Author: samuel

Observations From Isolation: Ch.7 – The Demise Of Civility (As It Were… And Still Is…)

(Originally written in August, 2017, but still pertinent today…)

For the past ten months or so, as befits a hobo journalist with relatively new paternal responsibilities, I’ve been moonlighting at the servo in town. Slingin’ petty, as the local grommets call it. It is, for the most part, a good little gig that affords me both the flexibility to continue plying my literary trade, all while allowing me to provide a bit extra for my fledgling family; a good balance at this point in my life, I feel.

With this newfound outlet though, has come a startling realisation. For these months past, as I’ve slung petty to countless people both during the day and through the night, I have come to realise that the demise of civility is upon us. A dark day is dawning, one where people care little for others and where good manners are naught but mere refuse, cast from the windows of speeding cars, left to fester in roadside ditches along with other antiquated and little-used notions like respect for one’s elders, chivalry and downright common sense.

In this day and age, it seems, people are far too wrapped up in their own lives to spare a thought for anyone else. Even the simple task of greeting someone is beyond some people, the thought of a ‘thank you’ come the end of the transaction now little more than a flight of fancy. I have lost count of the number of times someone has come in to pay for their fuel, and hasn’t even acknowledged that I exist, not even a look.

I was brought up to be polite, so perhaps that’s why this lack of common decency sticks in my craw. And I too, over the course of my adult life, have been wrapped up in whatever it was I was doing, and so have spared little thought for other people at times, of that I am surely guilty. But I have never thrown anything at anyone, I have never unleashed a torrent of abuse at someone, I have never told anyone they were worthless. All of this has happened to me in the past ten months, and it fair makes me wonder what the world is coming to.

Eighteenth century English writer Mary Wortley Montagu said that “civility costs nothing, but buys everything” – it seems, in an age where instant gratification is king, where a sense of entitlement, as bold as day, has settled over the landscape, that not many are aware of how cheap civility is, and how far it truly goes. Granted, giving me a smile and a cheery greeting won’t pay for your fuel, but I can guarantee it’ll get a smile in return, a bit of pithy banter and a good feeling buzzing about in your stomach. It’s basic human interaction, but I can tell you it’s beyond a vast majority of people I come across.

So why is this? When did civility begin its demise? Has it been this way for a while, but because I’ve not been privy to it on a daily basis, I haven’t realised? Perhaps people have become so used to online interaction that a face-to-face exchange has so become alien and strange, the muscles in people’s faces slack and flabby from underuse and so unable to form a simple smile. Good lord, it paints a grim picture of the future, make no mistake.

All I can do then I suppose, is try my best to ignore what I find abhorrent (along with practising my ducking and weaving). All I can do is stick to the ideals on which I was raised, and try my best to pass them on to my own daughter. All I can do is get on with my own life, paying proper respect to others along the way, all the while hoping, just hoping, that perhaps people will return the favour, and we can do our little bit to help restore the civility this world so keenly needs.

I should begin by qualifying the above title. For you see, I am in no way a medical professional, far from it, and even further from it for me to insinuate that what I’m doing is anywhere close to being as ‘frontline’ as these people; these doctors, nurses, pharmacists, GPs, paramedics and countless other medical pros are the ones who are doing it tough in order to keep people healthy and alive, and hats off to every single one of them.

No, my frontline activities are far more trivial – I work in the local bottleo, and while the government has deemed this an ‘essential’ service (indeed, woe betide any Australian governing body which sees fit to deny The People a drink, and in a time of crisis, no less), it hardly seems fair to call it, really, ‘frontline’.

So I’m naught but a humble slinger of suds, a bourbon broker, a vino vendor. I am also, for better or worse, a talker of entertaining shit, a sometimes surly retail worker, someone who in order to pay the bills as freelance writing all but dries up, dons a logo-d t-shirt a few times a week, punches a clock and serves the grotty masses their daily swill.

A bottle shop is a decent enough place to work. It is, as you’d expect, a good source of exercise; the money is solid; the hours are fine. It’s also a front row seat to the spectacle that is humanity, in that the constant flow of human flotsam that wanders in through those sliding glass doors provide an unending source of amusement, disgust, of sympathy and displays out outright eccentricity.

The big, burly, shirtless bloke who one would think the quintessential iconography of something like Tooheys New, or XXXX Gold, who is well and truly addicted to Passion Pop. The young surf guys who come in and, between five of them, split a case of Vodka Cruisers. The 19-year-old girl whose taste in shiraz is far more advanced than most three times her age. The older lady who wears hearing-aids but delights in not turning them on and so speaks at top volume, listens to nothing (not that she can), berates you in good humour and waltzes out, leaving those not used to her, in a state of shellshock.

