mind matters

I snip the MindMatters Victorian project officer position from the big Saturday paper weeks ago thinking I’m no more than a one in twenty chance of getting this job. It’s a high-paid, high-performance role based in the Melbourne’s CBD, a place where feel uncomfortable. The condemned work here.

I write a great application and my chances increase four-fold. It’s still a tingling surprise to be offered an interview. Today’s the day.

Home at eleven o’clock last night from a two-day gig in Sydney I prise myself out of bed at six to put together a five-minute presentation that will demonstrate my ability to work a room. It takes two hours to harness the thoughts that bucked around both my conscious and unconscious brain three days ago, and bolted in Sydney when SKIPS pushes everything else out.

I read my Jack Irish novel on the train to the city. The writing is spare, elegant, every word precise, a winner, just how I’d like to be in this interview.

I sit on a plush sculpted chair outside large frosted glass doors in an ante-room of the Oaks on Collins. A thumb drive with five PowerPoint slides is in my top pocket and long pants surround my usually bare legs. I’m ushered in by a vertically-challenged woman, blond hair, in her fifties, red-framed glasses with bright green arms.

I might not have an intimate knowledge of MindMatters, despite a website’s-worth of reading I might have conned in preparation, but I’m psyched, I’m primed. If I could script the dozen questions I answer during the interview, these are the questions I would write. I like the two interviewers, think they like me, are impressed. I am.

I walk back to the station thinking that whoever gets this job will have to be bloody good to knock me off.

Later I ride to the community hall in Ringwood for the second evening’s training to become an English tutor for a refugee. Rain threatens. The training is repetitive, monotonous, but I’m surrounded by good people.

Gitta hands me a folder: inside are the details of the 41 year-old refugee from Burma I will tutor. He works in a trailer factory, already has some English.

I pedal home, soft rain falling from the night sky. I’m on a roll.  

Rock on.   

dichotomy

Our Chatty sluzza is on time. We talk while Liz tries to check out but is held up by someone else’s complications. Again Tracy chauffeurs us to the venue. Again we stand on our hind legs for six hours and coax our trainees to come with us.

Sometimes I wonder what an introspective hermit is doing in front of an audience using a range of subtle interpersonal skills to meld a disparate group into something more. My natural inclination is for a couch and a book and silence. Yet here I am, like a stand-up comic, making people laugh, my timing and one-liners unrehearsed but exquisite.

A woman up the back uses the word dichotomy: the separation of things into two widely differing or contradictory divisions. That’s me, or one me, or one half of me, standing up there, an untrained ordinary bloke, training 25 psychologists.

The other me sits quietly, unnoticed, up the back, wondering who the me is up there flirting with a roomful of folk. Another me—how many are there?—turns round on an escalator in a foreign place and exhorts a schoolboy to tell his teacher, a good bloke, to fuck off.

Dichotomy, trichotomy. Lobotomy.

When the show is over Tracy hustles us into her Saab and we belt off to pick up her son, Harry, standing in the heat on a roadside somewhere. He’s lost his car keys. He has no idea who the two unexpected odd-bods are in his mother’s car. He’s a fourth-year arts-law student, folded like a grasshopper into the back seat with me, knees brushing his ears.

As Tracy takes us on a tortuous backstreet rollercoaster—“I never use the main road”—jibes pass between mother and son, and between son and the interlopers from Melbourne. Harry’s a sportsman, a cricketer, a quick. He says he went to Melbourne once. He thinks Melburnians friendly than Sydneysiders, but they talk too much about Aussie Rules. He doesn’t get the obsession.

“Are you into chaps rugby or bogan rugby?” I enquire.

“Union,” he says. “It’s a good excuse to roll around on the grass with your fellow man.”

“Ah,” I say. “Latent homosexuality played by homophobes.”

The car explodes. In laughter. My work here is done.

Liz drops me home at eleven. I stand at the front door, backpack on the ground, key in hand. Sid bounds out of the darkness and crashes into my legs. The JRT is all ears at the side gate.

It’s good to be home. A couch, a book, silence.

Rock on.   

chatty sluzza

The three of us wait on the footpath outside our executive apartment, our lift, Tracy, stuck in Sydney’s morning traffic. The bloke who scrawled Eternity on pavements and walls all over this city was an oracle.

A file of Asian kitchen-hands emerges from a driveway hidden in dense foliage 150 metres down the road. Each ferries an uncovered plate of bacon, eggs and toast while spitting left and right as he makes his stolid way up the path and we three Caucasians look askance as each passes.

Pick-up time is 7:45. It’s nearly 8:30. Our gig begins at 9. Eternity comes and goes.

A car pulls up abruptly at 45 degrees to the kerb and we pile in, me, map in hand, just in case, next to Tracy in the front seat. Tracy is mid-fifties, bronzed, long and leggy. She apologises, tells us she was chosen to chauffeur us because she’s The Reliable One. We pass Macquarie Uni, where, Tracy says matter-of-factly, her daughter starts the next phase of her young life today.

Our task for the next two days is fraught: to get twenty-five guidance officers, all psychologists, to open their minds to something new. The day’s training goes well, but not brilliantly like last year. As Tracy drives us to Chatswood she rats on some of her colleagues: “They’re a bit up themselves; psychologists know everything.”

