amberdextrous's Blog

Pale skeins of writhing steam drift up from sunlit roadways, following another unseasonal shower. They lift and swirl with thermal currents, veiling the trunks of the eucalypts at the bottom of the hill.
 
The land exhales, sending light white puffs of condensed breath upward, stark against the dark-bellied rainclouds overhead.
 
High winds spin tufts of cottonwool clouds across a patch of perfect blue. The edges of the clouds are ragged, teased and tangled by the struggle between updraught and downshear.
 
Mr Good Morning strides by in his customary pale blue shirt, dark pants, white court shoes, floppy cream hat. He walks the circuit past my house perhaps a dozen times a day, morning and afternoon, always passing left to right. He looks towards me and smiles and lifts his rolled umbrella to show he is prepared.
 
“Good idea!” I call.
 
He winks and gives me the thumbs up and in two dozen strides is gone from my view. For now. I expect he will be back in ten minutes or so, having completed another lap of the block, like a clockwork locomotive on a model track. He will glance my way again and if our eyes meet –if I am not bent, intent on writing- there will be an awkwardness between us, as though our vocabulary of interactions was already exhausted in his previous promenading.
 
We say “Good Morning” (hence my name for him) or “lovely day” or “rain again” –and that is our limit, long-established as the convention of our relationship, such as it is. In truth, we are only tiny tangents to the arcs of each other’s lives; we touch and go.
 
He has just gone by again, while my head was bent over the notebook. I didn’t notice him until he’d passed the flowering gumtree, when he struck my peripheral vision. And by the time I looked up, I was out of his eyeline, so that awkward moment was avoided.
 
A Lear jet sears the sky, banking loud and low beneath the clouds, heading for the crosswind strip at the airport south of the river. The people aboard have also touched my life, tangentially, though they were unaware of my existence on this little porch so far beneath them. Their jet’s engine noise is cause for resentment as it echoes back and forth between the clouds and the earth.
 
I watch the patch of blue closed over by the next cloud-front and think of people with whom my life’s course has intersected... how many thousands?
 
And Mr Good Morning strides by again. We meet each other’s eyes again this time around, and exchange smiles. And it doesn’t feel awkward at all.

 The elderly lady shuffled to the kerb beside my driveway and took a long, bemused look each way before she began slowly to cross the road. She looked about 70 and quite robust in body, but there was a frail uncertainty about her movement, as though her bones were porcelain and her brain just as brittle.
 
I watched from my porch as she stood for a time at the corner –perhaps to get her breath back, or to orient herself in an unfamiliar space. She was knee-deep in a patch of drying wild oats, peering at the street-sign, with an unsteady air.
 
She turned to face the way she had come and took a few sore-footed steps, as though her toes were cramped inside her shoes. Then she turned again and nodded to herself and shuffled on. And stopped again and shook her head.
 
The lady was obviously disoriented, perhaps lost. She looked in pain, confused, distressed. I resolved to help her if I could. I crossed the stretch of lawn and called her from the kerbside.
 
“Is everything OK, Ma’am?”
 
But she didn’t hear my call, so I crossed the road and stepped into her field of view. She looked up at me in bleary-eyed surprise.
 
“Do you need any help, Ma’am? Are you on your way home?”
 
She nodded deliberately.
 
“Y-y-yes,” she stammered, unsteadily, then swayed back as though appraising me.
 
“Perhaps you’d like a lift then? I have my car...”
 
The lady squinted and clenched her lips and swallowed.
 
“No, thank you.”
 
She swayed back towards me and exhaled and it was then I smelled the liquor on her breath.
 
“OK,” I said. “Are you sure?”
 
“I’m sure,” she slurred.
 
Now that I knew about the booze, it was obvious that this elderly lady was not struggling with dementia, as I had surmised. She was just drunk.
 
As I watched her wend her way down the hill, I hoped she would make it safely home.

It has rained (again!) during the night, and a single snail is coursing over the wet grass like a sailing ship of old, retreating towards the shadows. But, with the rising sun, the shade-line is also shrinking towards the nasturtiums at the base of my porch.
 
It is a race in slow motion: as the snail stretches itself along the tops of grass-blades, its shell rocks side to side; the shade’s retreat is steady, one grass-blade at a time.
 