Steve – old and grey-bearded, scrawny and sun-leathered – comes in from mowing lawns all day and walks straight up to me to talk footy. I’m a known Broncos and Queensland supporter among the League tragics in town, and so usually, playful banter is at a premium. In the current climate though, rivalries are forgotten as we commiserate together about how there is no football, and when will the football return?

Old ladies will walk towards me to ask a question but they won’t stop a metre and a half short and so I’m backing away from an old bird half my size, lest she get too close. I back into a shelf and have to tell them to stop where they are. They always apologise and look embarrassed.

Bus driver Dave, with his huge and droopy white moustache, buys the same two bottles of cheap semi-sauv every couple of days and then stays to chat for ten minutes, forgetting that people are waiting for him to move away from the counter so’s they can buy. Alicia, always in big hat and sunglasses, no matter the weather or time of day, buys her two bottles of slightly more expensive sauv-blanc, and always asks how you are.

Max, who used to run pubs, shuffles in for his XXXX Gold longneck and a bottle of chardonnay and cracks jokes but is very much concerned with your welfare. He’s just had a hip replacement, and I ask him how he’s feeling. “A lot bloody better now,” he snaps over his shoulder, “although I can’t bloody well go anywhere, can I? But how are you going? Surviving?”

People don’t read signs. They’re incapable of reading signs. A bank of fridges broke down last week, seven doors behind which sit all the pre-mix spirits and ciders, getting warmer and warmer as the fridge backfired completely and, sometime on the Sunday night, started pumping hot air instead of cold. It got up to 35 degrees in there.

So we put signs, at eye level, on each and every one of those fridges while they were being fixed, a two day operation. I lost count of the number of times someone came up to me, genuinely concerned for the most part, to tell me that they thought the fridges might be broken, and did we know, because everything was warm. I look at them for a second, a long and silent second, before saying, yeah, that’s why there are signs on the doors. They stare at me, and then laugh, and they walk off as I roll my eyes and continue stocking the longneck shelves.

I wear black, latex gloves, the same kind you’d see on a tattoo artist. I stand behind the Perspex screens that have been erected in front of the two tills at the counter. I sanitise the gloves every few customers. If I’m heaving cases, I’ll not wear gloves but I’ll wash my hands ever ten minutes or so. I use my shoulder to heave open the heavy coolroom door.

People walk in and make jokes about Corona beer. There’s a stack just inside the door; people laugh and say they feel sorry for whoever makes it. It’s still selling like hotcakes. Someone says they drank ten Coronas last night and so this morning they had coronavirus (to be fair, that one was pretty good… at least the first time I heard it). Someone else will pick up a case and feint a pass to a mate, “Look out mate, Coronavirus” and they’ll guffaw and I’ll roll my eyes again.

Occasionally someone will get testy about something. (“But the customer is always right,” they’ll say indignantly. “A common misconception,” I’ll deadpan back). I feel, in the current circumstances, a bit of dry humour works well. At least in the main.

To be fair to the flotsam flow, people are generally well behaved and if they fail to follow a sign, or the arrows marked in blue tape on the floor, a quick and friendly remonstration is all it takes for an apology, and an about-turn to follow the correct path.

You’ve got to keep it tight, in the bottleo, people know that, for if they want a drink, well, you need to toe the line. I tell them this, and they look at me a bit worried but I’ll smile and they’ll smile and we’re all good.

Every person is a threat, every piece of money a potential carrier of infection, every cough a gun-shot. But a bottle shop is a decent place to work, and while we’re not saving any lives, life on the ‘frontline’ flows on.

Observations From Isolation: Ch.5 – Tiered Waterfalls, Up In The Hills…

 

We get to the

Top of the Bitumen Hill

And I pull onto the side

To lock the front wheels and then

Kick it into four-high and we turn

Off the scrappy blacktop onto dirt and head

Up and east.

 

There are houses at first,

Decent size and structure tucked

Into the dense rainforest

But we leave them behind quickly and

It’s nothing but green and swaying ferns and

Palms.

We wind the windows down and smell

The peat and the moisture coming up

Off the forest floor.

 

We catch glimpses of the

Ocean through the

Trees and the land falls away to our right

As we climb higher.

 

The road is fine, packed hard and almost

Pink gravel, running divots cut through in

Places from recent rain creating diagonal

Speed bumps. The truck

Shudders and bounces across them

And stabilises. I sip coffee

Carefully between bumps, quickly averting

My eyes from the road to tuck the

Cup back into its holder.

 

We find a spot, high up, to park,

Tucked against ferns and backed

Against a fallen log. We cross

The road, with the small stream running beneath

That then finds freedom on the other side

Through big concrete pipes that make you think

Of sewage, but the water is

Clear and clean and is colder than the air.

