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.