I'll be honest. i hate the city. i hate cruelty. i do not feel like i belong anywhere in this country, this world. I'm suicidal. i have a daily battle called staying alive. meds don't work. ten years of therapy, I'm in the same place as when i started. there's something going on with me, the symptoms fall under many descriptors—ptsd, anxiety, depression, panic disorder, dissociative identity disorder, adhd, autism—all of which aren't really a problem if i hide in my house and self-medicate.
but i can't see the sun rise and set from my little canyon created by two storey rendered foam abominations with 8 air conditioners a pop going up all around my rented shelter. so i found a place to do that, its important and peaceful. i cleaned it of rubbish and tore grass and made a bed. a little stone fireplace. i promised myself before i kill myself i would always come up here and make a fire, listen to the wind through the sheokes, watch the currents play with the sunlight on the river, feed the Ravens, watch the nightrise to the east and sunset to the west, pretend i can feel the spirit of everyone else who is looking at the moon at that moment, pretend the world has a place for me, and then see if i really, really wanna die.
and this place says to me: stay. maybe it's the spirit of the land. maybe it's the spirit of the blackfellas who understand why this society destroys me. definitely it is that there are no signs, fuck all people, there's snakes and rats and frogs and natives and weeds and there is solace.
there is also a lookout on a bike track. the bike track is how i found my sanctuary. it winds serpentine up from the River to the bluestone-walled lookout. its a popular spot for photographers, lovers, loners and teenagers. from it you can see the sanctuary. the more curious and less fearful ones jump over the wall and grassgrab their way down the escarpment to the rocks. i call them Raven Rocks. they're not mine. i respect them and cherish them but they are not mine. they are a big part of how i stay, or try to be alive.
yesterday i gave my son a massage and he fell asleep on my bed so i lay next to him and just felt that—the feeling of lying next to your sleeping child. there's nothing like it. even now when he's a 22 year old man. i feel so sorry for him that his dad is so fucked up. but I'm happy for him that his dad is loving. he is the reason i found the sanctuary, he is the reason i am still here. the sanctuary can never stop me offing myself. it just helps me get out of rampant end it mode so that i can come home and not be suicidal around my kid. so that i can focus on some goodness, recharge so that i can give. cos my boy, he’s been through some shit. he first told me he would kill himself if it wasn't for me when he was eleven years old. his mother abducted him one week after he told me that. if you can imagine. needless to say i found him. gave him a choice. like she never did.
i dunno why but it was fucking fated to be that i rode up there yesterday. he woke up at 4:40 and sunset was at 5:23. nah he didn't want to come he mumbled sleepily. i chucked on my runners and packed water and a hoodie and was on the bike by 4:44. i made it with 8 minutes to spare, so i gathered some sticks and jumped over the wall and made my way down the now well-worn track i keep in existence by keeping myself in existence. my stick wall had been kicked over and the stone circle a little demolished but not too bad. with an eye on the unfolding glory of twilight i repaired camp and built the kindling lattice.
the Ravens were calling out to me, sorry friend i have no food today i hoped i said in their tongue. then the kids rocked up on their little rich kid electric bikes. one pissed off the wall while his two mates made a fukn tiktok or whatever out of it. my stick wall doing its job, they hadn't seen me. but they had seen my bike, chained to a fence up the top near them. they had a cunty vibe but i chose to trust they wouldn't nick my helmet or flatten my tyres. then the moment that changed it all. should i light the fire or wait. why the indecision. when I'm down, my intuition gets muddled, it becomes indecision. the indecision is a sign i need to tune into something, usually that i need to wait. but i can't feel it when I'm down. i push through, fall off the flow, lose the Way. i light the fire.
i usually go to the sanctuary when i have absolutely nothing left but the anxiety and the despair. i can't even be around my son. its the last stop before catatonia, before relapsing into heroin instead of weed and misusing my codeine. its a ritual. from bereft to… something one level higher than bereft. i am by that point completely non-verbal, hopeless, trapped. but yesterday i wasn’t feeling all that bad. but i wasn't feeling all that here, either. so when the abuse of the homeless man started i wasnt in a state to defuse it. humanise myself in their eyes. etc. i was feeling outside myself. encouraged by my silence they amped it up. i yelled back. not my voice. just a voice i hoped would scare them off. they gathered rocks.
one of them came smashing through my stick wall, a fist-sized basalt that would've caved my skull in. i jumped up and ran up the rocks and the track, not knowing what i was doing–you can't hit fucking kids man–but fuck them, not fucking rocks man. they shat themselves and got on their bikes and continued to abuse and whatever. i jumped the fence and they took off to a safe distance, stopped and abused. lots of homeless bigotry. lots of your 13, 14 year old tv and net-raised crap. they were filming me. christ i’m being reduced to a meme here, i thought. i picked up a rock, watching myself from about twelve feet away, up and to the right, sightly behind. wanted it to smash through a helmet and through a skull and into a shitty little brain and splattery splat it all over the path. i honestly wanted to kill these symbols of everything that gives me the absolute world-weary shits. as soon as i let it go i knew it was wrong. i had become them. i spend my whole life not becoming the evil i see and it all leads to this? i get emasculated by some fucking kids and become a fucking meme on a hill above what was my sanctuary and now it's just another fucked place where there is no peace. these cunts will now make it their mission to fuck with my camp. its over. my one place in this city to find solace, years of building the time ghosts there, with my son, alone, years of getting me out of suicide mode and it's all gone to shit. defiled. like the Earth. like me. why the fuck am i alive. its hell. everything is so fucking Wrong.
my rock missed to the left. we play cat and mouse down the track for a hundred and fifty metres or so. them being nasty little cunts and me walking towards them, grinning, the grin of a skull, a zombie, and that's what i am, a dead thing still moving, rictus and regret. rancor and rot. a will to death.
they disappear around a bend and i can't be fucked so i walk back up and over and down to my spot.
the spot, now.
a spot, soon.
another spot where shit went south.
of course they came back and started hurling more rocks and blahblahing their americanised insults and they are harping on about the illegality of the fire, louts these days invoke the law, spare me the fuck. i stare into the fire silently and feel how this is kind of fucking with me big time and how I'm about to move into a van and fuck do i really want to be at the mercy of idiots like this and worse again. my van life i have been excited about as a way i can enjoy being here again, just travelling around from beautiful place to beautiful place and recharge my deepdowns and it's all looking a bit bleak all of a sudden.
i can't stand the tainted atmosphere anymore i grab my stuff and leave the embers undoused in their stupid rock boundary and trudge up the hill. some guy is eyeballing me. i stare back. he says nothing. i get on my bike and ride through the gloom thinking about what do i have at home to get off my face with.
as i am about to lose the last bit of elevation off the serpentine track i see a freaking fire truck slowly making its way through the reserve. it looks so fucking alien. the kids must have reported the fire, bless them the good little citizens. they are so fucking dumb they couldn't describe where i was properly, the truck is the wrong side of the creek and hopefully gets bogged. i don't think i will ever come here again.
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if you read my notes you might have seen these before but here is a collection of photos taken up at the place i used to go.
That hits hard. Powerful piece.
fantastic words and pics