Adeline skips ahead on the

Slippery rock and we have to tell her to

Be careful but she doesn’t stop, just laughs

And keeps on skipping.

 

The rock tiers naturally, small steps

Downward, rivulets running and dropping

Then pooling before finding a gap

And gravity helps it along.

 

Birds call in the trees and there’s

No one about at all. You think

You hear a car somewhere further down one

Of the tracks but it turns out to be a lone,

Small, plane somewhere not too high above

Joyflighting over the emptiness of

It all.

 

Some parts are steep and you need

To find a way, a different way, off the

Track, somewhere easier to slide, to

Tumble, to step down to the next level

Where the water pools again, deeper this

Time under trees with dappled sun lighting

It in a way that makes the clear water gleam

Like nothing you’ve seen gleam before.

 

We race leaves down small runs to

See which will get there first. Mine

Always seem to end up caught under

Loose grass and Addy’s make it clear to the

Next pool.

 

We find the end, a proper drop to

Valley below, the view across Myocum

Towards Byron and the sea glittering in the

Middle distance. We sit

And eat mandarins and peanuts and sip

From the water bottle and find long grass

To make swords and we throw our fruit peel

Into the long scrub and sit and watch

The view.

On Walking The Track… Isolation In Nature… Pitbulls And Graffiti… No Sound But The Birds…

There’s a winding track a five or so minute drive from our place, that cuts through bushland and under the highway, running the couple of kilometres between north Ocean Shores and Billinudgel. It’s only wide enough for walking or bike riding, concrete bollards at each end stopping any cars coming through. It’s wild and untamed off the edges, but the track – cracked bitumen with faded white dividing lines down the centre – remains true and it curves lightly through the growth, little used by anyone aside from those in the know.

We regularly drive down, park the truck at the eastern end and pull Addy’s scooter out of the back. She darts ahead on three wheels and chatters constantly, picking up sticks and waving them in the air while we wander slowly behind. Aside from the tiny talk, it’s quiet and seemingly remote, a reconnection with nature as you make your way westward, stopping occasionally to peer through the trees, to look up to the arching canopy overhead.

Parts of it reminds me of the American deep south, rural parts of Louisiana in particular as you head west from New Orleans toward Baton Rouge and Lafayette – away from the interstate and the large towns that congregate along same, winding single-lane roads cut through isolated hamlets, past tiny white-painted churches and lean-to shacks partly hidden in groves of pine laden with Spanish moss, pick-up trucks parked haphazard in front.

There’s no hanging moss here, no rusty pick-ups or various houses of the lord, but it has that same lucid melancholy in the way the lantana grows right up to the cracked bitumen, hiding most that’s behind it all aside from the top third of power poles, the remnants of past industry, marshy wetland and rusty tin-topped sheds stacked with rotting rail timber and bolts the size of your forearm.

The only remaining signs of the actual rail line, as it were, are the rickety sleepers and oxidized iron that bridge the lethargic brown water of Marshalls Creek.

When you’re not close to the highway, all you can hear are the birds. You can’t see them, but they’re set in the trees and they call to one another like they’re the only living things ever to have been. Butterflies waft through on the occasional breeze, blue and orange, and clouds of grey moths disturbed by footfalls through the low grass on the edge of the path, puff up into the air in a silent frenzy before settling again once their danger has passed.

Walking under the highway, it’s a different scene altogether; brutalist and sparse, giant concrete beams span the width of the underpass and road-trains boom by a few metres above your heard, the sound below duller but echoing across culverts and divots in the scree piled out from the track. Storm water pools in stagnant ponds behind wilting wire fences and graffiti murals span beams, adding colour to an otherwise dull and grey concrete expanse.

Spent cigarette butts dot the darker grey of the rock, and there’s an empty cardboard carton of bourbon and cola cans half submerged in the muddy brown water.

At the Billi end, the track passes close to a residential property, a fibro shack built right up to the path, its grey wall scrawled over in green paint a paranoid message hinting at hidden security cameras. I can’t see any. Two pitbulls run the length of a wire enclosure across the patchy grass, barking madly, downing out the birdcall. It’s here that we turn and begin the walk back, under the highway, past the old rail bridge and the metal-encased cabelling running endlessly north, back under the canopy, the roar of interstate traffic fading behind us as we head east, to be replaced with the birds

We round the final curve and can see the truck sitting against the bollads were we left it. Addy scoots up to it and flops over in the grass, her helmeted head seeming far too large for her body. The birds call in the trees overhead as we load up and drive home.

Golden Orbs On Thick Strands… Pirates In The Bottleo… Dance Parties About The Loungeroom…

Two golden-orb spiders have built a huge and complex web off the side of the palms bordering the driveway. I pull in at night after work and they hang directly above the driver’s side door; I have to slip out and around the back of the truck, walk down the passenger side lest I come face to face, in the dark, with their spindly legs.

