On Being the Train Audience and the Studio Audience

The train is about to take off from Belgrave station and my bag bulges on the seat beside me.  If I was a baby, my mum would be accompanied by a hefty haversack full of nappies, wipes, a bib, a change of clothes, and whatever else is contained in nappy bags.  There are an astounding number of things that babies may need in a several-hour outing.  I'm unfortunately no different.  My burgeoning bag contains health-related d-ribose, progesterone cream, and coenzymated vitamin b6.  It also has a book, a 48 page green exercise book, various pens, a phone, tampons (grown-up nappies of a different variety) and a lot of crud on the bottom of a bag which hasn't been cleaned out in ages.

Girls from Mater Christi College, our local private Catholic school, are on the train too.  Two sit down across from me, and one begins to tell the other about some of the classes she had in school today - Maths, French, Orange House assembly and RE (Religious Education).  I wonder what RE looks like at Mater Christi.  Is it cutting edge and political, so that they get a glimpse of, say, a man overturning tables of people who are fucking around with charging interest on their money loans?  Or what about the version of Christianity that appears to emanate from the writings of Origen, in which a belief in reincarnation appears so commonly-held it's not even spelled out?  (At least I guess Catholicism had the decency to come up with a purgatory sandwiched in-between the eternal heaven and eternal hell, where you could work off your accrued karma until you're shiny enough for God to bear to look at you.  But that fear of never quite knowing if you've scored a one-way ticket to eternal hellfire is a wonderful touch when it comes to the minions.  Keeps them in line).

Do Mater Christi girls feel superior to the public school kids?  I would imagine so.  There's an inbuilt superiority/inferiority thing that automatically accrues when you spend more of our society's value symbol on one thing than another, so they must, even if it's unconscious.

A little way down the line, a massive amount of schoolkids get on at Upwey from the local high school, a rather cool-looking art deco brick building up on Burwood Highway that once housed Red Symons and then once housed Wendy Harmer.  One of the boys from Upwey High is yelling several times for Cassidy, but Cassidy, alas, does not appear.

An Upwey High girl in front of me is looking at her phone.  Her and her friend both have freshly brushed, long hair and a decent whack of makeup.  The phone shows what has the feel of a hastily snapped shot, of two boys in the schoolyard.  The way she's looking at it, pensively, cheek-chewing, I reckon she'll be looking at it a few more times this evening.

If Andrea and I had had phones and computers when we were teenagers, we would have filled up our hard drives with gigabytes of photos of Pas on hers, and Dale Cassar on mine.  I would have been quite happy to see the next round of photos Andrea had snapped that week, of Pas playing basketball, of Pas outside the maths room, of Pas saying hello as he walked past.  Pas looked like Stewart Copeland, which was pretty cool, seeing Andrea was in love with him too.  Plus, his name was Stuart too, so double bonus.  Andrea managed her love of Stewart Copeland and her love of Stuart Passingham quite well, I thought.

I apparently enjoyed being in love exclusively with unattainable people.  I was in Year 7, while Dale was in Year 11.  There is nothing now to remember him by except a few grainy memories of yearbook photos where he'd dressed up in makeup for a school play.  Dale left school at the end of that year, and I was mortified until I found Marc Ward to unattainably love the following year.  I would have filled another hard drive taking photos of Marc zooming out of school at lunchtime in his Holden Gemini, of Marc in his fluffy pink jumper, of Marc outside the maths room.  Marc's girlfriend, Suzie Szabo, was in the same year level as him.  I despised her with a warm fear and a cold despising that probably would have required a couple of photos of their own.

Marc was in Year 12.  I was in Year 8.  I liked my unattainable boys a little bit older.  That same year I would also full unattainably in love with Brian Mannix, the lead singer from Uncanny X-Men, for whom I would almost die running across Kings Way in order to reach as he got out of a taxi to go speak on 3XY.  It's not pretty, folks.  It's not pretty.  Several years after that, Andrea and I would go to see the X-Men play at The Village Green.  Andrea would ask for a kiss outside, and Brian would comply.  He would then say that it was the most amazing kiss he'd ever had.  Not that I'm chafing about that or anything.

It's so weird looking at these girls on the train with their phone and thinking about how different things were for us.  Yes, it's a common refrain held to by every generation that everything has changed, changed, changed (which is maybe more about time and memory and changes in ourselves than anything outside of ourselves).  But I think there's some validity in us reeling a little from all of the changes our lives have gone through.  It has been really different for each of the last three or four generations.  It's no wonder our heads spin so that we feel disorientated and need to go lie down and watch seven episodes in a row of Game of Thrones.

Things have changed in the ways teenagers interact.  It's so much more secondhand now.  Andrea and I would have been able to know way more about Pas and Dale and Marc than we could possibly have known back then, even with Marc's brother Carl to query.  We would have all known way more about each other.  And I wonder too if we would have known way less, maybe, in other ways.

Did we all look each other in the eye more back then?  Maybe.  We're definitely more in our own bubbles these days.  I miss the common sense of wider world community that was stronger when I was young.  Still, despite that yearning for the security of something shared, that doesn't mean that it didn't used to hurt to look people in the eye, with the shame I dragged around so intense at times, like a curtain.  It wasn't just the harsh paranoia that came from having an ever so slightly turned eye that people generally didn't notice unless I was drunk.  Looking people in the eye is such an intimate act.  I do understand the poetry of the eyes being the windows to the soul.  Sometimes it feels to me that with the onset of our awesome technology, we spend so much more time with our own eyes plastered to various screens, that looking at each other has grown scary by comparison.  Eek!  This thing I'm looking at ... is alive, and looking back at me!  Not in a box that I can switch off or delete!  This feels weird, man!  I wonder - has looking at each other become more like an invasion?

There are so many more ways to be alone while we're together now.  As a self-conscious, shame-struck teenager, I imagine that would have been better, that would have been worse.  But still, imagine, feeling like your friends were always in your pocket.  Friendships as teenagers are the best.  You need each other in a way you won't again.  Not like that.

The freshly-brushed pensive girl and her friend have got off, and another girl has sat in front of me now.  She has just sprayed a floral scent from her bag.  It's quite nice, actually, but it still causes my central nervous system to launch a weak panic stations alert that some incoming foreign body may possibly be trying to kill me.  I ignore this limbic panic, try to distract it like a child by noting how the high notes of the girl's fragrance don't screech like death metal in my nose the way a visit to the $2 shop would.

There are so many different schools on this train now.  But the uniforms are kind of all the same.  One girl wears dark and light purple and white check.  I would have been stoked to have that for Bentleigh High.  There are so many students that I wonder - are more of them catching trains to school now?  It felt like when I was at high school you went to one of the ones you were zoned to and that was it.  Are parents, in the quest to get their kids ahead, chucking their kids on trains so they can do the program that fits best?  Maybe.  I guess maybe some of these kids are on the way to their other parent's house.  It's all so scattered. And yet from what I can see, school curriculums are way more interesting than the dry, dusty crap served up to me in my high school years.

I talked to my mum about this.  She said she couldn't remember anyone from her high school catching the train, that everyone who accompanied her to classes in the late 50's and early 60's walked or rode.  There's something nice and nostalgic about that idea, that the friends you make at your school share the same space as you.

The David Jonecs ad on the platform at Box Hill has an Asian woman in a matching fuschia bra and undies set that would have earned her grandparents a pittance to make and mine much more to earn wheeling and dealing to get the lowest prices, the lowest prices, the lowest prices, which would then be marked up 400% or more to sell to us in the glorious land of globalisation.

I saw a woman on another train once, years ago, while I was on the way to work as an apprentice, vomit into the cardigan held on her lap.  She got out at the next stop.  As you would.

I get out at Richmond Station and catch the Sandringham train.  I have never been on this line before and it feels like people are doing quite well on it.  There are two men in business attire, separated by a sheet of perspex.   Both are wearing checked shirts on white backgrounds, with minor variations.  Are these shirts like the business version of school uniforms?  What's it with checks?  Do checks convey a sense of purposiveness, of industry, of concentration?

There are two separate phone conversations going on in this train carriage.  Both are about real estate, selling and renovating respectively.  There could possibly be three, but she's speaking Greek so I don't know, my Greek extending to kalimera, kalispera, kalinichta and baklava.  People on this line clean their shoes.  The woman next to me is wearing black and white leopard skin shoes and is reading the free train newspaper, MX, which once published an essay of mine that was a variation of this post here.  And so despite the fact that my shoes are ancient, I feel somewhat validated, until the the woman behind me says on her phone call that she is spending 5.5 grand on a mechanical door.  This once again makes me feel invalidated again until I realise that it's not her personal door, that organising the construction and installation of this door is a part of her job.

I do not like this relentless comparison.  It is particularly limiting.

The other woman has finished talking about her house that is up for sale and is now telling Kerry about how her husband is away at the moment and so life is fantastic.  Apparently they will take photos on the Tuesday.  Will that be enough time, given the opening is on the 7th?  It all sounds so important.  Important enough that those of us not wearing earbuds must be subjected to it.  But they're probably photos of, like, taps.  Or boxes of tampons.  Items for the next Aldi catalogue.

