Culture: A Bacterial Odyssey.

You got a smoke?

Sure mate.

I reach in to my pocket and open the package, hand one over. I've had a rough time brother, he says. I'm not going to make it. I know I'm not going to make it. Too many charges, I'm going inside, and I won't come out. I'm not doing so good man. I'm not going to make it. I've been taking it out on the dog, I don't know what to do. I'm not going to make it. The dog, small, white, sits obediently beside his terrified master and reflects the sadness and horror in his eyes. Another victim, two victims. Scars still scabbing brown and black blood form a relief map across the curves - the ridges and ravines - of his face, the map of his past and the route ahead. It's fear and resignation and death, a horrible fight against death, that light, the spark behind the off milk eyes and he spews curdled and panicked words at me in the hope of one last show of kindness, or more importantly - brotherhood. Proof of existence. Proof of humanity. Who writes this man's story? Who stops to mark his passage as he becomes a shadow? I don't know what to say, so I speak the truth for what greater crime than to lie to a doomed man, I say, I can't help you brother - but don't be hard on that little one - the dog - he doesn't know, and he's your mate. I'm not going to make it, I'm not going to make it. I shake his hand, give him that, and keep walking. I flick my cigarette aside and it's forgotten, swept far away, out of sight.

The night before is Henry Miller - I am the germ of a new insanity, a freak dressed in intelligible language, a sob that is buried like a splinter in the quick of the soul - and it's cunt and cock, cunt and cock, alone in the world, a sailor in dry dock lost both on land and sea, and emotion spills over when one teenage girl does not win the million dollar modelling contract, I shed a tear for her when the scarred face of death brought naught but an opiate of emptiness, an echo of compassion in the dark cavern of my soul, our souls, the world is a living creature and we are the dream rodents, scurrying and consuming and there's more cunt and more cock and more money and more death than we know what to do with and all those who don't look in make their way in the world and those who do simply close down and are lost, the incompatible waste of evolution's steady march and us in between, we try and find balance and love who we can and forget what we must and it's never, ever, ever enough. Ever. How do you love an insane world without going insane? I do it. I rub garlic and salt into a fillet of kangaroo and sit alone with red wine and watch the storms watch the wind fall for rain fall to earth and the drums beat a funeral march on the roof and it's all I can do not to laugh, an old dirty insane bastard, laugh as the world collapses, ready to be rebuilt at dawn.