Driving from the cold to the warm. Sleeping in the bush, a fox visits and stares then pads around my camper-van. I know because I have setup a camera trap. The infrared turns the animal ghostly or is it in fact a ghost? There are so many dead on the roads. I get to Brisbane and strip off my dirty fleece and smoky jeans. I enter a hotel room and look at the bed, how many thousands have slept in it? Had sex in it, cried farted and bled in it. Has anyone died in that bed? I think back to the bush and hear the crows as a memory. I shake thoughts off, tonight I am going to a party and that is the reason I am in Brisbane.
New people greet me, I am high on my drive and tell stories of dead galah and visiting fox, I jumble up words and my eyes are staring because of the driving. People find me funny because I am happy and there is laughter at my odd stories. Someone points to a beautiful woman with large wide set eyes:
She's a Hollywood actress
Is she!
No.
Oh. The pointer and myself laugh but I'm not sure why.
The party is a success for Natasha and I thank her and she thanks me. In the morning I am off again driving up the Bruce Highway heading to Noosa. The Sunshine Coast town welcomes me as it did seven years ago. The aged have made it their winter home, the young serve them in restaurants and cafes and then party with the back packers in bars at night. The middle age have to buy jobs here, a dog grooming business, a fashion shop, a newspaper franchise. The people I know here have moved from their twenties to their thirties. Seven years has shackled them with responsibilities and they talk about business ideas rather than how much they have drunk. One takes the day off from being a chef and we charter a fishing boat and catch pearlies and snapper and an amber jack the size of my leg. The iridescent fishes brain is pierced with a knife and is put on ice. Later we eat slithers of sashimi with lemon juice. We want soy but we are eating it on the beach and the moment denies us the wish because the perfect sun is setting and no one ones to go to a shop. The chef tells a story about a Noosa man who ate nothing but raw fish and became riddled with parasites.They crawled under his skim, worms from fish. Apparently he was lucky not to have them enter his brain.
That night I sleep in my van in a caravan park on Noosa River. The aged are critical of my van's condition. There are raised eyebrows at my rattling exhaust and a sort of snobbishness about me being among them. I am middle aged and they look down on me because I must appear sloppy and must have a questionable character. Can't they see I am living in the moment and my mind is free? All the same I look under the car at where the exhaust is vibrating and stuff a rag in a gap hoping that will do. I feel deep disapproval and make a sort of snorty laugh. They'll have to put up with me for now, I'll be back out in the bush before they know it.
