Report #1, from somewhere over the Pacific, three hours or so from Sydney, in what might otherwise be the middle of the night.
The planeload is in some deep torpor, relieved only by a cattle feeding every 6 hours or so, but even though I’m in the plebs section, where I rightly belong by birthright, I’m not too zombified, thanks to years of training in not getting much sleep at all.
As I lined up among the cheery travelers, shuffling their way through security checks, I couldn’t help registering that probably well over half these people were sufficiently fucked in the head to have voted for the Abject Moron, and to have plunged their mighty nation into the biggest decline and jeopardy since the Civil War. Nor could I help disdaining them, fearing them, and hating their mindwashed, greed-driven guts. I imagine you don’t get far if you walk up and down the aisle of a transpacific flight denouncing fellow travelers for their stupidity, gullibility, and craven self-interest, congratulating itself as fostering economic growth.
It has to be said, the voter is a moron. So much for 150 years of universal education in the wretched country. And onwards they trip, salivating over what they can do with the tiny percentage of tax “relief” – $500 or $5,000 or $50,000 for the real intended beneficiaries of these cuts – that they reap while advancing the cause of a permanent Republican majority.
Not to be a doomsayer, but let me declare right now that the Democrats cannot win in 2008 (the Hilary notion is fundamentally misbegotten, because it assumes that Americans will vote for impressive figures, rather than craven politicians) and in any case there’ll be little worth winning by 2012. Perhaps the voters will ordain Jeb, or Jenna. If principled Republicans, like the nonetheless patsy Colin Powell were to stage some kind of opposition from within the Republican Party, imagine the shit that would be heaped on them - in Powell’s case, blatantly framed in racial, racialist, and racist terms.
It struck me the other day, as it does from time to time, that the large part of the 25 years I’ve been in the US have been years of the Rule of the Morons, Liars, and Panderers to their friends and own bank accounts. The next four years, I’d predict, will see the greatest looting of a nation in the history of the globe. Forget the Central African Republic, we’ll see a huge collapse of the mortgage industry, which will cause the innocent-bystanding citizens – or not-so-innocent – to wring their hands for all of about two months. The perpetrators, like those of Enron and a thousand other lootings of the Reagan-Bush era, will string out their sham trials for a few years, and then be forgiven as Bush exits in blithering-idiot’s farewell gestures to the raping of the country and the subversion of civil rights, constitutional foundations, and American security wherever Americans go and wherever they reside.

Surviving the next four years, and beyond, is going to require of the sane and less-then-100% greed-driven that we reorient ourselves towards the culture as a whole. For starters, we’ll have to adopt a parsimonious diet of the blithe, spineless, complicit media coverage that will oil the Bushwackos’ skids. One thing is for sure: Unless we who think the rest of the world has rights, too, want to sink in despair, frustration, and anger, we’d best find venues in which to come together for solidarity and solace. We had best not dwell on what cannot, now, be stopped - the pillage of the world, the reintroduction of the draft, the overturning of Roe v Wade, and much more. The blatant lies will continue, and the promises will continue to be broken, unabated, because the American voters have signaled, yet again, and now much more strongly, that they are willing to be lied to and fucked over if only there’s 500 bucks in it, for them.
This is a time for cynicism and disgust, but it’ll get a lot worse.

That off my chest, at least for a few moments, I now am ready to arrive, and deal with whatever awaits, in Canberra.

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On the flight from LA to Sydney, a garrulous woman from Las Vegas decided to move from the row in front of me to take up the aisle seat, spoiling my three-seats-to-myself dream, my promise of stretching my legs and avoiding the heebie-jeebies. Instead I had to do the ten-minutes-of-pleasantries deal – the one that’s followed by 14 hours of discouraging further conversation.

I read, as always, about 6 pages of my book before succombing to having barely slept for the days leading up to the trip. For the first time, however, I took a day flight from LA; it left at 1pm and got to Sydney at 11pm the next day. The food was decent; the entertainment system was bleak. Nothing to watch, really, other than an episode of Mr. Bean and the feature film Arthur (of the Round Table) with Clive Whatsisname, the heartthrob of the moment. The film was remarkable only in the depiction of Merlin and his English as 19th-century-style dryadic mystic warriors, constantly saving the day by popping out of the greenery to launch thousands of arrows toward the Saxon dogs. But that image was updated spectacularly by having Guinevere don torn and tiny Danskins that made her comely bosoms bulge forward so boldly that Xena would appear demure by comparison. This, as she ran raging through the Saxons slicing them with her sword.

