Smug post

Yes, I am indeed extraooooordinarily pleased with myself, and thank you very much for asking! (I am aware that you did not ask.)

I do not know for certain but I may have alluded once or twice before to the fact that I ride my bike to and from work. This means that, in addition to dropped gloves and the same people in the same places etc, I see a lot of street and a lot of sky. Just at this time of the year I see both the sunrise and the sunset, and so every single day I am witness to the twice-daily ninety seconds or so when this planet asserts its cosmically imperturbable unconcern with everything but its relationship to the sun.

Last night:





The inexhaustible appetite for the witnessing of a planet's colours of light and atmosphere in Kim Stanley Robinson's Mars Trilogy is one of the means by which those novels shook me and literally moved me, in that they made me permanently open to suddenly seeing the alien instead of the familiar. It's about how the light of the sun falls on things. I was once looking out the window of a tram (when I used to do such odd and quaint things as go inside trams, this was) at the shops and house fronts on the southern reach of St George's Road, and I saw how the glare of the sun threw the tram's moving shadow on the buildings, and instantly I was not thinking of myself or of my journey but of this immense ball of radiant fire striking its inconceivably violent energy on those surfaces. In a gentler register the play and glow of vast intersecting form and light and colour on the morning and evening sky sometimes looks to me like a glimpse of the universe - not its visual appearance but its inner structure.

This morning:





Just about forty seconds of the rising sun smashing its savage unearthly golden light across these buildings, then everything was calm again. A moment before I stopped to take these two pictures I sensed a powerful array of intersecting occult forces at play across the surface of the world, for approaching in one direction on the footpath was the man who travels to work on a Segway, wearing his practiced expression that says What? Nothing to see here, and coming the other way was the slender stern-faced white-haired woman who dresses with more intense poise and precision than any other human being I've ever laid eyes on, and passing me at the lights was the cyclist who gave me some shit on the corner of La Trobe and Russell a week or two ago (in return for his pains I provided him with a long, detailed, informative and obscenity-spattered lecture when I caught up with him at various traffic lights across the CBD), and as a tram clattered past I glimpsed the woman who looks like Noel Crombie in one of its illuminated windows. What has done more good in the world, I wondered, out of the Talking Heads song 'Heaven' and the Victorian Arts Centre? I didn't make any progress toward reaching a conclusion but when I do turn my attention properly to the issue, I have a feeling it won't take long to sort it out once and for all. The real challenge will be determining what action ought then to be taken.

But why so smug, Laura?



Because I wore legwarmers to work today. WITH CLOGS. The End.