Pressure

There was a lot of pressure in his day to day life; snivelling into the carpet as he shook an editors hand, always wierd with authority figures; talent streaming out the fingers while the head thrombed; moving fast enough to get to work by 7.30am. Col is coming down tomorrow; after having been in hospital when they changed his medication and poisoned him; after he lost his teeth in the surf; completely embarrassing; after life churned out one too many indignities and all that was craven, all that was gone, came back to haunt him.

He remembered his loves; wished he had been more in the present, more there, when youth had stretched into the infinite. Instead of the sad dads of now; playing in the parks on Saturday, clutching themselves in neglected kitchens, living in the back of caravan parks, while the cavalcade of the self-satisfied, of over-paid public servants; of self-serving academics, of useful fools gleamed and laughed in expensive cars and expensive restaurants. None of it was fair. He didn't know why he scuttled away when they came near him; ignoring the opportunity to prove, well, that he was normal; that everything would be alright, that he was one of them.

None of them knew where it would end. The surprising beauty of the harbour; round bends, from cliff tops, in the Opera House precint, it was all part of Sydney he often forgot. He lived in the inner city suburb of Redfern, gentrifying slowly but still very rough around the edges; with the street alcoholics nearby keeping the nights alive; and work near Central, where the street alcoholics sit crowing along the sandstone walls. Got a cigarette? Got a dollar? There were cafes where almost no one went, yet somehow they continued to survive. And out there the city grew more bitter, more stressed; he could feel it, the pressures building up as the trendoids parroted their rosy version of reality while out there thousands of people's dreams were dashed against the wall every day. The Great Carr crash goes the logo in the Sydney Morning Herald at the moment, referring to the disastrous state the previous Premier Bob Carr left the state in. Today he declared, foolishly, like some overblown lying little child incapable of taking criticism, that he was proud to wear the moniker, it was his last great service to the Labor Party, to take the blame for his colleagues. What a ghastly charicature that man has become; while collecting $500,000 a year from Macquarie Bank, the bank which benefited so massively from infrastructure projects while he was Premier. Could it get more blatant? Could the Labor Party get any more corrupt?