  

School-kids, mostly Asian, from expensive schools, swarm the pavements, the stairs and escalators, the labyrinth that is Chatswood—now known as Chatswoo, says Tracy. The girls’ dresses are shorter than in Melbourne, the legs browner, shapelier. Some of the boys wear boaters.

“I went to Chatswood High,” Tracy says. “I was a Chatty sluzza.”

“Sluzza?” Sandy and I chorus, though I’ve guessed it and only need confirmation.

“Slut.”

“I’ve never heard that before, but I love it.” Sandy, another word gatherer, does too.

Tracy deposits at the station. An officious older teacher lurks at the top of the escalator, busting schoolboys who’ve removed their ties. It’s 30 degrees and steamy as.

I turn around on the escalator and speak to large, good-looking lad.

“What school?” (Stupid question. I don’t know any Sydney schools.)

“Riverview.” 

 “And that was one of your teachers?”

“Yeah, he’s a good bloke.”

“No good bloke tells you to put a tie on,” I say. “Tell him to fuck off.”

He pulls his tie from his pocket. “This is my way of saying fuck off.”

Sandy evaporates into the swirl at Chatswood Station, on her way home. Liz and I roam the streets, waiting for a Malaysian eatery to open. We shamble into a glitzy arcade to shelter from the humidity. Inside a shop door a hand reaches round and settles on a pert arse in a tight white skirt. Liz catches it too from the corner of her eye. Then we see the tape measure and the shop awning: Alterations.

Rock on.   

flight

Sandy, Liz and I are reprising last year’s Sydney gig: training northern suburbs school guidance officers to present the SKIPS program. It’s about supporting primary school kids who live with a parent with mental illness.

Will we fail Tourist 202? Last year we bombed Tourist 101 and should, by rights, be repeating. But we don’t want that: unable to find a way out of the airport; lost at Central Station; staring at each other in a motionless lift we can’t get to leave the ground floor; sweating it out in our apartment, powerless to turn on the air-conditioning.

Sandy’s an insanity consultant and mad theorist. When the media want a quotable quote about schizophrenia, Sandy is their go-to. No matter how brilliantly Liz and I engage our trainees over the next two days, Sandy’s hour of powerful testament about living with mental illness will lodge most firmly in their minds.

Getting from Croydon to gate lounge 25 at Tullamarine is more than half the journey. Flying is the most unedifying travel experience. Every airport is the same pretentious antiseptic glassed-in people hangar as every other.

Airport conceit—flights go through to instead of to some destination—irritates me. It’s only a preposition—through. But airlines and airports expropriate it to serve the conceit that air travel is more important than other travel. What do airplanes go through? Nothing. Trains go through things—tunnels, towns, countryside.

We shuffle along the air bridge onto Flight DJ849 and waddle down the aisles. I plonk my arse in seat 20E, an aisle seat, then happily relinquish it to Sandy who has particular likes and dislikes. She settles in and opens her attaché bag.

“Fuck, fuck, fuck, fuck—pause—fuck, fuck, fuck, fuck, fuck!” Her MP3 player is missing. “My iPod is my lifeline. Oh, no, no, no,” she moans. Explanation not needed. Her voices persecute her every night: ear buds and Beethoven are her front-line defence, temazepam her reserve.

She rummages in that bag for minutes, livid at her plight, her stupidity. “I’m a fuckwit, Liz, a fuckwit. What am I? A fuckwit, a fuckwit.” More rummaging, more profanity. Could it be on the floor at the check-in, stuck in the baggage x-ray, in the departure lounge where we shuffled books—her memoir—from her overweight bag to ours?

There’s time to go look for it, but no, the flight attendants can’t let her off the plane. Here’s a phone number to ring when you reach Sydney.

“Fuck, fuck, fuck, fuck, fuck, fuck, fuck!”

The plane remains on the Tulla tarmac long enough for someone to invent the iPod5.

Rock on. 

diy

The temperature stays high overnight. I sleep badly and wake with a headache. My good woman is beside me so the headache bothers me less because she is present and more because I want to take advantage of her presence. 


She sleeps on while I grope my way up the dark driveway to retrieve the paper and relieve the bladder. I return to bed but the sleep that never gelled during the night continues to evade me. I get up and set about keeping 37 degrees of heat out of my house. I water the garden and fill all the saucers under pots.


I return to bed. My good woman stirs and groggily suggests that I read to her from the paper, but is asleep again before I finish a short article. I read the weekend magazine, the sport, travel and arts sections before my good woman unwraps herself from her winding-sheet around nine. 


She suggests we walk the dog around the local park before the real heat; it’s hot enough already so we sit and watch a game of cricket before trudging home. Finally breakfast. We chat as she drinks coffee and I nurse my headache. She bemoans the fact that she must pay a six-monthly visit to a Serb friend on the other side of town on a day like this of all days. 


My good woman has commented that my chair covers are filthy and this is a perfect day yow ask them. She’s right. I dump them in the washing machine, one load, then two. While they wash I sit and wait out my headache.

At four I drive through the heat. Ikea Richmond finally has the loft bed I’ve been waiting months for. I make a lightning raid, entering the refunds door and marching through the check-outs straight to Aisle 30. I’m in and out in less than 15 minutes. 


The time it takes to assemble the loft bed is inversely proportional. I start at five and finish the six-step ladder after nine. I stop at ever-decreasing intervals to greedily suck water out of a bottle. 


