unloading

Not so much feeding my head perhaps as unloading it of random images of nights in the life. Writing as a process of forgetting, in the way that the character of the Judge in Cormac McCarthy's "Blood Meridian", a malign immortal, records phenomena so that they can then be erased forever from the memory of time. Images without provenance, without explanation ... a curly-haired man lying face down, possibly dead, on a concrete slab in the lurid yellow neon light of the next door Church of Christ, Rockdale, with desultory police gathered and a slow ambulance on the way ... while down a nearby alley a man runs hectically toward the scene of the crime ... a Silver Service cab (they are the elite among taxis, immaculate Fairlanes with liveried drivers) stopped on Broadway with the back left hand door open as a young woman in a party dress bends over a pool of vomit glittering like jewels on the kerb and in the gutter ... a young Japanese hooker with meaty thighs striding towards an apartment building in Ward Avenue while her sixty year old John, who looks like Norman Mailer, pays off the cabbie and follows her in ... four drunk people in Kings Cross, three women and a man, throwing balled up paper bags at the cab in front ... they have been celebrating a day shooting a low budget movie, maybe a porno flick, and want to go to Paddington ... a couple having a leaden, nasty fight in the back seat after attending the World Premiere of the new Nicole Kidman film "The Interpreter" ... she fell asleep ten minutes in and snored and blames him for not waking her ... a man standing in the middle of Darlinghurst Road at the corner of Oxford Street, arms raised in praise at the way the night wind moves in the dark leaves of the trees outside the old jail ... the car-wash men, Arabs stripped to the waist with fags stuck in their mouths, manically hosing and soaping and wiping down and polishing the once grimy cabs under stark white fluorescents at the Ampol Station in Five Dock ... the guy who sleeps sitting down and bolstered in a complicated arrangement of bags while leaning forward into a shopping trolley in a bus shelter on the Hume Highway, whom I pass every night on my way home ...