It hit 37 degrees today with no saviour sea breeze to beat off the unflinching light.

The heat is so much that all I can do is sit naked on the bed in front of our too-small fan and think about all the things I should be getting done that can't get done because of the sweaty afternoon sludge.

Even now I am a mask of perspiring ooze. To sit outside means dealing with flies and swatting at my face as they divebomb and nosedive willynilly. They are looking for hidration in the sweat pouring freely from my forehead and on down slowly turning my eyes into a suburnt red to match my arms.

I spent the morning in the laundrette concentrating in making the largest mushroom cloud I could in my tee-shirt from the ever-pouring armpit sweat.

I read Camus while the washing machines and dryers tumbled and slurped and mumbled and burped in the heat. The rhythmic hum sent me to a near stupor. I tried to focus on Camus' verbose musings on crime, punishment, the Almighty and Beelzebub, with my face supported by my arms on the desk.

I begun to count, a hobby of mine when bored. 8 Washers, 6 dryers. the old lady on duty pokes her nose in every 3 minutes to give the laundrette customers a look of disdain, she did this 8 times. There were 6 posters on the wall, two broken machines. Too many tiles on the floor to count, but 128 alone on the floorspace under my chair. 3 flies, then 2. 5 customers, I was the only one who stayed to wait on the cheaper self-service laundry.

I eventually had to approach the old woman with the disdainful looks. When I asked her for change she shrank from me, as old women tend to, and she shouted across to her daughter in Italian, who had been pottering busily about me in a summer dress. The sleepier I got the words that came from her mouth, that Italian that I don't speak, whose meaning was illusory to me, kept slurring themselves in my brain, slowly recurring like a lazy haunt. The more they did, the more I thought they contained mention to the strangest of words. I know that she saw me, then heard me speak because her eyes were locked on me. Then she moved away and shouted to her daughter. And when she did, she was definitely saying something about the Devil.

I wonder what part of the Devil she saw in me.

I wasn't wearing glasses and I normally always do. I don't tend to let people into my eyes unless I trust them.

The last time I was there, I set the rubbish bin right outside the laundrette on fire with a carelessly tossed butt. The old woman and her daughter had to heave 3 buckets of water into the bin to extinguish it and I heard her let free with a series of Italian curses in the low pitched high speed wine of the aged.

One of the dryers I used seemed to refuse to work for me. 3 wasted dollars later I had to go up to the curtain and get back my money. When the next customer went up to the Dryer, too soon for the “Out of order” sign to be posted up on it, they slipped in a dollar and it worked immediately. And the old woman bore witness to all of this, slowly tut-tutting in softly whispered Italian in a comfortable lounge chair. You sometimes just have a sixth sense that someone is watching you too close. And she was definitely on my radar.

And in all of this, Camus was still telling me about the Devil, painting him through the eyes of the romantics, who saw him as the ultimate fallen idol. A font from which no love or hate could again pour. An ace of poetic dandy cast out and left unable to feel joy or pain, or to see the suffering that he causes or understand it. A hobo, an incredible romantic icon, that of the brokedown beat-prince, ruined and all.

And the empathetic Devil appeals to me. And maybe the hypocritical God appealed a little too, though I shudder as I write this. And in all of this, the word diavolo playing slowly over and over in her soft Italian sulk in my brain.

I needed a tete-a-tete. Something combined in the stale heat, the flies, the humdrum of washing machines and my sublime unconscious made this strange moment, for me, out of thin air.

And in it all I needed to see the conclusion. So I sat there, trying not to ignore Camus, and waiting for the drier to ping.

I went up to the counter on the pretext of change for the dryer. I turned to the old lady and coughed up a quizzical glance. She mumbled something that again sounded too-eerily-familiar to the slow record in my brain, and returned to ignoring me.

I said “diavolo”? But quietly, like you mightn't hear it, in up-speak, questioning what she might have said to herself. She looked up again, not-too-sharp, and looked set to dismiss me again, as her daughter pottered around again collecting my change.

She poked an old finger at the book.

“The devil worked in that man, Camus.” she said in lilted but perfect and unflinching english. She seemed to spit out the words with a natural resentment of them, formed from a too-strict education in speaking them.

I looked at the book. “The devil, my husband's devil was the same one.”

“And you have that face too.”

Then she sighed.

“But, I don't know.”

Her hands went up in a dismissive gesture as she turned and ignored me again and went back indoors behind the curtain where I couldn't see her. I think she was waiting patiently until the devil was finished in her shop. I don't think she cared too much that I was there in the first place.

You fucking whackjob.

Ok. So it was a dark and flappy-windy night in St. Kilda and I was astrollin' home from the local supermarket with one of them cartons of wine (2ltrs) cradled in my arm

As I was leaving, I spied a guitarist of the past 30 hippie variety weighed down with booze of his own at the door and we got to talking about how much I missed playing guitar, if there were any stores around here, that sorta gas.

So I decided, fuck it, ask him if he knows where I could get a connection for some buds. He said no, then said, "well, later I probably could..." and sort of trailed off in his weird on too many drugs sort of way. I seized the possibility, like a rat up a drainpipe.