This loft bed is a major logistical exercise. I spread the wooden pieces around the spare room and spend almost half an hour nutting out what’s what, what goes where, and in what order it all happens. People go crazy trying to put Ikea furniture together. 


Staring at it for a while can make all the difference. So does reading the entire set of directions before beginning, in this case 40 pages of them. Two hundred and forty-six nuts, bolts, dowels, and small things I can’t name pull all the bits of black wood together. 


Once started, it comes together easily. I think this bed is an expensive item by Ikea standards, and they might have sent an assembler home with me.         


Rock on.   

dithering

The hot weather returns. A final burst of summer clouts us.

At 8:45 I front at Centrelink for my next contact interview. The interviewer is a drab woman with red-rimmed eyes and the charisma of a hibernating turtle. She regards me suspiciously. I tell her I’m working harder at getting a job than if I worked full-time. She tells me to come back in a month. What a waste of everyone’s time.

I complete a document for the templates project and speak to my project leader. She’s pregnant, suffering a horrid first trimester, and working at home. In the past fortnight she’s reviewed all the first drafts. Some are brilliant, she says, and some she has taken to with a big stick. I’m not precious; I’m sure the stick is deserved.

After lunch I finish reading my novel. It’s a Pulitzer-Prize-winning disappointment. The story hangs together loosely, too loosely for me. It’s New York chic, literary chic, I guess, and seems to go straight over my unsophisticated, unchic head. For aficionados of the NY music scene it’s probably laugh a minute stuff. One or two glorious similes don’t warrant a Pulitzer.

I fret about the five-minute presentation I must present as part of my interview for the mega-bucks job next Wednesday, but fritter away the late afternoon as the house succumbs to the heat. Between now and Wednesday I’ll have precious little preparation time when a trip to Sydney is about to occupy three days.

Despite a growing urgency I find myself dithering. Such a lovely word; such a lovely thing to do if you have the time. I don’t. Then I decide I’m not dithering, but cogitating. The presentation circulates in my brain, snippets of pithy sentences swirling in mix.

Toward eleven at night my good woman comes for a sleepover. We have not seen each other for days and she’s very welcome. She brings a custard and sour cherry tart. The miracle is that she didn’t bake it; it comes from a German food chain and is utterly delicious.

    

Rock on.   

we need to talk about kevin

Sociopath: that’s what a woman radio talkback caller labels our former prime minister and I think she’s right. Overnight he resigns as Foreign Minister while in Washington, and this morning relaunches his Kevin-O-Seven election manifesto before challenging the current PM to a duel.

The DSM-IV describes a variant of sociopathy called dissocial personality disorder. You’ve got to have at least three of: callous unconcern for the feelings of others (Kevin’s treatment of public servants); gross and persistent attitude disregard for social norms, rules, and obligations (Kevin’s dictatorship over the Cabinet); inability to maintain enduring relationships, though having no difficulty in establishing them (Kevin’s alienation of most former colleagues); very low frustration tolerance (Kevin abuses an air hostess, the Chinese, whoever); inability to profit from experience, particularly punishment (Kevin’s about to submit himself to another Labor Caucus flaying); persistent irritability as an associated feature (need more be said?).

The former cabinet colleagues who shafted him but politely declined to bag him when Julia deposed him take the gloves off today and, one by one, detail Rudd’s sociopathy.

The Ruddmeister’s forced bonhomie and faux attempts to call people mate flimsily disguise a nasty little intellectual bully and maniacal egotist. His Orwellian doublespeak of the past 24 hours beggars belief. That other talkback callers regard him as a statesman explains a lot.

     

Psychopaths find it easier to be president or prime minister than to get an ordinary job like mere mortals. No diagnoses are available, but I’m kind of sure that Hitler, Gaddafi, Idi Amin, Ceauşescu, Mugabe and an entire North Korean ruling dynasty qualify. George Bush lurks on the fringe.

Serious questions need asking. How is this possible? I imagine it’s a good fit for a psychopath to head the military and it’s a hop, step and jump from there to military dictator. The people have little choice with a military dictator: they run the means of repression, the army, and army training is rather like a short-course in psychopathy.

It’s the elected psychopaths who fascinate. If the adage is right and we get the government we deserve, was each of these countries psychopathic?

We need to talk about Kevin, and maybe in doing so, we’ll realise that Julia, whatever her political faults, is a real mensch.

Rock on.   

hats

I roll down to the gym in the dark for the 6:15 cycle class. My buttock hurts on the stationary bike when I sit up between tracks. My body’s aches mystify me.

After breakfast I work up a major sweat moving a rock border in my garden and revamping the bed under the side fence. The satisfaction is immense.  

I shower and settle into my office. Time to bite the bullet. I ring ‘Jim’s man’, a property manager and valuer, to ask questions about our owners corporation. He’s a hectoring bully like Jim. I have no expertise in subdivision or property values, so I’m powerless to challenge his unsubstantiated assertions. I don’t trust the man and go hunting an independent arbiter on the interweb.

A red car pulls up at the front door. Liz waits in the garden while I reply to a voicemail and confirm that I will attend an interview next Wednesday for a full-time, full-on state wide project officer position in mental health promotion in secondary schools. To me the salary is huge. I’m surprised and excited to get an interview in what must be a large and talented field.

Liz and I go over the SKIPS training we will present in Sydney next Monday and Tuesday: the travel arrangements, the running sheet, the on-screen presentation. She leaves and I hunt the interweb again, this time for background material for the big interview next week. Then I prepare for this afternoon’s interview.

