I can see why Alan Jones relies on Laura Branigan's Gloria to fire up each morning. Providence, or at least a Spotify algorithm, jolted my eyes open to this MTV marvel just last week as, straight off the VA842 to Tullamarine, I wailed down the Peninsula Link to Main Ridge in the new Mercedes-Benz E400 (lacks grunt, but cockpit is sumptuous). Think Jerry Maguire belting out Tom Petty's Free Falling as he burned away from the Cushmans' ranch in Odessa, Texas, or Hugh Grant re-immortalising the Pointer Sisters' Jump as he descended the stairs of No. 10, backwards. God it felt good! And what I grossly lack in leading man attributes I more than compensate for with Smooth FM's rhythmic fidelity indivisible from my very pulse.
I was on the Mornington visiting a friend, his tennis court so newly excavated that I pass its builder's placard at the front gate, my moon boot discarded on the passenger-side floor, crushing a McDonald's bag.
We slurp Asahis in the garden as four crazed children circumnavigate us on transports of varying exoticism, and drain three bottles of St Henri in front of the tennis. For my aching foot (and for the hell of it), I partake of an Endone before bed. During the night, torrid visions of the end of days, the Four Horsemen in the western sky, all with burned-orange spray tans and tiny hands.
Death lingering, stunk,
Flies swarming everyone,
Over the whole summit peak,
Flesh quivering in the heat.
My buggered ankle has brought me low this hellish summer; made me pensive, morbid even. In this frame of mind, one should avoid PJ Harvey concerts. And Endone.
Life is full of inflection points, most of them imperceptible in real time. My sister was married before Christmas; she will have her first child, a daughter, in June. My father delivered a superb and kindly speech at her reception, where my grandmother had her first sip of alcohol in 65 years. "Oooh, it makes you all warm inside," she giggled into her flute of Moët. Later in the afternoon, I noted, she'd moved onto the Chablis.
And my brother was engaged – he'll be married in August, with me his best man. The expectation of a bucks night for the ages is veritably Dickensian.
I remain categorically unmarriageable.
Meanwhile, I have come to the view that life as we know it is a week-by-week proposition. Contrarian fundamentalists – the werewolves of evening Sky News, howling at their nightly audience of 19 Young Liberals – mock this view as elitist. Sorry, but the White House Situation Room has fallen into the hands of an erratic manchild. You don't have to be politically progressive, or establishment, to be alarmed. We're suddenly as close to a shift in the global order – if not a conflagration –since the Bay of Pigs incident, or Germany's invasion of Poland. Though a foundational premise of commentary – anchoring by historical comparison – has been rendered defunct. Precedent guarantees nothing. Which is helpful for me, as I remember less and less. I should probably get a brain scan.
POTUS45 is vastly more venal even than No. 37, Richard Nixon. He is draining the swamp, but he forgets the working poor see two swamps: Washington and Wall Street. And Trump is filling the latter to the brim, his administration's key personnel a sideshow alley of misfit industrialists and financiers. Two Americas are peacefully at war with each other, seemingly, as ardently as when Nixon and LBJ before him were razing North Vietnam instead of Aleppo. And political machines across the western world have figured out how to win public favour: just lie. Promise a technologically-disrupted electorate you can bring back menial factory jobs. Nearly 63 million people fell for it!
This was something else again.
I fear it cannot explain.
At Siglo on the Spring Street rooftop across from Victoria's Parliament, my mate Graham chuckles as he reads aloud, by candlelight, from The New York Times' Book of the Dead. "Surrounded by all of his family and with no sign of pain, Gen. [Ulysses S.] Grant passed from life at six minutes after eight o'clock this morning. The end came with so little immediate notice as to be in the nature of a surprise."
I seek an assurance from Graham that we will have a cracking year. We'd just been there in the front row, on the net, as an inspirational Roger Federer won the Australian Open. We'd lunched at Café Di Stasio and marvelled at David Hockney's iPad-sketched landscapes at the NGV. The pace has been set. Millennia from now, when explorers stumble on our petrified forms, preserved as citizens of a modern Pompeii, they'll know we were living large. And funnily enough, from the restaurant's speakers comes Umberto Tozzi's original Gloria.
