Shane Bordoli

Hey Zeus! available now in paperback

2011-12-26T17:35:00.008Z

Hey Zeus! - Shane Bordoli

2010-07-08T01:33:00.010+01:00

Hey Zeus!

Islam is the most misunderstood religion, Buddhism the most misspelled. Thoughts came easily to me. It was like playing chess with an infinite amount of pieces, but it seemed enough that I had chosen white; I had the first move. It was time for some female company.

I always felt uneasy waking at her place. Her pillows had the consistency of my dead mothers' fake tit. Especially off putting along side the Nazi horrors; the extreme terror of coke and booze withdrawal. Monday morning on the wrong side of weird.

Sleeping with a beautiful woman is like having a good wank, but all--beautiful-women-go-insane. The moon pulls rip tides across their souls. Sitting in the bath, razors in hand, a redemptive vision came to her; her very essence, squeezed in too tight for years, sprang forth, like a bar of soap between the fingers into the morning rainbow light; eureka.

I too seem to have lost my core belief that laying waste to ones beatific soul, if done with style, is the epitome, the very reason for existence. This will save me an awful lot of time and money. The joys of Fear and Loathing had become the seriousness of The Sorrow and The Pity; still enjoyable, edifying and not to be missed; but you laugh a lot less. Addiction, I may add for the uninitiated, can make things like being kidnapped and raped a passing comment during a rehab conversation; a regrettable side effect of a life lived in a bad direction.

Unless the girl wants to have a drink for breakfast, why sleep with her; that used to be my mantra. Let's not worry about that now though, no need to pour that big bowl of Prozac and Nytol, not just yet; it's amazing how soothing it is to cut out that bottle of vodka at breakfast.

It's the fall that hurts, not the landing. When you hit rock bottom there's always a springboard down there; if you're not dead already. You can make it back, but for the jaded, it's a steep climb up there. There are many ladders to the light, and even more snakes for the slide back down. The world is simply a reflection of your mind, reflecting the soul back to its self. From Henry Miller to Kim Katral the truth can struggle to be hard to publish.

I no longer worry about meeting a girls parents; I worry about meeting her kids. Music wise, every decade or so, something really good comes along, and it's usually The Fall. I'm happy in England, it's such a great place to be depressed and uncomfortable with ones self; no one even notices. The best place in the world to be is next to a 22 year old topless Israeli girl, on a empty South Indian beach at mid day, with a half bottle of vodka, listening to Billie Holliday. And I was still depressed then. A true Englishman.

listen to Hey Zues! on soundcloud:
Hey Zeus! by Shane Bordoli by shanebordoli

Hey Zeus! by shane Bordoli (music by Seymour Klearly); footage borrowed from Fritz Lang's Indian Tomb, part of his Indian Epic, featuring Debra Paget.. with an added twist of Dali & Warhol.

Charlie Don't Surf..

2010-02-03T23:26:00.014Z

A selection of my favourite morning hangovers: #1 thinking I had an evil spirit in me that did things when I was too drunk to remember. This is where my spirit did his work, or so I though for a bout an hour on badly hangover Sunday. William Burroughs had talked of this sort of thing, (the ugly spirit) and I thought I’d just have to live with mine. I thought my ugly spirit had torn up a girl’s phone number I liked, where in reality I’d just lost the bit of paper. A couple of drinks latter I realised this was nonsense as I slopped around the sound system looking like I’d been shot as I’d spilt so much red wine on myself. #2 Calling an ambulance after the Samaritans and national health service hot line. Only to have an overworked doctor look me in the eyes and say "how’s your state of mind". I was quickly discharged to sweat it out at home. #3 waking up convulsing violently on someone’s settee. I just managed to keep enough alcohol down to stave off a really bad episode. I walked strait into accident and emergency reception, but slunked out after the woman behind the desk looked at me a bit funny.

You wanna know 'bout drinking? It all comes back to that breakfast of champions. To save you the bother of finding out first hand, I have researched this area extensively. Purely for academic reasons, you understand. Firstly, you want to be as far away as possible to having no booze. The breakfast of champions after a three day bender is pouring vodka into a 3/4 full can of super strength larger out of necessity.

To sum up what a bender is. Day one is fun. The first morning after a good drink is great; you drink again because you feel great. King of the world. Day two you get what is known as "the thirst", where you have to drink, but you really want to because it feels so dam good. You drink all day and pass out, always my favorite drinking day. Day three or so you start getting get "the fear". It may carry on like this for a few days, if you’re in a good mood, or on holiday, or traveling. 4 days of constant drinking suddenly and waking up isn't such fun anymore, if it’s not checked by women, or some other higher power.

