wine on the high wire.

Blog update. Work rushed headlong into Xmas break, my book/website project has been tentatively approved for sponsorship by the faculty, I scored First Class Honours in Law as quietly confirmed (in manner that is not open to most students - so hurrah for working in the faculty), my little bro looks on his way to cruising quite well into a selective school with all his friends (which is all he wants right now, other than more lego and to go to the Powerhouse Star Wars exhibition and play Wii + PS3 and sing Lucy in the Sky with Diamonds, the Bono cover), I fell privy to personal scandal to rival de Sade's finest works (Philosophy in the Bedroom, of course - thank you Iris for that continually amusing book), I am now fully employed and then some, pulled into several projects (Catfox, 85Boroads, the new Communications Law Centre), I caught up with old friends and found new ones, tidied up a little more Japan organising...

...and Julian came back from Vancouver, alive with the wild bug of traveling in a way he's never known before.

This, like so much, is for you.

To the world out there: I expect your intelligence and worldly experience, whether gained from a book or first person, will leave you to infer the finer omitted details.

"Travel & Leisure." (or "Here, the strange familiar.")

You said: I'm home when I'm with you.
Whispered in my ear as we reached (backseat, where else)
For the elusive
In the midnight crisp
By the black shadowed park tall with trees gnarled
Skin dried thin, cracked and peeling with burn
Trees emaciated after an overindulgence of summer.


You said: I found something
The Siren's song, an Absolute
I've sought so long in the strange familiar
Shapes of clouds.
In dead philosophers and suburban churches
In nights deep with you
I found it
In the north of the border city, walled by wide high snowy peaks
All alone but not lonely
Kerouac's months of mountains.

And you should see it.
I want you, you said, to see it.
I heard you. In my head, your voice -
Et cetera, et cetera, et cetera

I - in stasis so long
Broke.
Fell below bottom and loved the fall.
I rolled as the wind in the tunneling space of no stars, no milky way
Flew me to a place
Free of -
Words and art and other cages
Naming the nameless.
Grasping the Tao - The Great Beyond.

I dipped my pale face, my slender long nose and its midway crook
Into spring bloom roses.
Low hung magnolia seized my senses
And shattered my sensibility.

Oops.
Beyond rock bottom is not a floor
Solid and infallible.
No, it is an endless fall.

Delicious.

And through, you call -
I want you.
I want to give you everything.
I am ready.

I heard you.
I fell through.
Sweet with dinner dates
Clever young men of many inclinations and tastes
Sharing our elitist histories under the glimmer lights, a carnival
This side of the Harbour.

You know as well as I do -
You can lose yourself, you can betray
In many creative and amusing ways.

Et cetera, et cetera.
Singing in my ear, Thom Yorke is so
Beyond the thrall.

You are here. I am here.
I wonder at the lines that have left your face
The world's weight cast from your
Muscular, winter-tanned, taut shoulders
Your Armani exchange and your red muffed headphones
Your bewildered smile. Your assured, self-possessed air
Your confidence.
You speak - but unlike before
With sureness.
Built upon a deeper knowledge and understanding
As always - you say precisely what you mean
And do exactly as you like.
So right.

Though now, it is 5.05.
None of this has happened yet.
You're walking in the store - looking for
Kino's Travel + Leisure
December's evening pleasures.

You're looking, well, very good.
I'm thumbing through Lonely Planet
Budapest - the Avis-itis city
The 'Second city' of the Hapsbergs

You're here. Like The Who:
You're looking at me and I'm looking at you
We - ah. Don't know what to do.

I look you down and size you up.
Head to toe, to fall for.
Absolutely.

Stranger. Familiar.
Later, you will say: for you, I'm here.
For now, I straight-shoot look at you
And say:

"Hello there."

So let's go crazy.

"The only people for me are the mad ones, the ones mad to live, mad to talk, mad to be saved, desirous of everything at the same time, the ones who never yawn or say a commonplace thing but burn, burn, burn like fabulous roman candles exploding like spiders across the stars and in the middle you see the blue centerlight pop."

- Jack Kerouac

It's a seductive, easy declaration. One for poets and professional bums, philosopher artists by reputation, purveyors of heady intoxicants and high as satellites when there's bills due. Attractive sentiments, true. Especially while the rule of cool logic has delivered a natural earth stretched on the rack of human demand, pollution and population growth, brinking on collapse; when distrustful neighbour nations choose useful weapons of annihilation and war rhetoric ("You are either with us, or against us", and you know the rest) over diplomacy; when lego economies crumble under the pressures of near-sighted lending policies, speculative investment and regulatory absence - yes, yes, when everything you know, blows in a deeply unsatisfying way, sexy declarations of ideals suddenly glow.

