Sandstorm blew in and coated the 9th richest country in the world bar none. It came in and covered the mad, the bad, the Arabs in the hip clubs; the desperate and the garrulous. Emergency exit lights were left dusted and opaque. It was a sight, it was a scene; it was a sight obscene.
What followed was the intellectual desertification of the place. It was Laputa all over again, blocking the sun and the rain, and landing on the little pockets of cerebral resistance. Black planes against black skies are rolling and patrolling, and all we want is to be able to own the decisions we’ve made.
But if you flick your tongue out of your mouth like a lizard you can catch the faintest scent of promise in the air, an inexplicable something that makes even the summer days shimmer. Those terrible Sydney summer days where the heat falls and sits like fog. Dog days, they’re called – dog day summers.
What do I want? What we all want, I suspect. To know that these days in the sun counted for something.
Written on Sunday, 23 September 2012