Although that doesn't really fit in with the opening, does it?  Still, never mind.  Thinking of this woman organising photos of something banal makes me feel better.  And really, the fact that I even bother going there with this stupid comparison, that makes me feel worse.

I reach Elsternwick, and here I alight to the ABC studios.  Anth is here to meet me.  We are being The Studio Audience this evening for the first episode of the new season of Shaun Micallef's Mad as Hell.  As we enter into the studio, one of the people working there tells me this is exactly the same studio that the musical staple of my childhood, Countdown, was filmed in all those years ago.  I find it patently absurd that I never once went to a Countdown filming.  Brian Mannix was on it often enough, and Elsternwick was closer to where I lived than Richmond was, where we did go several times to see Blankety Blanks tapings.  It's an anomaly, a strangeness, a big chunk missing, something that should have happened in my teenage years but quite incomprehensibly didn't.

But I'm here now instead, at 44, and Shaun Micallef is a much more appropriate replacement, and a bit of a GILFIIHAL (GILF If I Had A Libido), and it's fun, but exhausting, to look at the making of a TV show.  It is tiring, being the ones responsible for laughing.   It is terrifying being the focus of the camera while an introductory skit is being filmed.  The camera, with it's enormous eye, pans from where it's pointed in our direction, where we have been asked to laugh, over to Mr Micallef, who makes some joke that I can't now remember because I was too fucking terrified having to juggle having a camera pointed at me and being required to laugh at the same time.

They didn't end up using the footage.  I was both relieved and disappointed in equal measure :)

But before I am allowed into the studio I must open my bag for inspection, the one bulging not with a gun but with progesterone and pens and b6 and so many wrappers, and old bits of cruddy paper that have been in there so long that they are caked with the unidentifiable crumbs that line the bottom of my bag.  It is terribly embarrassing.  And then some things fall out, and of course one of those things is a tampon.

I guess that's one thing that's changed from when I was a teenager.  I wouldn't have given a shit about how messy the bag was, but I would have been chastened, horrified, by the tampon.  Now, I don't much care that the man inspecting my bag knew for a fact that I insert wrapped cotton into my vagina.  But I did feel rather chastened that he also knows I'm a massive slob.

Boys on Trains

We are on the train on the way home from the Melbourne March in March.  This would explain why several people in our carriage are wearing black t-shirts that unceremoniously proclaim in white lettering Fuck Abbott.

The train is approaching Southern Cross Station.  There is a woman with two children in the seats opposite us.  We know she has been marching in March as well because she is talking loudly to her children, aged somewhere in the vicinity of four and 10, about how marching is something to be proud of.  There is something about her that instantly makes me dislike her.  From out of nowhere I get the feeling - either sniffed from the field or else made up in my own judgmental head - that she is attention-seeking and try-hard and it makes me immediately cool towards her.  For all I know she could be horribly lonely and totally at the end of her tether and I am judging her on this whim that I so dislike when I see it in others.

The woman is wearing purple and white striped pants but even they don't endear me to her.  I get the feeling that she is talking to the rest of her carriage through her children.

"Why are we on this train?  How did we get here?" the little boy asks.  I ask myself the same sorts of questions, but I'm not sure if he is asking from an Albert Camus absurdity position or not.  He's about four, so anything goes when you're four and I wouldn't be too quick to discredit a four year old's ability to pick up on absurdity.  The difference is, when you're four you just roll with it.  The things that seem absurd when you're 30 have enough of a rut worn into them that the pit can more easily roll into cynicism.  It also continues on to freedom and some kind of Buddhist stance if you keep rolling in a particular direction, which is probably where the four year old rolls to in the first place, without the ruts.

"Why is that train going the other way?" the little boy asks, pointing to a train going the other way.

Anthony points to a new model V/Line diesel to our left  He says he has never been on one and that he wants to go on one.  I get strangely excited about this.  Which is weird I know, but I like taking little trips that have absolutely no requirement to them other than the trip itself.  I think Anthony does too.  Maybe that's why when I asked him the other day if he would care to travel the entire length of the Hurstbridge line with me - twice - he readily agreed.  We are, perhaps, a little strange.

The little boy points to the same streamlined purple-looking V/Line train that we are looking at and says, "Hey!  There's the same one we saw before!"

I suggest that Anthony should go and talk to the little boy about Hitachis and Siemens because he would probably have a captive audience.  I correctly identify the train we are on now as the model Extrapolis.  But I always get the Extrapolis right - it's the easiest model to identify because it has bendy concertina bits in-between the carriages.

The train is making that awful screeching and grating noise as it goes through the City Loop and the boy spills his takeaway coke into his mother's handbag.

The boy wants to know which station they're getting off at (Mitcham).

He wants to know can they go to Nana's when they get home (no).

He wants to know how we will get out of the tunnel (no response).

The boy has a lot of questions.  "Why are you so inquisitive?" my dad asked me in exasperation when I was young.  But my major question is, why are so many other people less inquisitive.  I'm with the boy, exhausting though it might be.

The boy's mother is now telling him something about how a man is getting on the train and that he shouldn't put his dirty sticky hands on the man's nice clean shirt.  She says he needs to have a shower or a bath when he gets home.  She says this loudly, as if it's for the train's benefit, as if this is a performance of Look What A Good Mother I Am.

"Can I have a bath now?" the boy asks.

There is a man sitting in the next row back from the woman and her children  who has an eyebrow ring.  I feel that it doesn't suit him.  There is something indefinable about the shape of his face that says that he does not look like the type of person who should have an eyebrow ring but that he should instead be someone who works in the office of a Kalgoorlie mine.  I have absolutely no idea why I think these stupid thoughts, but I am having a tired-but-wired CFS day where the extra noradrenaline runs stupid labelling thoughts through my speedy tired brain and shutting down the thoughts is extremely hard.

At these times I so wish I would stop thinking these pointless and stupid thoughts.  But actually, no.  I wish not so much that I would stop thinking them as that I would stop them catching on the brambles in my mind so that I stay with them.  Some thoughts are simply there to be dismissed.  Let them flow on through to the other side, wherever that may be.  The Department of Lost Thoughts.

Let anybody who wishes to have an eyebrow ring, no matter the configuration of their faces, have an eyebrow ring for God's sake.

"Why can't I have a bath on the train?" the boy asks to the air, while his Mum and brother both look at their smartphones.

The boy begins shouting as the coke takes full effect in his bloodstream.  His mother tells him that he had an opportunity to shout earlier at the march and he should have done it then, adding another stupid thing to say to her collection.  As if a four year old has any understanding of the conception of  Seizing The Right Time To Do Something In Case You Might Want To Do It Later.  I am beginning to think that maybe this woman has some kind of meth habit going on that is rotting her brain.  Which is another not very nice thing to think, isn't it?   Because really, as if a naughty four year old with relentless and ongoing questions wouldn't potentially cause brainmelt without any drugs needing to be involved whatsoever.

The train's automated voiceover lady very kindly announces the name of the station as we approach it.  The boy repeats the names after she says them - Hawton, Campbellfree, Surrey, Box Hill, Burnam.

The boy is getting cheekier now, getting him perilously close to the annoying status of his own mother.  He begins mouthing off, pinching his brother and his mother and generally behaving like a bit of a snot.  The boy's mother recites a litany of the damage he has done to her today:  He has kicked her, punched her and pinched her, and she's tired of it.  Why does he hurt her like that?  My annoyance parts and a tinge of sympathy rushes in.

The boy goes to throw a toy at his mother.  The weakness I have picked up on in her, he senses it too.  I can tell he senses it too.  All children sense this about adults and it increases with the amount of idle threats that are issued forth.  He decides against throwing the toy at his mum.  Perhaps what she just said to him has sunk in.

Or maybe not, because a minute later he spits on her.  Maybe that coke wasn't such a great idea after all.

"Mum, do you need to go to the toilet again?" he enquires.

The yukky burning rubber smell that besets train trips is wafting into the carriage.  "Yum, that smells like noodles," the boy says.  Taste and smell are funny things, aren't they?  They change not only from person to person from through the space of a life.

We have reached Mitcham Station and the boy, his mother and his brother get off.  

Anthony looks out the window, checking out the station's new configuration.  The train now runs underground, helping reduce traffic flow congestion along Mitcham Road, and the station has been largely rebuilt.  He looks like a little boy himself and I am drawn to gaze at his eyelashes as he stares out at the station's new digs.

Anthony wonders out loud if we are in the last carriage and then surmises that we must be, considering the three-carriage motor/trailer/motor configuration of the Extrapolis model of trains.  I have never once noticed the configuration of the Extrapolis, nor indeed any other model.

As we travel again he informs me, "I wanted to stick my finger up at that kid we just went past so that it would give him something to talk about." Anthony likes to rattle the mental cages of people who believe that 44 year old men should behave in certain ways. Sometimes he waves at people he doesn't know as we're driving past.  He likes to leave people curious.

