The DayGlo hitchhiker and his Doomsday Army.

At the very edge of suburbia there is a Shell petrol station and a housing estate where all the houses look the same, as if someone has tried to build a monument to the ideal of suburban bliss by photocopying a picture over and over and pasting these copies side by side. Beyond this there is nothing but endless highway, you could just keep driving and driving and driving and there would be nothing to get in your way, nothing to slow you down until the petrol in your tank burnt up.


I think about this endlessness everyday as I am heading out to work. Whilst lighting a cigarette or sipping coffee from a styrofoam cup I think about how if I had the guts I could just keep on going but I never do. It is on this never ending stretch of road that I first saw him...


He was a hitchhiker heading to Coldstream walking very slowly as he only had one shoe. His booted foot on the pavement with his other stuck down the side of a weed infested drainage ditch. Over a DayGlo yellow jump suit he wore an open military shirt, his face hidden underneath a dusty drover's hat peering out through World War II flying goggles. As I recall he appeared to be talking to himself. I don't think he would have made a very successful hitchhiker, the thought of letting a random stranger ride in your car is scary enough without having to contend with someone that looks like they have been admitted into a psychiatric hospital at some point in their life and probably should not have been discharged.


But then again I have often since wondered where the hell someone who looked like that could have been going... maybe I should have stopped the car, but then I was late for work... maybe that was for the best... but then again as the man disappeared from view so too did any hope of a memorable experience. I cannot remember a single detail of that day, nothing before nor after this moment which was history in a matter of seconds, it is funny to think of how much of our lives we must lose to routine, all those moments we live that aren't worth recalling which fade as our precious brain cells vaporise.


I saw my friend once again from the safety of my car as I made that same daily pilgrimage in pursuit of my weekly pay check. I was coming around a bend that descends into the bottom of the valley when I was nearly run off the road by a mob of people dressed in army greens, gas masks and a rainbow of different coloured plastic DayGlo jump suits carrying hiking packs on their backs and swags rolled up under their arms as marched at a ferocious pace up the hill blocking off the oncoming traffic lane.


Was the apocalypse near? Are there environmental terrorists in our midst hiding in the hills waiting for their chance to pounce and bring down the industrial-capitalist machine? Are the dispossessed psychiatric patients who've fallen victim to the 'integrated recovery' scam mobilising into a guerilla army intent on wreaking a revenge so terrible on a society that's turned its back?


Who knows...