Taylore Square

September 29, 2009

Tuesday, around 6:00pm

Taylor Square

Oxford x Flinders x Bourke

Sydney, Australia

Sitting in an outdoor café whose name has something to do with Cuba.  Far from the Americas.

I’m not much for sightseeing.

I’m more of a rambler.

Having traveled to the other side of the planet, I spend most of most of my short time in Sydney haunting cafes and roaming drowsy neighborhoods. 

I take naps.

I like the morning best, though I don’t do much with it.  I lay in bed inside the top floor room I am occupying in a Victorian B&B.  Awake with a start at a quarter to 6, then languishing til 8.

I listen to the hushed white noise of Sydney waking at 5am from under the down comforter.

The thought crosses my mind that I ought to record this tranquil soundscape, cloaked as it is in my hazy consciousness. But I stubbornly refuse to get out of bed.  Instead, I compose prose in my head and swear I’ll remember it.

I don’t.

I doze.

The sound of a barking dog reawakes me with another start.  It sounds other-worldly.  It sounds other-side-of-the-worldly.  I recognize it as a dog after a moment’s pause and later discover a dog lives in this B&B.

Six hours after landing in Australia after fourteen hours of suspension, I hear a small bunch of bamboo creaking in the wind bursting off the harbour.  Two women photograph it.  I’d like to record this creaking, but there is an outdoor concert on at the moment.  I vow to return.

I have not yet.

I have, however, taken numerous photos of sunlight peeking through leaves and other sorts of botany renderings.  I am in love the flora of Sydney.

Somewhere—I don’t remember where—Sydney was described in strictly Californian terms: “Los Angeles without the attitude; San Francisco with better weather.”  But it reminds me of yet another Western American city.  A city in which I lived for 4 years.

…but with better weather.

Wandering, roaming, rambling—I feel quite at home on the move.

The key way that I know I have traveling 10,000 miles to be here is by listening to the various municipal tones which alert the citizens of Sydney that they now have the right of way to cross the street, that a police vehicle is traveling at a swift clip to some emergency or other, that the subway doors are closing, that an alarmed home has a door or window ajar.

In New York, everything is a car horn being laid upon.  Like it’s trying to compensate for something, while Sydney is quite satisfied with passing a leisurely morning under a sky inhabited by both sun and moon.

Under this surprisingly vast sky (which I profusely photograph), I continually see people who look like people I know from other cities and towns and countries and continents.

This always happens.

Though there is only a single person on this continent who could accurately place my face with my name—David the innkeeper—I am utterly startled every time.  It’s not that I really believe that anyone I know is here, yet I still become hyper-alert for a split-second—bereft of my bearings. 

Do these mis-sightings make my feel more or less alone?  I am wondering.  After a few blocks of walking, I decide that I am utterly ambivalent, and move on in my thoughts.

I must unlearn a lifetime of left-right-left in order to successfully cross the street.  No easy feat in my current state of mind, and it takes me a correspondingly long time to move to the other side.

I acquire medicine for an ailment I brought over from Brooklyn, and faithfully take vitamins to ward off new ones.

Sudden and exaggeratingly dire pangs on hunger beset me with no warning.  I am confused, and seek out the first seemingly suitable establishment.  In my dazed state, I am always overpaying for food.  I order more than I can eat.  Thankfully, I am not eating often.

It’s all I can do to stay awake til 8pm.  I wander the neighborhoods, admiring the lacy iron railings which adorn the facades of little houses cozily tucked-in to each other.  I feel conspicuous taking precisely the sort of photos that I favor in more familiar surroundings.

I keep checking the weather.

I sleep well past my alarm during an afternoon nap prior to my date with Mozart, and go to the opera with bedhead and sheet creases pressed into my exposed flesh. 

Following the performance, the prospect of waiting a half an hour for the bus is too much to bear, so I hire a cab.  The driver declares that I “look like” the neighborhood I have requested, which seems to confirm my knack for research.  I already know this about myself.

Awake again, 6am.

I am acutely aware of the banal psychosis that is jet lag.

Aboard the ferry to Manly, an American man sits next to me.  He narrates with an enthusiasm that seems boastful over video footage of the harbour that he captures on his cell phone.  His is the first American accent I’ve heard since Delta #17, and I find that I haven’t missed it.

He’s from Brooklyn.  This also always happens.

I receive text messages from a recent lover while at Manly Beach.  He’s stuck on a train with no electricity in the middle of nowhere in the middle of the night in the middle of northern United States.  I am wandering in the afternoon sunlight searching for fish and chips.

I keep missing buses.  It is difficult to imagine conjuring the patience to wait 20 minutes for the next circuit.

But I do.

Aboard the 9:15 am train to Newcastle, I see Rebecca Solnit’s “blue of distance” across a deep valley.  I’d like to be in those mountains.

Precisely as I am stepping off the train at Civic Station, A nearby church’s bell indicates it is noon with the requisite resonant “thonnnnnnngs” one would expect.