mercoledì, aprile 27, 2011

Warm again warm again jiggedy jig

The three day drive back here to L--- was capped by collecting the keys to our house. It feels pretty good, I have to say, even though our walk-through of the backyard prognosticated months of hard work just for things to be tidy. But after the dry, scabby dusty crabbiness of Victoria and the chilly pseudo-European autumnality of the drive through the Hunter Valley - even after the wet and cold forests with the heartbreakingly beautiful fern trees of the 'mountains', or the Australian equivalent of mountains, through central NSW - it was such a relief to get back here to L---, and such a relief to get out of the car outside our house, and hear the fruitbats shrieking and the birds squawking and everything just being so damn warm and green!

It's a little absurd as a conversation to be having just as we've bought a house but the F-word and I have been discussing leaving Australia someday. The fact of this country is that it is so damn expensive that if I didn't have my high-paying job I wouldn't feel comfortable living here, and I don't want my high-paying job forever, and doubt my company will keep me forever. And the F-word has a sweeping psychological spectrum of forces simultaneously pushing him away and pulling him deeper into this country, the 'pushing' forces probably being badly exacerbated by two weeks in Victoria exposed to some of the less appealing members of his family . . .

All that being what it is, not to mention all of my psychological spectrums, I already know it will be hideously difficult to leave L---. I've lived in some fucking beautiful places in my life - beautiful in very different ways - and it took me to my early 30s to get to something approximating the tropics. And it is so comfortable. It is just so much better than anything else. God, it breaks my heart we as a race get along with each other so poorly we can't just all live in the tropics.