It's the lonely yearn to roar out your voice across the planes, and hear the wonder of an echo back from nature.

So we've been in our little studio and are settling in. Melbourne's wintry lull is blowing itself out outside us and is preventing us from enjoying the best of the place for now. There is a sharp Southpole bite to the wind here as we are living a block or two from the beach.

St. Kilda is a friendly place where the streets seem to smile at you as you stroll down them. It's a million miles from the Melbourne CBD, with its bustling rushing foreigners, traffic and the opressive feeling of being lost in a strange foreign land. I guess high expectations don’t threaten that much outside of the city.

Living here is like getting a warm hug telling you it will be ok. It's a sea of madmen, restaurants, homos, hobos and smiling drunken people.

I got accosted today by a smiling drunken couple for carrying home rice pudding whilst smiling, drunk.

It was actually cheese, but for some drunken reason, they were certain it was rice pudding. I didn't want to correct them, so I joined in in their conversation about how nice rice pudding was.

It was just great to have someone else to talk to, even if it meant that I had to lie about my cargo.

I hate rice pudding.

But it was nice that they genuinely just wanted a bit of drunken banter. We met at a road intersection. Our conversation lasted maybe a minute, but I still waved at them as they went in a different direction to me.

Loneliness does strange things to a person.

But I guess that's the difference between St. Kilda and Melbourne centre. I had no interaction with another human in the CBD, beyond strange smiles at strangers whilst waiting for traffic to clear. Other than that, there were a sea of Asians, happy to stick to themselves, and who could blame them. I remember one of the nights we were here, and the incident sticks out in my mind as having the most negative effect on me since we arrived in Melbourne. An of-japanese-origin kid, of college age, some 4 years odd younger than us, was walking along Swanston towards town. He passed a tram stop inhabited by some dirty white Australian biker types, too poor to afford bikes to polish. Their eyes threw drunken racism at him, That most stupid of racism, the righteous, undoubting vehement hatred of the truly misled moron. I didn't immediately get it from the slurred accents, but the looks in their eyes shouted out clear.

One of them from this crowd of red-faced drunken white skinned bottom feeders decided to follow this kid down the street.

Why not? He had about 40 pounds on this small skinny kid, and his pack to back him and egg him on. So why not ruin somebosy else's day?

He accosted him at a street corner and asks him "Why are you in Australia?"

The kid takes out the i-pod speakers from his ears and asks him what he was saying, in a respectful and also thick-accented Ozzie twang.

The kid was born in Australia.

And the guy says again "What are you doing in Australia?" purely aimed at the colour of his skin.

Immediately, my left hand, the good one, curls into a fist. Before anyone said anything, I had resolved, inspired by some blood curdling new anger I have within me, that if this redneck prick fuck says anything more or tries to hurt this poor kid, that I would punch him right in the throat.

In the throat.

I didn't want this guy to continue living. I was already wondering, how much pressure in the punch would actually kill him or is that even possible? Then how much would just send him spluttering? And it was a calm decision too, Maybe I saw too much of my own tendencies, multiplied to infinity by this retarded-by-his-own-hatred moron.

The kid just shook his head and crossed the street. The prick laughed. A horrible sneering snort of derisive sadistic pleasure. I hated him for it.

Sarah said to the kid "Just ignore him, he's a fucking idiot." and of course she was right.

I don't think that the kid thought about it again, just another racist low point to be forgotten about. But somehow it stuck with me, I guess because of my own blood curdling reaction and the rise in my own hatred, for this prick, which is of course just as wrong as his.

Trying to digest little things like that has me in a quasi-meditative state here in St. Kilda, now that the travel has calmed down to a daily stock rotation of quiet exploration.

It's a time for digestion, not reaction, of both inner mind and outer world. I cook twice a day, and keep our little flat clean. I delight in dish washing and laundry, and sleep in late because I can. It's certainly a new dawn in quiet reflection. Where before, the freak outs and mania of solitude would creep on me and manipulate my entire day, now that has turned to a kind of disconnected lulling painful patience.

I don't yet know what I am waiting for, but I have a feeling that just getting out of Limerick, and moving to a new city, country and continent, is slowly improving me.

This change is vital, to wash out the salty dry earth of lugubrious soul-searching that is the plague of my quietly unhappy secretly self-hating generation.

I am an outpatient, in a little fishpond halfway house, waiting to cure and grow before I can be returned to a happy normalcy. I am waiting for the confirmation of the cure, and it may be a long wait though all looks good. And when I get the all clear, then the wait is over and its time to return to life and Ireland.

So I'll wait on here, or yonder, in a state of mellow exploration, until intuition slowly disappears to numb happiness.

