Welcome to the road movie of my life

It's just me and her... on the road again. I'm at the wheel, and Janis, sits perched invisible bleeding song.
[summertime, and the li-ving in ea-sy"]

Welcome to the road movie of my life.


After two years on the edge of the world I fell out the other side drawing bigger circles between nowhere and somewhere, between me and you. Leaving... only to find myself back at square one... again, but square one is always different. A new house, I am a new person, a clean slate and I can be whoever I want to be. The tonic of distance, that feeling that you are moving somewhere, the cauldron of smoke and mirrors that says 'further is infinite' until you've gone too far... in a theoretical world if you travel far enough in a straight line, you'll end up back where you started however the schizophrenia of movement keeps me reinvented, for now... I feel good.


The moments inbetween, all those things one forgets to see even if one is looking, they are the substance of novelty... watching a mother and son at a local coffee shop, both of them sporting dreadlocks and bare feet, a boy no older than eight drinking espresso and talking like a mini adult to his mother who is totally absorbed in his every word.


[fish are jumpin, and the cotton, lord the cotton's high]
in the late afternoon sun, even the drab expanse of outer suburbia looks like some lost work of expressionist art bathed in a deep impenetrable orange... my foot to the floor as we stream forward, as the years pile up behind me and although I am not yet old, I can feel myself being over taken but if I can keep this up maybe I'll find the formula to cheat time itself. Time makes me feel like a sex doll with a slow leak, I am safe, for now, but it is only a matter of time before they throw me stained and limp on the scrap heap, the stink of being used, the strain of being used up... safe for now but how long?


The day I moved... sitting with my father in the hotel listening to a jazz trio in the midst of a 90th birthday celebration. The birthday boy approaches my father and holds out a platter to offer us a piece of birthday cake.

BIRTHDAY BOY (to my father): "Cake for you young man?"

I suppose it's all relative but next to this smiling dinosaur my father, 23 years his junior looks tired and fed up like he's waiting for the final curtain call.

DAD: "So what's the secret?"
B BOY: "Plenty of good food, women, not too much to drink and learning not to worry so much."


I suppose the air is leaking out of everyone's skin but that doesn't mean you have sit there straining to keep it in till the tension building up tears to hole open bigger. By the time Janis was the age I am now she was well on her way to being dead and buried but she's singing her song to me now as we slide off the edge of the map and into a place where I can start again because your never to old to stop getting it wrong.