The reception at Australian customs and immigration typified how things can be more civilized and dignified here than in the US. No long lines, cattle-yard style. Just a smooth, open, friendly approach with plenty of staff and a gentle approach to questioning, with little beagles to sniff out the naughtyboys.
After I arrived at 11pm, picked up a rental car, and drove a short way to hotel, I experienced a further show of civility – a comfy bed made with real cotton sheets. I slept very soundly, reinforced by Ambien.
The drive to Canberra was beautiful. Gorgeous spring day with sun and clouds and wind. Not one billboard along the highway. The only distress is due to the low and tightly monitored speed limits that make the excellent roads somewhat of a taunt. But everyone drives to the left unless overtaking, a habit of courtesy that could save the US billions every year in highway-contruction costs.
I stopped for a swim in the Olympic pool at Bowral, but struggled to make it the 50 yards at a time from end to end without reverting 2/3rds of the way to strokes other than a crawl. My backstroke is progressing nicely, and may actually be close to surpassing my crawl, which doesn’t at all suit my short breath, nor my fear of being drowned, which is not quite as strong as the nightmare of being buried alive.
The Bowral area was one of the richest in New South Wales for much of the 20th century – as well as the birthplace and home of Donald Bradman, the greatest-ever batsman in cricket – and the handsome properties there by now have been bought up by tv personalities and other scum on the societal pond – although one, at least, is owned by Peter Garrett of Midnight Oil, who is now a member of federal parliament, a Labor member, of course, and who with any luck may steer that mob back onto the left of the aisle. I was surprised to learn from my parents, though, that he’s a parishioner at Bowral’s Anglican church. But he also came by the Bowral Jazz Festival, so he remains a Great Shavenheaded Hope.
Ten miles down the road in Moss Vale, I stopped to buy a lovely apple pie for myself, and some roses and a native plant from Western Australia for my mum. The plant is a kind of bush with soft-ferned branches and eventually with red bottle-brush flowers. It grows to 9 feet wide and high tree in the arid West, but ideally will stop well short of that in my parent’s yard, among their other, almost exclusively native plants, which attract native birds – rosella parrots, large magpie-like currawongs, and occasionally cockatoos, as well as a variety of small songbirds.

Lots of dead kangaroos along the roads, in the Illawarra, approaching Canberra. Splayed this way and that. Once bowled over their tails become their predominant feature. I
even saw a couple of roos on the dry, lushly green bed of Lake George, which is currently a huge, weird, spectacular oval of green about 15 miles long and 8 miles wide, but sometimes is full of water – generally for about 10 years on, 10 off.
In Canberra, my sister looked out her front window recently and saw a kangaroo on the front lawn, peering in. As my sister watched and beckoned to her kids to come quickly, a joey poked its head out of the pouch.
In fact, she’s seeing roos all the time, lately. They have to come through a few blocks of housing to get to her lawn, which suggests they’re really hurting for water and feed – the drought has lasted three years now, although it’s still relatively green in the countryside.
Elsewhere in Canberra, kangaroos have attacked a couple of people. They can do quite a bit of harm with the feet, which are pointy and extremely strong. But at least one of the two reported recent cases has involved a woman walking with a dog that apparently was stupid enough, as dogs tend to be, to start worrying the roo, which responded accordingly and appropriately.

When I see my mum, she looks gaunt, and her energy is depleted, but she has been in hospital overnight with a neighbor making a racket from dusk to dawn, so has lost sleep. She was having a valve inserted in her upper right chest – her chemo treatment will involve having the gunk flow into that port from a bag she’ll carry around for two days every second week for at least five weeks. Then they’ll see if the tumor in her liver is shrinking and seems controllable before determining on a new round of a different chemotherapy, or presumably something else, like surgery, although they now try not to operate unless they must.
Dad seems well and fit, all things considering. At the moment he is aging less rapidly. It was striking, though, to stand with him and Michael and realize how grey we all are, and now even Michael is losing his hair in front. It’s his 50th birthday on Wednesday.

I brought along presents and touching cards from Marge, and Rainer & Mary. My mum was very moved and pleased by them. She loved the 2005 calendar that R&M made with photos of me on various recent jaunts – Baja, skiing in Canada, hiking in Mazama... Marge, the kindest and loveliest of any ex ever, sent my mum a beautiful bowl and a big round selection of Dilettante chocolate-covered dried fruit. Mum and Dad and I each tried one, and my parents were both in raptures about how tasty they were. But they only had one – with a discipline that they did not, alas, hand down to me.