The seats we are sitting on have a metal bit on the top of them that serves as a handle for people to hold onto in case the train lurches wildly around corners.  As we approach Upper Ferntree Gully, Anthony is shoving his fist through the hole in the handle in a rude thrusting gesture.  It is, he informs me, for the benefit of the security camera in the roof.  Just to shake things up a little.

Congeniality Carriage

Blue Train by Viscious-Speed (cc attribution licence)

They say the journey is more important than the destination.  When the destination happens to be another Geelong v Hawthorn game when you're the Hawthorn supporter, let's just say that Saturday night's train trip to get there was vastly more enjoyable than the game itself where once again, for the eleventy-seventh time in a row (11th actually), Geelong somehow managed to get over the top of a quicksand-engulfed-but-late-surging Hawks to win.  Again, fuck it.  Incomprehensibly.  Not that I'm bitter about it or nothin'.

The trip required to reach aforesaid game takes me the entire length of the Belgrave line sans one, from my home stop of Belgrave to Richmond, one stop shy of Flinders Street.  Seeing I barely travel the trains anymore, it was a pleasure to contemplate a ride with the possibility of people watching and maybe being able contribute another train travel tale to this blog :)

Especially because the trip was ... well, it was all sorta friendly like.  Unlike much public train travel which, Melbourne being a Western city in the death throes of capitalism, generally means that everybody retreats into themselves, surrounded by a veil of almost detectible contempt for everybody else, because strangers in the flesh are ... well, they're too intimate, and politeness is unnecessary in these days where we don't need to talk to strangers anymore.  I wonder if we don't feel that it's invasive and boundary-invading talking to other in the flesh humans that we don't know.  We're not used to the scent.  Don't talk to me when I intend to spend all of my time travelling talking to people who aren't here (many of who I don't know either), on my smart phone device.  Which is what I was doing before I got here, and probably what I'll be doing after I leave.  You, invading me with your body and your energy and your mannerisms and postures, your smell and facial expressions, you are a little too much, and much less manageable unscreened.  I wonder if we are less able to process such things as a conversation with each other when we don't have a box around us.  I imagine many of us would be far more comfortable if, when others desire to chat, they would instead text us their comments.  Strange times.

There's a guy in a black beanie on his phone a couple of seats over when we take off in a reasonably empty carriage.  He looks to be in his late teens or early 20's, pretty nondescript really, just a young bloke.  Almost against my will I form an unflattering opinion of what he therefore must be like, as I am rapidly ageing and sometimes a little scared of stuff, and this is what older people do to younger people.  I am ashamed to admit this.  As we move along several stops, the carriage starts filling.  There's a couple a little up from me decked out in Hawthorn colours.  There's an old couple, the woman with a rather loud voice.  There's two younger women, maybe heading out for the night, one with a fine face, the kind that can carry blood red lipstick, and a decent rack, the other unfortunately plain.  I say unfortunately because women everywhere know that still, though we are all male and female judged according to how we look, women are judged more harshly.  Still.  (And that, to further murk the waters, women also judge each other more harshly than men do each other. But that's another story).  If you don't believe women are judged according to how they look, take a look at these responses to the Wimbledon win by Marion Bartoli, who had the crazy temerity to go out into the world and achieve something whilst not being ridiculously fuckworthy.

But perhaps it's just me still smarting from the comments I got from the football the other night where, sensorily overloaded and exhausted because I'd overextended my body this week and the football is ridiculously overstimulating, frustrated because my team was losing again, and sick of listening to the completely unfunny ongoing remarks behind me from a bunch of 30 year old guys drunk on snucked-in Jack Daniels, I turned in the dying minutes of the last quarter and grumpily requested that the guy behind me stop clapping his hands right behind my head.  Part of the exchange that occurred in response was from one of the other guys, who apparently was a plain-clothes member of the Hair Police and who informed me that for someone as unattractive as myself, my hair was too long .  The hair-as-sexuality maxim.  I've always wondered why so many older women cut their hair short.  Perhaps this sort of thing is why.

"That's the pot calling the kettle black, isn't it?" I said in response to him.  He was of average looks, but that's all I could come up with at the time.  His response to my comment was something like, "Huh?" because as we all know, glasses of Jack do not make for high-falutin' intellectual conversation.  And then he said, "What are you lookin' at?" to my boyfriend, who responded, "I'm not sure in laconic fashion," and who I secretly wished, in the Neanderthal part of my limbic system, to punch this guy's head in.  That shut him up, except then he proceeded to make the universal cunnilingus sign to my mother which, while funny in one way (maybe just because it wasn't me) was disgusting in another.  "Have some bloody respect," Mum snapped grandly, though giving in like me to the ridiculous pursuit of arguing with drunken young guys who not only think they know fucking everything, but are hilarious in the process.

But anyway, I have digressed far off the train trip.  And anyway, that's that's what happened at the end of the train line, and the story I'm telling is better backwards, where the more enjoyable elements of human nature were on display from within the train carriage.  And so back onto the train, Momma.

It's impossible not to hear the guy with the black beanie's mobile phone conversation because it's rather loud, as is the general tone of mobile phone conversations.  "I might be on TV soon," he's telling the person on the other end.  I don't know what he is going to be on the telly for as that bit of the conversation's lost somewhere between the rest of the carriage conversations and my ancient eardrums, but my first impressions are that he's probably going to be on The Block or something like it for his requisite shot of fame.  Fame is like nectar to 21st century inhabitants, especially if it's one-step-removed fame, like on the teev or social media, being as we are rather deprived of the nourishment and attention that would come from a society that actually properly functioned with people and sanity and soul at its centre.

"How's the new vacuum cleaner going then, mate?" he asks. This befuddles me.  Is this a guy he's talking to?  Whatever floats your boat, but I haven't heard many young guys have public phone conversations with each other about vacuum cleaners at all, not least asking after the vacuum cleaner's general health.  But then he ends the conversation with, "Okay, mate.  Love you too."

I really don't want to generalise any more than I already automatically have about this guy, but now I presume that the mate on the other end of the phone must be a girl.  Maybe a cousin or a sister or something like that.  Because I just can't envisage two guys having a convo that includes vacuum cleaners and ends with love declarations.  But then, what do I know beyond my assumptions based on nothing about a guy I've never met before?

The older couple ahead of me have begun chatting to the two young chicks heading out.  I cannot hear what they're saying, they're too far away.  But people on the train are smiling at strangers, and it's a bit strange.  Then the older couple get ready to get off.  Or at least the woman does.  "Come on," she says in raucous tones to her husband.  "Leave them girls alone.  You're a married man."  She is saying this as she walks up the carriage aisle to the door where she waits, unaccompanied.  But apparently he's not coming.

"You comin' or you stayin'?" she shouts down to her husband.  Her stop arrives, and she shrugs.  "Fine, suit yerself.  Stay here."  Her husband waits till the train stops completely before he gets up, and walks down past me to the carriage's other door.  With a smirk on his face, just to shit her.  They look like fun.

Many people don't like to draw attention to themselves out in public spaces, maybe because we are unsure about how to behave in them anymore.  And anyway, we're saving up all our attention-seeking for Facebook.  Seeing somebody pay disregard to that, and talk to strangers and be loud and noisy, gives permission for other people to talk to each other too.

The Hawthorn-bedecked couple begin chatting to some other carriage-dwellers about the fight to stop the Tecoma Macca's being built.  Just down the road from me, the actions of the local community against a proposed development that 92% of Tecoma residents oppose, and in which VCAT overturned a "no" decision handed down by the local council, are an ongoing source of pride. Seems the woman is involved somehow, and she talks about the CFMEU, whose actions have buoyed the protesters maintaining vigil at the site, by having temporarily halted site production due to protester safety issues.  Some people, including Janine Watson, have spent time sitting atop of one of the buildings slated for demolishment.  Janine celebrated her 50th birthday up there, before ending up with a broken finger in an incident of which there are several different accounts of what happened.  But it's certainly a case of the people against the system, which has garnered international attention, and whatever cries of "hippy" may come from trolls, and by jaded people who can't see the point in protesting the relentless roll of multinational progress, I am inspired by these everyday people.

The beanie-clad young guy chimes into the conversation.  "I'm a chef," he says, "and I've worked in a few different food places around Belgrave and that.  And we don't need any Macca's in Tecoma,"  We all look at each other and nod.  It feels like such a minor thing in the grand scheme of things, but it's these interactions with the wider community that quite simply make my day.  We need each other.  United we change things.  Separate, we underestimate our collective power.

An older man gets on the train and sits down next to me.

