EDITING A LIFE

As I write the rain is falling on my Italian penthouse for the first time. I have dreamed about this. Yes I know, I should get out more but rain on roofs is one of my joy triggers. Tommie seems to agree as I can hear him snore in his moving kennel.

The rain makes a softer noise than it did on the tin roof of my Surry Hills childhood home where water smashed above us like a Keith Moon drum solo.

On my walk along the Great Divide, soft thumps touched my bivvy bag early one morning. It was light snow and when I escaped into the warmth of Wallace Hut the local cows tried to join me around the fire. A farmer later assured me that was what they do. All beasts seek a refuge ... or as Bob said: 

I came in from the wilderness a creature void of form "Come in" she said "I'll give you shelter from the storm"

Well I didn't give the cows shelter I can tell you. I shooed them out and lit a guilt free fire. 

I am in a reminiscing frame of mind. Nothing I can do about it. There is a deadline from the publisher of my book for any rewrites or changes to be made as soon as possible. Thus I have been thrust back into my own life over the past week. This time as a reader rather than as the writer.

Remember when you hit the water after a dive and you are suddenly transported into another dimension; different soundscapes, different speed, no fresh air. That is how I have felt all week, swimming though memory, history and emotion and not sure when I'll reach the surface to breathe new air.

Reading my words has the disconcerting feel of performing my own autopsy. Its like an episode of Silent Witness where I am both the young handsome pathologist and the corpse, still strangely attractive despite the missing cranium. Thankfully a bloodless one where any splatter is arranged in neat rows of digital ink and the body of work lies flat on my laptop screen rather than on a slab. The life I lived, even up to this comma, is over. Yep, right up to this moment as each rain drop hits my roof.

One things for bloody sure, I take life way too seriously. I certainly don't wear it like a loose garment. I have been known to talk about genocides on Christmas Day. You should see me at kids birthdays parties. I let the little bastards know that life isn't all candles and birthday cake.

Mind you I have amused myself enormously this week telling stories that take the piss out of myself at my own expense. That's when I wasn't making myself cry with my heartrending accounts of myself.

If I have a saving grace it is that I take other people's lives seriously too. I enjoy their stories, their journeys, trying at least to understand what lines and rigging keep their masts upright or what loose shackles have them cast adrift. Throughout the book Tommie and I unearth those stories as we walk in lonely cemeteries. Dog Walking in a Cemetery was in fact the title until very recently. 

The rain is petering out as sporadically as a dimwit's afterthoughts. If I hadn't eaten a packet of sweets I could drift off to its rhythm rather than having this idea.

With exactly 3 months until the book is released on October 11, and all SWAGGERS will be invited, I will offer the occasional excerpt from the book This is the first of those from the first chapter called LEAVING. It is set in my favorite cemetery and I hope you enjoy it.

EXTRACT FROM CHAPTER ONE OF THE ELECTRONIC SWAGMAN

Tom and I pass into neighbouring Newtown, a thriving gay, student and druggie hub. Within its cosmo pulse of cafes and bookstores an older beat attracts us, the Camperdown Cemetery. We discovered this place some years ago and revisit often, always lingering, reading the same gravestones like a favourite mantra, getting to know the inhabitants. We can’t head out of Sydney without dropping in, especially on such a long journey. In any case Tommie needs his daily walk and I a moment just to sit after the madness of leaving.

Lest the departed try and make a break for it, the cemetery lies inside the high sandstone walls of St Stephen’s Church grounds. Over the gate presides a multi-limbed fig more reminiscent of a giant wooden octopus than a tree. The long term residents inside, many of whom arrived with the First Fleet, have watched it grow for over a 150 years.

Tommie loves this place. He dodges through the Gothic maze of tombstones in varying states of decay, sniffs elaborate Italianate scrolls and Celtic crosses all carved in the sandstone of the Sydney region. He searches for food scraps amongst relics, like the forged blade of a ship’s propellor that stands in honour of drowned seamen, or the headstones with a broken stem motif for a dead child. As Aborigines still walked the desert in the traditional way, well before the continent had been crossed, these stern monuments to death and God were crafted in this outpost of the Anglican Church.

We sit under the tree that always attracts us, with its soft shade over an unmarked sandstone block in the quietest part of the cemetery. Tommie is showing his age after chasing real and imaginary adversaries and now pants heavily at my feet. As we are ignorant of what will happen on the long road ahead, so too were the Charlottes, the Edmunds and the Elizas ignorant of their fate. In my imagination the graves are opening as the characters rise up in the fashions of the day. All their dreams and ambitions are restored. Mothers fret for children. Men doff hats to ladies. Young girls are excited by young boys who pretend not to care. My reincarnated friends move through their daily lives again, their hopes flowing along with mine, oblivious to the death that awaits; the time of it, the nature of it and the point of it; making the moment shimmer with life and purpose for the fantasist who sits on a slab with his dog.

I like cemeteries. They are my pathway to an internal world. Better than meditation—I hate the quiet bits. Certainly better than cognitive therapy. Again the quiet bits. Nope, I am at my best amongst the deceased. My mind slows. My body draws downward into the earth as imagined spirits rise up to meet it; life, death, fantasy and reality breaking down into a rich warm compost. A place where dreams are encouraged because life is clearly too short. Where perspective is gained for the same reason. So the journey that lies ahead travels not only above the ground but tunnels beneath it, like a Dreamtime worm, churning up sods of earth into which blood and stories have drained. In any case, I’ve never met a dead person I didn’t like.

In the world of dogs, Tommie is oblivious to any such impressions. He is purely about the present and that is to bound after the stick I hurl towards both the troopy and tonight’s destination, the Blue Mountains.