With any luck you won’t start convulsing when your body goes into alcohol withdrawal. This is where you wake up very nervous and paranoid; you can't look anyone in the eye. Hours spent pacing around the house, peeping if you dare out from behind the curtains. You realise its got to be some kind of breakfast of champions or you’re fucked. The life of a drinker varies through each of these fazes throughout each day. I only stopped when my dad died of acute alcohol abuse and I was finally hospitalised for 5 days with alcohol withdrawal symptoms. Is the sun over the yardarm yet? It is somewhere. I've come home at around 7pm more than once and been convinced its 7am. So drunk you can’t tell the difference, phoning people up for a second opinion, never sure whether to phone in sick or not. However it’s only after years of abuse that you get jaded. If your lucks in and your young enough almost anything is possible. What the hell, you could always right a book.

Vagabondage Soul

2009-12-24T00:16:00.010Z

Vagabondage Soul by albi!

I felt like I could handle the motorbike round these tracks on the edge of the jungle. One of my rare Marlboro Man moments. Real American Wild West mentality. But lest we forget, the question is not whether America saved us Brits in WWII, but why they took so long, while Coke designed Fanta solely for sale in the Third Reich post 1939 and IBM adapted and maintained systems for 'processing' Jews. A new bread of hero was now needed and that might just be me. Not good in a bar brawl but good in a bar at dawn. I had heard you could get opium up around here in the hills of North West Thailand. I went past a seemingly half alfresco hospital on the way up the winding dirt track. Not knowing I would spend some hours getting bandaged up their later, after another minor opium and moonshine spill. Later still I would meet a girl back in my hometown, who had spent time in the same hospital. She once rubbed my cock as I turned to kiss her friend.

The tracks lead past the hospital to a solitary collection of huts on low stilts. I pulled over by one and asked for opium. I bold move, but it paid off. The next time a guy hailed me from the side of the road, I thought my luck was in. He actually wanted to offer me a fried bug. I ate it of course. I had already eaten a boiled bug back in an opium hut. After my first score, I brought along a Dutch friend, Eelko and we ended up in this family’s hut eating dinner with them after smoking opium. I ate my bug down, when the head of the family offered me it to me. My Dutch amigo was so stoned he didn't realise what it was he held out in front of his mouth. Once he did, he let out a screech and flung it across the room. The family thought it was hilarious. I've had fertilised eggs offered too, and accepted by me, before now. It’s mostly done for shock effect I think, on both sides.

A nice evening meal was an added bonus. This was not long after the father had stoked our opium pipes, with our heads on block pillows. There was no threatening over tones. Smoking opium here was so far up the drug chain, the real cunts hadn't even got involved yet. No buying and selling of self esteem and nightmares here, just a transaction for a bit of fun. I smoked too much opium on a boat on the Mekong once, for aesthetic reasons. I think I had too-many-pipes. It was the coolest thing ever, until both the seller and I got greedy for our respective goals. It was Christmas Eve and I spent the whole of Xmas almost paralysed in bed, after throwing up in my rucksack liner.

The Joyful Plath

2009-12-06T00:36:00.014Z

“I am certain of nothing, but of the holiness of the hearts affections and the truth of Imagination - What the imagination seizes as Beauty must be truth”
John Keats

The Joyful Plath

I’ve got a port in every girl, but they’re no shelter from the storm. I was in the mood for that old tradition of opium smoking and I’m always one for tradition. I met my contact at the appointed time at the now closed out door beer bar on the banks of the Mekong. Its brown snaking waters lapped at the side of the battered old boat moored there that was to serve as my own private Opium den. That afternoon I had first met my contact whilst sat, gazing at the sinking of the giant orange sun. I made a covert agreement to meet him after hours. Everything seemed right as I sipped beer killing time before my moonlit rendezvous, exactly the sort of thing I find so romantic. There’s an innate realisation from the poppy to the vein that you tell nobody, especially not that Dutch guy you’re with, so it’s back to guest house and double back here to loose him. Like drinking its best savoured it alone.