My good woman rings and says she will come around with afternoon tea. I can think of nothing nicer but have to tell her I’m walking out the door right now to go to a sexuality educator interview.

Two women sit on cheap chairs in the middle of a long white back room in an old church in Camberwell. The first question throws me: it challenges my unconventional approach to the selection criteria. I defend myself by saying that I’ve always been unconventional. Later I think of five better responses. I emerge uncomfortable. The fit is not right.

I sit in the car—windows down, door open—eating chips from the bag in a side street. The first training session for AMES tutors begins soon. Five tables each seating five tutors squash into a community hall. Late middle-aged woman predominate; four in their 20s add some spice. In coming months we will share our experiences of teaching refugees English.

During the break, Robert, one of only three blokes training, approaches. “What do you do?”

Although my previous job is nearly two months gone, no one has asked this question, and I’ve not considered an answer. “I guess I’m either unemployed or retired.”

Sometimes it occurs to me that this jobless interlude might continue indefinitely. I don’t think of my business, Plain Talking, as consuming enough time or generating enough income to call it a job.  

So many hats I’ve worn on such a long day. Very late, on the phone, my good woman listens to my account of the job interview. “Nah,” she says in her strangely endearing way. “You don’t want this job.”

She’s unerring. I don’t want this job.

   

Rock on.   

modules

Driving home from work about 15 years ago I’m listening to the radio. A woman—researcher, social commentator, whatever—talks about the way of the future for humble workers. Modules.

The increase in part-time and casual jobs means workers will construct incomes from work modules. At lunch the other day Andrew tells me he has three jobs—two days a week at a southern community health service, one day at an eastern service, and two days lecturing at a university.

So far I’ve applied for one full-time job. I put a one-day-a-week job in the bin. One is three days a week, and the other casual—a half day or evening as required and no work (and no income) during school holidays.  And I’m about to begin volunteer tutoring with AMES. Piecing it together won’t be easy.

Tomorrow I go to an interview for the casual job. It won’t pay the mortgage, no matter how many half days or evenings I work. Two days a week of reliable uninterrupted income would keep me afloat, with my business just bridging the gap. The business is irregular but up till now it just covers times when the bank balance nudges empty or a big bill crops up.

It’s a strange society where so many complain of being asked to work too long, while many of the rest of us try to manipulate work modules into a mosaic that helps us picture exactly who we are. Andrew tells me he struggles with it.

In 2003 I work Monday, Wednesday and Friday in community health and Tuesday and Thursday in tertiary education. No two days of continuous identity. Both jobs suffer and so do I. Now instead of being two workers, I might end up being four.

    

Rock on.   

old boys

Thirty years seems a likely gap for a reunion dinner so it must be 1999. If ambivalence can have depth, mine is fathomless. I’m about to meet again the boys, the old boys as private school alumni call themselves, of what is now in true-blue American parlance referred to as the Class of 69.

We mingle in a semi-swish reception rooms in a leafier part of Caulfield. Two refuseniks, the former school captain and his vice-captain, me, dress casually to spite the gilt-embossed invitation’s request that we appear in suits and ties. I’ve not possessed a suit or tie since the school dance of 1969. I never bother to ask Will where he left his suit.

The old boys are older, stouter, smugger. Privilege sits on every sleeve. Here be doctors, lawyers, and men of commerce, men who run things. None ascends from the bottom; we all begin halfway up the ladder. A very few have fallen off and a couple may have jumped. I think my former Greta Football Club team-mate Gunna might have climbed down while no one was looking.

Here’s most of his latest blog post.

It has been a confusing couple of weeks. There's so much to deal with every day. I'll not dwell on my workload or current affairs or politics or business anxieties. They mean nothing, amount to nothing; here today, different tomorrow. 

What moves me is what lifts and prevents me drowning. My dog resting her chin on her front paws as she waits my every movement. The two grey fantails flitting about in the garden. The dead eastern spinebill I pick up from the road. The fresh blackberries I eat while reclaiming sections of the farm from rampant weeds. The dead chestnut tree I'm cutting up for firewood which succumbed after 35 years of good health and growth. The fresh eggs from Lib's chooks. Watching bees belting the blossom on a lilly pilly hedge. The warmth and resilience of my friends who give their time at Nobelius Park as volunteers.

These things in this last week give me a spiritual connection to the earth and my human tribe.

Gunna’s what southern Yanks might call a good ol’ boy. I wonder how many of the school’s old boys know a spinebill from a hundred dollar bill, a fresh egg from a tidy nest egg, or feel much for their tribe.

Misanthropic me doesn’t feel much for his tribe. Gunna and his blog remind me why I should.

Rock on.   

heritability

Apparently Australian women are only half as likely as their American counterparts to administer what they know to be a lethal jolt of electricity to a stranger when ordered to do so. Our sheilas have a spirit of independence, defiance and mistrust of authority. Thank god for Australian culture.

This factoid from an article in today’s big paper corroborates an argument as to why nurture, and in this case culture, is as or more important than nature, as decreed by our genetic make-up.

Nurture held sway in 1975 in the Nature versus Nurture debate. Studying a bit of pop psychology in my final year at teachers’ college, I want to believe that the children whose lives I am about to enter are blank slates ready for me to do a bit of colouring-in.