My beautiful Canadian Friend, clarkee, and I spent many hours on my front porch during her recent three-week visit, watching the world go by. I am sure she would confirm that a large proportion of these passers-by are as regular as clockwork, often exercising their dogs. And –almost always- the dog-walkers resemble their pets in clearly identifiable ways.
 
A woman strides by in tights that give her muscular legs the same lines as those of her short-haired terrier. And she wears a ponytail that bobs and flicks up with each step, like the tufted tail of her other dog, a spaniel/terrier cross. She sees me smile as I observe the similarities, and calls: Good morning!
 
A broad-shouldered man with short, skinny legs and a pugnacious thrust to his chin, puffs by, his barrel-chested bull terrier snuffling side to side, straining at the thick leather leash.
 
A thin-framed, small-featured woman passes with prancing steps, just like her poodle’s, whose dark grey curls are exactly matched by its owner’s hair-dye.
 
It is fun to watch the passing pet parade and to note pet/person parallels. I wonder how this phenomenon evolved? Do people sub-consciously change aspects of their appearance in order to resemble their dogs? Or do they choose dogs –again, sub-consciously- that resemble their own images?
 
While I ponder this conundrum, the snail seems to have given up chasing the fleeting shadow, which has now reached the edge of the concrete path. The snail has withdrawn into the moist and slimy sanctuary of its shell, to minimise the chances of its becoming dried out by the sun.
 
I think of the coming summer heat, and how most of my city’s population will need to emulate that snail. I am grateful for the recent unseasonal rain, which has topped up our dams and aquifers, though I do wish there had been more sunny days while clarkee was here.

This morning as I sat on my sunny porch I noted with jubilation the number of Australian native bees darting and hovering and farming the nasturtiums in my little garden for their nectar.
 
Native bees are much smaller than the European honeybee, and swarm and hive in smaller numbers. They are also stingless, and less aggressive in defence of their hives.
 
Native honey is produced in much smaller quantities than the industrial-scale output of the introduced bees.
 
Indigenous Australians called the native honey “sugar bag” and it was prized for a thousand generations as the richest source of sugar in their diets. As it is often made from the nectar of eucalyptus flowers, native bees’ honey is also known for its medicinal properties.
 
Native bee populations were dramatically affected by the introduction to Australia of the European honeybee, which bred and spread and became the dominant nectar-feeding insects in almost every corner of the continent.
 
In previous years, I have seen only single native bees occasionally browsing flowers in my garden. This year, they are turning up in their dozens. And there seem proportionally fewer European bees.
 
Perhaps the rapid change in climate in this south-west corner of Western Australia –with each of the past ten years warmer and drier than the year before- has caught the European bees off-guard? Perhaps the native bees are better adapted to the warmer, drier climate?
 
Let the fittest survive, I say.

My upstairs neighbour, Pat, will not be coming home from hospital, her husband says.
 
The “tough old chook” –as I described her in my account of the brave way she survived a fall in our driveway that broke both her wrists- is on palliative care now, in the final phase of her last fight.
 
She has endured repeated attacks from within, her own cells mutating into rebellious offshoots that choked and broke her internal infrastructure. Endured also the medical world’s counter-attacks: the surgical strikes, the chemical weapons, the radioactive bombardments.
 
Like any battlefield, her body is torn and scarred, worn down, rendered unproductive of all but pain.
 
But now, it seems, there is a ceasefire. Soon will come her surrender, and then ever-lasting peace.
 
~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~
 
It is difficult for me to think of Pat’s predicament without considering my own prognosis. She chose to fight, to dig her fingernails in deep and hang on desperately to dear life. She battled bravely, but both the cancer and the treatment took their toxic toll. And I have chosen not to fight, but  to loosen my grip and slide down what is, perhaps, a quicker path to peace.
 
The last time I spoke to Pat was as she stood between my back door and the laundry block, where she and I have so often chatted throughout these past ten years. Her eyes glimmered still from their sunken sockets and she lifted her chin as she defiantly declared:
 
“I’m still here!”
 
Alas, she never will be here again, except in spirited memory.
 
I’m still here, too. For now.

When I first received the news about my cancer, I had all sorts of strange, sometimes conflicting thoughts flow through my muddled head.
 