"You gonna win?"  he asks.  I nod.  "Like Gough Whitlam's Labor, it's time," I say, confident despite the fact that we've lost the previous 10 times because all bar a couple of those wins have been gettable.  And it feels different this time.  The Hawks have displayed a psychological spinal strength that departed them at times in the year before and incurred disrespect from the football community for being chokers, a problem which it could be argued cost them a grand final.  But this year they have displayed steely tenacity, and it's that which buoys my confidence.  Because at this point the game's end is all future, and I have every reason to believe that our 12-game winning streak will continue with the biggest scalp of all.  Because on this train, we are in the goodest part of the night :)

The man next to me I would guess to be in his late 60's.  He is wearing an Andy Capp cap which sorta looks stylish on him.  By the end of our conversation I will deduce him to be one of those people who carries before them an air of quiet dignity and quiet authority, a masterful combination.  We chat about the nature of the game.  He is a Melbourne supporter, going out in the chill to see a game for the pure enjoyment of it.  No, he wasn't there for their rare win last week; he'd been out with a friend for dinner.  We chat about Melbourne's recent coach sacking and he provides an eloquent response as to why he believes Mark Neeld was not up for the job and why he lost the respect of his young group.

I joke that I enjoy being in a carriage on this particular line with Geelong supporters because we have to go past Glenferrie Station (the original home of the Hawks) and then Hawthorn Station, and I will take whatever psychological advantage I can glean.  We discuss the history of AFL.  "I used to go to Glenferrie back in the days when they played football there," he says.  It was a bit before my time - the last game Hawthorn played there was in 1973, when I was two years old.  "I was there the day Peter Hudson did his knee," he says.

My favourite Peter Hudson story is an off-field one, famous in Hawthorn circles.  A local church, as is their wont, had a sign out the front of its building from whence it would put pithy sayings designed to bring the heathens to God.  On one particular day it read: "What would you do if Jesus came to Hawthorn?"  Someone underneath wrote, "Move Hudson to centre half forward."

Fair call.

We chatted about the modern professional game. "It's a different game to how it was," he said.  "There was a lot more biffo back then, but then ... in other ways too it's different.  It's so much faster now, it's hard to keep track of where the ball is."

"What do you think is the difference between now and then," I ask, "if you had to define it?" 

"I'm not sure what you'd call it," he said.

"I reckon it's lost just a little of its soul." 

"I think you might be right."

"I'll always barrack for the Hawkers whatever the AFL does, and I love the modern game, but professionalism wipes out a little bit of the heart of things," I said, and we both agreed on that one.

The soul and the heart of stuff.  I might be easily pleased but for me, the kindness of strangers chatting and being civilised on a train, though a common thing once, is harder for us to get to these days.  A lot of us are scared, because life is scary and it's not supportive.  This hermit likes and needs her solitude, a great bit chunk of it.  I don't like small talk, and if you find me at a party I'll be in the kitchen, if I'm anywhere, hanging with the Jonah Louies of the world.  But those everyday little interactions of strangers coming together all friendly like, they fuel me for days.  They're important, in some small intangible way.  They're glue for us.  They make us stronger.  Because we don't need to be kinder to strangers, but when we are maybe it means that we are coming to understand how our technology and our economics telling us we are competitors is maybe a false economy.  Seeing strangers as something more than competition makes life safer.  And better.  And from there maybe we see clearer how much change is within our power to effect.  Or at least to try.

To continue trying to oppose a McDonald's outlet that is inappropriate.

And to continue trying to break that bloody Geelong hoodoo.

Maybe next time.

4.15 Belgrave to Flinders Street

According to the overhead disembodied woman, I'm on the Flinders Street.  Direct.  Train to.  Flinders Street.

To get to the train I have walked past the sign that points the direction to Puffing Billy, the local steam train.  I hear Billy's toot as I go about my business during the day.  I hear him at night on the weekends too, where for a rather expensive amount of money you can ride the train and have dinner and drink wine.

This version of train travel is decidedly less sexier, but as Puffing Billy doesn't travel to Richmond I have to take my chances with Metro.  The train has just taken off, and I'm thinking how genteel Belgrave train travelling is compared to the Sydenham line now that I am living out the other side of town with all the other whiteys.  But then a feral bunch of little delinquents get on a few minutes after I do, saying "fuck" really loud.  As the train starts up they disappear, doing the obligatory walk-between-the-carriages-while-the-train-is-going-to-show-how-fearful-you're-not thing.

Metro Trains has refitted the carriages so that the seats which were once facing outwards, catering for disabled and elderly people have all now gone, but the plates on the wall that say "Please vacate these seats for elderly or disabled passengers" are still there, referring to seats that are not.

The ferals come back again.  They are children, really, 14 or so (which betrays my age more than anything else I could say.  I was like that, with a subterranean fear stored in subterranean shadows and a close-knit group of friends which enabled me to adopt an armoured persona that would yell from one end of the carriage to my friends at the other because I knew it unsettled the boring middle-aged beige freaks that sat in the middle and let me down by their conformity and deflation).  The ferals loudly get off the train at Upper Ferntree Gully. 

The man sitting diagonally opposite me (and who I see later, walking past me at the football at quarter time), looks vaguely familiar through my astigmatism. One of my eyes is more blurred than the other lately, so on the pretext of rubbing the blurry eye I get a quick squiz at him to see if really he is the husband of a woman I went to primary school and high school with.  No, it's not someone I know.  He is rubbing his hands together and looking a bit wistfully out at the rolling terrain rushing past between Ferntree Gully and Boronia stations.  I wish to know what he's thinking about.

Now he gets up and moves so that he's facing the same way as me a few seats over, reading the crappy MX newspaper, which nevertheless once published a version of this post here.  I get a bit paranoid and wonder if he moved because I was looking at him.  He is wearing a green scarf with baubley bits on the ends.

Three teenagers, 13 or 14, get on and stand in the doorway.  They begin a discussion about what will happen if they open the doors while the train is going.  The kid who's standing on his skateboard rocking backwards and forwards is pretty authoritative about the matter.  His dad drove trams, he says, and the mechanics are the same on trains ~ the train will automatically stop if you open the doors all the way.  His friend looks dubious.  It's pretty funny if you open them a little, though, the kid says.

The train is heading in to Bayswater Station.  I'm in familiar territory here in Bayswater.  Years ago my grandma lived a bit further back and several streets over.  The three teenagers get off, and the train leaves the station and passes over Mountain Highway, which always brings back my childhood.  I travelled many times down that road with my cousin, my auntie and uncle.  They lived further up Mountain Highway, the den of childhood imaginative delights where we created out of our own minds, in the space and freedom of the school holidays, entire family groups with complex interactions.  We were singers in a famous band.  In summer we swam in the pool in our nighties.  Once, we pretended we were orphans who lived in the ferns that ran down the side of the house.  Crossing Mountain Highway on the train makes me a little nostalgic for a weekend at Andi's circa 1978.

The guy sitting next to me bar one is multi-tasking his iPhone, playing music through headphones while playing a card game on the screen.  A cursory glance around the carriage shows a majority of people tied to their phones in some way, either through headphones or with heads bowed in reverence to their screens.

A lady gets on with her blonde curly boy.  He is about two, and I smile at him and he smiles back and then he says, "A byss?  A byss?  A byss?" and then whacks himself in the head.  A comic.  He's adorable.  He and his mum play, and we all smile at each other, and then he says to me, "A titutt!"  I feel both pleased by the interaction and sad at my incomprehension, and then they get off at Ringwood.

Kids are a safer bet to smile at without them thinking there's something to mistrust in you.

For a second I think the pretty dark-haired young woman with the red lipstick and red jeans is looking at me, but then I realise she is looking at herself in the window's reflection next to my head.  The sky is starting to darken.  She is looking at me.  She's looking at me, and then she's looking at herself.

Out the window to the right there is a descending sun covered with cloud but bright enough so that I can't look directly at it.  The sky is medium grey.  Though muted, the covered-over sun still shines through the droplets of rain collected on the glass.

We are at Nunawading Station, a congealing mass of dull suburbia.  The word is Aboriginal and means "battlefield" or "ceremonial ground".   

Two middle-aged woman are talking.  I can only hear snatches of their conversation.  One is wearing a fluorescent yellow raincoat and is indignantly saying lots of sentences that begin with "I".  "I know she was there!" she says, and I wonder what it was "she" did to piss this woman off.

A man is standing in the doorway of the carriage talking on his mobile phone.  "Yeah, I'm heading to the city for the rugby," he says in a South African accent, looking out the door as he talks.  "It's the last game of the season," he says.

There is a break in the clouds, a little one.  A patch of blue peeking through the grey.

"Monday will work out fine," the man says into his phone.  It sounds like he is arranging a time for someone to come and collect something from him.  Maybe drugs, but more likely something he's selling on eBay.  He's out on Saturday evening, he says, but Sunday could work, too.

A group of teenagers get on.  One is wearing a pair of those embroidered ugg boots I've seen on eBay.  Fashion trends have been crossing the ocean from England and America ever since the introduction of cinema and radio.  A new hairstyle begun by one person with gumption starts it up, and then everyone else follows suit.  Soon you're a mug if you're not wearing a hairstyle that six months ago would have had you seem a pariah if you were.  Ugg boots are a pretty fashionable streetwear accessory in America.  In Australia they have always been an uber daggy form of wear that only bogans and people like me who don't care wear in public.  But that seems to be changing.

The South African guy has sat down and is looking at his phone.  He looks up at the ceiling, as if he's asking some sort of question, and then nods, as if the air provided him with the answer.  Anthony does that sometimes.  It's very endearing.  It feels intimate watching this man do that though, like it's a very private act that I've walked in on.