Nature wrestled its way on top when the human genome was decoded and we were absolved of our faults—heritability determined our likelihood of being a bogan, getting a divorce, voting Liberal or psychopathy. But Nurture lives to fight another day.

As I obsessively self-analyse (during this bout of ‘transition’), I wonder what sort of Muslim, or Eskimo, or Chinese I would be. What sort of person or man might I be had I not finished school and been a teacher, had I not played sport, or gone overseas at 17 instead of 55? They’re the imponderables I ponder from time to time.

Would I be an atheist in a Muslim country given my lack of the religiosity gene? Would I harpoon myself if I were an Eskimo rather than endure the sterile whiteness of my snowy surrounds another minute? (I missed the love-of-snow gene too.) Would I be perversely dissident in the herd of one point three billion corporate Chinamen?

My organic latter-day hippie but grounded and eminently sensible daughter is, of course, paying homage to nurture in busting a gut in a relaxed way to give my grand-daughter, young Miss Nerrington, a stimulating and nourishing environment in which to begin life, while I wait for those inherited characteristics I can now observe over four family generations to emerge.

My daughter is right, just as I was with her and her brother, to do whatever she can to raise an intelligent, independent and well-balanced child without obsessing about perfection, either from Nerri or from herself as a mother.

I can’t help but think that the Nature versus Nurture debate is a spurious one. Most of us are inexplicable messes of genes and upbringing and culture. Sometimes one rules over the other. Some genes are stronger than others, some environments all-pervading.

“They fuck you up, your mum and dad. / They may not mean to, but they do. / They fill you with the faults they had / And add some extra, just for you.” Is Philip Larkin talking genes or child-rearing? Surely he’s talking about both.

Rock on.   

growth

Growing in large pots along the back fence are cucumbers, chillies, watermelon, climbing beans and tomatoes. The cucumbers are producing, rats have eaten the tomato stems, the watermelons want more heat and the beans are doing nothing. The chillies are taking off since I moved them from a less sunny spot.

Above them on a trellis is a pandorea jasminoides in full pink and red-throated flower and against the house is a metal compost tumbler half-full of rich black decomposition. A rampant lemon tree fills the corner near the tiny deck by the back door.

Under the lemon are broccoli, leeks and zucchini, and two baskets of basil dangle from the branches. And against the deck battens are pots of garlic and plain chives, basil, and marjoram. The oregano, lemon grass, thyme and rosemary are planted in the garden around the corner.

Two vegie boxes house green mignonette lettuces, French beans, self-seeded cherry tomatoes, beetroot, carrots and some capsicums struggling back to life after ravaging by rats or possums. The coriander didn’t make it.

Two lime trees—the Kaffir is rollicking along—line the side fence, along with a grafted apple tree. The other apple tree is espaliered on the back fence but mostly billowing high above it. In my new vegie bed are more capsicums and broccoli, cos lettuces and onions. Basil and parsley grown from seed occupy a sunny nook near the carport.

Off the back of the carport is a new garden with small flowering natives—brachyscomes, paper daisies, a running postman (kennedia prostrata) and others whose names escape me. Another lime is in the middle of the plot and a blood-red bougainvillea and a deep pink mandevilla are twining their ways up netting tacked on the back of the carport.

In a sop to my affection for the flowering windowsills of France I have gaudy petunias cascading down the back steps and hanging in baskets on the side of the carport. A few more are planted out around the garden. The midnight violet and the smoky-blue with networks of purple veins are my favourites.

One large central space remains to be converted from turf to vegetable patch. More brick paths need laying. The sandy hydrophobic soil needs bags and bags of manure and compost. And all of it needs the daily attention I happily give it—pulling a few weeds here, pruning off dead bits, sweeping, watering and refurbishing the pots after their produce is spent.

     

Rock on.   

transition

My good woman says I’m in transition. She tells me it’s a difficult time for the problem gamblers she counsels, the time they are most likely to lose control, if they have any. Apparently I’m having a very late mid-life crisis, whereas I think of myself as in a state of perpetual misgiving.

Transition suggests movement from somewhere to somewhere else; from one job to another, or to not having a job. It could also be moving from one stage of life to another. These are matters for judgment. My own is that I’m not actually going anywhere, hence a vague but pervading feeling of discontent.

My good woman has a point. I was gainfully if not lucratively employed until 31 December. I earned a meagre salary, but it is packaged to advantage, my mortgage is fortnightly and descending rapidly. Going to work three days a week gives a modicum of structure to a mostly unroutine life. No structure props any part of it up right now.

I run an OCD house—everything has its place, but nothing runs to a timetable. I’m punctual to a fault for appointments, but if a time isn’t set for something to happen, then it could happen any time or just not happen at all. I don’t do any of my three favourite things at a set time. I don’t write every night or first thing every morning. I don’t ride regularly. I read at the strangest times.

My bank accounts move from Cr to Dr, my back gives me gip, my weight heads in the wrong direction, headaches are more frequent, and my gym attendance diminishes.

Perhaps transition just means out of kilter. We are full of contradictions. It makes us human.

Rock on.   

days like these

Last night I facilitate a special owners corporation meeting in my lounge room. We have no manager, bank account, or unanimity about how to proceed. Dan and Jim have almost come to blows in the driveway about other issues, and Joyce can get pretty feisty. Fio wants to pay no management fees, his English is nil, and Alvena defers to her incomprehensible husband.

