Australia Day

One sentence for a spark... I just need one sentence. I've felt that writing energy these past few days, that inexpressible feeling of being alive directly at the fingertips. I feel it. It's coursing through me like anything else necessary for existence. I feel it. Something great could be written sometime soon: All I need is one sentence. If I had a truly perfect first sentence, something great would get written. I feel it. Anyone who's written anything will tell you the same thing. It's a mood, it's an energy, it's a mindset. It's uncontrollable, unpredictable, inconsistent. You can just feel it and know it. I just need one sentence. Any thoughts? No, it can't come from someone else. It has to be complete, whole, and the original product has to be entirely of me. I just wish it would happen, because I don't know how much longer this will last or when it will come back. I wonder: did Isaac Asimov feel like this everyday? Amazing guy, Asimov, with an amazing mind, but what did he feel like when he wrote? I know he did it basically every day of his life for maybe seventy-some-odd years. What kind of energy must he have had?

I went with Leo and Cassie the other night to take Mel to the airport. Mel's going to visit her family in Malaysia, then her friends in Singapore. She used to live in both places, and her parents still have an apartment in Concord, one of the innumerable suburbs of Sydney. She'll be gone for two weeks. It's odd, but I miss her already. I missed her the morning after. Mel's cool. She's one of my best friends down here.

"Aussie ! Aussie! Aussie! Oi! Oi! Oi!" --John Howard.

A lonely impulse of delight

Drove to this tumult in the clouds...

Mel One of the first things you notice about Mel is her smile. It's this broad, genuine expression that is given to the world on a very consistent basis. There's a chain reaction: Mel's face lights up when she smiles or when she laughs, and she, in turn, lights up the room as a result. It doesn't matter why, or whether or not you were listening to her, because she's a conduit of positive energy and everybody feeds off it. Looking at her, it does occur odd that such energy would be present in such a small person. She's short, she's slim, and she's almost perfectly proportioned. She walks funny, as if each step were just a tiny thrilling surprise. Her dark hair, now died slightly red, is almost always pulled straight back. Her skin is of a light, even olive color, and her eyes match her natural hair color. Her eyes are almost as expressive as her smile. She calls them Asian eyes, but I don't really know what to call them. They say eyes are a window to the soul, and Mel's eyes are like two bay windows. They're open and accepting in the same way that her personality is. They can do so much, say so much, that they add an extra layer to this bland language, English, that she speaks in a confused Australian/American accent. She's an Australian citizen, and has lived here for now almost four years, but spent significant amounts of time in Louisiana, so her accent is a mishmash of Southern-Belle American pronunciation of Aussie vernacular. In an odd juxtaposition of localities, she calls Australia home, her family lives in Malaysia, she speaks largely like an American who hasn't lived here long enough, her Mom is a native of Singapore, and her dad is a stodgy-Englishman looking Aussie. The resulting mix is what people long ago called an "exotic" beauty, but to me at the dawn of the 3rd Millennium, she just looks stunning in a way I'm not used to. It's a blessing that she's got a warm personality to match. This is a long way of indicating why she's been gone not even two days and I miss her already. She's greatly benefited my time here in Sydney, and two weeks is going to be quite a while without her.

Australia Day Today is Australia Day. It's like the 4th of July, but less emotional. You get the feeling that people really like it here, but not enough to get excited about it. It's just Australia, no big deal. Today I saw more Australian flags than I ever had before, and these much ridiculed cartoon characters supposed to remind Australians of their unique environment. The effect was less than stellar. The Australians looked a little embarrassed, as if they didn't want the culminating cultural symbol of life down under to be the Wombat.

Cassie and I took the bus downtown, got off near Town Hall. We went first to the Australian Museum which is right across from Hyde Park. The Australian Museum, Cassie thinks, is modeled after the Museum of Natural History in NYC. It had tons of interesting exhibits, from a tour of Aboriginal (or Indigenous, as they said in the exhibit, so as to not offend one group or another, I believe) Culture, which was extremely interesting, to an exhibition on Biodiversity. I love museums in general, and this was polished and fun. They also had this amazing collection of nature photographs. God that sounds fruity to say, but, trust me, it was quite amazing. Things were done with cameras that we, as 21st Century humans would think only possibly with large amounts of computer editing.

After the museum, Cassie and I went through Hyde Park where there were Australia Day festivities happening. There were antique cars, including someone's Cadillac Pride and Joy, in front of which I had my picture taken. There was multi-cultural food and drink. There was a stage for kids with annoying performers who didn't even have the decency to sing "Do your ears hang low?" There was a main stage with a nameless, hopeless rock band. There was a jazz stage just off Hyde Park where even the performers looked bored. This all sounds rather cynical, but it was a nice experience. Hyde Park is beautiful, with its overarching gum trees that filter and disperse the light, its many accessible and dramatic water fountains, and, today, its special provision for public alcohol consumption. All these factors conspired to make it an interesting and beautiful afternoon.

After Hyde Park, Cassie and I walked around the City Centre (yes, they spell it weird like the French. I've already been yelled at for spelling it Darling Harbor, instead of Harbour, for saying the light had a nice color, when in fact down here it has nice colour. It's all faux-sophistication, if you ask me. It's also rather odd that the Aussies, who drop whole syllables and sounds off of words would get in a funk over me taking away one pointless letter) and then down to Circular Quay. We got something to drink at this nice place called Quay Grand and just generally soaked up the sun and the harbor and the floating masses below us.

This was quite an excursion, and a great day to see Sydney in its finest. We went home after Quay Grand and got Oporto's (the stuff is too addictive, I really need to cut down). Then Cassie went to bed and I watched Lock, Stock and Two Smoking Barrels with Paul and Jenny. I had forgotten most of what happened in that movie, as well as how good it is.

Now, as it's getting a bit late and I always feel like writing when it's too late to do anything else, I'm writing down the day's excursion, because I really would not want to forget it.

Sound and Consciousness One of the things recommended for meditation is to rely on senses other than sight in order to concentrate and calm. I've been thinking about that a lot lately. The sound here in my room is so vivid and the acoustics so amazing that I can hear lowly spoken conversations at the bus stop on the other side of the building across the street. I can hear the twist of a shoe on the pavement outside, the belch of the wino that sleeps on a park bench up the street, sirens that start close and end up far, far away, screeching wheels of miraculously torque-laden ghetto rollers racing through the night, bits of phone conversations at the pay phone half a block up. It's amazing. It keeps me up at night. It's audio-overload. I've had to leave my laptop on with music, usually Radiohead or Jay-Z, oddly enough, in order to sleep. I'm not exactly a big sleeper even when I'm in my insulated, close-windowed-room at home, but this is a whole other level. Amazing the effect concentration can have, though. If you just sit there, feel the breeze through the shade, close your eyes, concentrate on breathing and letting the sounds of the world wash over you, your heart rate goes down, the restless nature of my mind, at least, is momentarily calmed. So it's no bull. It really does work. It's easy to pawn off the work and beliefs of mystics as "mumbo-jumbo," and feel a need for cathedrals, holy wars, etc. but the experience of this has lent another level of legitimacy to my belief in mysticism. I think I'll stop one step short of the mushrooms and Timothy Leary posters, but higher-consciousness is possible. Very possible. What a thought! There's hope for me after all.

B.