Newsfeed

 Your newsfeed is an ailing opinion. This week’s high-flying mark replaces last week’s bomb attack. Viruses threaten to take down everything, you and your computer. Your [newsfeed] is colourfully flat. It lacks the personal touch. Should you take more gold standard roughage? Go on a diet of ten feeds a day? Or revert to baby food, anything as long as it’s mush? Unasked for, someone says your rock band is your favourite ice cream flavour and your brand of underwear. Some days you want to give up on newsfeeds, forever. It isn’t going to happen. Your newsfeed dripfeeds bewildering personalities.

 

Crisis

 Krisis is a Greek word. The serious moment in an illness when a decision must be made. What to do next. The decision to stop the Melbourne Grand Prix in March 2020 was a serious moment. The state went one way. Not another. [Crisis] moments have been Australia’s reality. Ever since. One such moment was late June 2021. Decisions were made not to lockdown. Not make masks mandatory. Not isolate Sydney. Only measures. Measures. Consequent crises there and beyond have led to further denial. Further illness. Non-decision-making. Measures. Australians watch avoidance generate further crisis. Argument every day centres on indecision.

And

 Overwhelmed by sensory overload, time to meditate with the one word: ‘and’. ‘and’ affirms the breath, the next breath. ‘and’ enacts relationship. ‘and’ knows of the other.  ‘and’ opens up more possibilities. ‘and’ causes us to ask what more is there that has not already been said, thought, imagined. Breathe in. ‘and’ will be inclusive. ‘and’ questions. ‘and’ is very helpful in any activity involving essaying. Purists complain about [and] at the start of a sentence. Explain then the modernist book-length cantos that open with ‘And’. ‘and’ here implies everything that ever went before, all history and literature. Breathe out.

Picnic

 On the day this week when the NSW daily case figures went into four figures, the Premier promised that some people could go on picnics, if they did the right thing. Had to laugh at the journalist who thought this announcement jarred. Jarred is not the word for something that is preposterous as an official state policy, immoral, stupid and obscene in the context of an ever-escalating health disaster. However, the Premier‘s nice-thought-at-the-time reminds us that Australia’s Edenic vision of itself as enjoying one continuous [picnic] has come to a temporary halt. Just for now it’s one continuous stay-at-home takeaway.  

   

Green

 During cold morning daily lockdown block walk of crescent, avenue, street, terrace light [green] seeps an inch all over a prunus. Why town planners call any other street a terrace, I don’t know. Their ways are not our ways. Verbs come into play when looking at early shoots of green. Plums fountain amidst white blossom. Roses fight back, pittosporum bulges, poplars pop. Bare branches of unidentifiable trees slip, spray, constellate. Maples, maybe Monday. Other greenery is contrary. Jacarandas fritter, magnolias pinkify. An empty Flinders Street passes by with its sleepers wake sound. Clover comes from nowhere to win the day.