It's no effort, here, to inhale and exhale the sea air in my little studio hermitage. I burn with the sluggish desire of the misinformed for yet more buzz and huff-puff adventure, as I lay on the bed, watching the birds fly by my tree-lined window I hear them snorting and squealing in dizzying urgent calls to move on against the sweeping tide of natural law that keeps their tiny hearts beating a mile a minute, forever and ever until they finally lose the race and shuffle quietly away to nothingness.

I am kept amused simply be the soundscape of my surrounds. Of couples near us, by turns muffling their fights and affections as they sweep through their own life on into the night-and-day-and-repeat cycle of this human blink of existance.

It's a strange kind of isolation, turned around by overhearing superficial conversation in bars, talk of cars and sports and politics and the rising tides of daily commerce that can enforce human longing in me and re-inforce by turns everything right and everything wrong with this picture of just one human's move to a new place to find a dream.

I think I just want the dream of travel back again rather than the reality with its continual problems and the overpowering sense of responsibility and the need to do and be curtailing all fun always too early. It's been making me look at things differently. I can see layers now to my life, and to everyone's outward projection, and it's hard to peel them off and see the truth. I spend about an hour, most days, going on a little walk around St. Kilda on my own. Always in one different direction or another I am pushing my knowledge and comfort zones out, slowly, block by block each day. I don't know why I bother, except to say that I know it's something that I'm chasing. I'm just not so sure if it's there. I get the same feeling now when I stare at myself in the mirror, staring beneath the layer of glasses and human flesh, right through the eyes, and I know I am looking for something that is not there. I am looking for some giant human talent to reflect itself back that can sort all this stuff out so I no longer get caught up in the crazy of this unplanned life.

It's a strange facade too, the big city. In truth it's any big city and it's a cheap trick. They make you both love and hate the sprawl and scope with such passion and to change your mind with its lessons in humanity daily, hourly, if you sit and look with your whole being rather than just plugging in earphones and ignoring the world.

Melbourne is a tower glowing with the electric boom of industry with those parts left in the shade teeming with the masks of humanity much like everywhere else. You take all the buildings, the magnificent and terrible architecture that represents a free-for-all in new development ideas for the past 100 years, and take it away. Take away the ridiculously wide roads too, another interconnection to aid commerce and travel in the city. Take the cars and suburbs and people and every brick laid by a human to aid a human in making a buck.

And the parks too, manicured and landscaped delicately, they just leave a rush hour at mc.donald's taste of unfulfillment in your mouth, like a dip in the kiddie pool of nature that is supposed to be an oasis in the big city but has turned into a place for divorcees to take kids and healthy people to chunder thighs and listen to their heart beat as their ipods pump out the music. So you can take them off the table too, all human inventions designed to aid the cogs that grease the wheels of culture and work here, and I am struggling to find anything else, I guess like urbania anywhere, nothing else but the atmosphere of millions of individuals working together to make life work, better, faster and stronger. And that's the truth of urban life I so desperately want to live, because to really know a person is about the only gift left that you keep getting offered that you can't yet pay for, and having everything you need at your doorstep, or a phone call away, or within bounds so as you can reach out and take it if you want it, that's the power of the big city and it's alluring.

It's just a blip on the horizon of sprawling metropolitan Melbourne, a quirk of the ever improving economy that thrives on decent humanity working-a-day through life to get back to its kids or plants or cats or drugs or toy trains or whatever they need to get by on this crazy ride.

But sometimes, all this human creation that has forged this city and rose it from the pacific sands like a mighty empire, it just feels as fake as the promises on the advertisement hoardings here, when you look at what was here, maybe even 600 odd years ago before we ever even touched the skyscape. And look again forward, to thousands of years from now, when maybe the only memory of our arrival is a few fallen blips wasting in the sand as the life and earth hustles through it's voyage around the sun.

Look upon my works ye mighty and despair.

I guess it's a mind-trick I have, a reality that I can flick on and again off when needed, to look at myself and see the triviality of mine, or anyone's existence in the light of time and space, and all the things that we are cursed to never ever know. So when you really stare, from the point of view of the Earth itself, our existence now is just a quirky new lustre to add to the earth's ever-flourishing sonata. If we disappear tomorrow, or live to leave our permanent mark on the planet, it's still just an isolated line, on a small page in the liner notes on the biography of time. So it's important now, in my case, to truly feel how inconsequential your entire life is. And then you can really appreciate how totally unimportant a small flood of depression or isolation is in the light of all that life spreading its wings and pushing the universe on and on in its ever changing ever growing race to self-destruction.

And to cement that, I just want to feel some honest earth under my feet, put there by god or nature and not left because we have a use for it. That's why I like the beach here, where every minute grain of sand was brought across continents by the Pacific, journeys taking millions of years, that humans cannot infect or affect beyond the tertiary drawings, foot stains and castles on the sand that the earth itself rises to erase each day, cleaning the slate of the human effect on the plant in whatever small ways it can.