He said his name was Joe. and he lived in like room 104 in a lodging house down a dark alley in st. kilda. about 400 feet from our dark alley in st. kilda.

He told me it was called the Regal. And how well it was named!

The street populated entirely by scary shadows with their head full of drugs (mostly crystal meth). And the Regal, covered in graffiti with its sign proudly displayed.

How fucking Regal.

He said anyway, that I should call back about an hour or so later, you know, to collect some smoo.

So I went home, strumming Joe, 104 and the Regal over and over in my mind so I wouldn't forget it later on.

I went back an hour later looking for John in room 105 and got nowhere, confused befuddlement from people very very on drugs who really didn't want to be bothered, in an I probably am heavily armed and don't want to be bothered sort of way.

So I stood there smoking a fag wondering what to do as a young lady walked right by me and gave this hoodie in the shadows a ferocious hug as he handed her a small brown bag containing narcotics I can only speculate on because the street was completely cast in shadow.

I went up to them and she immediately assumed I was on pills (eckies here) and asked if I wanted a hug or something.

Seriously.

Anyway, I declined in a giggly sort of way (In a street full of scary people on drugs, its generally best to try and also be a scary person on drugs, because if you aren't, you are the person with the target painted on your ass)

I asked if she knew John (cant believe I forgot the name) I was waiting for him, he said he could get me some weed.

"Mike, he wants weed" she roared out to hoodie still in the shadows.

The kind of yell on a dark alley that makes you jump. The kind of yell you really don't want to be about drugs and the kind of yell you definitely don't want to be about you and drugs and you buying drugs right now, with your own money in this dark alley here, as the patrol cars meander by every ten odd minutes or so and slow down as they pass staring at you as all of these people are too drug-riddled to care.

So she told me to wait for 5 minutes. I waited for 7 before a sober looking Regal resident ambled on by and I forgot about her. I asked him if he knew a long haired guitarist named John. He said no, and look confused before the cobwebs lifted. "Joe. You must mean Joe!"

Yeah. Joe. Whatever.

"Hang on, I'll buzz him for you."

He buzzes 104 as I laugh to myself and kick myself for forgetting his name and his room number in under an hour.

Joe comes down, flanked by a burly black dude.

"What?"

Just barked out mono-fucking-syllabic what.

Nothing else, no flame of recognition at all in his eyes, just what.

"Umm.... I'm Nick. We were talking earlier, about guitars, and you said you could sort me out. Bit of smoke remember?"

He points to the dude he came out with and just shuts the door on me and him, leaving us again in the total dark.

I'm really confused by this point. The nice guy who let me in realises I'm looking for drugs and immediately hightails it back into the Regal, regretting his neighbourly behaviour in aiding my score. Joe, that cranky bastard, has fucked off stage left back to his drugroom to be on drugs after mumbling one word at me and pointing so I have no idea where he is, what he is doing or what the hell I am doing there.

The poor guy in 105 is hanging out the window wondering why I kept buzzing his room asking for someone called John and this crackhead is standing next to me, thrusting a rolled up bit of tp into my hand and telling me "that's 15 bucks."

Wait... What's 15?"

I started to unroll the TP.

"Chrissake not here man" says big burly drug dude and he pulls me out of the light of the front door of the falling down Regal lodging house.

He says "You wanted some pot man yeah?"

Yeah

"Well this is a gram, its 15 bucks."

Well actually do you have any more?

His eyes go to heaven.

He is on meth, and full of these visions that he is in fact sober, holding it together, sorting out everything for everyone and being on top of it all, his money, his supply, his dealers and his customers. In reality, he is weaving up and down the street barely able to stand or hold the fag he is huffing on, whilst talking about star wars and cursing and roaring really loudly about all the illegal things he has in his pockets to sell me and how his name is Chucky, but folks call him Sith or Chef (cos he is a meth cook).

I was like a kid in a candy store.

Well, sorta.

Anyway, so I asked him for some more, he says he has none. I took the gram and made to leave but something clicks in his brain and he mumbles hang on, does a john wayne shuffle and grabs me back. I asked him for 2 grams more. I only had 40 bucks on me.

(I decided not to bring out more than 55 because I was pretty certain I would get mugged)

He calls someone who lives, surprise surprise, in the fucking Regal (probably on fire by this stage) and we wait in the fucking alley, as fuck knows who strolls by looking pretty fucking mean and like they could not only beat the shit out of me, but also that they could use me as a toothpick to pick the parts of cars they were just eating whole out of their lack-of-teeth.

So I'm not exactly comfortable as Chucky gets more and more agitated about weed. Then he starts talking about star wars. And I tell him he looks like Boba Fett. (Fuck it, he did, I don't know what to say to these people, but I didn't want there to be an awkward silence between me and the crack addict or anything) he smiled at that.

He asked if I had the change for the rest of the drugs, 40 bucks.

I did.

I gave him 5, a sort of a thank you for the connection. He demanded i take his phone number. By this stage, it was quite difficult for the guy to stand up, talk, and try and unlock his phone, so he falls against the wall, huffing.

