Wednesday

Just went to see Mission Impossible Three with the kids. It's a school night but I just didn't feel like sitting at home. Action packed. Tom's not very popular in Australia because of the scientology thing, and because he dumped "our" Nicole. She was our success story and nobody was going to muck with that. The film was very loud, the kids close. You could watch other people's lives on the net now. Young junkies dying in foreign climes; middle class American tourists exploring the Great Barrier Reef, mentally ill women wandering the United States in their campervans.

This was the day after the budget and the miners emerging. The great churn of our money which passes for governance; when we'd all be better off if they just left us to spend our own money. Services I never wanted and will never use. But I'm about $25 a week better off, allegedly, and that might pay for the rising cost of petrol; and everything else with it. I relate, he wanted to say across the wires, I know where you're at. Not all junkies die young. Some wander in and out of rehabs and go to meetings or just go dry when they've had enough, usually precipitated by some crisis, and they end up growing old when they never wanted to grow old.

These things were left for us, then, at the end of the line; when it was just another day at work and when getting plastered to the four winds just wasn't feasible anymore. But God it got boring some days. Some days he just wanted to merge into the walls at 3am like he used to, and ride the tide of late night bars and wild friends. Before the silence set in. Euphoric recall alive and well. When so much chaos and gloom had enveloped someone, there was no way back to a normal life. All there was; all he had ever been, was painted out in arcs of light amongst people he did not know. And would never know, now that it was too late.