Some were entirely practical: I should make a will to name James, my son, as my next of kin rather than his mother, whom I have never legally divorced despite a decade’s separation.
 
Central to most of my thinking –and my feeling- was consideration of what I would leave behind; what kind of footprints in time’s shifting sands.
 
And chief among those considerations was an earnest desire that my departure should not cause excessive pain –especially to those I Love. So how to avoid hurting them, when my own pain ends?
 
My writer’s mind will wrestle with an idea, fictionalise, re-characterise, so the ‘I’ who is writing the story shifts responsibility and consequence to a character. With this device, I can ‘act out,’ on paper and on screen, some of the darkest –or the brightest- facets of my personal prism.
 
The writing ‘I’ suggests that one way to reduce the pain and grief on Loved Ones is to reduce their number; to make them stop loving me.
 
In an instant, I conceive a short story –starting in an empty cemetery chapel, with a naked coffin on a plinth. A crematorium functionary enters, footsteps echoing. He presses a discrete button and then turns his back as the coffin slowly lowers.
 
Then follow a series of vignettes revealing how the coffin’s occupant had changed quite suddenly from being a friend, lover, loving father, son and brother; how, from a gentle, caring man, he had metamorphosed overnight into someone mean and malicious, snide, sardonic, savage in his criticism and his treatment of those who loved him.
 
He had kept it up, this malign manifestation, with barrages of toxic comments, shunned invitations, unkind acts of all descriptions, until they had all hated him. And no-one mourned him when he died.
 
~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~
Of course, it is not my intention to behave that way, during the time that I have left. Rather, the reverse. I don’t think I have any actual enemies on this earth, but there are some with whom I have fallen out –or simply fallen out of contact- and I aim to rebuild one last bridge between us, to communicate again, because we used to care.
 
I know that some people will be saddened and sorrowful when I am gone, and I am sorry that I will have caused them that suffering. But it is inevitable, a necessary price to pay for having been loved.
 
The more I love and am loved, the wider will spread the ripples of grief when I take my final plunge into that tranquil pool... tranquil, at least, for me. The bigger the splash one makes in one’s life, the further floods the devastation.
 
My final existential dilemma becomes: how much should I love people? And the answer is, intuitively, obvious: I must leave behind as much love as I can.
 
I Love You for reading. Thank You.

It is the doves that wake first, well before this part of the world rolls far enough towards the east to be tickled awake by the sun.
 
“What do we do?” one dove calls from a tree outside my window. None of the other doves seems to know the answer. They repeat the question: “What do we do?” from tree to tree. “What do we do?”
 
The pied shrikes pipe up next, declaring: “Pretty boy! Petty Boy! Pretty Boy!”
 
And then the wagtails chime in. “Cheeky!-Cheeky!-Cheeky!” they accuse.
 
“Shit!” calls a New Holland Honeyeater, running late. “Shit! Shit! Shit!”
 
“Cheeky!-Cheeky!-Cheeky!”
 
“What do we do?”
 
“Pretty Boy! Pretty Boy!”
 
“Shit! Shit! Shit!”
 
Then suddenly there is a silence as a dark shape blots the stars, and a low whistling farewell from a departing owl.
 
“I’ll see you!” she warns the other birds. “I’ll see you!”

There is a fruit salad sunset sky in the west, a disc of deepest mango orange, sliced horizontally by plum-purple lines of cloud, then a band of apricot paling into the star-freckled blueberry night.
 
A final flight of black swans plies the skies above the chain of lakes that snakes its way through the northern suburbs of my city, a few miles inland from the ocean’s sandy fringe.
 
I follow their V-formation in my mind, as though piloting a glider in their slipstream.
 
They will slant across the freeway soon at 300 feet, and feel a thermal current rising from the homeward traffic. They will hold their wings still, outstretched, micro-steering with their outward primary feathers spread like fingers tickling the breeze.
 
I will bank with them towards the lights of city buildings, reflected in the broad expanse of water, fringed with silhouetted reed-beds, known as Herdsman Lake.
 
We will follow the gentle curving of its northern shore to cut the breeze, then turn into our downwind leg, above broad beds of reeds and rushes, growing slowly closer as we descend.
 