The first night I went to bed at 10:30pm and slept like a log – on and off, rolling around – until 6am. It was freezing in the room, with the window open, but that may have helped wake me up occasionally, and I remembered three dreams, which hasn’t happened to me in my living memory.
The first was that R&M and I and some others were on one of our trips here or there, and its main features were that Rainer was mentoring some 18-year-old runaway waif, imparting to him the wisdom of his own dissolute youth. Also, rather than walking in the conventional fashion, we were eventually all moving on stationary legs like skiiers coming down slopes.
In the second dream, I was frantically searching for an airline confirmation printout that was taking me somewhere, if only I could find it. I was en route to somewhere to prepare an article about something relating to French studies. I vaguely recalled that I’d made arrangements, and knew when I was supposed to leave, but eventually couldn’t remember whether I’d really finalized the appointment. A lot of the dream took place in an airport where for some reason I was wearing only a towel that kept almost falling off. I went through absolutely all my pockets and several coat pockets and backpack and computer case and so forth and realized what an enormous clutter I labor with... Rose suddenly popped out of a coffinlike box full of lettuce and screeched in delight so loudly that I nearly lost the plot and told her repeatedly how close I was to cracking under the pressure.
A call to feng shui?
Then, in a third dream just before waking up, I witnessed a cop struggling with and shooting a motorbike rider, who then stood up not yet dead to be frisked and taken away, even though he was clearly about to expire altogether. I muttered something derogatory about the cop, and then the cops coming to his aide – I’d called out Don’t shoot him, don’t shot him, and then said or wished that he would perhaps just wing him or shoot him in the leg, but he’d gone for the kill. The cop heard the muttering and came after me, and I had to make up some elaborate story about what I’d really said, in support of him. It was very realistic. But then it was morning, the birds were all going at it outside, until the airconditioning generator outside kicked in and chased them all away.

It’s odd to be with your mum and not know yet whether it’s to be the last time, or she’s to recover with the chemotherapy, and live on. At the moment I’m thinking it’ll be the latter, but perhaps that’s the easiest and most natural thing to think, while the next few weeks will impress other possibilities on me.

There was an evening party at Anne’s to celebrate Jessica’s 10th birthday. The inlaws were there – Frank’s family. His mum and dad say virtually nothing, although they can speak English to some degree – they’ve been in the country well over 40 years, but clearly linguistics has not been their greatest skill. Frank speaks Hungarian with his mother, and Serbian with his father. It’s not clear how much communication there is, father to mother. Not a lot, I expect. Vera sits quietly in a perhaps culturally generated position of subservience.
Frank works with his brother Tony, who’s about the same age, and a card, highly amusing. His gorgeous wife Natalie was telling him that he really should come with her to ballroom dancing lessons, and he was telling her she should go without her because he could already dance, as he’d demonstrated at weddings and other events, didn’t she remember? He stood up and showed how all he needed to do was stand there twirling his partner, this way and that way.
He likes to joke about how good he looks, for his age. And he does, actually. His missus, too; after three kids very attractive and lively. A character like Tony. Together they have their schtick, as do Tony and Frank, quipping constantly at each other’s expense. Their father smiles quietly, so he gets it, apparently.
Their sister Aron is only 47 but has a 30-year-old daughter, a Serbian knockout, Liz, who was there with her boyfriend Bruno, an electrical engineer and Canberra boy. She’s like something out of a movie, laughing constantly and overbrimming with energy and optimism.
Anne hugged me in a way that suggested not just sibling affection, but a certain sense of impending doom, which at this points seems a premature fear. Her kids were well, though. They seem happy and healthy. Jessica was in the 5th day of birthday celebrations of various kinds, including a trip to a paintball center that afternoon.

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The next morning: It’s bloody cold, but the cockatoos are screeching, the rosellas are flitting through the garden and the sun is up so soon it may be possible to get to the pool and see if this time I can make it all the way up a length without having to switch to breaststroke, or to I’ve recieved a timely email from my friend Brendan’s wife Jonquil’s sister Janet, who is an aspiring writer, and for whom Jonquil hopes I shall be the suitor of the ages as written in some Book of the Fates. I’ll be contacting her and Brendan and Jonquil, and a few other local acquaintances – including my primary-school best friend Anthony and the woman who stood me up on my first date, Dinah, to try to get some kind of steadying social outlet set up here, as soon as possible, my mum’s response to the chemo permitting.

