Messages Found On The Troubled Path

"He was my North, my South, my East, my West,
My working week and Sunday rest,
My noon, my midnight, my talk, my song,
I thought love would last forever - I was wrong."

WH Auden

I've always loved these words; they just hit me as to the way I was; ready to sacrifice everything for whoever it was I was sleeping with. The nights are long; perhaps I should get a dog. I was thinking of trying to get the car up to the farm today but it's pouring rain and the portents are all wrong; Henrietta is firmly against; and doesn't God talk through children? And Joyce wants to go to the movies; although we've seen just about everything. But I can't just leave it in the street collecting parking tickets from the marauding parking dogs who make their living fining ordinary people who can't find a parking spot.

Sydney is bedevilled by these parasites; the councils have worked out they don't have to do anything but fine people to make the millions that feather their own useless nests; and the parasitical nature of our local, state and federal governments compounds; stomping into our lives, controlling our every move.

I have to finish the Hunting In Packs column off for Trevor today. I'm not sure why I do it; considering it doesn't pay; he's a gnome like creature who is everywhere in Redfern, commissioning editor you could call him for the local paper, The South Sydney Herald. He was always in awe that I worked in the mainstream; something I had been doing for so long it didn't impress me. I kept telling him he had to broaden his political base from his narrow left left every minority deserves sainthood Labor can do no wrong all conservatives are evil editorial line; and he finally took me up on it. So now I have to deliver.


HUNTING IN PACKS


We have entered a strange disconnect between the manufactured world on our television screens and the lives most of us live. A strange, Stepford Wife world. Can there really be that great an interest in cooking shows?

All rationality has left us and there is something fundamentally wrong with the bland fronts that make up Australian culture - its decaying intellectual and media life. Left and right have morphed together, horrors coming equally from each side. Labor leader Kevin Rudd poses as a conservative while our supposedly right-wing John Howard out spends and out taxes anyone in Australian history.

It was perhaps a more profound disconnect over the collision of ideologies and reality that compelled columnist for the UK's flagship left newspaper The Guardian, Nick Cohen, to pen What's Left: How Liberals Lost Their Way.