I took his phone and got his number to save him the hassle of remembering what he was doing. He took it back and put it in his underpants (don't ask why, I, for once, didn't)

He asks me "Do you wanna go back to my place? We can get totally fucked up on speed! Man I cook the speed. I deal to hells angels you know" And on and on and on, more star wars, whatever his speed addled head remembers until the Regal opens its doors, another silent beardie old dude walks out, does that secret handshake thing with Chucky to get the buds. That secret handshake that of course all police can never see, some blank in their vision, as Chucky roars about how he wants 5 bucks of the deal because he sorted it out and how it's a shitty deal anyway and how he will never deal with him again., Chucky hands over the money, nobody says anything, the Regal closes up again, and again its me in a dark alley in fuck knows where with a drug dealer next to me who can barely stand but really wants me to go home with him. Like a lot. So I made up some shit about girl.... mumble.. waiting on the smoke... blah blah blah. I'll call you again hey thanks for the hook up man blah blah. On and on like this until we both stroll back onto Grey st. and street lights. Thank God.

So I mumble a seeya and make to cross the street hoping Chucky won't follow.

He doesn't, but shouts after me

"24/7 man, I'm open 24/7"

At least I made sure that everyone on the surrounding three block area knows where to score their dope if they fancy some banter with a meth addict.

Cool.

I half-ran half-hopped home in the eerie streetlight that blots out the black empty void of St. Kilda night. The night that comes in low and fast and early, swallowing all stars and moonlight and bathing the toes of Victoria in a total dark in the alleys where the electric hum of civic lighting fails to penetrate.

I made it back quick, quick before I had to think about what I had just done in the light of all the promises to my parents about not taking risks with strange foreign druggies on dodgy streets at night.

Home fast so Sarah wouldn't worry that I was gone too long without giving her a text.

Home fast so my brain wouldn't dilly dally into the whole world I can't seem to mould for myself here.

Home fast to warmth and wine and food and drink and the buzz of unsober tranquil bubbly night.

Home fast so that vast unmalleable ball of St. Kilda didn't crush me down one tiny bit more with the reality of the always real, the fretting for money, the fretting for work and the fretting for the comfortably numb humdrum jazz of mournful ideals. That sun- sinks-to-night rhythm that taps out the rest of our days like a long, ever-louder funeral march.

Words that Joanna said to us before we left were playing on my tongue.

I started counting the letters and letting the sentence flow through my brain until it slowly flooded all other thoughts.

It's a trick of visualisation that I use like a child, to pull that sentence you have just heard, those sentences that you know are important, and take it out in one piece from the aural buffers like a glistening sword. Then you leave it hang in the air for just a second to settle, hovering and glistening in front of your eyes, for just a second before it becomes too clear, then draw it deep into your mind, slowly, from end to end, like you would drain the dregs of a nice Amarone into your mouth, leave it mingle and then pass on into permanent storage for later self-flagellation.

And it wasn't meant as an insult, or to upset, just a piece of sage advice proffered by the universe directly to us.

This time the universe, ever-cunning and always playful Universe, had again morphed its message through the filter of unexpected afterthought. It's chosen form on this occasion was our great friend, sometime house mate and longtime psychiatrist who was possibly largely unaware of the wisdom, the universe's hand in taking over her mind that second or how lasting an effect the Universe's words and it's great ventriloquist trick would have on us before this trip gets done.

“You know, no matter where you go, your problems have a way of following you.”

And it's true, inescapably, wonderfully, terrible true. We packed so much more baggage that day when we first took to the airport than we ever could have known checked in with us, and unpacked it here without delay. And with that sword of truth can be explained so much of the petty, temporary misery I have berated myself with on the path to settling back down here, and maybe, just maybe, with more hidden messages, send us on the path to a kind reality that we can keep up with either here, or somewhere on this big blue coin.

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.

Resting, leaving, travelling, finding something and then that great feeling that returns to being just beyond reach.

On then, from Nimbin, we drove to Byron bay. We had breakfast in Lismore on the way, surveying yet more of the damage and getting out quick from that unpleasant little berg. We planned to stay in Byron bay, in a nice little hotel, but couldn't find a one when we arrived and logged on the Internet to look them all up. So we were slightly defeated, and I decided fuck it, lets just drive to Brisbane. So we drove the three odd hours to Brisbane looking for a hotel. We stopped at the airport, thinking cheap accommodation would proliferate, but none was obvious.

I drove into Brisbane, right into the city from the mad 5 lane freeways, highways and byways. We parked on Anne st. in an underground car park in the City centre, right outside the Museum of Brisbane and walked around for an hour, staring at skyscrapers and looking for hotels.

We asked in a Holiday inn, and they told us that from Monday to Thursday there are no beds to be had in Brisbane. So we got back in the car and drove weary to Surfer's paradise.

By this stage it was hitting half six and already pitch black outside .So somehow, without getting lost once after getting directions from a brisbanian, we found ourselves on the right road out of Brisbane back to the Gold Coast and Surfer's paradise which I had passed at 140km/h on the same freeway not three hours before.

We got to Surfer's paradise and I was shocked by the vista, the smoky silhouette of cityscape lit up so high the lights rivalled the stars. They have skyscrapers! It’s like a tiny wonderful city for stoners fresh from Nimbin, surfers and other random fun seekers devoid of pretension. None of your soy milk here.