At 100 feet, above the terra cotta roofs of the encroaching suburb, we will wheel sharply round to face the wind and point our noses towards the dusk-shimmering surface, slowing and losing height as we approach.
 
Just above the water, we will flare back to wash off the last of our air-speed, then kiss our own reflections, scattering stars.

~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~

If I believed in reincarnation, I wouldn’t mind coming back as a swan.

There is a new visitor to the red-flowering gum that dominates the view from my front porch, and the pair of wattle-birds who’ve grown up there are not impressed, despite the interloper’s colourful plumage.
 
I hear the rainbow lorikeet chuckling quietly to itself among the upper branches, but it is strangely difficult to see. It seems counter-intuitive that a bright green bird with a purple head and bands of red, orange and yellow could be camouflaged, but it is. I see the parrot, finally, dangling upside down as it farms the rain-fringed blossoms of their dewy nectar.
 
As beautiful as they are, I despise rainbow lorikeets, which are not native to this South-West corner of the continent. A small flock, brought from their native Sydney on the Eastern seabord, was irresponsibly released here in Perth some 20 years ago, and they have multiplied and spread, to the point where there are now up to 50 thousand of them.
 
I detest them for their aggressive breeding strategy, and for usurping all the nesting hollows that the truly Western Australian native parrots used to occupy. I haven’t seen the local “28” parrot, or heard its sombre whistle, for some years now.
 
The young wattle-birds make tag-team attacks on the gaudy invader, darting with their pointed beaks, fanning their wings. The rainbow lorikeet tries to ignore them as it feeds, but the wattle-birds persist until the parrot finally succumbs to their hostility, and swoops low across the road to settle in another tree, devoid of blossoms.
 
Something in me, beyond mere parochialism, wants to cheer on the locals.

View From A Concrete Porch 2

-occasional observations from my front porch as the world passes by, and sometimes drops in for a chat.

I have been inside for most of the day, listening to Parliamentary Question Time, watching it in a window on my laptop, and live-blogging on an Aussie politics website. It is more fun than it sounds, I promise.

But all morning the sun has been screaming through my windows at me: Come outside and play!
So I obey, and find it is, in fact, a perfect autumn day –if, that is, one can suspend one’s worries over wetlands and aquifers and dams.

Grey-bottomed puffs of silver-topped clouds dot the sky, which is a pale powder blue at the horizon and a more steely hue as it rises.

Above the roof across the road a rangy palm-tree thrusts its lengthy fronds in all directions, tousled as a teenage boy with a bottomless budget for hair-gel. The leaves along the palm-fronds respond to the tickling fingers of the breeze and, although it is inaudible to me at this distance, I can see they are playing the great Existence Symphony for wind and palm-tree.

It is ten degrees warmer today than it should be. This, the same day the Government’s Climate Change Commission reported that sea-levels were rising faster than expected.

A family of Golden Wattlebirds is using the tree 10 feet from my porch as a kindergarten. They are dove-sized birds whose long necks, beaks and tails, and whose flat heads are so evocative of the dinosaurs from which they evolved. They have dark brown heads, wings and tails, flecked and banded with white, and their narrow chests are a greyish beige, overshot with a sheen of yellow.

The mother takes her two young through a program of branch-hopping, and shows them how to forage inside the bowls of gum-nuts, in search of bugs and grubs. It is a question of survival.

My friend P drops by on his bike. He is on his way to meet his wife at a nearby shopping centre, where they will buy some warmer clothes.

“Your car is still parked in our driveway,” he tells me.

“Oh. Right.”

I had forgotten that they borrowed it a few nights ago, when it was raining.

“You should have taken the car to meet S,” I suggested.

“Well, she has her bike,” he explained. “And the car-keys, too”.

Ah.

************

So many day-to-day problems beleaguer us. From feeding our families to legislating global action to combat climate change.

But the most important question of all is: “Who has the keys?”

View From A Concrete Porch

-occasional observations from my front porch as the world passes by, and sometimes drops in for a chat.

Afternoon
 
The sun-slant, on these autumn afternoons is such that as I sit in my favourite cane chair, my face is out of the direct sunlight, but my legs and body are warmed by it, and my book spot-lit.

