THE GREAT BEYOND

Western Australia, courtesy Toni Smith

There they were, talking as if nothing had ever gone wrong.

She packed bong after bong, and smoked them incessantly.

He sat there watching, thinking how nice it would be if the world was a reasonable place. If they could talk sensibly about the children they had had together. About the vagaries of the past. About the nastiness of history disappearing into time.

The apartment was located next to a methadone clinic, another low point.

"They're old junkies, did you get that?" the intelligence officer commented.

"Yes," came the reply.

Back in the not so distant days when they thought he was worth watching. Before he disillusioned them as best he could.

"Tell them the story they want to hear," came the instructions from what might have been a future time, or a wiser self.

And so he did.

"Old juunkies."

"Was Asia the worst you have ever been?" his old mentor asked LATER, attempting to provoke him into thinking about the downhill slide.

"Well no, of course not," he thought to say, but did not. "It was only made worse by the harassment, by the situation, by the bastardry and mockery and pitiless pursuit."

But he said nothing, or little, demurring as ever.

He stayed, surprisingly, for more than two hours, talking to the mad woman who had been such a bane of his life, the mother of his children. A tormentor bad mouthing him to anyone she could.

Michael flirted with the notion that time would cure everything, including this, that he was communicating to a half-way decent person, that whatever had gone before did not matter.

But later, when he found himself lighter on the cash than when he arrived, something snapped and that was that. Much of the world, and many people in it, had no reason, no conscience, little decency; and their brains, far from skating across myriad topics, plodded from one piece of malevolence to another. But that didn't mean he had to be a part of it.

THE BIGGER STORY:

Tony buys into media fueled hysteria, promoting yet further extension of the Nanny State of Australia.
The statistics suggest incidents have been declining for the past five years.


http://www.presstv.ir/detail/2014/01/10/344777/aussie-pm-slams-alcoholfueled-violence/

Australia’s Prime Minister Tony Abbott has slammed the ‘violent binge drinking culture’ in the country and an increase in alcohol-fuelled crimes in Sydney.

Abbott said on Friday that the heavy-drinking atmosphere has turned parts of Sydney, which is Australia’s most populous city, into violence-ridden zones, as the city enjoys the summer festive season.

“The tragedy is that places that should be entertainment precincts have become, on some occasions, almost war zones because there is just so much alcohol-fueled violence,” Abbott stated.

He also denounced the “king-hit” incidents - a single punch that floors an often-unsuspecting victim - as a “gruesome new development.”

“Gratuitous, unprovoked violence by disturbed individuals who aren’t going out looking for a fight the way juiced up youngsters have for generations, they have gone out looking for a victim,” he said.

“Invariably these disturbed individuals, often with a history of violence, are going out looking for someone who is weak or vulnerable. They are catching them unprepared, sometimes with deadly results, often with catastrophic results.”

Meanwhile, some emergency room doctors in Sydney have warned that the booze-driven violence is spiraling out of control and they are being inundated with alcohol-related cases, amid rising calls for politicians to do more to contain the issue.