RMIT University is advertising on the wall above the South African guy's head the the fact that they provide Australia's first degree in sustainable systems engineering.  "Many talk about sustainable engineering.  Few will do it," they say.

Wow.  The sky has cleared.  The sun comes through a crisp and brisk yellow.  The lines of everything are so distinct in the beautiful winter light.

We slow down before reaching Camberwell Station ("change here for Alamein," Disembodied Woman says).  There are a few large rocks next to the retaining wall.  The rocks look like sandstone, but for a second, when I first glance at them, I think they are giant discarded bread rolls.

Camberwell Station is pretty.  Miss Fisher's Murder Mysteries filmed some train scenes here in its inaugural season.  Along the top of the wire fence that separates the train line from the rest of Camberwell is rolling barbed wire, like something out of World War 2.  The only war going on round here is the one between The Corporates and The Rest of Us.

Why aren't we all standing with our noses pressed up against the window watching the sunset that has begun dazzling outside the window in the sky between Camberwell and Glenferrie?  There is something comforting and reassuring about such beauty that nobody can coopt or buy.  It's just there.

A man with a yellow and black Chirnside Park Football Club parka gets on at Glenferrie.  He has a grey and pink fluorescent backpack and spends the whole time looking at his phone.

"Where are you off to?" a naturally-greying woman in a grey coat asks a dark-haired woman with an Australian accent with possibly Sri Lankan heritage.  "Oh, I'm off to the city.  I'm going once a week.  I'm still in the honeymoon phase, enjoying all the coffee and cake I can get in Melbourne.  I'm meeting my husband there.  He works in the city," she says.  "Do you miss it?" the woman later asks.  "I miss the research and the people I worked with," the dark-haired woman says.  She is wearing a tweed jacket in a pinky orange colour that I don't like much.  They got on at Glenferrie and sound like they must work at Swinburne.  That's the place I went to to last year participate in a study researching the effects of a particular substance on anxiety.  They paid me $100 for the time involved in taking blood tests and doing questionnaires.

"... so again, there's not the exchange of ideas," the dark-haired woman is saying.  "Hopefully George will support it too if he comes," the other woman says. "I used to say to people ..."

She is drowned out by Disembodied Woman overhead.  I'm at Richmond Station, and this is where I get off.

The Tyranny and the Romance of Distance

I am  returning to undergraduate studies this year.  Very much looking forward to completing the Bachelor of Arts I began way w....a....y back when the top ARIA chart song for the year was one by Ricky Martin and John Howard was Prime Minister.

I am majoring in Professional Writing with a minor in Literary Studies.  Now, I'm considering whether to add Anthropology to the mix.  It's a big decision because if I do it, I would like to major in it, which means it would take up eight subjects of the remaining 11 I have to do.  That's a lot of the one thing, right?

But Anthropology.  I mean, geez, as if this isn't something I've spent hours and hours and hours pondering anyway:

In this unit, students will learn the key concepts and approaches in medical anthropology through both the study of non-western medical knowledge systems as well as the study of western medicine, or biomedicine, as a distinctive cultural system. Through detailed case studies of different medical phenomena and how humans act in relation to these phenomena, students will examine health and healing from a cross-cultural perspective. Fundamental concepts such as the division between mind and body, the idea of disease pathology, plural medical systems and culture-bound syndromes will be examined. Special emphasis is given to studying developing or third world contexts where disparities in wealth and resources impact upon health.

That's Medical Anthropology.  Or this, Australian Anthropology:

This unit explores key areas of recent anthropological literature in order to provide insights into several significant dimensions of Australian social life, drawing on examples from Indigenous and non-Indigenous contexts, as well as their interaction. With an explicitly cross-cultural focus, students utilise what they learn about other cultures in order to achieve a deeper, more reflexive comprehension of their experience within Australian society. Topics explored are: family and kinship; race, ethnicity and violence; cosmology and the rituals and meanings that attach to birth and death. A methodological theme runs throughout the unit, including some short team-based field exercises that enable students to gain an understanding of how anthropological research is conducted.

I mean, I think it's a pretty good tip that if you have spent countless time pondering things without anyone forcing you to, so that you bubble over when you read the course outline, it's probably a safe bet to give it a go.

So the first 101 course is on the cards for Susie.  The only thing is, these subjects are offered in Geelong.  I live in Belgrave, which is two hours' drive away.  Which means either studying off-campus, or driving, or catching public transport.  My heart sank when I first realised this.  I like studying off-campus, but an entire major?  Eight subjects off-campus?  Hmmm.

The on-campus option didn't seem palatable, nor even doable, when I first thought about it.  However, the longer I have thought about it, the more rose-coloured the thought has become .  As I sat out on the grass this morning with the grass ever so slightly damp underbum and underbarefoot I thought, "What better study space than a two-hour each way train trip away television and internet distractions?  A space where I could reindulge in my delight for writing train travel stories and observing the peeps?"

Ahh.  The online journey planner has taken my rose-coloured glasses and ground them into the ground by informing me that it would take me three and a half hours just to get there.  One way.  Oh, dammit and dammit.

I hate you, logistics!  Time to take it back to the drawing board :)

The Axeman

The train comes to a stop in the middle of the tracks.  Stopped between stations, the train driver's disembodied voice appears over our heads.

There is an "incident" at Sunshine Station.  The train will proceed to West Footscray, where we will have to make our own arrangements from there.

I have a headache.  I have been unwell all week.  Today was my last day at work which nobody remembered and so, feeling unwell, I slunk through the day without my usual bonhomie, and without the (yes, expected) farewell speech and gift that the preceding people leaving over the past weeks have all been afforded.

I was dreading that, really.  And looking forward to it, too.  Who doesn't want a present, right?  But getting up and standing before people and having to give a speech about a workplace that sucks and that I am not sad to leave - full of people who I do not get to talk to because we are battery hens, typing stuff, under deadlines - I rehearsed what I would say a few times, just in case I found myself with nothing to say at all.  Some days I am outgoing and expansive but today is not one of them.  I slink through.

Even worse is not getting to stand up and say goodbye at all. I watched each person leave, waving goodbye, not telling them it was my last day.  I just couldn't rouse myself to go through the rigmarole.

The driver informs us of our West Footscray destination, which is one stop before my usual stop, Tottenham.  Everyone sighs and everyone picks up their phones and it can't be proven except in Swedish findings that nobody wants to read but I swear I can feel all those waves zooming through my body, frazzling my senses.

The man in the doorway of the train is with his workmate, a woman.  He is on the phone.  They are going to his house for dinner.  Their cars are parked at Albion Station.  They are going to get a bus from West Footscray Station to Sunshine.  Could she pick them up there?  Yes, he loves her too.  Etcetera.  I really don't give a fuck about this man's logistics but I have no choice.

There are about five different conversations going on within my earshot and none of them are with other people in the carriage.

The train driver's voice comes over our heads again.  It says the incident at Sunshine Station is someone with an axe.  The commuters gasp and out come the phones again.

"Cool," I said to the man in front of me but I don't think he appreciates my sense of humour.  Or else he doesn't understand what I am saying.  Or he doesn't care.  One way or the other.

We sit on the tracks for a few minutes. There is a palpable sense of rising fear levels in the air about someone who is several suburbs away with cops bearing down on him as we speak.  I hope we do not have any major catastrophe any time soon in this city.  We're not ready for it.

The people are all on their phones again rejigging plans.  Worrying.  Worrying.  The kids with malaria continue with malaria but we've got our own stresses here, thanks very much.  Sometimes it's all we can do to get home without having a nervous breakdown.  We do not like our plans to be thwarted.  The train will not arrive at the station in time and we may very well turn to pumpkins, or spontaneously combust if they don't.  We like our train timetables, we like to get home at the same time, we like it because it is something that we can hang onto.

"Let's hope they have a straightjacket at the station," the stupid man booms at his workmate two paces away.  "Go and put him in the loony bin."

That's the idea, Jack.  Slice it nicely down the middle, and you get to reinforce your flagging security by reminding yourself that today, you have not fallen off the edge of the plank and gone careening down to Sunshine Station with an axe.  Today you, law abiding citizen that you are, are trying to get home, a fine upstanding citizen.

The driver's voice comes over for his triumvirate of disembodied messages.  The "incident" has been cleared up.  We are free to proceed.

Everyone breathes a sigh of relief, impending mass disaster averted.  The phones come out again, rejigging rejigged plans.  It's been a long five minutes.

Alright to Come Over?

I was listening in to someone's mobile phone conversation on the train home before. As you do. Sometimes I like to play, "Spot the dude going to score some choof" (I don't have the heart to play it with the people going to play more hardcore reindeer games :(

I thought the guy tonight might have been a contender, but the way he said, "I'll be at Sunshine Station in a couple of minutes; I'll give you 10 minutes to meet me there," had a tad too much disrespect in it for it to be anything other than, like, his brother being forced to come pick him up.