We pulled in at a Marriott, a huge and feminine skyscraper some 40 storeys tall, flirting and teasing the skyline. It was a happy accident that we went there, as it was the only thing we could definitely navigate ourselves towards, with weary eyes on large and ever changing multi laned roads. We were doing all of the driving without streetmaps, relying on signs and intuition and petrol station wisdom to steer us right, and it always did.

So we pulled up, I parked illegally outside the Marriott. With fatigue setting in, the joy I felt at being free of the car made it feel like arriving in Makkah, and I prayed that they had a free room.

I spied the restaurant next door with a glare of hunger. I noted the bottle shop on its bottom floor for later. I was desperate to begin this night and the celebration. They had a room, incredibly, prayer answered! And more incredibly, it was super cheap, on the 12th floor, with a great view, TV, right in the centre of a town flanked by other huge sky scrapers, and we could see the whole ocean vista of the sleepy, grumpy pacific from our balcony. What a place and what a night!

We smoked and drank and drank and smoked, giggled at TV and had a great hotel night of it, with Chinese takeaways and mini bar chocolate, champagne and red wine called Promised Land, the same red my boss bought me as a goodbye before I quit my job to come here.

And it did feel like the Promised Land.

I had wine and more wine downstairs, and was sequestered with the most beautiful girl in the world in a great hotel that cost no money in a place with Paradise appropriately in the title. How could anyone not have fun in that situation?

So we had the night of nights, the best night of this whole shindig since we started, and I got hammered, we watched scarface, and digital TV, we stared in awe at the view. We went stoned shopping around the bright wide streets and overheard a drunken English couple arguing about infidelity. The girl promised that she wouldn't ever sleep with another man, that if she did stray it would only be with women. The man accepted this and they loudly declared their love for each other. Then slurping noises, then they disappeared.

We went back to the hotel and more drugs.

I fell asleep, or passed out, I don’t remember, early and elated.

I woke up well rested at eight am, somehow someway, flying in the face of the sweet abuse of smoke. I found a local post office to get stamps and envelopes before Sarah woke up. I came back and brewed up that sickly sweet single serving of hotel room coffee. I smoked a spliff and drank in the caffeine on our balcony. The rolling coast was so close I thought I could touch it, or jump in from our balcony.

In awe of the view yet again.

I woke Sarah up with coffee, and another wee smoke, and we went to breakfast, I posted off our weed and we drove back to Brisbane airport, arriving fresh some hour late and having to pay an extra 25 dollars on the car (big fucking deal).

I dropped it back, and they told me I drove 2225km in 4 days and 2 hours! How delightful to know! The entire east coast in 4 days somehow. I think we are the first to do it, and may well be the only ones ever to enjoy it, but I will beat my road miles record again before I finish this trip. It's an ambition.

We ambled around the airport, ate cardboard airport fast food. We waited around reading, took our flight home, took a cab from Melbourne airport in rush hour and arrived in our apartment, the one I told you I was sorry about never living in and was planning on not living in until some two days before when we booked the flights back to Melbourne for some reason in some internet cafe or other.

We got our keys, paid our cheapo rent, met the lovely Irish girl from Cork who was working for the place, walked to a supermarket to pick up coffee and milk and booze and the whatnots of settling down, and I find myself here.

For what seems like the first time in ages I am settling here indefinitely and have nowhere to drive tomorrow and it all feels great. What a 4 days. What a crazy 4 days. I have finally broken the seal of adventure on this trip and I'm beginning to feel like this is all worth it after all.

Promised Land is sometimes more than a cheap bottle of nice Australian wine, but equally as fleeting.

We had a lovely late breakfast in Post Macquarie and got back, a bit browbeaten, into the car and the familiar rhythm of fifth gear driving on straight lines. It was hard to keep our happiness up. So we decided, fuck it, no matter how long it takes or how hard we have to drive, it's Nimbin time, ASAP.

So we took the main highway on to Sydney, about 180km from our start point. Things got a bit choppy and it was a tense drive through the Sydney streets, at high speed, tight lanes, angry drivers and many shunting stops for traffic, but we got through unscathed, despite anxious glances at the watch whilst stop-starting and low-gearing through. And from Sydney, the roads deteriorated drastically. No more beautiful two lane dual carriageway to overtake the slow coaches, it turned to two way roads where overtaking opportunities were scarce and frustration and too-low-speed driving was getting to me. The beautiful ever-changing verdant scenery was continually amazing, and it was just nice to be out of the mad 6 lane highway and constant lane-merging, picking, choosing and half-panicked half-exhausted orienteering in Sydney. We found another hickish town to pause for hick lunch in. Not much to be said about it, its fading from memory, except that beetroot does not belong in burgers and people around there don't seem to know what chicken soup is.