I run a calm meeting, reframe Jim’s “dispute” into a discussion, and we achieve a nice outcome that moves us all to better understandings of the issues and each other. I go to bed relieved and sleep peacefully under a purple sarong after a hot and muggy day.

I rise this morning to some relief of the pain above my left buttock that’s increased over three days. I can’t lie, sit, stand, or walk without great discomfort. Yesterday’s residual warmth radiates from the walls. The Bureau promises a hotter day with even higher humidity.

The morning is a blast: things unfold nicely. Before breakfast I fire up the interweb and launch an email into cyberspace: is the mentor training I’m running tonight in Castlemaine still on? At nine I meet with my co-presenter for an upcoming two-day workshop in Sydney. I’m excited to be reprising last year’s well-received gig. I write the sexuality educator job application with a brilliant first-time cover letter and proof of my godliness packed into a one-page narrative addressing the selection criteria. Mike emails that tonight’s Castlemaine gig is off. I top it off with a lunch of mushroom risotto my good woman made the other night.

Later I wake from an after-lunch siesta in a muck sweat on the couch, my head leaden. Sid the cat lies stupefied on the floor; the JRT hangs limply out of his box-bed. The airless house slumps on its haunches.

The phone rings. Bullyboy Jim tells me he’s spoken to “his man”, and his man, a property manager, reckons I should pay higher fees than the other units because my lot area is greater. The last air in my day seeps out of me.

I raise every blind and open every window to get some oxygen into the house. Gloom descends instead and a fierce electrical storm bursts. Thunder rattles the panes, water cascades over the gutters and mocks the temporary drain protecting my front door.

I decide to turn the computer off but it dies as I reach for the switch. My back aches.

Later I drive to my good woman’s place. I feel depressed and in need of psychotherapy. She tells me everyone at her workplace began the day wrung out and it just got worse. It’s the weather, she says.

“It’s life,” I reply. “It’s Jim, it’s not having a meaningful job, it’s being sixty, it’s constant pain in my back.” She likes it when I whinge, and tells me so. We laugh.

Rock on.   

remission

Andrew is a funny young bloke who likes to laugh. He’s both gentle and a gentleman. We meet when Andrew, Becca, Julie and I put the SKIPS program together in 2000 and he’s a health psychology student on placement.

How does health psychology differ from other psychologies, I ask. It’s the psychology of health, he says. He should know: he’s a registered psychologist and has a doctorate in his branch of it.

Late in the morning we meet for lunch, Andrew and Julie and me. Julie supervises Andrew’s placement at EACH all those years ago. He has a wife, Celia, then and now, and Andrew and Celia have two children aged three and a half and eight months.


There’s no good time to get a life-threatening cancer, but for a young father with a pregnant wife, it could hardly be worse. And no one ever deserved cancer less. The cancer is so rare and has such a ghastly polysyllabic name that I can’t remember it or what body part it affects. It’s an older person’s cancer, so as a thirty-something, Andrew has a good chance of beating it. So far he has: after six months of chemo he has colour in his cheeks and hair. He’s in remission.

I ask him if, like Lance Armstrong, he calls himself a cancer survivor. No, he says. His oncologist tells him that it’s not a matter of if the cancer returns, but when. Cheery folk, oncologists. He might stay in remission long enough to die of old age.

We don’t dwell too much on the cancer, but talk of children and work. We have only an hour before Julie must go to a meeting. We eat, Julie leaves, and Andrew wants to keep talking, about sport mostly. We agree that we must get to a Carlton game together this year. We're both diehards and will enjoy each other’s company.

I’m conscious that my car has overstayed its legal welcome at the side of the highway and cut things short. I shouldn't. If Andrew wants my time, he should have it. As I open the door and get in I feel a bit ashamed.

   

Rock on.   

blood

Whatever a unit of blood of plasma is—millilitre, milligram?—I am minus 846 of them. The Blood Bank is keen to have my plasma and I am happy to give it to them, even though giving plasma takes twice as long as giving blood.

I am the first person to open the Bank’s door this morning: an 8 am appointment means no waiting. I’m full of liquids—orange juice, water and tea. I fill in the mandatory medical, travel and sexual biography. This is a legal document and is signed in the presence of a witness after my blood pressure, haemoglobin and pulse are taken.

This morning a nurse supervisor is training a new nurse who preps me before pushing the catheter into a raised vein on the inside of my elbow. The tube connects to the centrifuge. When all is ready the clamps are released and the dark red blood flows. Four times it comes back to me, minus the plasma, but followed by cold pink saline.

As a small boy I regularly haemorrhage blood—spontaneous nose-bleeds. One day in sixth grade I lean over a rail and let it bleed till it stops. A clot about 30 centimetres in diameter and millimetres thick congeals on black bitumen. At other times I plug my nose then, to my own mingled horror and delight, gently extract sinuous clots ten or more centimetres long.

I first donate blood as a 19 year-old at university and continue for years in all locations. Then I tick the box to say I’ve had sex with someone who injected drugs and they ban me for five years. In the end the ban endures for 19 years.

I love the beautiful ‘blood’ words: sanguine and sangfroid. Sanguinity, originally ruddiness of the cheeks, comes to denote cheerful optimism and courage. Sangfroid, literally cold blood, is about calmness in the face of danger.

Hippocrates’s theory of human temperament, the four humours—sanguine, choleric, phlegmatic and melancholic—each based on a bodily fluid, has always appealed. I suspect a well-balanced man might be a mix of each in almost equal parts, perhaps with a little superfluity of blood.