The girl standing in the opposite doorway was obviously speaking to her dad. And men with daughters, I know it warms your heart cockles but really, do not let your daughters wheedle and cajole and manipulative you. Do not give in when they say, "Pleeeeeeese, Daddy," at least not while they're on their mobile phones in public places, because one day someone will slap them and it will be your fault for letting them be such horrid little manipulators when they're, like, 25. Oooh, the way she was laying it on thick and sneery at the same time. Smackworthy :)

I imagine that the choof dealers on the other end of those "Alright to come over?" calls must scratch themselves a bit more in their paranoia in these days of public mobile calls. Back in the eighties they'd be sitting there, the end of the day looming hard as they've dealt deals from their couches since lunchtime, sharing cones with a few customers and now watching Wheel of Fortune and keeping an eye out for the cops. The always-ringing phone at least would have Gazza calling from his own lounge room. But now, you've got countless Gazzas calling from countless trains saying, "Duhhhhh, alright to come over?" when really, they may as well say, "Spot me a quarter and I'll pay you next week, is that alright?"

You know, if I was to end up working from home, I'd have to do a few trips with the notebook every now and then. The variety of life that flows through a carriage on any given day is fascinating, I must say :)

Ahhh, all those people looking for God at the bottom of a bong. We just all wanna feel the love, don't we? I have a soft spot, I suppose, for people getting caught up in drugs. It's a short-cut way to dull the pain and feel the transcendence and it takes away with the other hand twice as much as it'll give you but I guess my heart goes out to those people because I did my reasonably fair share of partaking of the old chooferoonie. But oh, it's the wide road, though. Wish God didn't have such a bad rap in the hearts of men, makes it twice as hard to let him find us, and twice as easy to take the shortcuts.

Fifteen Minute Friendship

I left work at 5.45 tonight. Ran out of puff. The only problem leaving work at that time is the sardine-packed train that lugs into Flagstaff at 5.59.

"Gee, look at all that nice space up there," I commented when I climbed on, about the middle of the carriage that stood free of bodies while we were all squashed up in the doorways. The people who could move into the middle, don't. Presumably they are worried that they won't be able to get off at their station in time if they move several paces to the middle of the carriage. I honestly don't know. Maybe it's not their problem. But it really gives me the shits.

The blonde women next to me nodded and groaned in agreement. The dark haired woman next to me made some other comment and the woman to her left piped in and soon we were having a bit of a chat, you know? It's amazing how friendly people can be when they are given permission to be. Sometimes I think that's what it's all about. That we all want to reach out to each other and connect and nobody sort of knows if they're allowed to do that anymore or what the rules are, because these days connecting is optional when it actually needs to be forced. This is our scary freedom now.

I think of cultures in the past, that people must have been very much more conscious of how much we need each other. No faux connection. No keeping up with people via blogs and tweets and facebook profiles. If you wanted to see someone, you would have to ... well, go and see them. Or conversely, maybe we're more conscious now of how much we need each other, and how difficult it is becoming to connect.

Seriously, the older you get the harder it is to form friendships. I used to look at older people when I was a teenager and say, "Never, no way will I be like you." I was far too enamoured with my friendships, with the security and love and warmth. I didn't understand how older people would be willing to give that up and live so much in their isolation, with their Saturday nights with their televisions and their pets and their partners.

Welcome to older life Susie Q :) Just without the partner *sigh*

It is so much harder now to form friendships! I would be interested to have straw polled my four 15 minute friends to see how difficult they find it to reach out to others? I fancied I could see loneliness in a few eyes.

I fancy I can see loneliness in everyone's eyes.

And so we chatted for several stops and it was nice and we laughed about being new best friends. And then we got to Middle Footscray and a whole lot of people got out and then the relationship broke up now that we had more space. One of the girls moved off to talk with her fellow workmate, the blonde woman ventured over into the other corner, and me and one of the other women stood near each other looking out the window. And I couldn't think of anything to say. Just clammed up.

It's hard being shy and insecure and outgoing at the same time because you seem like Bobcat Goldthwaite. People say things to me that show me they think I am capable, that I know what I'm doing. People ask me for advice and I can see in their eyes that they think I know. I have authority. This is the problem with being outgoing because sometimes I don't know and sometimes I feel shy.

So I could see this other woman looking at me, as if she was waiting for me to say something. And I don't blame her because I was the one to climb on a train and start a conversation going with a whole lot of people who didn't know each other and then now I was standing there looking out the window feeling clammed. Weird. I got tongue-tied making small talk with someone on a train.

When I climbed off I forced myself to look back and smile and we all smiled goodbye at each other. If I was 20, I probably would have exchanged phone numbers with them. These days I feel so butterfly stomached I can barely muster up the guts to smile at a couple of strangers that I shared a train ride and a bit of conversation with.

Bit sad, isn't it! It gets harder when you get older. Someone get me a knitting group.

9-5 Morning Train

The man gets on the train and sits down. The girls behind the man are talking about Facebook. I keep hearing people talking on trains about Facebook. I wonder why people don't talk to each other about things out here instead of talking to each other about Facebook. The man starts talking to himself. I keep seeing people talking on trains to themselves. Last week a man said very loudly to someone who came to sit down next to him, "Don't sit here!" He then proceeded to talk to the empty seat for the rest of the ride. I wonder if the man today talks to the woman next to him if she will talk back. My guess is a reasonably large no. She has her eyes closed to escape the social inappropriateness of a man who is talking to himself.

I can't hear the man over the babble of talk in the late morning carriage. I catch fragments, words above it all. "Secondhand ... fuckin' ..." He talks all the way from Footscray to Flagstaff. The man sits with his leg crossed and his leg moving backwards and forwards. "Fuck," he says. He is wearing a beige coloured suit jacket over a pair of jeans. His brown shoes are shiny. His shiny brown foot moves backwards and forwards.

The Indian man opposite me has his arms crossed and questions coming out of his eyes. Occasionally he glares at the talking man for daring to be mentally ill. The old Asian man looks at me with this funny pushed-out fish lip look. He has questions coming out of his eyes too. Something in his expression reminds me of the way my dog looks at me when he has questions in his eyes about playing with the ball. Nobody knows what to do in the carriage. You can see it. What do we do here, we all ask silently to the carriage. I distance myself with a pen and my notepad. I try to will myself to make eye contact with the talking man but he does not look at me.

I get out at Flagstaff and the man gets out behind me. Waiting for the lift, the man in the navy Ecko United soccer shirt with the number 2 on his back looks behind himself, looks for the nutter. Turns back very quickly to face the front and wait for the lift.

In the lift the talking man is silent.

"Concourse. Doors opening," the lift voiceover man says as we arrive up at the top. "Concourse," the man says, walking out the lifts, out up to William Street.

Hell in Melbourne Town

I love summer, I really do. But the monster that invaded Victoria and South Australia in the last week is not summer. It's some extra new season. I think we should call it Beezlebub. Winter, spring, summer, beezlebub, autumn.

I enjoy nice dry 35 degree heat. But bump it up 10 degrees, and repeat the experience for three days in a row, and everything goes haywire, including my head.

I caught the train to work yesterday. Well, a train. My usual train wasn't running, along with the other masses of trains that were cancelled this week. The heat was so intense - three days of 43, 43 and 45 (that's 109, 109 and 113 for you Fahrenheitians) that the steel rails were buckling. My train had to stop for a couple of minutes just before Spencer Street station, and the seat I was sitting happened to be in the sun. I was already battling a bit of heatstroke, I think. Sitting in the sun for those couple of minutes, I really began to wonder if I was going to fall over on my way to the carriage door. And then the 10 minute walk to my office. I have heard of people coming to Australia from the Northern Hemisphere and getting caught out at how quickly it is to be sunburnt here. That damn ozone layer hole. The beating sun is an intense beast for us here these days. Yesterday, I'm surprised the footpath wasn't beginning to melt, the street lamps, the trams, everything. I kept to any shadows I could find and battled nausea for the rest of the day.

The trip home was even better. A signal fault at Flinders Street meant that no trains were running at all by the time I went to catch mine. And so what is usually a 40 minute tops trip for me turned into a trip that took over two hours. No trains meant a bus trip, but after four consecutive buses that sped by me, full to capacity and not taking any more passengers, I started getting desperate (mainly because I was going to wet my pants). I was also desperate to get home because my dog was inside, and there was talk of rolling power outages to start occurring across the state to try to get the grid under control. I was getting really worried that I would get home to a house so hot that my dog would have expired. It was a real worry, even though by the time I had left work the cool change had rolled in (oh, bliss. Bliss bliss bliss).

So finally I got desperate, hailed a cab, and paid 20 bucks for the privilege of getting home. At the shopping centre the power was out, the only light coming from the Coles, brightly humming along on its generator power. The refrigerated shelves, however, were empty, making me feel somewhat like I was in a Russian supermarket in the 1980s. The checkout operator informed me that the power had been out for quite a few hours. Turned out that there was an explosion in one of the electricity thingymybobs-where-explosions-occur and that this was also another reason why entire suburbs were without power. Traffic lights were out, all sorts of mayhem. On the way home in the taxi, I witnessed a car accident that had one car crumpled in on the other side of the road while the other car sat where it had landed, through the plate glass windows of a shop.