I am a comfortable and unimportant little blip floating on the tides of uncertainty, taking the easy ride on the lazy tributaries of life, away from the heart-diseased seas of the new human predator that has taken over the world using and fuelling desire to turn human desires in the same direction it is always taken, towards self-improvement.

Here, and by turns as i said any big city, its too easy to get caught up. You feel like the look-out on a tsunami of self-importance, entirely consumed by where we are going, how to make the most of it, how to see the next big thing on the horizon and milk that. I dont like that feeling, or the self-important conversations on mobile phones in bars I overhear people more important than me have. I just hope that the trunami breaks, and ebbs back to the low tide again, so we can just look back and survey the damage of our own over-exhuberant self-destructive frenzy before these cities just become one big bank, one big golden calf idol representing the new darkness in the hearts of men, that can never be shared collectively without collective apology.

Our first few weeks, back in the saddle of this trip, passed by with not even a squeak. I don't think I have had any prolonged conversation with a soul other than Sarah since I got here. I have started silently talking to myself, reasoning out situations and uttering self-help monograms to calm the nerves to the lilting boredom of this starter-upper-life.

It's two weeks now since we finished our glorious shoddy travelling through two continents, two short weeks since our lives have returned to some semblance of normality, two weeks since my window on new worlds was closed, shut out violently and suddenly. And the world has repaid me by closing this window into my soul, this one precious gift that it had given me to sustain myself in the bleaker moments. The writing that has poured out of me like water through my sweaty hands has dried to a calm barren desert that sits in his room playing solitaire until tedium forces him out the door.

We sit and circle jobs and talk of our return voyage and getting back on the road with great fondness. We email and call and tramp the street from agency to agency in the rising vortex of the job hunt. And that's how it must be, now that money runs lower and we have enough strength to tough out the vaccum of existence we have dug ourselves, oh so temporarily, into.

A homeless man came up and asked me for a cigarette the other day. A shambling blazered raggedy-booted old man with a crazy mane of stalky grey hair that shot from all sides of his face like the epicentre of an explosion.

I didn't have anything else to do, so I stopped and smoked one with him, starting conversation with weather and beer and rugby. It was early and I was cursing the amount of whiskey I had drank the night before as a hangover made itself at home in the pit of my stomach.

He was one of those tender souls, badly bruised by a world that didn't wait for him and eventually tossed him aside like yesterday's leftovers.

He told me, in an educated, soft-spoken lilt, that he was once a commercial pilot. He spoke fondly of the job, and with enough intelligence that I didn't feel he was selling me some con of a hard luck story so I would dip my hands into my pockets out of sadness.

I got the feeling he didn't want a thing from me, other than the cigarette. He definitely didn't know why I wanted to stop and talk to this scab faced ripped-jacketed old hobo sipping on the dregs of life on the streets at 8am.

We were just shooting the shit, and I was glad to lend an ear. I felt like his stream of consciousness, the truth of his sad story just flowed out of him slowly, and I controlled the flow like a tap by probing, asking, listening and respecting him enough to care about what he said.

He told me of his struggle with drink, and how he started smoking heroin, then the obvious fall from grace at work that always comes with that fucking drug, and now he spends his time meandering through St. Kilda, from Fitzroy down Grey st. then back up the Esplinade, along acland, through the bustle of touristy st. Kilda, and repeating the same trip over and over. He shuffles painfully slow, along narrow paths that bustle with tourists eating and drinking outside countless restaurant bars and only stops for ciggy butts.

Just another lonely soul, forgotten by the world and existing in his own personal purgatory until death plucks him for a second chance at something worth having. Just another lost boy on the road to something else, just that fine line between him and the rest of us.

I asked him if he could score me some weed. He said that he couldn't because it was 8am and anybody who sold weed wouldn't be awake, on account of their heroin habit. I said that I would meet him later and give him ten bucks if he could source anything. He thanked me. I handed him 2 dollars and another cigarette, but wished I could have given him more. To be honest I wish I could have given him a pen and paper, so I could properly tell you all his story and not just be a second mouth repeating the dulled memories of what I can remember from a hung over conversation that is incosequential to the rest of the world in any case.

He consumed my walk home. I couldn't get him out of my head. A walking epitaph tenderly reminding a too-cruel world to look after it's weaker sons. I think I saw a lot of myself in him somehow. I had a taste of a destiny that could have been mine and am consumed by the sad romance of it all. That poor wonderful bastard.

I looked out for him again, but the next time I saw him, not ten days later, he was in a wheelchair and didn't remember me, or ask for anything, just shuffled on past with this look of fresh pain in his eyes, like a small child that has scraped his knee. And on he shuffled, on and out of my life, a sorry sickened lump of pure man tenderised and then crushed by something he could never hope to understand.