   

Rock on.   

whispering

I’m immediately attracted when I see the show title—Dog Whisperer. He is Cesar Millan and I have my doubts. Television is smoke and mirrors. And Nicholas Sparks’s The Horse Whisperer, a horseshit romance, put me off the whispering business. Whispering reeks of New Age charlatanry, anathema in these parts. But Cesar is the real deal.

I buy What the Dog Saw, a book of essays by Malcolm Gladwell, online and on spec. I’ve not heard of Malcolm before but these collected essays of ‘the hidden extraordinary’ all appear in The New Yorker, recommended reading from Daphne. I discover that the essay that gives the book its title is about Cesar Millan.

I’ve always believed I have an instinct for dogs. My expatriate friend Robré left Oz to chase his guru to the USA. We shared a house and dogs before he decamped. Years later he stays overnight before winging it back to the States and comments that my dogs, Miss Meg and the JRT, are exactly as he expected: friendly, sensible and not imposing themselves in any way.

I am the pack leader long before I ever hear the term. I never read a book about training or living with dogs, but my ears prick up at any discussion of the relationship of dogs and humans. Watching one episode of Dog Whisperer, and now reading about him, teaches me the theory underlying my practice.

For ten years Jezza the JRT pulls my arm horizontal as he strains the leash when we walk. He ‘goes’ other dogs we encounter along the way. The remedy is so simple, and I’ve intuited it all along but haven’t done it. I halve the leash and keep him strictly at my side, even fractionally behind me. And overnight a headstrong terrier becomes a spaniel.

“Check this out,” I say to my good woman the next time we walk Jezza together.

“What have you done to him?’ she asks, astonished.

“Reasserted my role as pack leader.”

Malcolm Gladwell describes how dogs are unique in watching humans and learning how to react to the signals, coded or otherwise, we give them. Chimps don’t or can’t do this. Cesar Millan, Mexican émigré, known as a child as el Perrero, the dog boy, has the perfect body language for dogs, upright and assertive, but not aggressive. He says nothing but lets the dog see him and come to him.

Perfect canine empathy: what the dog saw.

   

Rock on.  

sid

I am not a cat person, but I like animals, except horses—big expensive bastards. Tassie devils have little to recommend them. The dog is numero uno and the goat rates high. With cats, it depends on personality.

Fluffball cats, pampered cats, demanding cats, aloof cats: these are not the cats for me. I think of Noël Coward’s lyric, “Why can’t a woman be more like a man?” and ask “Why can’t a cat be more like a dog?” and come when called, go for long rambles, and travel in the car.

My good woman’s Turkish swimming cat, Mimi, is demanding, constantly bashing her head into your legs and miaowing for no reason. I have grown accustomed to her face.

But for the most part cats have been few and far between in my life. When my son was in utero his mother and I got a ginger tabby from the dairy farm down the road. Mister Id had spunk, loved the goats, and free-ranged in the back of the Kombi when we migrated to Adelaide.

When the kids were little at Menzies Creek we had a grey cat. Smokey accompanied us on those long shambling walks you take with young children to visit other young children, but one day disappeared without trace.

Today Sid comes to live, on a temporary basis, with me and Jezza the Jack Russell. Sid grew up in this house. Occupying my house while I work in Bendigo, my son and his girlfriend get Sid as a kitten, a manic black Dervish, into, onto and up everything. In time he develops into a long, sleek, miniature panther.

When Mo and Katie move out of my house to venture round Australia Sid goes to Chadstone with Katie’s sister. But the sister doesn’t want him and Mo and Katie are looking for somewhere to rent.

He arrives in a dog-box. He makes no sound. Jezza sleeps outside in the pale sun when Mo lets Sid loose in the house. We grant him 30 minutes to roam cautiously, sizing up the escape routes, then admit the JRT. The rule is that cats run and Jezza chases. But Sid does not run; he stands and stares and Jezza skirts him warily, exactly as I predict.

For hours they pretend to ignore each other, though each is acutely aware of the other. Sid is not impressed when Jezza puts a soft toy on my foot and demands action. I lift the toy into the air with my foot so he can leap and catch it or pounce on it wherever it lands. This is a bit too much action for Sid.

In the evening they pass in the hallway and Jezza cops a four-clawed whack for his trouble. He yelps once and it’s over. He’s been warned. Sid is longer, taller, quicker and younger.

Rock on.

resort

We wake after eight. The wind rattles the windows and rain puddles in the car park. We peer from our second-storey window at families wheeling their luggage from three multi-towered resorts around Warrnambool’s Lady Bay to their four-wheel drives. Middle-aged women with badges on their ballooning bosoms cross from their overnight lodgings to the conference centre.

“I reckon they’re healthcare workers,” I tell to my good woman.

The weather forestalls our hoped-for bike ride along the foreshore, so we loll about on our acre of bed, massaging each other’s feet. We sully all the pristine white towels because we don’t have to launder them. My good woman’s yogurt and raspberry breakfast freezes overnight in the tiny fridge. I eat Weeties with yesterday’s blackberries. God bless the eleven o’clock checkout.

I ferry our small bags to the car while my good woman rounds up her toiletries. Knots of healthcare conferees jam the foyer, stuffing themselves with morning tea. I disturb one as she ladles clotted cream onto a discus-sized scone and ask about the conference theme. “Breast-feeding,” she informs.

