Friday

This past week was a little bit of going off the rails week.



I've not gone to the gym for a week or so because I developed tennis elbow from using my weed whacker when I went berserk at the garden. It had the audacity to have grown in all places rather splendidly while I was untangling my life from the other ("other" as in O).So, I went at it with far too much determination and my right arm paid the price. The gym had to wait.




I had proudly lost some weight and somehow managed to shave centimeters off my waste size but the whole arm thing brought a sort of swagger attitude towards it all. I bought a cheap bottle of bourbon along the way somewhere, ALDI bourbon, that is supermarket bourbon, and for some reason it wasn't as cheap and nasty as I thought I would be. It may actually be that cheap and nasty but it's been so long since I actually drank anything like it that I no longer know what's good and bad.



Determining quality is a problem I have; it's a theme running through my life if you will.



No, no, I'm not bitter about being my age, single again, and still having that last one contacting me to complaining about his mother. There's nothing wrong with that, is there? That's not a bad thing, is it?



*Sigh*



Anyway, off the rails with a bottle of bourbon. I had more than one last night which was a little lovely. In order to make myself even less intellectual I coupled it with catching up on True Blood. I left True Blood in disgust mid episode four season five and didn't look back until now.



Lowering the bar is sometimes a good thing.



The day had been spent not at work as should have been but doing a road trip with my daughter "Spink" (Spilling Ink) style and that means hopping on a bus to anywhere and discovering new things. It becomes a meditation of sorts because it always makes me realize that Sydney, Australia is not just one big same same city; it has distinct parts. Some are old (old by new country standards - not European standards)and well cared for. Some are oldand decrepit. Some are new and fun. Some are new and wrong. It's all there and you can spend an hour on a bus to nowhere and see it all.



We ended up in Bondi Junction - not too far from the infamous and always crowded Bondi Beach - and I had the best Turkish kebab I've ever had. The man who made it was a master. I like Turkish food at all times but usually don't count the humble kebab as part of it - it's take away food - but even though this one came from a food court in a shopping center it was divine.



It was the trip from Bondi to the city that made me think though, about how life is so good for some of us while for others it starts out in ways that's going to set them back from word go.



Boo, in her fifteen year old glory, was parked next to me all hooked up to her iPod while in front of us another fifteen year old was working her iPhone. She wore a hospital bracelet, her left arm a testament to her pain with the whole lower arm covered with cuts that were almost like an almanac of pain - some were fresher than others. She was working that phone like she was organizing a charity ball but what she was in fact doing was trying to find a place to stay for the night. She couldn't go home, her mother would put her in hospital again and the child protection officers didn't want her to go back home. There wasn't a refuge that seemed willing to take her, she's too young, but she eventually got a bed for the night in one after the accused one refuge of discriminating based on age. She then kept calling school friends to get them to talk to their mothers to persuade them to let her stay for the night, maybe for the weekend,just for a little while, OK?



She was a beautiful Asian girl and it scared me witless that she's out on the streets at night on her own because she's safer there than at home with her mother. I wondered why child protection services had not found her a place, were not watching over her, why she was left to her own devices and had to find a place for herself. Why? Why are we wasting people before they've even began to really launch their lives?



My life, such as it is, is good and thankfully so is my daughters, but I can't help think that it's a pretty shitty world when some people are forced to start their lives like that.
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