[Miscellany]

winding roads leading from the concrete heart into the leafy greeness. It's a bright, lush, unexpected green, and with the light breeze playing havoc with your hair, you almost forget it's Summer. Summer here is grey and parched. It has yellow grasses in some parts and dry olive coloured leaves in others. But this green is a welcome reminder of Spring. This road takes your from the city into what they used to call the rural urban fringe, or the green belt and take each curve expertly, feeling the melancholy overtake you with each soft turn of the wheel.

But it is busy, this small community. You watch their hurried footsteps run in and out of the local shops and small speciality stores. Casually dressed middle aged divorces mingle with young couples and happy singletons. This community is unpretentious and relaxed and you like it.

You visit small shops where tinkling bells sound your arrival and spend your money at the local fresh produce guy, sitting by the side of the road with a collander of lettuce resting on the nature strip. This is the other side everyone keeps talking about.

posted by M at 2:11 am 0 comments

If this city is representative of you, then you wonder what you are today.
The scorching hot sun that burns everything it touches.
A dry oppressiveness that is undermined by soggy grass in infrequent patches.
The stark glare somehow reflecting off the bitumen.

This is your town today.
she is unforgiving.

posted by M at 9:26 pm 0 comments

she is a mess
A varitable jumble of chair legs, fire hydrants and items for sale in various states of distress. Cheap dollar shops interspursed with high-end fashion stores and dirty looking souvlaki shops planted next to sit down cafes outfitted in chrome benchtops and sturdy looking stools.
This is the end of Chapel that makes the most sense.
It's the end that's real.
The other end of Chapel, (the Toorak end) is like you'd imagine Hollywood to be - polystyrene people drinking their de-caf skinny lattes while rifling delicately through their Dolce & Gabanna handbags for another fag.
Real people do not survive in the Toorak end of Chapel - they are eaten up by foam of vapid conversation and drown in the fluff of commercialism at its very worst.
I like the messy, cluttered end. I like the side of Chapel that forgot to comb her hair today. The side of Chapel that refuses to admit with any certainty exactly who she is. The side that yawns her good mornings while still rubbing sleep from her eyes.
So, you find yourself trying to discover her secret - this antipodean strip.
Moving from store to store, and person to person, you walk away with more questions than with what you came with.

posted by M at 11:49 pm 0 comments

it's been raining all day.
A quiet, constant rain.
it seeps into the consciousness and takes your mind over
and without you realising it you are beating it's tribal rhythm with everything you do.
chopping, typing, thinking.
This rain is a cold response to the stifling oppressiveness of the past few days.
I've been watching this grey day go by from my kitchen window.
Everything evens out in the end.

posted by M at 12:54 am 1 comments