I can't help it, the road keeps on rolling out behind me.

I'm out... the household was not disolved so much as dismembered. We killed it!


Riding on the back of a week of sleepless nights with three days to go and Mark has disappeared leaving all his stuff behind. It's 3am after a day of caffiene, codeine and ginko bilaboa... four angry texts messages and a half a bottle of wine later with no sleep in sight and the door explodes unleasing an amphetamine crazy on my insomiac drunk...

...Footsteps...
...CRASH...
...The sound of cheap pressed wood furniture being dragged over the floorboards...
...silence...
...and then sound of something else imploding, falling to the floor and starting a chain reaction that echoes though the house in wave after wave.


I hear Mark swearing, it's three hours till my alarm is set to go off. I crawl out of bed and stumble to my bedroom door. Even with the whole world out of focus and spinning I can see the sizzle in Mark's skin. His eyes are cruel little points, pin prick pupils, his sockets rimmed red raw... bullet holes.

ME: "Mark man, what the fuck are you doing?"
MARK: "Just what you fucking asked me to, it's all going... NOW!!!"

This is psychological warfare! I retreat into my room defenseless, plug myslf into my discman and pull the covers up over my head to wait out the offensive. My alarm goes off and the army of noise retreats into the rising sun.


Fast forward through a seemingly endless gas cloud of bleach. Hours spent with mop and bucket in hand or waltzing through slow motion work days. My home is being reduced, becoming 0, the last twelve months of my life are being sterilised; erased. My whole world is a stack of cardboard boxes in the corner again.


The clock ticks... thirty six hours and I will have no fixed address. I'm on the verge of another migraine when the phone rings. It's a travelling salesman from Warburton who needs someone to live in his house to safeguard his property whilst he is on the road. En route to Warburton in a rented van sucking on my fifth bottle of Redbull I pass the caravan park which marks my only other alternative and realise that I have already accepted his generous offer.


And then there is only five hours left and counting, Mark and I are sitting on the back porch together for the last time smoking and he turns to me and says:

MARK:"You know these have been some of the best times ever. Completely fucked up but fucking good" and as he says it I remember...


Gav, Mark and I drunk on homebrew throwing lit cherry bombs at wild rabbits in our backyard giggling like braindead stoners. I think about the time spent babysitting Gav's kids, malnutritioned and flithy after Bec told them she never wanted them, never loved them. I can almost feel the warm glow, that sense of being home like I felt on the many Saturday nights the three of us spent sharing pasta, drinking premium whisky none of us could afford and sampling Gav's painkiller smorgasboard accumulated over five years of being on workers compensation for chronic back pain. All the bad horror movies and joint roaches... the way someone was always home when you had a problem and needed to talk. It was a house where there was always tea on the shelf, beer in the fridge and a fresh mix in the bowl on the living room table.


Being here now after the fact sitting in some franchise coffee shop in the neighbourhood I grew up in and thinking about everything... knowing I'll be in L.A. in less than a week a smile spreads over my lips and for a brief second, just for a moment I'm actually glad that I'm the one who get's to be me... anyone else would just get it all wrong.