Seriously. I had no real idea. I was dimly aware that the last day of October was passing me by, but instead of the autumnal pastiche of yellow leaves and party vomit, I was basking in sunlight. I took in summer sights and weather, and saw only a modicum of particularly enthusiastic young people dressed in costume. They wore black and wigs. Make-up ran with sweat. I chuckled and trundled onwards.
I spent the weekend in Sydney, a city whose harbor provides many overseas with their iconic view of Australia. This view, in fact:
It shouldn’t be hard to see, hopefully, why I wasn’t feeling particularly spooky. Although the famed Opera House’s insectoid carapace is a little alien. But under the bright sunlight, with music blaring from street musicians, it was hard to be anything but fascinating by its scaly design.
Halloween hasn’t historically been my happiest time. From psychological troubles to the onset of a general seasonal depression—I like that it’s called “Seasonal Affective Disorder” as though one shouldn’t be affected by seasons and “SAD” is a passable acronym, cheeky shrinks—it’s generally been a time, for me, of retreat. Crawling back into a shell of bad attitude and protective cynicism. That’s not that fun, but you know what? It was damned comfortable. So maybe it served its purpose.
Whatever purpose that was, I guess I’m done with it now. I’ll eschew a clumsy cocoon metaphor, and even refrain from one of hibernation. It’s a little hard to call the majority of your life a transitory period. And more than a little hasty. Instead I will dive right in, and describe my experience of the city, and why I wasn’t concerned with Halloween or getting hammered.
We arrived at 830 on Friday night, a nearly disgustingly short plane ride from Melbourne. Around an hour after we initially took off, I was wandering blearily from the plane, praying silently that the hotel wasn’t too far off. It wasn’t, thankfully, although it became apparent fairly quickly that the reason for its low price was its proximity to the airport. Airports are, by and large, loud places. It might have something to do with the enormous, fossil-powered machines that defy gravity and ferry people from one continent to the next. Or it could just be the taxis, bleating their impatience into the night like ewes in heat at a ram brothel. Technically that wasn’t a bad metaphor, by the way, I used “like” so it was a simile.
We checked in and I slept hard on a folded out sofa bed, after watching a Korean movie. It was a drama, all people cheating on one another, the separation of a family. It also had subtitles, which is helpful, given that I was trying to be quiet, you see.
I awoke ridiculously early by having a 2 year old plopped onto the bed next to me, and spent a few minutes allowing him to poke me in the face and say things like “beard” and “nose.” If I can be a teaching aide, then so be it. It’s a purpose, right? We got our collective shits together and headed for the harbor.
Sydney harbor is, as I mentioned before, iconic. Like the Empire State Building, or the Eiffel Tower, or one of those other large lumps of metal and rock that instantly identifies the location. The kind of thing that sets the scene in a movie, leaves absolutely no question about the protagonist’s whereabouts. The only movie I can really think of with Sydney Harbor in it is Finding Nemo, but I stand by that. We arrived before the early morning cloud cover burned off, and took in an upclose view of the famed Opera House.
It’s a bizarre structure, equal parts artistic inspiration and seemingly organic growth. The concrete and whatever-the-hell-its-made-of paneling merge to create a building that looks simultaneously dated and futuristic. I like it. It weirds me out. Sends little shudders of strangeness down to the spot where sweat drips shoulders to the small of my back. That’s my initial reaction.
As the day wears on, I begin to get a better feel for it. I feel less haunted by the foreignness of structures and accents (although, in fairness there were plenty of Americans milling around). I wander through crowds and watch street performers. Contortionists and jugglers, b-grade guitar players. A man plays a digeridoo, haunting and droning, over some heavy techno beats. I buy a CD, because why the hell not.
I continue weaving and wandering until my time of responsibility is at hand. The mother has a lunch-date to celebrate a friends 40th birthday, so I collect the nearly-2 year old and we head straight for the best place to take a kid: The museum of modern art.
