tales from an ordinary world

2002-06-11

A restless mind needs exercise, even when it's dark. I took a route through familiar and unfamiliar streets, to try and keep it interesting. The tyranny of high-beam lights along side-streets versus dark and barren trees in the park. I keep my head down as joggers pass, because it's just not the time of day for eye contact. If you're walking (or jogging) alone, you're walking alone. A fully-lit tram slides by, across the opposite edge of the park. I'm a little tired, but not from the walking, so I press on, heading east, past the barbecue smell of the local grill near the park, and past houses and blocks of flats, new and old. Each of these dwellings look like something, as if I can somehow trick myself into guessing what kind of people live there - but this is foolish, and even moreso when it comes to rental properties. When I started out, I had an old Magnetic Fields album - the travelling one - in my head, but now it's turned into The Handsome Family. Near another popular restaurant, I rest a moment in the concrete park, staring into the greenish glow of the fountain-thing that they've lit up from within, but there's nothing in there but algae and pond scum. As I approach a road that'll take me home, I consider extending my journey, but it feels as if it's run its course already. My walking's all about instinct - one day it might tell me to walk home from St Kilda, another day it might just be enough to walk around the block. Mostly, it's somewhere in between. Sometimes I'm disappointed that the length of the walk doesn't seem to correspond to me coming to any particular conclusions about the things doing mileage in my head, but I've come to understand that this is merely an aid, rather the means by which these conundrums get solved.