it's time

Almost a full moon and so I went for a walk. Not so many people in the park now it's getting cold at night, apart from kids smoking bongs in the picnic shelter and about two hundred people hanging around on the steps of the football house (is that what it's called? I don't know what else to call it) but enough human and dog activity was going on for it to feel like an extension of any other ordinary city space and not like a dark empty field. I hadn't thought too much about why I wanted to go out and walk whilst pretty much drowning in an exceptionally deep pool of Friday night exhaustion but soon enough I noticed that the dawdling freely and aimlessly at no definable pace and with no aim brought a great deal of physical and mental relief.



I will switch off my blog again soon. It's a temporary measure but possibly of longish duration. I turned it and facebook off at a very low point, on the spur of the moment, thinking that to temporarily shelve the complex relationship I have with the writing I do here would probably be a good move and I think that was an accurate call, although I have felt very isolated and lonely and a bit pent-up at times. I'm sorry if anyone worried. But it is just one of the realities of online connections that people come and go from online spheres and absence from the internet usually just means rising preoccupations elsewhere.

I came back because as I walked I thought that I need to just come in here and acknowledge that tomorrow's election will almost certainly bring a change of government and also, one has to hope even without a great deal of confidence, a seachange in political attitudes to climate change, human rights, equality and justice. At this point I do not seem to have the energy even to  my expectations of the next government are very low, having been formed across many years of disappointedly watching Labor do the bare minimum politically that is compatible with maintaining some sort of continuity with the labour movement's aspirations, values and achievements. My interest in tomorrow is almost entirely concentrated in hoping some of the worst of the worst are humiliatingly defeated. Think of me tomorrow evening if any or all of the following indescribably craven arseholes lose their seats: Abbott, Dutton, Andrew Hastie, Josh Frydenberg.

It was a good walk. Yesterday and today I'm falling love all over again with this perfect miracle of a song, released in a new version a couple of months ago, and I replayed it over and over in my headphones as I walked round the park and the field and the creek path and the nearby connecting streets



So much going on in there to feel love about; the deep and beautifully lightly worn musical literacy and the magic, sometimes surprising way this song connects to other, older, beautiful and much loved songs - sophisticated reworkings side by side with simple repetitions, because if something is great you cannot do better than simply doing it again, paying your tribute of love; and it all coheres seamlessly into one idea. This is music made by people who really understand and love music themselves and find it most natural to express themselves in languages inherited from the artists whose work shaped their imaginations.