Nimbin, in my little group of close friends, has it's own lore. It's a sort of stoner beacon that beckons every midnight toking backpacker to it. It's renowned for forgotten nights of thick weed brain fog, strange encounters with the shabby locals when trying to score, and a town that literally stops dead at 6 for all its inhabitants to roll up, toke up and get some downtime. It's like if Amsterdam were moved to my tiny town, Castleconnell, and never expanded further. It seems to exist for locals to grow their own and powered by curiosity tourism and gawking at the very strangeness of its existence.

We were desperate to get there as soon as possible, if only to take a break from the constant driving, and to get there, we had to drive some back-roads through another isolated berg named Lismore. This meant taking a turn off the main highway onto much smaller fare, with plenty of curves, trees and wildlife to distract.

For the entire 122 odd km from the highway to Lismore on that weird little road, we didn’t meet one other car going the same direction as us. We met a few going the other way, and they seemed like flies, buzzing angrily along the road desperate to get somewhere, anywhere other than the nowhere we were on the weird Australian purgatory of that road.

The feeling of total loneliness comes upon you suddenly, but on those roads, it was like a hitchhiker you immediately regretted picking up.

I decided to get on and ignore it, and turned concentration to steering the car hardfast through turn and tail on its slippery feet on dampy forest roads. I was eyeing always the close treescape; weary of deer, koala, kangaroo or whatever else that could threaten the rental car and cost me a fortune in minimum accident excess. But that aside, I was still going very very fast, about 140km/h on a 100km limit road. I swung the back of the car around corners, and gunned it sharp, braking before each and accelerating cold fast and steely into each corner. The aggression of this road stretch gave me some relief, yet again arriving just in time. It seems if I hang in and grin and bear the strangeness of my own thoughts, eventually I can kill it with some sweet relief in the simpler things.

As I was starting this drive, Lismore, our intermediate destination, was hit with the worst hailstones in its or New South Wales' recent history, and was fast on the way to being declared an official disaster zone. When we arrived, there were leaves, torn from the trees, masking every street. New South Welshmen stood puzzling, surveying their cars, and practicing amateur actuary whilst breathing in deep and sighing. Cars were pockmarked with dents, trees were down, windows were broken, the whole place just seemed beat down and wrecked. And this is one of those small Australian hick towns. Its not your common backpacker resort, it's off the beaten and just exists for the locals. A red neck pollop between Sydney and Brisbane connected by shitty roads, with a few tourist concessions to its proximity to much greater towns, but largely an angry buzzing little hubbub of petty masculinity, like fifties Texas. The cognitive dissonance of hating non-locals versus needing the tourists seems to have given everyone in town a headache. So we drove on through the disaster zone, delighted that we decided to take time over breakfast, as if we had left an hour early, the rental car would look like a colander.

So on we went, the short hop from Lismore to Nimbin, running into 5:30 6pmish before we managed it, The road from Lismore to Nimbin got worse again, strange flitty tight turns, roads like yo-yo dieters, widening and thinning rapidly and without warning. Cars sped past in both directions, overtaking devil-may-care on tight corners.

I took it slow, tired from all the exertion, and barely broke the speed limit, though I did barely break it the whole way, encouraged by local driving.

First off, Nimbin is the smallest town you have ever been to. It's just a tie-dyed little street, in the middle of nothing. A peculiarity of nature, a strange mountainshape of three fingers pointing up mark the skyline, flanking you on the left as you drive in. A restaurant, a bar, some shops that close before 6 and some backpacker lodges. During the day it bustles with tourists, and street performers, but at night, the town likes to get down to its main hobby, the intensive abuse of locally sourced and spicy marijuana.

So when we got there, we got there to a town with one shop open, one bar open, and one restaurant open. Tourists ambled wide-eyed, either waiting desperately for the offer of maryjane from some of the scruffier drug-addled locals, or desperately trying to avoid it.

I walked to the shop, bought tobacco. On the way the offer came, loud, one-worded. We accepted quicksharp, delighted. He took us into a little zip-down style tent door on the dark fringe of the tiny town. The front porch marked the waterline where the electric lights of the town went no further, so as the place we were entering was almost entirely obscured in the thick soup of fresh dark.

In through the door, by pulling some string that was rigged to some ingenious pulley system in a way I didn't understand and we arrived in a tent-like habitation that had clearly been there forever. The rope-pulley system ran through the whole 15 feet of shambly tent, and this told the owners whenever anyone was about to walk in. The floor was pebble-clad, and there were sofas lined up, places to chill out and sit down. The only light came from coloured rope lights on the ceiling and flickering TVs showing Mexican cartoons and music videos at low volume. The entire structure was canvas and detachable. There was no back wall that was just a patio onto the backgarden. We didn't go further than the tent-room, but could continually hear cute dogs squabbling and inane chatter from the back as we sat waiting. Some more largely personalized tents sat out there, shabby places where the owners clearly slept. The place reeked of the weed that was being passed around from local to local in the strongest spliffs I have ever toked!

So we were told that this "Musicians club" got into the swing about 7:30pm and that if we wanted our buds, best to come back then. We hung around, digging the vibe of the place and the strange very Australian stoner folk rock one man and his guitar music they were playing.

