Opening Credits

My brother called me Friday morning. He sounded distressed and a bit distant. He said he was at the emergency room at Royal Darwin Hospital and he was on heavy painkillers. The bulging disc in his vertebrae was pinching the nerve and he was having trouble urinating. He wanted some headphones to listen to his ipod to pass the time. Waiting at R.D.H. to be treated can take up to six hours on a good day. I rode over to find him on his back in ICU. He told me he was going to have an operation that evening if possible. He had put off surgery for two years and it couldn't wait any longer.

I was meant to be at work at 1pm. I got to work at 1.30pm. I kept my phone on me if my brother needed anything. My mother called and said she was on the next plane to Darwin. The surgery was not minor. If there were 'complications' then my brother may not ever walk again. Any damage to the nerve could mean a life altering change.

I don't remember much of the remaining day. Everything that night felt meaningless. If anybody asked how I was doing, I would usually say 'fine' but at times couldn't help telling the person how worried I was. I must have seemed like I was from another planet. I tried not the think about it as I might have started hyperventilating and crying. My head hurt. I felt nauseous. I needed to get outside. What was I even doing at work?

I got back to the hospital at 10pm to find my brother in the Private Hospital waking up after the operation. There were no apparent complications. I talked to my brother for at least two hours as he awakened slowly. He had a little pump in his hand that injected some wonderful drug into his system that he was told by the doctor that he couldn't overdose on. He showed me the sinew that was scraped-out so the disc wouldn't bulge. Somehow his showing of the little white tangle floating in a jar didn't seem morbid at the time.

I have no idea why.

The twinkling cunts of my home town

There are very few people in the developed world's middle-class who would call themselves 'economically left-wing' while many remain 'socially left-wing'. What I have come to understand in my brief existence is that these terms for the middle-class are labels and that the label of 'socially left-wing' is empty jargon. Those who identify as socially conservative end up supporting economically conservative policy. Those who identify as socially permissive end up supporting economically conservative policy because it shows no threat to their status. My anger towards this comes from the political left not practicing what they preach but also for the political right for being outright bastards.

I live in Darwin, an ugly male dominated frontier town with no history past colonisation, mining, trade, and a couple of city leveling events (The bombing of Darwin by the Japanese forces in World War 2 and Cyclone Tracey) The weather here is arresting in the wet season and pleasant during the dry. Not many people live here permanently (probablyaround 100,000) and the population fluctuates up and down with the tourist season and the whims of the free-market. The most prominent demographic here is military personel and the other being people from down south who come to disconnect from their past.

There exist clear class lines in this town that notabley cut down racial lines. Aboriginal & Torres Strait Islanders form a sort of underclass for the most part. The most common thing for other classes to comment on Aboriginal existence is their smell. They also comment on their anti-social behaviour, their public drunkeness, their fighting, their loud voices or any other thing that can firmly place the Aboriginal underneath them. These people who are constantly under the disapproving gaze are only a small fraction of the the total Aboriginal population but damn them all to being filth in the eyes of the other Darwinites. Darwin is no abnormality by any stretch in Australia when it comes to racism. The only difference is that Aboriginal people weren't wiped out as in other southern states. The fact that the whites didn't kill all the blacks is something that gets on the nerves of all the local dipshits and most of the visiting ones too.

Darwin is above all things a mess.