Of course I wasn’t to be alone, Kham Dao was my provider and he coaxed me onto the broken down vessel. One pipe after another was placed between my lips. Through international sign language of the drug fucked we spent an hour as he filled my pipe, my head nestling on a cushion. An unnatural orifice had opened in the side of the boat which the gentlemen used as their exit point; they made an unusual couple; Albi, a traveller guy slumped on his feet and a local guy cutting through the night like a knife. Life, like motor sports or skiing, is only interesting when it goes wrong and like a mini cooper going down a slalom course it looked like it was going to be an interesting night.

The taxi ride home was slow motion mayhem. Having forgotten he was staying opposite the bar, he had the local driver take all over town looking for the Fall Flophouse and Grill. All he could get out of his mouth were the titles of his failed movie scripts; “Transformers in Jamaca, Robots In Da Skies” (his attempt to break into Hollywood), “The Antidisestablishmentarian’s Mistress” (his historical romance) and “Sexy Merlin” (his pagan Rom-Com); the taxi driver looked nonplussed. A few opium epiphanies later he found himself in his strange mirrored room. The following day was a Mekong whiskey fuelled an attempt to pull him self out of an opium stupor. From then on each morning he awoke to find a new empty bottle of whiskey on the floor and slogans scrawled in the lipstick of different $5 whores on his walls. The first slogan to appear was “The Jaws of Spring”. Easter had always been a real period of death and rebirth for Albi and this one was no different. Verses appeared on his walls like “April snapping tightly at my toes, a lark dropping dead at my feet, this unvanquished day shows what life forgoes”. This all spiralled into a lost week of injecting hookers with booze. Albi woke with his face in a plate of noodles and looked up from this bill of fare to realise he had to get the fuck out of this town. Besides, he had already booked passage up river with Zinc and Spengler; freelance alchemists who had bought the opium boat and inauspiciously christened her Spirochete. Albi was bound for the lawless lands.

Joining Albi as passengers on their lazy winding way up the Mekong were Ava Maria and Agnes Day; Holy Hookers from Chicken Town, that lawless city state at the head of the river. It was said that one lay from them and you became enlightened, but of late they had taken to bad habits, such as not putting out and saying they could only minister to ones own spiritual needs and enlightenment had to be achieved the long way round. Albi loathed the long way round, for anything.

Every night sleeping beside one of the girls he would constantly check their breathing to see if they were still alive. Something he had picked up through finding his mother, father and ex-girlfriend dead on various unfortunate days. But he always found them in the best Nabakov style, alive and unraped in the morning.

They put ashore in one of the many towns that had sprung up along the rivers winding ways through the Sadlands. Each was policed by their own mercenary force; here they were all ex-coppers from Europe. Inspector Thesaurus Puzzle headed up the team here. All were alcoholic and had a problem with authority. Cliché was the worst for it; you could often hear Puzzle shouting “I’ll have your badge for that, Cliché”. Too boring and implausible for their own well described home towns, they had ended up in this story. They were the only law in these Interzone towns; the only businesses here were whore bars and nightclubs. “$5 a throw, $15 dollar for the night” slurred Colonel Kuntz, the famous German sex tourist, as he staggered his way past Albi out of the nightclub on another rancid hot morning in this nameless town. The Clubs were a site to see; local guys dancing on the edge of the dance floor facing the full length mirrors that surrounded it, while girls with numbers on them paraded around for the customers; a mobile menu of human degradation.

Too much of this town would turn any true mans stomach and Albi was no different; it was only a matter of months before he tired of its wares and moved on up, over the hills on a dead whores Enfield, leaving Messrs Zinc and Spengler behind. They claimed to be on the verge of inventing time travelling Tofu, but after their time travelling teasmade debacle, Albi left them to it. He was heading for a last fling of opium and moonshine, before hitting Chicken Town and the very heart of darkness itself.

The Goethe Gaol Card

2009-10-22T01:25:00.026+01:00

If you bring forth what is inside you, what you bring forth will save you. If you don't bring forth what is inside you, what you don’t bring forth will destroy you. Yuz Asaf-Issa.

It finally ended when we smashed the place apart, piece-by-piece. There are few things more satisfying than physically destroying the place you used to work at with your own hands… whilst blind drunk. The place was The Workhouse bar, Leicester’s then premiere haven for underage drinkers and rug dealers, a real zesty, zeigisty sort of place. The year was 1992; I was 20, E’s were £15 each and you really did love everybody when you took one. These things are impossible to explain to anyone now, especially in the current social climate.