After about half an hour our stomachs called us back out to streetlit Nimbin centre and the one restaurant, we ate there, and then found a hostel that a local stoner recommended to us. Granny's farm it was called. It sat outside town, well into the darkness of Australian night and away from the town. A tiny dirt road with a sign pointed us there, and after heaving over and steering clear of swimming pool sized craters on the tiny road, we pulled up near a lit patio with 5 or 6 people milling around happily, shooting the breeze.

When we arrived we were greeted by the hostel owner who was drinking wine with his mother (Presumably Granny) in front of an unsmoked spliff and there was a taste of weed in the air.

He gave us a double room key, we were happy with it; we left again with the car.

I drove the maybe 800 feet into town, as it was so dark we couldn’t safely traverse the terrain on foot. I parked in front of the bar. We had a quick drink and a game of pool, while we talked to a trackmarked Layne Staley-abee and an aboriginal drainer who kept trying to sell me weed the whole time I was there. They stank like sweat and pain and dirt. Like Middle Australia. We walked back to the tent, and lo and behold, we heard Irish voices outside!

The Navan accents of two lonely guys called us to companionship, like Nimbin called us for the tokes. We smoked a fag outside with them, and it wasn't long before we were tipped-the-nod, led inside and were feasting and rolling on the prodigal weed, talking shite about everything and setting up an Irish corner in the sitting room cum tent cum coffee shop that we had somehow been thrown into together.

A whim of the gods.

We stayed smoking and rolling till the Irish guys left for their beds, then a little longer again till after the guitarist, who had been playing us sweet weedfolk music all night, disappeared somewhere and we were left alone with the owners. So we left and headed back to the hostel. The weed was hydro-organic, grown probably within stones throw of where we were wobbling, stunk to the heavens, and one of the buds, I shit you not, was the size of a tennis ball.

So we ambled shoddy back to the hostel, to drink our wine and rest weary on hard stranger mattresses. The locals with a sort of red-pupiled polite disdain eyed us. I guess, a form of stoner snobbery.

Man, I turned that key on the little double doors of our hostel, and the first thing that struck was the spiders flanking and gaining advantage on us immediately on all sides. There wasn't a wall that wasn't covered in webs. I immediately set to spider slaughter. And that took about half an hour and the walls were still covered in webs.

I chased muscular fuckers, speedy bastards, evil looking multi coloured spider cunts that you would run a mile from Ireland, and I killed them all to the best of my eyesight and ability. Then we set to the bottle of red and smoking so much weed our eyes turned Chianti.

We passed out late, trying to ignore the insect fear, and woke early, immediately rolling a spliff to dispel any more unknown insect fear. That helped.

Day two, the raggedy-anne-doll feeling of just being.

Well it's day two of the great Australia drive 2007 and we managed to hit another 600km, driving on and off from 9:30 until 6:30. I woke up too early, with red eyes from tiredness and the eternal flap flap of insects getting too much to bear for my changeable mood.

It was just strange, really strange, to wake up and have to wait ten seconds until you remember just where you are. The driving was getting to me a little more than I wanted to let on. A Mc. Donald’s breakfast set us up for the road again, to take on Sydney and on up the coast.

Sleep last night was stunted. Our little queen bed sunk towards the middle, and I guess with the place we were in, we were both jumping, moaning and groaning every time a moth darted at our window or flitted around UFO in our room. So sleep last night didn't top 5 hours, which was fine for me, but Sarah needs more, most people do.

We drove without stopping past Sydney to Gosford, where we stopped for Australian Reptile Park. What a zoo! Alligators and crocodiles and other evil looking reptiles. We watched them safe behind a fence as they hunted us and snarled at each other.

Kangaroos mingled with the crowds. We got to pet them! Can you believe, petting a kangaroo? Their hair is as soft as cotton wool; they are more docile than sleeping kittens. A park ranger "milked" a snake, the 4th deadliest snake in the world, a Black tiger snake or some such. He gingerly let him out of his cloth prison, aggling him out with a 5-foot hook, then grabbed him by the tail and slowly worked up till he had a death grip on his throat. The snake was introduced to a plastic cup, which he bit, and they held up the microphone so we could hear the pop as his fangs broke through the plastic, to inject a huge amount of venom into a sterile cup. The place is apparently the world's largest producer of anti-venom and other such noble causes. We hung around for a few hours, loving the animals and loving that we got to see some or real Australia with it, and bush walks, and talks about how to survive a snake bite (by bandaging up the spot as if it was a broken arm, say, and also to never wash the bitten area as the only way that they can know what kind of snake bit you is by swabbing the skin to test the venom) Australia is home to the ten deadliest snakes in the world.

They had a smattering of evil, truly evil looking and huge spiders that made my skin crawl, birds I had never seen, Tasmanian devils, and my favourite part too. The house that they keep and observe the platypus is called the platypussery. Beautiful!

But too soon the road crawled back up on our backs and again I was gunning the car's uncomplaining engine for another 4 hours of straight driving, until we landed on the coast, just about 6:30pm as the sun was setting, to Port Macquairie, a lovely seaside tourist town, with surfing and other high excitement sports I have limited interest in but am excited to spectate on.

We asked for info in a petrol station, the font of all important hotel hostel motel and directions based information.

