Safe Haven

*

There were a thousand things right and a thousand things wrong; focus on the negative; I don't do happy, the dwarf said; and yet here they were, marooned in a happy place, where the world could get lost and they could feel ultimately safe. He was astonished by what had happened. Where was the misery? Where was that atrophied creature behind seven veils, seven walls; the creature shrieking at the very hint of light? Now the days passed in relative domestic bliss. Ian was coming to stay and he looked forward to his old friend's no doubt chaotic presence; beaming good cheer and healthy lust. If only he could share the same simple pleasures. We were moving deeply into the quagmire, fragile and forgotten. Atrophied not the word, but sheets of pain and ossifying flesh, calcified nails and stringy hair, a corpse walking, a mind deranged, love lost. They could smell the stranger from 20 feet behind; the stench of his urine soaked clothes. Drunk? Shawn asked. Mad, he responded. Mad. They lurched down bewildered, busy streets, and if there was antyhing better to be had, he did not know it.

The synopsis was clearly forgotten, forsaken. Nate was still in Safe Haven and from all reports remained as uncommunicative as ever. Forlorn. Lost. A bricked in kiln. Walls of non-communication the only protection. He would like to have been the same, romantic, stoic, silent, but was far too garrulous, too social, too gossipy, to ever keep it up for long. They would be surrounded. They would make way for younger flesh. Sometimes there was nothing to be said. He could not even warn them they were on the wrong path. He sat in meetings and declared his contempt and hatred. God bless you, the American mumsy said. They would go for lunch at the Saint Louis canteen afterwards; 55 baht for rice with two dishes, a bottle of water and Thai dessert. There were a million Christmases. He would dish out tips to the staff. He could feel his stomach sinking because he did not want to go back; not back to Sydney, that city where he had been so desolated; where he jerked across the pavements like a scattered form, a misshapen ghost, with no emotion matching another, with no coherence but a bitter slide, no hope, that was for the young; and no desires but the unnatural.

Desire was for fluent creatures, with a confluence of instincts, a bright step, a gleam in the eye, a new car a new girlfriend a flash job a neat set of friends. It wasn't for a forlorn creature with a wasteland in its head. It wasn't for a bundle of rags coated in addiction sweat. It wasn't for a grimy skinned wasteoid in a blizzard of conflicting despair, so conflicted self deprecating humour was the only way to operate even as a semblance of normality; and so it was he pretended to be human. Frustrated, even so, by the many inhibitions, limitations of the flesh. A short life time being amongst its many deficits. Here and struggled and gone. A crack a smile a flimsy glare; all in the muted flash of a dark bar moment; and then it was gone and the infinite was nothing, the flash of an artificial firefly in the biggest of nights, a speck of mica glinting under a foreign sun, even less than dust, just a moment. That was all. Seen by some, seen by one, then gone. The skyscrapers soared up around them; and the flashes of joy he had known for so long, they, too, hung precariously in the balance; and waste-oid or not, the flesh eaters were coming to get him. Reminding him of the old cliché: just because you're paranoid does not mean they're not out to get you. The frozen flesh was a barely inhabitable place. And all the infinities of negation, the forms of indulgence and annihilation, they, too, were barely worth the wait; the only thing of value the silent, or not-so-silent, commune between his fellows. On a bare rock. Far, far away.

THE BIGGER STORY:

http://www.news.com.au/features/federal-election/tony-abbott-narrowly-misses-out-on-becoming-australias-next-pm/story-fn5tas5k-1225915620290

