Weather board refugees.

I go to bed, Mark comes home, I get up, Mark goes to bed or so it has gone on for almost two weeks. I come home from work and the only light bulb left in the house is in my room, the rest have gone to some mysterious place.


ME: I had to buy all new light bulbs yesterday, what happened?
MARK: Um.. I had an accident (going bright red) I'll get a bunch of spares and um... (trails off)


We had a talk yesterday Mark and I...


MARK: I guess you've noticed that I've been all fucked up lately. Nocturnal, I don't know what to do anymore, I'm back on the gear... too much gear.


The art of keepin' on truckin', it's a balancing act... I take the psuedoephedrine to get things done so I need to take the loratadine to put myself down at night, which only means I need to take more psuedoephedrine to get going again and pretty soon my health is such a mess I am on a steady dose to codeine for the headaches and vitamin supplements to keep my immune system from collapsing... we are not that different Mark and I.


MARK: Megan really fucked me up man, the way she came back into my life only so that she could leave for Canada and destroy me all over again. It's been hurting so bad, I was on the train yesterday coming home from work and I broke down. I just started crying so hard I hyperventilated and the security guy thought I was some crazy and almost herded me off the train, I was heaving so hard I couldn't even explain myself.


The problem with gutter drugs are that once you understand how the system works you can get on anywhere. Some pills you've got to avoid because they are cut with things to make you sick if you dose up excessively and some pills are dangerous because they are chock full of aspirin or paracetamol which you can't extract. There is also the issue of finding the right pharmacies, some of them make you sign off against your drivers license which get's logged into some central database to keep tabs on how often or how much you buy, this is usually the bigger chain stores. The stores that are too small and under-staffed to follow procedure during rush periods are good but unpredictable, unlike the pharmaceutical bulk buy warehouses, department store for over the counter medicine staffed by teenagers who don't know and couldn't care less. Consumer information websites will usually tell you what unlisted ingredients go into the manufacture of the different pills, a pharmacist can tell you the generic equivalent of any big name drug and any place you visit that asks to see your license should be visited no more than once every six months.


MARK: Dude, I'm really sorry about the lights, I smashed the bulbs to cook my gear so I could smoke it... I've been so spun I completely forgot to got new bulbs. I'm so sorry you got dragged into this shit. I feel like a total fuck up, all the pot just makes me so lethargic I start to fucking hate myself, but I only started this because I couldn't deal with shit... and the speed, it's like a holiday from sitting around so fucking dead I can't even think. Now I've got two habits I can't control and I'm scared I can't deal with that either.


We are the white niggers of suburbia... the displaced weather board refugees who move from cheap rental to cheap rental, we get stuck in one another's gravitational pull for a while, sharing a house and at that point in time everything is shared, rent, bills, furniture, habits, troubles, neuroses. Our households, our lives are unstable ecosystems... environments on the verge of collapse... the threat of displacement ever present. I have moved four times in the last two years with a block mounted poster of Michael J. Fox ('Family Ties' era), a growing collection of trash cinema and a medicine bag that looks innocent to everyone but keeps me going, keeps me moving forward and focused whilst screening out reality just enough so that it doesn't really matter.


MARK: I swear to God, if I lose this job I'm going back to Adelaide... even though there's more trouble waiting for me there. If I lose this job I don't know what I am going to do, I'm such a screw-up!


A girl named Kath stayed with us for a while, Mark met her in Falls Creek, where she had been working and living for the past two years. She came to us because she wanted a place to stay so she could look for a job and find a place in the city. She found a job at the Vic Market and moved to East Melbourne with three gay men, all of whom had monster drug habits. There she was a country girl (born in Albury), a self professed homophobe who was trying to leave drugs in her past living with three gay drug addicts. She lasted six days, six days during which she was so wired on whatever they were giving her to snort that she didn't sleep, so fucked up that she couldn't leave the house to start her job. Finally her mind and her wallet buckled under the strain and she found herself back in Albury... another success story.


In three weeks we leave this house and all of this will cease to be of any importance... nothing more than a funny anecdote I can tell at parties when the conversation wanes and I've had too much to drink to know better. I am going to L.A. and then I am moving into a caravan park to plan my next move... I have not stopped moving since I was 21, I have eroded many friendships to dust, I have not had a girlfriend in almost two years and I have lived with so many freaks, geeks, burnouts, slackers, psychos and head-fucks that I can't even be sure if I am the normal one anymore.