Luckily I got home, opened the door to something resembling a furnace, but my dog was okay. His poor tongue. Lester's tongue is so long he's like the Gene Simmons of the dog world. If I ever have to have him operated on, while they are there I will ask them to cut off 5 centimetres and he'll still have one that is fully operational. Lester's tongue was lolling out of his head. The house was uninhabitable, so me and Lester went and sat outside, with a blanket and a candle, and I commiserated with my cousin's husband via text message. He is a linesman for an electricity company, and has gone back to work after holidays to rotating shifts of 12 hours on 12 hours off for the foreseeable future.

My power was off for about another two hours. Whenever there is a blackout, I am always reminded anew of how monumentally reliant we are as a people on things other than ourselves and the earth. As we sat outside in the growing dark, and I admired the stars, which seemed just a little bit brighter for the blackout, I thought about how it would be if all of a sudden electricity was no longer an option for us.

And it sort of scared me a bit, how reliant I am on it. Sometimes I wonder how we as a people must appear to the centuries that have gone on before us. Such a different way of living. It would be a terrifying thing if, say, you came from the 16th century and were given a chance to witness people living now. We must be curiously out of touch in so many ways, like people who have a leprosy sort of relationship to the earth, the thing that sustains us. How fragile our existence must appear to be to them.

Which is ironic when you consider that most of us probably look at people from centuries before and wonder how the hell they managed to get through a life without refrigerators, air conditioning, heating, computers, Internet, television, movies.

I suppose they must wonder at our dearth of storytelling skills, our strange little ways we go about things, our masses and masses of distractions, the humongous amount of bloody plastic everywhere. Sometimes I think the days of living individual, in the way that we have been allowed to in the past few generations, are coming to a close. And by God that scares me, but in another way it excites me. Because it's not meant to be like this. There are so many layers of artificiality concocted around our lives, between us and each other, us and sister earth.

When the power was off, all around me in my suburb, it was so much quieter. There was less of a hum in the air. Our efficiencies and trinkets and toys are indispensable to us, but they silently hum in so many ways just behind our conscious awareness. How much of an effect do they have, all of these things? All of these waves flying through the air, messing in ways we don't even understand with the delicate electrical balance of our bodies. I spoke on my mobile last night for two hours to my cuz. I could feel the effects afterwards. There is some evidence that some instances of certain types of disorders such as autism, ADHD and the like, can be linked to urbanisation gone mad, to the lack of basic nature in children's lives. A Chicago study found such conclusive evidence that more trees and greenery around its high-rise developments lowered crime rates that they plant trees as a matter of course now.

I want this crazy monster that has built up around us dismantled. But I can only pray that it happens slowly. This frog is comfortable in her boiling water, as bizarre and as crazy as that sounds.

Current temperature: a beautiful, balmy 21 degrees (69F). I appreciate it like you wouldn't believe :)

Sydenham, Springtime

I forget that the term 'Spring Fever' is not just a literary term. I feel flushed. Slightly manic. I haven't had it this bad for years. All of a sudden. Spring impaled itself into my senses right on the dot of 1 September. The Spring fever keeps bubbling out my ears. I'm sad for my northern hemispherean compatriots that their Summer has ended, but I have earned this Spring :)

Tonight when I got on the train I couldn't help smiling, at my book, which wasn't funny, at a woman nearby who had the most expressive face. She was obviously doing some heavy-duty thinking - something I have been unable to do for the past two days. The heavy duty thinking showed itself all over her face. She kept lifting her eyes up so her forehead would wrinkle. Her mouth would pout, her mouth would turn itself onto one side like a cartoon mouth, so that her nose would twitch. It was so full on. I think she might have an answer for the Middle East peace crisis.

Me, I can't focus for too long on much. My eyes kept being drawn to that woman and beyond her, to the older woman wearing a long black imitation leather jacket and carrying a large potted plant. It spilled itself over the sides of the pot in rapturous applause. I don't know what it was, but it was green and light green and it lustred up the carriage. Next to me, a young Asian man held a bunch of lilliums, a gift in plastic cellophane, so young that none of them had opened to tell me their colours.

The woman with the rapturous plant got off at West Footscray. When I got off at the next stop along, the sky was darkening but not dark, not like it has been for months and months on end whenever I arrive on the platform. Tonight it was an aching colour of deep blue velvet violet, like the Vicks Vaporub jar. My tree, in the parking lot next door - the tree I love with my eyes four times a week, was budding new foliage for the first time. It felt the way it feels when you listen to a new song on the second listen and know you're going to love this song so much that you take a mental snapshot of how it felt in your relationship at the very beginning :)

I'm so afevered there's nothing for it but to go and do some cleaning. I have a new CD to listen to (Ohio, Over the Rhine) and oh, it all feels so rich I think I'll just eat the air for dinner (which is good, 'cause there's no clean plates left).

Celluloid Sydenham

This morning on the train I tried to look at people as just people instead of potential subjects for my next train study :) And anyway, they were doing not much of anything really, it being a rather dull Tuesday, albeit a beautifully sunny one. Despite the sunny weather there was a dreariness about the day - tightarse Tuesday, the dude selling the Big Issue whispered to me (after I'd bought a copy, of course ;) Not much buying or selling or much of anything happenin' on the old Tuesday. I think there are lots of colds and flu's swathing their way through the streets of Melbourne at the moment, if the sneezing level at my workplace is anything to go by.

On the train, everyone being dull, I looked out the window. Actually saw a tumbleweed blowing down the tracks, like some kinda throwback to a wild west street a century and a hemisphere away. But of course, everyone has tumbleweeds, right? Just because they've been captured so much on film in that setting doesn't mean you don't have Thai tumbleweeds, Romanian tumbleweeds.

Went across the small bridge and then past the empty dirt field that caught my attention last Thursday. Today, like then, the wind was swirling around, having its own little dirt and wind party. There was something somehow whimsical about it, the way the dust whirled in circles, dancing for the entertainment of nobody. I gazed at it again this morning, in my fancy imagining invisible men in invisible cars doing invisible doughnuts.

Came home this evening and watched The Book of Revelation which is neither religious nor spiritual but instead, an Australian film about a man struggling to regain himself after a traumatic episode involving an abduction and torture and sexual abuse by three women. Sounds strange. But the role reversal really threw effectively into stark relief the disorientation, dissasociation and shame of abuse. I really loved this movie.

The movie would have affected me all on its own (indeed, Margaret and David, my favourite movie reviewers, both gave it 4 stars and I am always interested in seeing movies that both of them agree on). This would have reeled me in anyway, reminding me of my own struggles in a way, and of others I know, the silence and inablity to express what is going on when you are held prisoner within your own soul.

But blow me down with a tumbleweed if that little field with its dirt swirls isn't sitting there in that movie, with trains going past and that funny little bridge up in the corner. And dammit if it isn't going to feel just that much more poignant when I see it tomorrow morning.

6.59 Sydenham. Thursday

The first I saw of him, he was standing the next door along in the carriage, smoking a fag. A small flicker of irritation passed through me but I thought, "Let the boy smoke" because it was apparent from where I was standing that there was a certain sort of edginess about him. It was like sharp short spikes of red were emanating out from him even from where I was standing, and he glared his way round the carriage, defying anyone to tell him to stop. He knew nobody would.

His girlfriend/enemy/best mate got off at Footscray and yelled platitudes at him as the train pulled away.

"Yeah, you're a fucking hero. Fucking h-e-r-o."

"Fuck off, ya moll," he yelled out the door as the train left. Lovers' tiff at Footscray station maybe ;)

Then he waltzed down the aisle towards my end of the carriage. The usual thing of, "Oh, no. Don't come near me!" My writer mind thinks he waltzed with insouicance, even before I looked it up - but really, I could just as easily say noncholance and sound like less of a smartarse. And anyway, I'm not so sure how noncholant or insouicant you can be when you've got blood spatters on your forehead and on your windcheater. But noncholance is an easy thing to counterfeit, especially when you learn it young. The counterfeit fools people more often than you'd think.

"What the fuck are you looking at?" he said to the guy sitting in front of me, who had been having a conversation with the guy in front of him about the bloody Labor government, and how they've had enough time to do [whatever it was] and they still haven't done it. The woman next to the other man had been saying that she thought that every politician should get thrown out of office when they don't come through with their promises. Which I imagine would make for an eternally echoing office. But it was around about then I tuned out. Political discussions about political structures seem quite pointless to me these days. And anyway, the conversation ended on an outsider's violent volition once one of the participants was asked what the fuck he was looking at.

"Nothing," was the correct reply, a downcast turn of the eyes, a human version of a puppy lying on its back and showing it's belly. A reply I would have viewed with scorn and derision as a teenager and which now shows to me, wisdom. The courage not to fight.

"Yeah, nothing's fucking right," the guy said. He sat down to my left. I stole a couple of quick glances at him but not for me tonight the entering into a conversation with a fellow traveller who was drawing me in. This one was all intimidation and spikiness. It is to the eternal gratitude and eternal loneliness of wounded people that spikiness works.