You see, the thing is that old art is just paintings and sculptures and the occasional giant mobile. Modern art, on the other hand, is a self-indulgent slurry of video, projections, and garbage sculptures. It’s a mixed-media nightmare of creativity and uselessness. It’s exactly what children want. Example: Take a landscape painting. It’s okay, I guess, but what’s a kid gonna say? It looks like a field. That’s not very exciting. Take the same picture, point a projector at it, and have a man walking around on it, disappearing and reappearing at various distances. Now you’ve got a 22 month old fella who wants to sit and look at a painting for 20 minutes.
So we did. We saw chandeliers sticking out at random angles from walls, electric bulbs flickers. We saw a 17 minute video of a man playing the drums not-very-well-but-on-top-of-a-waterfall. He was mystified, I was lightly amused. We saw a helicopter made of garbage, a projector in the cockpit spraying the video documentary of its creation onto the wall.
Then, when we had exhausted the meager offerings of the smallish museum, we returned to wandering. He tired quickly, falling asleep in stroller, in a pathetic and adorable display of the unique ability children have to pass out anywhere, even while moving over bumpy wooden docks. I sat with him in the shade, killing time until I could return him to his rightful owner, and watched as a skywriter scrawled “JESUS something something” across the sky. The wind took it before his message could be completed. It ended up floating upside down on the other side of the bridge for the rest of the afternoon, which I thought was poetic justice. Perhaps God doesn’t care for aerobatic proselytizing. Perhaps I’m reading too much into the wind.
I returned him to his mother, who was finishing up a large-scale expensive lunch at a dockside restaurant. They were parked in umbrella shade, beneath a mighty cruise liner parked at the dock. They seemed to be having fun, but it wasn’t much that I wanted anything to do with. No offense intended to ladies making a big expensive deal out of turning 40, it’s apparently significant. Just not where my interests lie.
Freed from the burden of ramp-only walking, I headed straight uphill, climbing stairs to hit the harbor bridge. I got up there and walked out, seeking a post-card perfect shot, which I got (the first pic above). I saw numerous touristy folks, and had a good hearty walk alone. I returned to the street performers, thought strange thoughts and felt my skin absorb the heat. I took a train back to the hotel a couple of hours later, and spent the night watching “The World’s Fastest Indian.” Which is, in point of fact, about a New Zealander, played by a Welshman.
I awoke the next morning in a similar fashion, small person clambering towards me. I eschewed the wake-up routine and headed straight for the shower. The water felt fantastic on my rapidly browning skin, driving out the last of the sleep heat and general eye crustiness that comes along with sunny days and warm nights. We took a train, then another train, then a bus to Bondi Beach, apparently a famed surf spot and the subject of a life-guard based reality show.
All I’ll say is this: It was damned nice. I can’t say that all that much interesting happened, other than some kind of terrible art installations mounted on a cliff, and the occasional rippling body of someone who spends 6 months a year on a beach and the other 6 months staying toned and tanned for the beach. It was relaxing, and involved a large sandwich. It was a fine day, but not the caliber of day that Halloween had been.
I got back to Melbourne about 6 hours ago, and have been recuperating. My legs ache, the skin of my arms is freckled and slightly red. But I feel great. And all without the usual drunken stupidity and costume-anxiety of Halloween. It’s interesting, and a different place to be, mentally.
Slipping into Autumn usually proves to be the death of my good mood. I am either “seasonally affected,” or maybe just reminded of past misdeeds and mistakes that occurred around this time of the year. I have a bit of an anniversary complex sometimes, but this year was different. I didn’t realize what day anything was. Hell, I find it really hard to believe, when I’m in shorts and a T-shirt, that it’s November right now.
I don’t think that this season-reversal has cured anything in terms of negative tendencies or reactionary self-abasement, but I do think it has provided me with a great opportunity. It’s giving me a vacation. A year off, a chance to break old habits. It also gives me the unique chance to have a bitchin’ tan at Christmas, which in the Northern hemisphere is impossible without resorting to airbrushing or staining oneself orange.
I would normally go for some sort of pithy conclusion here, but I feel like Australia’s sun has drained it out of me. It’s different from our sun, you see. Our sun is a light source and occasional heatlamp. Australia’s sun is a raging ball of flame perched perilously close to the Earth’s surface. Or so it seems. It saps you and invigorates you at once, paradoxical and not unlike the weight of experience.
That seems pithy enough for me for now. Goodnight all.
RJC