I envision breast versus bottle contingents. “Will there be blood-letting,” I ask hopefully. “Scuffles, scone-throwing?” She has no humour; a terse no.

My good woman sees no point to a conference about breast-feeding. Perhaps it’s about technique, not whether or not it’s a good thing, I offer as we roll out of the car park.

At Allansford we jostle our way around Cheeseworld’s cheese room, then bump our way on lumpy bitumen to Timboon. The boutique shopping in this tiny town surprises my good woman. I buy her a cloche hat, though she doesn’t wear hats. The shop lady tells us we are a cute couple. I am beyond response.

We meander and rollercoaster our way along deserted back roads for the next two hours, past dairy farms and pasture seed businesses, through Simpson and Carlisle River to Colac, picking more blackberries along the way.

Colac on a mid-Saturday afternoon fails to inspire in every way. Dingy smelly arcades run off the main street which seems to be the exclusive province of grubby obese young women. Paint-flaking showrooms line the desultory entrance and exit to the town along the highway. The Lebanese café looks good but the food disappoints.

We bypass Geelong on the new peripheral. The traffic thickens as we approach Melbourne’s sprawl. The underground thrum of the Burnley Tunnel fills me with a dull dread. At about six we are in my good woman’s drive and our small but wonderful adventure is over.

Rock on.   

adventure

After 6:15 pump class I have an hour to pack the car and get to Centrelink for an 8:45 Personal Contact Interview. My Activity Test requirements are on the line: I must present my Participation Activity Record sent with my Reporting Statement.

The interview is inconsequential. I’m new to receiving payment, I’ve got six attempts to find work on my record, and I’m soon on my way to my good woman’s place. I take the pedals off her bike and load it into the Jazz. My good woman makes morning tea and a sandwich each for the journey. Just before eleven we pull out and head off for the Otways and the Western District.

My task is to explore roads from Warrnambool to the Surf Coast for a four-day bike ride. And to take my good woman for an adventure, showing her parts of Victoria she has not seen. I have not seen some of it either. We stop at Winchelsea and eat our lunch in a grassed area close to the old bluestone bridge over the Barwon River.

The Cape Otway Road leads us through Forrest on its windy way to the coast. We emerge from the mist and rain at the top of the range overlooking Apollo Bay. Here we stop on the roadside to take photos and fill a metal bowl with blackberries, then turn back and snake our way through thick rainforest to Beech Forest and Lavers Hill.

My good woman leans out the window with her camera; I sum up the conditions for road bikes and enjoy the challenge of driving a twisty road with little visibility and branches across the new bitumen surface. This is the only driving I enjoy these days.

From Lavers Hill we stick to the Great Ocean Road all the way to Warrnambool. The wind whips spray off the whitecaps it’s driving backwards up the Gellibrand River at Princetown and knocks the thermos off the picnic table where we eat afternoon tea.

We loiter on the jetty at Port Campbell, eat potato chips at Peterborough and explore the Bay of Islands and Childers Cove where the sandstone formations and the ‘fjords’ fascinate my good woman. We do not encounter another soul. The day is not for swimming: the wind buffets us and the occasional shower scuds across our backs.

In Warrnambool we check into the resort then stroll off across the mouth of the Merri River to explore. My good woman is rugged up in a jacket, her hair blustering in all directions. Winds like this will drive her out of her mind, she says.

The trainee receptionist recommends Bojangles Pizza in Liebig Street. The pizza is fine but the noise in the pizzeria precludes conversation, so we eat hastily and retire to our clean and comfortable room at the resort for an extended shower and a long night’s sleep.

Rock on.  

bladder

I get up in the dark and stumble down the hall to the bathroom. My bladder is painfully full though it seems only five minutes since I turned off the light. It’s the same every night, always once, often twice, occasionally three times. The dog needs to go too. We grow joyfully old together.

Ten or fifteen years ago my stream weakens and my bladder demands frequent relief. Doctor Ruth suggests I get my prostate checked. The urologist instructs me to kneel on his medical table while he applies a five-fingered condom to his right hand. The brute crosses the surgery, takes a short run-up, plunges a digit up my puckered date, and wriggles it round for about three seconds.

He pronounces my prostate to be in fine fettle. I am sent to radiology where liquid is pumped up my urethra into my bladder, a disconcerting feeling if ever there is one. X-rays are taken as I lie sideways on the X-ray bench. Then I’m instructed to stand on one leg and piss into a bottle while more photographs are taken. I can stand on one leg for a day, but I can’t piss with a leg in the air.

The diagnosis is that I have a congenital defect in my bladder; the opening to the urethra is small so the bladder muscle thickens from the increased squeezing it must do to evacuate urine. I am doubly damned by diminished capacity and age.

Older men experience weakened flow, and difficulty starting and finishing: you think you’re done and another couple of drops need passing. I used to wait impatiently outside the Ladies at the cinema for my companion to emerge. Now she waits for me. On group rides the bunch pedals off, leaving me camped on the shoulder, lycra bunched around my groin.

I stare at the tiles in railway cloakrooms, whistling a happy tune and waiting for a flow. Scores of younger men come and go while I study the wall. Sometimes I rest my head on the tiles and doze.

Some nights I go out into the garden with the dog instead of to the toilet. We piss together and look at each other forlornly. Then we return to our beds and hope for sleep to come again.

Rock on.