The drug dealers stood in the back alley and the real underage drinkers were in the doorways of the closed/closed down buildings either side of the front. You could, of course still smoke inside in those heady days. Though the smoking of drugs always came after we closed, staff only fringe benefits. The only place in England I’ve ever know smoking dope to be acceptable was the back room of the St Johns pub in Hull. Enid the old Landlady would come into the windowless back room in her slippers and bark at us to get out come closing time, our weary eyelids drooping as we shuffled out after playing Little Red Rooster by the Stones too many times on the old jukebox.

The workhouse was rumoured to have a Kinky Gym. I never quite new what this was but I know that rumours abounded about the goings on in that place. I know first hand there was no Kinky Gym, only an old bench press down in the cellar, classic Chinese whispers. The owner, a fat grubby Uncle Monty character, would offer £50 to any of us boys to let him suck them off. I declined, though not everyone did. Not that I’m adverse to cock, you know my mantra, “I take my coffee sweet and black, like the first cock I sucked”. There was enough perks of the job to keep us happy; smokes and drinks after work, free entry into the best club around for what we were into and free drinks if we stood talking to the dirty old man. Every pump in the cellar was connected to a weaker cheaper barrel than indicated by the taps on the bar. Taps that we enjoyed smashing off with a wooden mallet. Knees on the bar and bash that cider tap off, watch the cider spurting from the now open-ended pipe arc-like behind the bar. Now its time for the mirrors and the wall lights. There were three of us lads (all ex-employees) and my girlfriend. A mate ended up fucking her that night; I’d ended up with recent ex of his just before, but couldn’t quite close the deal, I couldn’t fucking get it up. That happened to me so many times in my early days and still does, Viagra or being in love are the only cures I’ve found.

Before the bar was finally closed down, which lead us to be left with the keys to a now derelict bar that fateful night, it had been the jewel in Leicester’s crown. The police had been so inept at raiding the place it was funny. Plain clothed policemen, looking very like plain clothed policemen would come and loom over the bar at lunchtime (we did a good trade in working lunches for the offices near by) and ask for drugs. We would say, “what are you talking about” and carry on as usual. When the busts began to come at night (the real illicit time) the owner would always receive a tip off first and inform the dealers. The dealers disappeared into the night within seconds. One morning after an attempted bust I found a bag of trips (Bart Simpsons’ in case you were wondering) and a 8th of weed the dealers had dropped in their rush to leave. Perfect for my first of many trips to Glastonbury that weekend. That was a weekend that changed my life, the peak of the rave years, a holy ground for the left field mind. Another time after work I found a scrunched up newspaper that contained some weird dried mushrooms. I went to my boss who told me they were magic mushrooms and how to prepare them. We took them later on a trip to Hull and giggled for hours whilst listening to HP Lovecraft (the psychedelic 60’s band) and the Grateful Dead’s first two albums. If you’re going to take psychedelics, do it in style.

The end was closing in on the Workhouse. I had gone away to University and missed the final throws of the dice. Eventually it was just too illegal to live. A time and a place that none involved will ever forget. I was introduced to the rapier gay wit there. After work one night I stood back to back with another guy, seeing who was the taller. The difference was marked. “It’s a good three inches” someone proclaimed. “There’s no such thing as a good three inches!” came the reply. Indeed.

We blamed the wreckage on local bikers and hoped we wouldn’t go to prison for the many thousands pounds worth of damage. Nobody ever came knocking. I sit here now all these years later pondering this and other more pressing matters. Like the wisdom of Barak Obama receiving the Noble Peace prize. The end of meaning for the Nobel peace prize; the Nobel prize for perpetuating most war crimes on other sovereign states soil; for his steadfast work on devaluing the currency of human rights/the Geneva convention in relation to Iraq/Afghanistan, rivaled only by the Israelis genocide of the Palestinians. Those war crimes are of course funded/backed by the new Obama administration as well. And if you think Obama or his administration make the decisions you’ve got some research to be doing online. Try Noam Chomsky, John Pilger and Alex Jones’ Prison Planet (http://www.prisonplanet.com/) for starters. The Workhouses where the poor refuges of the industrial revolution were forced to eek out their pitiful existence have been with us in one form or another ever since; sometimes it’s more manifest, sometimes more subtle. We all work in a giant workhouse these days and only a few of us have been bothered/lucky enough to figure it out, thanks to the likes of Noam Chomsky. Noam was due to get this years Nobel peace prize, but he was sidestepped for Obama. Selah. Any artist in the broadest sense, who doesn’t put across in her art the core beliefs of the free soul, needs her fingers braking. One by one. Crow bar it in there if you have to, subtlety not a prerequisite. Nothing is prerequisite. Gene Genet wrote Our Lady of the Flowers in prison again and again as it was confiscated, on the bags he was made to sew. I thought I needed a Mac book to get anywhere.

