A new point of reference.

Driving along Kangaroo Grounds-St Andrews road on the way to the St Andrews market with Tania.

There is a point at the top of a hill where the scenery to your left drops away down a sheer cliff face and you can see the whole of Melbourne city like a grey smudge of vertical lines sitting on the horizon; it looks like the Emerald city out of the Wizard of Oz only filthy and out of focus. Tania smoking a cigarette and me coughing into my hand whilst on the radio Jedi Mind Tricks are trying to tell us that aliens exist. The driver's side speaker is broken, fizzing static and mimicking the music with rhythmic chatters of white noise.


It's weird to see the city looking so vulnerable, a tiny place like the plastic fairy-tale shoes people put in with their mice or the castles at the bottom of fish tanks. A scale model you could steal from someone's mantelpiece and they wouldn't notice for weeks; small like something that doesn't really matter in the grand scheme of everything.


Ever since I'd left it behind I've wondered if I made a mistake, what was I doing out here anyway? A refugee from the real world hiding out in the hills till he'd figured it out (the problem is, you've gotta know the question before you can come up with any useful answers). And then to see it like this, like the first time I was in Michael's house looking at the view out his living room window: the city lights as if the night sky had sprung a leak and all the stars were pouring out over the world bellow. A mirage, a laser light show facade disappeared with the dawn to reveal ancient concrete naked and alone. It seemed stupid to care about it, about anything.


Movement cures the blues.


Feeling awake for the first time in ages, feeling mobile and kind of free like I didn't really have to get up for work on Monday. At the market, a woman in her 40's with bare-feet and dreadlocks vends ganja cookies, floating up and down the aisles wrapped in a shawl and headscarf offering her wares to passer-byes in a soft voice communicating calm with her every body movement. We're talking to a man about how the crystal lamps he has for sale radiate negative ions, we take a pamphlet which claims that the lamps can cure ADHD and alleviate the stress of daily living. We smoke a cigarette on the porch of the St Andrews hotel listening to a duo sing the blues and pick over the second hand book stalls.


We drink organic coffee, eat falafel rolls with chilli and the right amount of hommus. We smoke some more cigarettes and I confess my closet consumer anxiety to Tania, I explain to her that in the company of others my purchasing anything can only be theoretical at best and Tania laughs.


On the way back we decide not to go straight home and stop at a cemetery in some town so small almost looks as if it can't really claim to be anywhere in particular. Wandering through the gravestones we look at all the families laid to rest, the children dead before they'd ever lived and Tania talks about how weird it is to think of a world where we won't exist anymore...


...and then we're crossing through Toolangi state forest, nearly home. Tania's watching the ferns at the side of the road reach out over our heads, we're listening The Pogues and there is a warm feeling in my beaten-up falling-apart car.