As soon as I got out of the car I got worried. The petrol station lights, that light the pumps so you can see how much of your money is being given to an oil company to pollute the earth, even in the dark, was almost entirely obscured. There was yet another swarm of angry insects, buzzing hopping and biting over each other to get closer to the light, like Christians in the Armageddon. This was not what I was looking for, the kind of situation we are used to, or the kind of relaxation you expect from a seaside resort, so yeah, when it came to finding a dingy motel or some sort of god awful hostel, insectwise, it didn't seem a good bet.

I think it was right then that we decided, enough is enough, we are putting ourselves through a lot, so it's beautiful hotel time! Why not? We booked into the Observatory, Port Macquarie, parked our car in the lush private lot, took the carpeted elevator upstairs and tucked in to two bottles of cheap fizzy. We booked into a suite, that's some top-end hotel accommodation, which exceeded all possible expectations. It has everything! Washers, dryers, walk in showers, clean new ovens, TV, DVD, the hugest bed in history, a suede, yes suede sofa.

For me though, the real sign of lush comfort, as well as wine glasses it had champagne flutes! And coasters. I insist on the coasters for some reason. It just seems like more comfort, and for the price (under 70 euro each) it seems just plush and delightful and worthwhile after our last few weeks or whatever it is here, time seems to zip by and it also seems ages since I left everything behind. And so we must sit here tonight, and decide how to continue. Is it back to Melbourne for jobs and the old apartment hunt, or on to Asia, or maybe to Eastern Europe for some cheap fun, on to Amsterdam for a few weeks of chill out, and then back to our lives in the dull as dishwater. I just don't know.

I will be sickened to check out tomorrow. And that says a lot.

But what a night we had. Of externalised internal contemplation, chalkboard ideas being rubbed out and re-writ continually as our opinions got eroded and refreshed. Drunken discussion, argument and consultation, on just what and where we are.

And its all just seeming too much, and then all too little, and its time to go home, but its time to stay and man up.

So I sat out on the balcony for a final smoke before the sleep of the weary traveller, jerking off the stars like any stupid poet in silent awe, as midges swarmed around me looking for nick-tid-bits and finding a face full of fag-fumes.

day one. On the road. (Guess where I got that title from)

Another crazy day in Australia passes into inky dark night.

I write this from room 27, on 93 Auburn st., in a place called Goulburn in New South Wales, another new state to add to my collection, town population 20,000 odd of died-in-the wool Aussies and not a backpacker, tourist, traveller or Irish bar in sight.

We are in a motel room, about 25 euro each for the night, on the good side of tipsy with 4 cans of Amsterdam's finest to go and the lights off, tv blasting in the background.

My little Yaris sits outside, centrally locked and resting after the abuse I gave it today, which, to its eternal credit, it took like a masochist. I drained a full tank from it, and what use I got out of that tank!

The sun sets here at about 7pm. It's still on the chilly side of spring, but of course, as we drive further east, the temperature literally rises a degree with every 100km we gain north-easterly.

I spent the sunset driving away from the horizon and towards Sydney, on the glorious 888km of Freeway that some poor fool had to build to link Sydney with Melbourne, flanked with innumerable gory Kangaroo carcasses, and the inverdible interlinking and ever changing knuckle scenery of hills, dales, farms, trees, mountains, cows, solid rock, and a million other glorious things you will just have to come here to see.

I spent the morning, and the hangover from last night's Melbourne swansong, driving from Melbourne, trying to find a freeway, any freeway that takes us east, and stop-starting and shaking with nerves in an unknown car in a huge city the likes of which I have never seen, let alone navigated amidst 5 lanes of crazy, u-turns, undertaking, and the Melbourne Marathon notwithstanding.

A sense of power, regained from the ashes of my swift depression slowly returned as the car and I got to know each other and begun to flirt. I gunned it softly, making the engine hum and purr that just right mix between power and refinement. The noise like a small concerto, and re-igniting my love of driving that had been lost to me for the three weeks I had spent without my little Clio.

My average speed for the trip today, some short 8 hours of driving (Including countless breaks in those awful service stops that big freeways always have) between ten thirty and six thirty, broke the highest speed limit by about 4km.

I am immensely proud!

I think that's only the 2nd law I have broke since I came here, so it was nice to achieve something while I was stuck sweating and smoking behind the wheel hitting 140km/h in my 1.0 litre whore of a car.

The 3rd law to be broken, I hoped, was to be drug smuggling some herb across state lines. Nothing like weed to settle you into a new kind of strange.

We travelled something like 850km today.

Can you imagine!

In 8 short hours on a beautiful straight line, with no red lights, no traffic, no stop-start humdrum of daily commuting, just an ever present two lane freeway called something like Hymen (Hume I later remembered, but would still ask Sarah, the navigator and co-pilot, to find the Hymen Highway to get back to driving from adventure)

I stopped plenty, to drink water and treat the sunburn on my right hand that sears through the driverside window, and piss and work out the pain in my stomach from yet more too-rich restaurant food.

But here I am, triumphant!

It's beautiful, to start on something, and to succeed, and to enjoy it in the process. It's another tiny footshuffle forward towards success and achieving, amassing hope and conquering that cursed depression.