I don't know what the guy he sat down next to said to him. Whatever it was, it defused his anger. I'd like to think too it was my prayer for him, breathed out of my heart out the door of the train where I was looking because I was too scared to look at him. I couldn't bring myself to do anything else.

Whatever the guy said, a middle-aged dude with long ponytailed hair doing a crossword, it elicited an interesting response.

"Nah, mate, it's not alright. Nothing's fucking alright," bloodman said. Probably one of the more honest things said this evening in this carriage, full of largely lower-middle to middle-class people, coming home from a hard day's computer toil, just wanting to get home, get the door shut, get away from the freaks. A completely understandable and rational desire.

One that no Christian can comply with. Not really. One that we can rationalise away to our heart's content, but it's surely not an option. That desire to get away from the freaks fuels the reasons behind the violence of guys with blood spattered foreheads. Which sends the people scattering home even quicker. And so the snowball goes, and so the streets empty.

I wish I'd had the guts to lose my life to talk to that guy because when he said, "Nothing's fucking alright," he said it out to the entire carriage, and it was the most truthful thing the carriage had heard in its short life journey together, and we blew it. Like we always blow it lately now that God's dead and so is vision.

It's easy to think that no truth has been spoken 'cause it came out the mouth of a guy with a shithouse attitude, a foul mouth and a full container of violence. The Other. So easy to demonise the Other, right?

Of course, in one way you can argue that of course he is nothing to do with us. We have been off doing respectable things while he has been off bashing the shit out of people. But still. Whenever truth gets bleated out into train carriages, if we can't respond we should at least listen. Even if its by intimidation. Maybe he brought all he had to the table. But there were no crumbs anyway. The public table has no food on it. Keeping your head down and your eyes downcast is not always a brave thing.

The guy said to the carriage, "Hey, does this train go to Broadmeadows?" And the man who thought the Labor government had had ample time to do stuff said, "No, mate. Your best bet is to get off here [at West Footscray. Frank's station, right?] and catch the train back to North Melbourne."

"Oh, fuck. Thanks," he said, brushing past me as he got off the train and the carriage realised it had been holding its breath. There was a sudden rush of scapegoat cameraderie and strangers began talking to one another.

The second most honest thing said in the carriage was from the mouth of the woman who I see often, a simple-minded woman doing a simple-minded job that requires her to wear the unattractive fluorescent orange of the manual worker, and who said,

"Wow! I'm glad he got off! Oh, boy! Am I glad he got off!"

And that was the second most honest thing that was said, and I just felt like crying.

6.20 Sydenham

Got the early train tonight. Stood in customary spot in doorway. Diagonally opposite, two teenage girls. In front of them, young man in early 20s sitting on the floor.

Was listening to his iPod and began singing. Quietly at first, but then louder.

"How do you describe a feeling?
I've only ever dreamt of this."

Desiring greater communication amongst his fellow travellers, he opened it up to the floor. He asked me first, and I kinda smiled at him. Hoped it was a rhetorical question. Thought he probably was maybe a bit mentally challenged or a bit drugged out or something because no one is that excited or communicative on the train, are we? Because we can't veer out of train convention. People might think we're whacked, you know? Guilt by association.

So he posed it to the girls in front of him and they did that thing where they were ignoring him but not fooling anybody. Kind of an ostrichey burying your eyes in the air and just waiting for the buzzing noise to go away.

So he posed it to me again. I could feel that feeling where you want to slide into the floor, you know? "Don't look at me!" The way I feel at comedy venues or at impro shows when they're scanning the crowd for someone to bring on stage. Don't - look - at - me. Oh, hot shame.

But this, this was tepid shame, really. And anyway, I have been blessed with a relatively outgoing personality, one that can switch off the gazes of the people staring at me on the train. Well, I'm pretty sure that personality trait still exists; it's been ripped around the edges, like everything, in recent years. And I am feeling a bit mentally challenged myself this week, a bit frail and fragile. But then, something tipped me over, poured me out, and I pushed down the shame. Had to, really. Would have been rude not to answer. I looked at him. Prayed that he wasn't going to say anything horrible to me. And he said,

"Guess who is singing this song!"

Right. The rest of the carriage is looking at me. The only time we look intently at each other on public transport is when someone has removed themselves from the 2 inch wide appropriate behaviour tangent and gone off and done something crazy like ... laugh. Or talk to strangers.

So fuck it. It makes my rebellion rise. The train ride is boring and this guy is looking me straight in the eye, which is more than I can say for most people you come across. And who can resist music trivia, right? So.

"Oh, I dunno," I say.

"Well, guess!" he says. He's in his early 20s, obviously gay, sitting on the ground, surrounded by his mini discs. I feel brain dead after hours in front of a computer screen. But this could be fun.

"Umm ..." I feel my 37 years. "Well, okay. Has it come out recently?" I ask.

"What do you mean by recently?"

"Well, in the last six months?"

"Well, yes. The album was released last October, and this single was released in May,"

He knows this performer pretty well, obviously. And I have a ridiculous remembrance for him stating those dates considering I can't remember what I was doing 5 minutes ago.

Okay. You're pushing the bottom of Susie's musical barrel, 'cause I can hear that disco-ey beat through your headphones, and me and music you dance on ecstasy to have never really been all that close. So here we go, making an idiot out of myself.

"No, you'll know her," he says confidently. "She's been around for 21 years."

"21 years? Okay. Maybe I will get here then. So she was around in 1987."

"Yep."

Mariah Carey was my first guess and hit upon the correct answer, Kylie - of course, Kylie, the love of so many gay men's livs - about third. This was getting fun, so then I played guessing some of his other musical tastes - Madonna (I've got her book "Sex", that she released back in 1992. It's full of really fucking crazy shit"), Amy Winehouse ("Her album is called Frank. That's my name. It's the only album that's ever been named after me.") We agreed that Elvis Presley was okay but not anything to go nuts over and I told him about some of the stuff I've been listening to lately - Counting Crows and Ray LaMontagne and The Beatles. And then we went on to talking about The Jennifer Tate Show, which I am really starting to get into now and think she is quite berwilliant. Frank's favourite character of hers is the old woman, who goes into various public places and behaves abominably and manages to say the word 'fuck' 14 times.

So Frank was getting off at West Footscray.

"Where are you getting off?" he asked as he got up to leave.

"Tottenham."

"Oh, I used to get off at Tottenham. Well, anyway, seeya!" And he ambled off the train, the doors closed, and off we took.

The elderly Vietnamese woman said to me,

"Excuse me," and pointed down at the ground where Frank had once been sitting and where his mobile phone still was. As the person who knew Frank best on the train, it seemed it fell to me to return his phone.

So anyway, now I have spoken to Frank's brother and Frank's Mum. Looked up "Mum" in his contacts on his phone, figured Mum was probably a good bet, and gave her a call. Could hear the suspicion in Frank's brother's voice when he answered the phone to, "Ahh, hi. Is this Frank's Mum's house?" Or maybe it was fear. Fear that then I was about to tell them that Frank had fulfilled his lifelong dream to fly off the Westgate, or had taken 14 eccies in a row and was lying in a bush at West Footscray station, or whatever. We always think the worst. Indeed, we're trained to.

So finally sorted out why I was ringing Frank's Mum. Got Frank to call me. He was all effusive and bubbly and gregarious and oh so very happy to get his phone back. Which I'm just about to drop off. I think I'll neglect to tell him I've just written a blog post about him :)

I feel strangely cheered, you know, having this conversation with this stranger on a train. It felt ... daring. Which is totally fucking ridiculous but it's always how it's gonna seem in this stupid society where every person who sings song lyrics must be a crazy head. No wonder we all teeter into depression, and ennui, and meaninglessness and drugs. Anything to get away from the place where the ways we are allowed to behave are 2 inches thick.

Edit: I got such a big hug when I dropped his phone off, heh :)

"Let me give you some money for it," he said, moving to go inside. And I said,

"No! Don't be silly! You don't have to pay me!" I noticed that I was being rather more flamboyant and dramatic in my speech, flinging my body around as I was talking. Isn't it funny how we mirror each other's speech and stuff? I used to think that was a symptom of a too-ill-formed identity but now I think it's evidence of the way that we all need each other. We're meant to seep into each other's edges, just a little bit. You can always rub it out again later if you don't want it.

And so he didn't go inside, and what I really wanted to say to him was,

"Well, actually, I don't s'pose you know anyone round here that sells single grams of dope, do you?" But I didn't. Luckily. Dammit.

The Butterfly Effect

Never doubt that a small group of thoughtful, committed citizens can change the world. Indeed, it's the only thing that ever has.
~ Margaret Mead

While waiting for the train this afternoon, a young woman practiced her unicycling on the platform. It filled me with a strange joy, the same way I used to feel as a kid on primary school excursions, where the everyday was writ unusual and slightly surreal because it was seen as a group in school hours.

If that girl knew how inspiring it was to see a unicycle on a grey suburban train station, she'd use it as her everyday mode of transport.