Am I being overdramatic or has the world gone to Hell in a handbag lately? All the Horsemen seem to be about, gambolling from one ghastly jamboree to the next, lobbing their evil two cents’ of human catastrophe and riding off slapping thigh as the shit hits. These dark days I lie in bed with the World Service looping misery: the planes, the Strip, Our Girls. The greedy oceans filled with drowned ferries and seekers lost, vast floating wrecks of sun-curled flip-flops and gasping animal mariners. In blasted lands everywhere, human beings run for their lives. For the first time since the doomed twins I feel a grim existential weight. Sure, I’m tapering off the Zolpidems. ‘Expect feelings of dread,’ it says on the packet. Cheers for the heads up.
In addition to the imminent invasion by Lizard People in the general rest of the world, shit’s been going down in CharmingVille, too. And it’s not just the usual bag snatches, break-ups, moto dings and death by misadventure. Tumultuous events are taking place and I’m not talking Aeon or the blokes upstairs calling barleys and getting their GRKs off my street corner. Set against the ceaseless lament of evictions, floods, strikes and wedding wars, cars barrel through shop windows, helicopters crash, good people are shot or bailed up in their homes by bags of deadly snakes. Running away doesn’t work. On trips out of town I see more sandfill and less lotus. More rubber and ads for bright orange soylent corn nailed to old-growth stumps. I used to avert my gaze from puppies in cages, upside-down chickens and sunburned pigs on motos. Now I can’t look away.
I’m not being flippant here, but it’s hard for a simpering narcissist like me not to take it personally. Despite its craven injustice, Dadaist politics, stinking piggery, great hawking gobs of slag and unsightly mole hair, CharmingVille has until recently felt welcoming and warm in its own wonky way. Cheap and cheerful. Gritty, true, but hearty with it. Certainly shouty and full of unnecessarily loud singing. But safe. Ish. Safer than Kings Cross or Fitzroy on a Saturday night, anyway. Imperfect, impoverished, anarchic it may be, but it was my little dysfunctional hellhole and I loved it. I don’t like it that I don’t like it so much right now.
I can normally winkle a brightside or a blessing but I got nothin’. Even those YouTube goats don’t cut it. And it’s not just me. “What the fuck is happening?!” exclaimed my usually unflusterable friend. My gentlemanly, self-absorbed, smart, wicked, adventurous, hilarious, kind and loyal friend. We’re in the process of consciously uncoupling since last weekend when, at the tail end of a rare bender, in between me ogling some ladyboys and propping me up on the bar at Cavalry bellowing for Britney, he told me he was leaving.
He’s off to some two-bit ‘Stan to do important work in logistics. I don’t really even know what that is and I don’t care. A lot of nice folks have gone off to big jobs or places with gentrified port precincts and excellent public transportation. I occasionally twinge with envious first-world FOMO, like they’ll be able to drink water out of the tap or be near a Target. But that’s soon outweighed by the smug knowledge that I can walk around practically naked at all times. And that they won’t see too many toddlers riding buffalo down the main drag, no siree. So I go on the boat trip and make them a card. I feel a little bit sad. But sooner or later I’m back happily rubbing along in the CharmingVille life as we know it.
But this goodbye is different, and my usually wry ‘n’ chipper cheeky chica is TKO’d. My mojo is MIA. At gym today I burst into tears during treadmill sprints and had to pretend my blubs were endorphins running out my eyes. Normally I’d meander through lunch with a robust bloody Mary and a nice long read of the paper. Instead I went straight to work and ate a packet of seaweed crackers left over from Secret Santa 2010. Later I stared at our office’s defunct Chinese stone ball water feature. I found a rainy afternoon of sad songs about people saying goodbye, then wrote some maudlin haiku about suns going down and boxes to the left. Listening to the most tragic version of Ashokan Farewell I could find until the light frowsed out, I read all about an American thing called ‘abandonment issues’. I think I might be American because I’ve got them. Yesterday I don’t remember.
But there’s always tomorrow. Though right now there’s a black dog pissing all over my front yard and we’ve got a bunch of mouth-breathing Nazgul scything round our blue planet, I’m pretty sure this downtown downer will disappear once the drugs wear off, my dear friend lets go of my hand, and the milk of human kindness fills everyone’s glass to the brim. Chins Up and Hugs All Round ‘til then.