In the mornings, when I head down to the beach, or go and buy some bread, a newspaper, they’ve extended their empire and thick and sticky strings are looped around the side mirror, the radio antenna. When I back out, the big diesel engine throbbing, the strands pull and then snap and the huge web bends and flexes, its occupants jarred into quick action before web and spiders settle and I’m free and away to start the day.

There’s something intriguing about the fact they’re working together – something oddly unsettling as well, but I don’t think about it too much until I’m face to face with them again later on.

There’s a mass of smaller orbs about the garden too, they’ve proliferated in the past couple of weeks, stringing webs in the little native trees out the back, off the edge of the clothesline, across the gate into the back garden. Mostly, they’re off to the side but occasionally they need to be gently dissuaded from invading public space and so a broom handle or a fallen palm frond snaps strings and the webs fall back gently so’s you can walk past.

They’re so delicate they float on a breeze you can’t even feel.

On Tuesday just gone, darkness fallen, sometime between seven and eight o’clock, a pirate wandered into the Bottleo, a pronounced limp and a grizzled, grey beard. Surprisingly bright eyes and clear, tanned skin though – I tried to guess his age but failed; he could have been forty or seventy.

Big, black leather boots, a ratty and long black coat, brown leather tri-cornered hat on his head, fingers adorned in silver, crystals and opals and all sorts hanging around his neck. Homeless but cheerful enough. He bought a small bottle of port, paid for it in change, then leant against the counter and talked to me about whisky. As befits a pirate.

He was surprisingly articulate, well travelled. He knew his whisky. We compared favourites, we both like our single malts heavily peated. He wasn’t crazy. But he was dressed like a pirate. I saw him the following day, down in town crossing the bridge in the sunshine but still covered in black with his long coat, the bright light flashing off his ringed fingers, the bottle of port nowhere to be seen.

Claire and Addy have dance parties in the loungeroom. They plug a phone into the stereo and find something they both want to listen to. Addy quickly runs into her bedroom to find a dress that twirls and then runs back out saying she can’t find her ballet slippers. They’re usually on the floor in plain sight. The two of them hold hands and swing around the coffee table, around the couch and Papa’s old armchair which sits, faded by decades of sunlight, just inside the front door. They try out new dance moves and Addy will then run into my office to tell me they’ve got a new dance move and that I have to come out and see it.

I sit on the couch and watch them dance, Addy’s dress swirling around her waist, both of them laughing, getting sweaty from the lingering summer humidity and the exertion of it all. Eventually they both fall into a pile on the floor, laughing, legs flailing and I stretch out on the couch and laugh too. This is our isolation.

These are desperate times and so desperate measures are required.

People are confused, their eyes dart right then left and they stand stock still, although not for too long lest they be pulled up by the authorities and told to move on. People aren’t quite sure, and so no one is moving fast, no one knows what to expect.

Desperate measures for desperate times. People adapt and do what they can to survive. The Fear is almost done perhaps, but the waiting – the interminable waiting – is in full swing. People wait, they tentatively go about their lives all whilst thinking to themselves how much their lives have changed, and they wait.

Do they think this is the new normal, or is it hard to adjust and to keep swimming as the current switches like a whip without a second’s notice? Some go with the current while others buck against it.

Places once viewed as naught but pit-stops have become all important places to meet, to catch up, to reconnect, albeit at a distance and in almost hushed tones so as not to affect anyone else, so as not to give the impression that one is flaunting the rules and congregating, mingling, whatever the opposite is of social isolation, of distancing, of doing for the good of the People what one should.

The supermarket and the bottleshop, these are the places where people meet now and so both, usually quick-stop-move-on types of places, ring with the laughter of friends reacquainting under the bright lights, in front of the craft beer fridges, leaning against the cold meat freezer, flirtations in the pasta aisle, catch-ups lit gold by the coolroom glare, recollections of isolation to the smell of BBQ chicken fresh off the rotisserie.

People wave from passing cars far more often than they used to and one wandering the streets is all too keen to wave back. It doesn’t matter who’s flung an arm from a slow-moving truck, it’s Someone and so the interaction is enough to elicit a response and a retelling of the episode once the wanderer has returned home. Home, wherever that may be.

People read the news more than they did and yet the news is dying.

These are desperate times and so desperate measures are required. It’s the new normal, but how normal is it, and when will the waiting end? You’re lonely, bored, sick of the whip-quick current switch and so you head to the bottleshop, hoping someone you know has the same idea so you can catch up, a casual elbow-lean on a stack of promo beer on the shop floor and interaction is once again achieved. Before you’re required to move on once more.