HE MISSED out by the narrowest of margins on claiming the nation's top job but Tony Abbott was applauded as a hero by colleagues when he stepped forward to accept election defeat last night.
Mr Abbott will be re-endorsed unopposed as Liberal leader tomorrow, with Julie Bishop staying as his deputy and foreign affairs spokeswoman, and the man he replaced - Malcolm Turnbull - promised a senior front bench role.
The Liberal audience was roused by Mr Abbott's warning the new Government would be challenged, and forced to an election if its performance warranted it.
"You won't be surprised if, as an Opposition, I tend to focus on what can be done better," he said.
But the acclaim for the man who nearly wiped the electoral floor with Labor and at one stage thought he had, will disguise a number of problems within the Liberal Party exposed by the election.
One is the operation of the NSW branch, where candidates were selected quite late and campaign organisation was considered poor.
There also will be questions asked in Victoria where the Liberals failed to make big inroads against Labor, and a renewed crispness in relations with the party's Coalition partner, the Nationals.
First there will be recovery from the emotional turmoil of the 17 days following the five-week election campaign which failed to give Australia a government until yesterday.
Liberal figures, including Mr Abbott, were strongly hopeful of getting the backing of the independents early yesterday after Rob Oakeshott's six meetings with the Liberal leader the previous day.
The overwhelming feeling in the Abbott office yesterday, where MPs and staff watched the press conferences that announced their fate, was disappointment after winning more seats and 700,000 more primary votes than Labor.
"A negotiation is at times a bit of an emotional roller coaster and I certainly felt optimistic and pessimistic, I felt exhilarated and deflated in turns in the course of the last fortnight," Mr Abbott said.
"I'm not surprised that my colleagues sometimes did [as well] and I'm not surprised that occasionally something of their mood was communicated to the outside world."
Mr Abbott warned that the delicate balance in the House of Representatives might lead to an early election should the Gillard Government make a major error.
"How quickly we go back to an election depends entirely on the performance of this Government," he said.
"If the Government's performance is so manifestly deficient that it loses a vote of confidence in the House, then it is highly likely that we will have an election.
"It is entirely in the Government's hands and I certainly would not lightly move no confidence in the Government given the circumstances we are now in and I wouldn't expect people to lightly support such a motion."
Mr Abbott said he could not have asked for more support from colleagues and staff and the Liberal Party.
"The Coalition won more seats and more votes but sadly we did not get the opportunity to form a government," he said.
He wished Prime Minister Gillard well and said he hoped she had "a better government than it was over the last three years".
"For our country's sake, I hope that the Labor Party can rediscover the soul that has been so lacking, particularly over the last part of the previous parliament," Mr Abbott said.

Read more: http://www.news.com.au/features/federal-election/tony-abbott-narrowly-misses-out-obecoming-australias-next-pm/story-fn5tas5k-1225915620290#ixzz0ytMzHAvg

http://www.theaustralian.com.au/national-affairs/take-the-centrist-path-despite-greens-tony-blair-tells-julia-gillard/story-fn59niix-1225915661385

TONY Blair has urged Julia Gillard to stick to the "Third Way" centrist path of recent Australian and British Labor governments.

In his first Australian newspaper interview in three years the former British Prime Minister told The Australian that Gillard's new government should carefully wind back fiscal stimulus spending and avoid being locked into long-term deficit spending even if the Greens use their balance of power in Parliament to pressure the government to spend up.

At the same time Blair said the unprecedented influence of the Greens in both houses of the Australian parliament would have the positive effect of increasing the chances of Australia doing more to fight climate change.

The Greens' vow of support for Gillard's new Government "can mean that certain reforms obviously to do with the environment will be easier to accomplish as a result of that support," said Blair, who runs his own think-tank to champion climate action.

Blair said Gillard's announcement that she would appoint her predecessor Kevin Rudd to her Cabinet was not just an astute move it was also personally admirable.

"It is not for me to offer Julia advice, she is perfectly well able to do the whole thing on her own, but I think the fact is that bringing someone of Kevin's experience and talent into the Cabinet is a tribute to both of them actually," he said.

"One of the things that is important in politics today is use the talent that you have got."

The Australian and UK governments now both find themselves in the awkward position of lacking single-party majorities at a time that the public wants clear and strong leadership but it should still be possible for Gillard and her British counterpart David Cameron to provide that leadership, Blair said.

In his new memoir "A Journey" Blair argues that his successor as British PM Gordon Brown lost this year's election because he strayed to the political Left rather than sticking to the New Labour creed of Blair's decade in power, and he said Gillard must avoid the same temptation and keep trying to overhaul public services.

"She is a very, very capable leader, I'm sure she will do well," Blair said in his London office .

"Coalition politics is always tough but the key thing is that (the public) want strong direction."

The biggest challenge for Gillard would be to stick to the approach launched by the Hawke-Keating government and shared by Blair's own government in trying to modernise and prune government rather than resorting to the comfort zone of an old-fashioned "big government" approach.

"I hope very much that Julia does manage to do that and I am sure that she will give it a good go."

"It is a strange thing about today's politics, the paradox is that the public are unsettled and uncertain, it is an era of low predictability, you have got a coalition government in the UK as well as Australia and yet people actually want strong leadership as well.

"So that is the challenge but you know provided (Gillard and the non-Labor MPs backing her government) agree their program they can carry it out but it is going to be interesting because both in Australia and in the UK government is going to have to be taking tough decisions with coalition government in place.

"It is far more difficult but on the other hand it is better than being in Opposition."

Picture: Peter Newman.