Artists are generally right-minded individuals. Dark creativity isn’t aesthetically pleasing; it’s the craft of war, grey buildings and politics. The creativity of light is words, music, colours and art from the heart. Sure Charles Manson made an album, but it was shit and its rejection was part of his descent into evil. Sure the third Reich appreciated art, but nothing came out of it, other than what seeped out due to their crushing of souls. Messiaen’s wrote and premiered the Quartet For The End of time in Stalag VII-A as a prisoner of the Germans in WWII, played on a few broken down old instruments they gathered together. It changed my life, merely by listening to it. Here we see dark against light in action. The dark obeys the rules and follows the uncontrolled delusions of self-love and hatred of other. The light obeys no rules and seeks truth as beauty and above all enlivens emancipation.

I could sense an epiphany was approaching; as I listened to the quartet playing in front of me, the arches in the cathedral walls became translucent. Two vast edifices rose above me, one white, one black, out of space and time they loomed over, one gave me a sense of foreboding and fear, the other hope. Across town I felt the old places where they used to keep criminals, the pub cellar that used to be men’s Jail and the pub that used to house the women before their execution. The spirit within me ranted for redemption. Reality rent asunder, I staggered for the door. The sky was overcast. Like lost peoples souls. I finally knew my spirit would forever ascend. I am cast down by my actions or rise with my love, but nevertheless we are all saved, like Goethe’s Faust, for it is our destiny, our evolution, and our goal, to become the bright white wisdom light; it’s the inexorable evolution of the soul.

Mammy Low Pt1 & 2

2009-09-29T23:58:00.008+01:00

"I keep asking myself - what would Gandhi do, or Abraham Lincoln or Martin Luther King, then I realize - those guys all got shot."
John Lurie

A stop over for a thriller in manila: one week to recover from jet lag and hangover from England before hitting Australia. Except in reality it’s only going to mean more jet lag and more hangovers. At least I had those downers; animal tranquilisers I had bought from home. After an aborted attempt to buy cigarettes, I was returning to my hotel defeated and discombobulated. It was then, that things took a turn for the more interesting.

Shola Luna was her name, gazing welcomingly from the sunny side of the street. She’s obviously a transsexual too, but beautiful and legs as long as an Icelandic summer. And tits like polar icecaps. She was famous for being famous in Manila, and no surprise there. First stop was a Tequila bar then on to Hobbits a bar staffed entirely by dwarves and midgets. Being thrown out of the night club in a 5 star hotel was the last thing I remembered of the night; the lady manager seemed to take exception to our outrageous manner.

Next day we go on the guest list to a first class fashion show, in the same 5 star basement, via one of Shola's benefactor who lends me a silk shirt. The manager’s manor now changed to obsequious smiles, ushering us to our seats. So here I am faced with the cream of Filipino fashion, girls so beautiful I can’t talk. If only I hadn’t taken those animal tranquilizers. The day, then days, blurred into one; Laurent Garnier playing in a night club where the locals and visitors all gaze longingly at Shola’s tits on total display through a sheer net top. I spent a night off with a bar girl. The young guy I sat with was intent on taking home the Mamma San, the middle aged and long retired woman who pimps out the girls; I left him bartering his price. The next afternoon Shola laughing in the doorway, my girl complaining from the bed about how the downers had made her oversleep.

I needed to get out of Manila. A couple of days with Shola by a volcano with an artist gentled me down some. I was convinced Shola wanted to rob me out there, in the wilderness, but nothing could have been further from the truth. My last night back in the metropolis ended with a lovers tiff, after staying up all night drinking, to catch the morning plane; Shola threatening to have me killed. And I new she could. It takes a while to realize people really do know killers and then you meet them yourself. A paid killer in India, who asks you why you didn’t wash that apple before eating it, after miming the action of shooting to explain what he does for a living, or that guy in Thailand who had made a car bomb and blew up his neighbour. After a snack of a fertilized egg, I staggered onto the plane at dawn, bound for Australia.

Part 2..

