for the launch of non-governmental organisation Safe Climate Australia to take a stand and push for change. He said people must respond not only to the danger, but the opportunity.

"The economists tell us the obvious response is to find opportunities to invest sensibly in the building of new infrastructure that can make our countries stronger and put people to work and give them money that they can spend to the the economy moving again," he said.

http://www.theage.com.au/national/nice-breakfast-but-fielding-unmoved-20090713-ditf.html

Nice breakfast but Fielding unmoved
Michelle Grattan
July 14, 2009

THE persuasive power of Al Gore hasn't been enough to sway Family First senator Steve Fielding, who says the climate guru did not answer a key question at his Melbourne breakfast yesterday.

At the end of the breakfast, attended by 1000 people, Senator Fielding spoke briefly with Mr Gore and said he would like a meeting. The question bugging the senator, who holds a vital upper house vote, is why, if carbon dioxide is a major driver of climate change, atmospheric temperature has not been going up in the past 15 years as carbon dioxide has risen.

"We didn't get a chance to discuss that level of detail," Senator Fielding said. Mr Gore had known who he was and said he had an important role, the senator said. He told Mr Gore he would be happy to fly to Sydney for a meeting if a time could be found. But last night he had not been able to make contact.

Senator Fielding has written to all senators urging them to take a close look at the science before voting on the emissions trading scheme next month. He provides in the letter a chart making his point about rising carbon dioxide but steady atmospheric temperature.

Senator Fielding said in a statement it was incomprehensible that "we'll be voting for this scheme and going it alone before the rest of the world acts. Kevin Rudd and Penny Wong are hanging the Australian economy out to dry if the rest of the world doesn't follow suit."

Meanwhile, Opposition Leader Malcolm Turnbull is facing fresh problems on the climate issue, with Nationals senator Ron Boswell strongly opposing the Coalition supporting legislation for a 20 per cent renewable energy target by 2020.

Mr Turnbull wants the Liberals to try to own the issue of renewable energy. But the leader of the Nationals in the Senate, Barnaby Joyce, said the Nationals had not yet reached a party position. It was "hotly debated" within the Nationals, he said.