There is a softer yellow in the light, now, than that which has glared, unblinking, for the past six months. This gentler light seems to have the effect of integrating the objects in my view –the houses blend in better with the trees- whereas the summer sun made everything stand sharply apart, defined in shiny lines.

Cloud-shadows slink across the terra-cotta rooftops like an inflowing tide, dulling colours, muting shadows, dappling the contours of the hills opposite. And, in between, those “Angels’ Spotlight” shafts of sun, whose path is lit by a trillion tiny shining droplets hanging in the sky.

Summer’s dust is washed away, and leaves and roofs and walls shine clean and richly coloured, washed in this light, bright like new. The bougainvillea across the road is an almost-painful pink.

New Holland honeyeaters –with their black and white speckled chests and yoke-yellow bars on their wings- forage inside the shrivelled gum-blossoms for unwary insects. A wagtail skips and flits and fans its wings and tail to flush out any insects on the grass, then leaps to catch them as they try to flee. A swallow-tailed swift flies low altitude sorties up and down the length of the lawn, its beak agape, in search of the same prey.

An African woman pushes a stroller up the hill. She is tall and lithe, swathed in a bright cotton print dress, with a matching band wrapped and tied around her head.

Her big-eyed child looks my way and smiles.

“Hello,” I call, waving.

“Say ‘Hello’,” her Mum tells her.

“Hello,” says the little girl, and waves.

They continue up the hill. The child twists in her seat to keep me in view.

“Hello!” she calls, as the angle narrows and I can no longer see her.

“See you next time!” I call back.

View From A Concrete Porch
-occasional observations from my front porch as the world passes by, and sometimes drops in for a chat.
 
Wet Morning
It was raining when I woke about 3.30am, the downpipe outside my bedroom gurgling and the tin roof of the laundry drumming with fat drops. I lay listening for a few moments before the pain in my arm dragged my mind back to the reality of the need for drugs.

My breakfast, whilst perusing political stories on the net, was soundtracked by the sweet music of solid rainfall –the first this thirsty city perched between the desert and the deep blue sea has seen for six months. So I do not begrudge the rain.

When I first wake James, there is the faintest tinge of light in the east, and a honeyeater lets us all know it is awake to the fact. I take my coffee, cigarettes and notepad onto my cool front porch.

Rain-mist shrouds the distant vista of tall trees, the rolling dune studded with still-sleeping homes, and my visible world seems to have shrunk to my immediate neighbourhood. The passing tyre-hiss of traffic hushes early birdsong. There are no dawn-walkers on the footpaths this morning.

Above, a solid scrim of lightening grey, high, diffuses the sunrise. Silhouetted are the lower, darker whisps of cloud, wind-stretched and ragged, scudding fast.

The north-west wind is pushing more rain-bands towards us, condensing as they cross the coast and dumping their load over wide areas –at last. The concerned citizen in me is glad of any minor inconvenience I may have to suffer for the sake of the rain that we so badly need.

And then the Parent in me remembers that today is “National Walk To School Day”, aimed at encouraging kids to exercise more. A laudable goal, given childhood obesity rates and the prevalence of sedentary activities such as TV, games and internet.

But I reason that James walks the 2km distance both ways, most days, and he is slim and athletic. And I can’t stand the thought of him struggling through the streets, battling those umbrella-grabbing wind-gusts, and those trouser-soaking slanting showers. So –just this morning- I’ll give him a lift in the car.

Probably not. I will most likely be a junkie until the day I die. Because nothing in my life gets close to the physical bliss of heroin. Orgasm is a poor second. My love for my son is the only thing that motivates me more than heroin. Maybe -just maybe- I could use that love for him to pull me back into the straight world?

I look back on this past year with mixed feelings. 2010 began with such poverty and depression, although the friends I made here on EP helped me cope with those. Then, mid-year, I suddenly had more money than I'd ever had before... and what did I do with it? I blew most of it on heroin, after ten years of being clean. Moron! So 2010 ends as it began.

What does 2011 have in store? For the last few weeks I have been working hard -seriously hard- on writing a novel, and I have maybe 20 thousand words down on paper. Perhaps that will come to something?

I am too old now to start a new career, and too crippled to do any kind of labouring work. Maybe I will be able to start the online editing business I have often considered?


Maybe I will just give up... everything? I don't know. Right now, I can't think or plan anything beyond my next hit.