Don't mistake me for a revolutionary. I've grown up more or less knowing only affluence, even in the early years, when the wealth was reached for through glass display windows and glittering parties at which I did not belong. I've caught a lot of breaks in my short life so far: intelligence and luck, intrinsic talent and the will to risk, conspired for some very good times. In such surrounds - as I watch myself, my family, my closest friends and further friends of extended amusement, emerge, I suppose. Reap, as my friend said (over coffee, in Newtown, could it be any more cafe philosopher apt :p) reap the rewards for our long and lonely uncertain efforts.

And I wonder. Cos that's what you do at 1am when you're definitely supposed to be doing something else - like buying travel insurance, planning itineraries, writing law articles, organising interviews, reading the New York Times, browsing foodie blogs, filing my professional life, brewing a cup of oolong - you wonder about Douglas Adams stuff. 42 and the meaning of everything.

Around this time last year, I kinda broke. Law clerkships, the tugging obligation of a well-paid corporate future to match my impressive grades, sleepless nights and crankiness, were you know, annoying me with taglines. "It's amazing what a doodle can reveal." "We value our people." "No day is the same." "9 to 5 is boring." (This should ring alarm bells for anyone with a shred of value for sustaining human relationships. Not work, not academic - human. The kind of coffees, strawberries, gin martinis, reckless indulgence, midnight wisdom and inappropriate confessions.) It was, in fact, around 1am. Glazed and glaring at the July 2007 edition of Lawyer2B (the magazine to read if you are young and lawyerly), which featured a medical diagram of the human brain, with a young woman ripping through, between the eyes, peeking, apparently, at her future. Headline: Anatomy of the Ideal Grad.

I read it cover to cover. I was pretty sure I was supposed to have applied for every major clerkship in town. Or at least some. As opposed to...none. (I did accidentally win an interview at the Law Careers Fair with Gadens. To their greater wisdom and my lasting joy, I made it to the final round but didn't get hired.) Still, HECS debts were looming. Plus the general feeling that someone in my position should just be amazing already. North Sydney Girls, brilliant marks, a CV that employers swoon for...and here I was sipping black tea and doing things so useless as 'wondering.' Revelation struck. Seized by impulse, I foraged a black DVD marker pen from my little chinese take-out box on my table (from Sugar Fix!) which serves as a pen holder and drew lines through the medical anatomy of a human brain, the front cover of Lawyer2B. Dividing the brain, the face, into partitions of essential graduate attributes of the ideal lawyer to be.

Blind ambition. Flexible ethics. String of failed marriages/relationships. Shameless narcissism. Prozac + cocaine addiction. Cardiac arrest. Nagging sense of disillusion. = Ideal corporate drone. (There's more, definitely more. Haha!)

Tagline: ...It's amazing what a doodle can reveal.

Forgive me - or at least excuse me - I was something like depressed, cynical, and anger was a step up from being in the pits. Let it stand for the record that I don't think this is true any more. That like all that's worth knowing in this world, there's a lot more to lawyers, to corporate culture, to graduate recruitment and professional practice, there's worthy ideals that still hold and guide soulful (currently) corporate lawyers, there's corporations committed, (no, really) to being ethical world citizens (I did my thesis on this, just to prove it) ... there's a lot to like. Fine dining, magnolia in bloom, blue open skies, Border 35% off vouchers, Alicia Keys/Jack White, Obama 2008 ("Penn just went. Bolinger Bolsheviks. This is wild."), oysters and wine, John Mayer and Disney, park rendezvous, John Legend...ok, lots. Trust me. You know too. Really.

I'm coming to a point, I promise. I said at the start of this entry that mad people are the only ones worth knowing, that madness is underrated. No, I'm too bourgeosie to head for the nearest asylum for some friend-making (or to NSW Parliament, Seven News or Macquarie Bank, for that matter). My point is this: given the rather unsuccessful way logic has ruled our world for a few hundred years, in its Darwinian cycle of conquest, domination or to destroy what one cannot have (yes yes, success is relative, etc, but neither being a Jew in the Holocaust nor being a Palestinian in Gaza is a particularly pleasant reflection on the success of society's rules right now).... I seriously doubt whether the prevailing definition of sanity has served us well.

So I say, madness is an evolutionary imperative.

We're a generation raised by Tyler Durden & Dangerous Liaisons/Cruel Intentions. Interesting role models, no?

I say: Let me never be content (with the perfect sofa). Let me never be (made) complete (by buying stuff I don't need, funded by jobs I hate.) Deliver me from clever art. Deliver me from Swedish furniture. Deliver me from self-destruction. Deliver me from nihilism.

Embrace craziness. Trust me. It's very cool right now. And maybe, with all our supposed excess of IQ points and other incredibly poor measures of intelligence, with all our lucky breaks, dazzling talent, thrilling potential and worlds of oysters and brimful promise, we might do something useful. We might go mad. We might - yes yes, you know you want to hear it - we might forge a better world.

Are you in?