We pulled off Hymen, weary, into a tiny town, Goulburn that we picked at random from our backpacker book because of the proliferation of cheap motels. It sits snugly inland, about 100 odd km from Sydney.

And why, might you ask, did we not drive on till 8 and make Sydney? Because Sydney, at the moment, is covered in a plague, yes, an honest-to-god plague of moths, (The words of the local news, and not my own) Sarah's most feared of insects, and not something I enjoy spending my night killing and chasing for her security either. Though of course, if she commanded that they all die, I would be on the road to Sydney now with a fly swatter, a grim determination on my face, and some cans of insect repellant to take out those that flew beyond my reach.

But yes, even as I type I can actually, and this is no exaggeration, I can hear them, at least 100 of the flappy flitting fuckers, outside our windows and door, flying about, anxious to make love to the tiny light we have left on in the hotel room.

That's right. Even 100 miles from Sydney, we too are trapped by the plague. Pictures in the news showed postboxes, pillars, cars and street lights literally covered with the evil insects, so as you couldn’t' even see anything but a pukey swarming shape of what they were covering.

I have never seen or experienced anything like it, outside the pages of the bible or a bad horror movie! And yet here I am, throwing myself in the middle of it, and as I drive tomorrow, I know its destined to get worse before it gets better, but it's a fun kind of strange, and I am sated by the freedom of having a car, a direction to drive in, and hopes of a better tomorrow are winning out over regrets from a shitty yesterday.

When we finally arrived here, by god I can say honestly I never wanted to see a car again! And after the obvious first necessity of getting a bottle of wine to chill out the night with and reward myself for my driving, and why not, because dammit, 800km straight! From Limerick to Dublin and back, twice over! In a day!

But yes, I did it. I cut through a good half of our drive, that we have given ourselves 4 days to complete. And it was as if every time I ever got in a car, every lesson, passing my test and all was in preparation for taking drives like this, where you gear change and accelerate, overtake and undertake so much that the climate changes, the scenery changes entirely, and suddenly plagues of insects show up to spoil the party!

So we got our little bottle of vino tinto, Australian Shiraz with a pleasant bite.

The air in the place muted, the Rugby team just lost to the English, or the Poms as they are called here, with a newfound bitter vehemence since last night's result. And it has set in an air of hard drinking and depression, quietude and bitter language that we have little interest in beyond the fact that all our hosts seem bemused by it.

Of course, being Irish, or Canadian Irish or whatever it is I am, I hate the English, (it's not their fault really). I just learned that my far distant relations, some hundreds of years earlier in a rural Wexford town had fought them and survived a bloody massacre at the Battle of Vinegar Hill.

My own name, apparently, harkens back to Brian Boru, though it's hard to chase a lineage that far back, over myth and under half-truth.

From being at home, where I was forced to watch the rugby games with my father, I know because I saw it with my own hazel-browns that England were playing really badly, the Wallabies were on fire, and so how did it transpire that they lost to the old enemy? I don't know, nobody here knows, and the whole thing has upset an entire nation (except for the kangaroos, though you wouldn't know it, considering the amount of them that seem to delight in throwing themselves in front of cars).

So we checked into our motel, as you know. We were planning on getting hostels, but there are no hostels in town, and not wishing to reach the epicentre of the plague and venture further driving unknown roads in the dark, we decided on a super cheap motel. And that's what we got. It's pleasant in a shambly way (rather echoing the entire trip so far). We have a room with a queen bed and it's little dauphin, a TV and a kettle, and a shabby little bathroom, and after haunting the poor car so long with my sweating and bad singing to keep up my interest, I am delighting in it!

The first thing I did, before Sarah could even enter the room, was chase innumerable moths with a large phone book and seal off every open-to-air section. I got to 12 on my mass-murder of those poor winged lunatics before I stopped counting, and collected the carcasses and buried them in the bin marked only with toilet paper for their grave. The final crunch of their tiny bodies is a sick kind of satisfying mixed with the haunting shiver of unnecessary murder. When we first got here, we were delightfully unaware of the plague, so when we opened the door to our winged roommates, I honestly thought that the motel was infested, and not the surrounding world, and was all set to throw my keys back over the reception counter in disgust.

But here we are.

I think the moths, aside from anything else, have finally galvanised us against working in Australia, though that's always subject to change, and here, with everything so new, the plan (if there ever was one to start) changes daily, hourly, by the minute. But what an omen! A biblical omen to match my newfound hodge podge spirituality. Of course, its barely been talked about, and its all in the air with the rest of God's gifts, but what's the point, when travel brings such strange newness to everything, in stopping to work in some job that doesn't match with our lives or wants or hopes at all?

But in any case, its to my sagging mattress in our cheap lovely motel with the moths flapping at the window and a chill in the night air, to sleep off the hangover of staring at straight lines and gunning the car all day, and plan how to get to Nimbin, where the lore surrounding the weed and hipsters has us entranced.

Suffice it to say, I don't want to tell you anything about it, or us, or our state of mind, or the state of our travels, until we get there, and book some downtime with cheap smoke and wine to figure out just what the hell is the state of this trip!