Sunday
I went to watch Ciaran play hoops in a huge hoops barn by a large shopping mall, one of the few in Canberra as in Australia generally. It has 6 courts, and is one of three or four in the city that is used from 9 in the morning to 10 at night on weekends, and I’m sure during a lot of weekday evenings. Very nice facility. Ciaran’s Weston Creek team walloped one from the Canberra Church of England Grammar School, old enemy of the Monaghans. I was gratified. Hate those smarmy bastards, although these particular ones seemed like nothing but innocent young 13 and 14 year olds who can hardly be blamed for their descent from the bloody Pommie empire.
Then I went to the gym and swimming pool, where I was shocked to see that the American-style obesity epidemic has struck Australian kids, too. Lots of tubbies. The pool was huge, and kiddie pools and play pools and the like adjoined. (I heard on the radio today that the average American has increased in weight by 20lbs since 1990, and that it costs the airlines some astronomical amount each year.)

At dinner Dad, Mum, and I wandered into politics, for a moment, and I was gratified that Dad and Mum are as incensed about such issues as the imprisonment and torture of detainees at Guantanamo Bay as I am, and Mum in particular is disgusted by the Australian government’s policy of mandatory detention of refugees, which has had the effect of imprisoning boat people from Afghanistan and other places in remote, razor-wired facilities – men, women, and children. For years, now, in many cases. The refugees are being used blatantly as an advertisement of the Liberal Coalition’s toughness on illegal immigration – humanity, be damned.

Dad made the point, too, that the Australian voters have become almost as ignorant and self-interested as the Americans – prime minister John Howard, just reelected for the third time, has learned the methods of dissemblance that the Americans and British constantly use, but his string of lies, and repeated demonstrations of callous disregard for human dignity, and rights, is simply not processed by the electors. Like Bush, Howard can simply lie as much as he likes, and practice more subtle forms of dissemblance. The father of David Hicks, who has been held at Guantanamo Bay for over 2 years, reported recently that his son was close to losing his mind after prolonged solitary confinement and harassment (probably torture, which has been clearly demonstrated in the case of another Australian detainee, who is of Afghan birth). The Australian minister for foreign affairs Ruddock proclaimed that as far as Australian authorities were aware, and concerned, Hicks was fine, but that if the Hicks family had concerns, they should address them to the Australian government, which would pass them on to American authorities. This, after two years of such expressions of concern, during which the Howard people have done nothing but kowtow to Bush & Co.’s agenda of terrorization.

Even the tightwad Liberal/National coalition parliamentarians are having to contort themselves to fit the expectations of their leader, prime minister John Howard, and the Bush administration to which he is trying his hardest to kowtow – as part, no doubt, of his pathetic conceptions of statesmanship. The most pathological, at this point, is the attorney-general Philip Ruddock, who was formerly the minister for immigration, in charge of locking up refugee families in razor-wire enclosed facilities in, for example, the middle of nowhere in the arid South Australian outback. He has reduced the complex arguments about immigration into such notions as law abidance and its rewards, law breaking and its costs, and political opportunism by anyone who opposes his regime’s treatment of even children whom they have locked up for over two years, now.

I wrote to my high-school mate B’s wife J’s sister J, and await her reply about getting together. B's J seems certain that the match has already been made in some place in the great book of life, and all we have to do is meet. So, I’ve had to ask her direct, without B&J as intermediaries, to meet for lunch or dinner or somesuch. Otherwise, says B'sJ, J will withdraw and go all quiet. So, perhaps, now, J will suggest that we get together with B&J, but that’s OK, because some mysterious family dynamic is maintained, or avoided, or something.

Today I swam 20 lengths of the 50-meter Tuggeranong swimming pool - not without breathers at the end of each length, and not all freestyle, to say the least. In fact, I can’t make it 50 meters without having to break into breaststroke. My backstroke is now pretty good, however. I can do that for quite a while. Something about not half drowning with every stroke. Half of the pool is roped off for swimming lessons for little kids. There are hundreds of them flailing about, some barely able to dogpaddle 6 feet, some belting away at the water, up and down the lanes.

I’m encouraged to keep swimming, I must admit, by the commencement of the young-ladies’ water-aerobics class. Each time I arrive at the shallow end, I can see underwater, through my goggles, the odd sight of 20-some bottom halves of slender things bobbing up and down, doing odd contortions underwater.

I’m taking my mum and dad to the hospital in the morning for the start of Mum’s treatment. She seems calm. But I notice that I get from her an impatience with illness – with the tedium of having to sit around. I suggest that she try to be a bit patient, because after all, so far she’s had just the preliminaries to the main event.
Several people have rung to wish her well – old neighbors, jazz-club friends, sons and other loved ones.
I’m calm, too - something has changed in the last few years, because before that I would have wrestled with fate, while now I simply settle on fighting it to the degree reasonably possible, and ultimately settling for what it dishes up.