I stepped from the plane into the cultural ant-capital. I soon discovered a cultural void edifice the size of Uluru (that’s Ayers rock to you Nazi’s), akin to the immeasurable internal all consuming void edifice of my need for alcohol. I think its funny after being an alcoholic; I still can’t spell the word without spell checking it, much like my degree in Communication Processes, which I still can’t spell either……… Not that any of that mattered in such a godforsaken country as Australia. Maybe I could bring culture to this country like an old style missionary but bringing culture instead of Catholicism. There are of course the amazing Aborigines, but they have been hunted almost to extinction. I was due to stay a year and Sydney was my first stop. My first tentative steps, nervous with hangover fear, took me out of my dorm room and put me face to face with Kuntz (real name). He was a young German fellow with a handlebar moustache and a calibre of the likes you will rarely see again. He asked if I would share a bottle of fine wine with him, (its 10.30 am) as it’s his last day in the country. Never wishing to rile our Teutonic friends, I took part; what’s the worst that could happen? After all it would take him a day or so to get to Poland and he would have sobered up by then. This drinking session lasted 6 weeks. As Kuntz left he was replaced by a series of wonderful fellows, but my money and liver were wearing thin, after a louche month spent up the east coast in Byron Bay, involving booze, dope, a tad of heroine and a 24 hour pie shop. One day I had a moment of pan au chocolate clarity; a flash of genius; I could go and stay with my Nan and alcoholic step-granddad in Perth, that way I could save money and cut down on my drinking; I really believed this. 6 months later and was booking my flight home, financially fettered and exhausted.

My time there had been eventful though. There had been a lovely 17 year old who I fucked everywhere, she was always bra-less and only ever wore a short piece of hippie curtain material wrapped round her waist and never, ever any knickers. Her sharp nipples peeping strikingly through her top and red bush gleaming at me from across the room at a party, as she sat cross-legged on the floor. There were others too and a tip off for a fixed horse race that eased the financial troubles. I had a bar job to lessen my woes too. A titty club by day and a music bar by night. I ended the trip by hitching from Perth to Darwin. I hadn’t really figured on the distance; around 5 thousand miles. At the end of the first day I was hitching back to my gran’s again, with my tail and a leaky bag from a box of wine between my legs.

That in itself, turned out to be a Taoist blessing in disguise. I was too embarrassed to go back to my gran’s in the end and headed to my uncles, where I was tipped off my elusive other uncle John who I hadn’t seen in 15 years, had a trip up to Darwin planned the following day. He had only waited 25 years to get round to it and would be going unknowingly the same day as me on the 3-day bus journey. At the first truck stop I mysteriously handed over the dollars my other uncle had given me to pass on and said enigmatically “you don’t know who I am do you?” as I recognised him, but I was very different to the 8 year old kid he had last seen 15 years before when corrupting me by taking me to the then still controversial Monty Pythons Life Of Brian and giving me me a glass of gin. Having spilt some in the sink, someone thought I had tipped it away; could my prodigious alcohol abuse be put down to still trying to prove to those long gone critics that I could REALLY DRINK? John had always been my favourite uncle and we clicked again instantly. As I hadn’t been able to track him down during my spell in Perth I had settled for hanging out with The Drunks. The Drunks, as they were half affectionately known, were Peter and Barry. Both dead now of course; Peter turned Simpsons yellow as his liver failed and Barry has long since drowned in his own sorrows. They were so much fun, those guys. Once a week they would receive their benefit checks and duly head into Freemantle town to cash them in. Money in hand, they would proceed to spent a load of it on a day time drinking session that would see them awake the next morning with no recollection of the night before. Nothing unusual there, except that the bar they frequented was next door to a pet shop and they would often be surprised to find a Parrot or some such creature greeting them in their living room upon their hazy coming to of a morning. The Awakening of The Drunks was always an interesting ritual. The first to rise would sneak a can from the box of beer and with a tea towel tightly wrapped around the top to minimise the noise, gently spring it open; this was so the other would not hear and start on the limited amount of booze too.

I finally made it to Darwin after an uncomfortable penniless time in Broom, where I had left my uncle. On the way up to Broom each stop saw the people in these roadhouses know him by a different name, I never asked the details of why, I just left it as an enigmatic little story. Life’s more fun left as a fugue of enigmas. Some people lead mysteriously interesting lives it seems, though not nearly enough of them. The flight home from Darwin to the UK was uneventful it seems, as I recollect nothing, except planning to become a teacher of English as a foreign language. I eventually became one, with plans to travel the world that year financed by it; I got a far as teaching an infamously dumb white area of my hometown. I still wonder how Kelly, the 17-year hippie kid is doing now. I wonder who is fucking her and hope that she is calm, happy and at peace in her life.