Phone

I’m on the 7.05am Amtrak
train from San Diego to Los Angeles and I’m looking out at the ocean, through bits and pieces of fog, when 2 seats back a man starts to talk, very loudly, into his phone.

‘It frikkin' sucks,’ he says, in a southern accent of some sort, ‘it was wasting my breath,’
The he goes quiet.
Then a moment later he starts saying how ‘fucked’ something feels.
‘Yeh, man,’ he says, ‘it just feels so fucked,’
Then he goes quiet again.
Then he starts talking about something organic.
‘Yeh, so I pick it up,’ he says, ‘and the guy goes, like, yeh, it’s organic. But I’m looking on the back of it and I can’t see it so I’m like, what the fuck ever,’
Then he goes quiet again.
Then he starts talking about being pissed off about things.
‘I’m pissed off,’ he says, ‘things have gotten kind of screwed up. All the notes were, ..were…were…’
Then he goes quiet again for a few moments.
Then he starts talking again.
‘Anyway..,’ he says.
And then he goes quiet again.
The he starts speaking again.
‘Yeh, it’s not,..’ he says.
Then there's quiet.
Then he starts again.
'There are three levels of presentation,' he says, 'and it's like...that's...that's...'
And then he stops talking.
The he starts talking.
‘It’s not open,’ it’s like…it’s, um…’
Then there’s another silence.
Then he starts talking about someone called Randy.
‘Randy, he’s like, Randy’s almost, like…he’s, uh…’
Then there’s silence for a few moments.
Then he laughs very loudly and says, ‘I’m watching the waves break,’
Then he shouts ‘huh?’
And then he laughs again and shouts-‘No, I’m watching the waves break. I’m on a train and I'm watching the waves break.’

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A Girl Called Destiny

I am in the car, driving Downtown, with Stephanie, Pete, and a girl called Destiny, and in the boot of the car are salads and tuna sandwiches and peanut butter and jelly sandwiches and bottles of water that we are going to give out to the homeless people of San Diego.
'Okay, we are Team Awesome,' says Stephanie who has long brown hair and a big smile, and whose car, an Audi, we are in, 'and here are the rules for Team Awesome. We stay together, we don't engage in conversation, we don't wake people who are sleeping,'
Then Stephanie starts the car and tell us more rules, while at the same time, driving, laughing and shouting about pedestrians.
'Oops,' she says, 'I don't want to be an arsehole who runs over pedestrians, that would be so totally not cool,'
Then she yells at someone to get out of the way.
'Out of the way, areshole,' she says, and laughs and turns the corner.
Then she asks us what our names are, and we all call out our names again.
Pete says Pete, Destiny says Destiny, I say my name and the Stephanie says hers again.
Then Stephanie asks us all what we do.
Pete says he's an arborist and Stephanie says cool.
I tell Pete and Destiny and Stephanie what I do and everyone says 'cool', but we don't get around to what Destiny or Stephanie do because we haven't gone very far before Stephanie sees some homeless people and is parking the car and yelling 'WOOH', first stop, let's roll, let's rock out some SALADS,'
Then Stephanie tells us we have to hurry because we are parked in a disabled parking space and she is not disabled.
'Clearly,' says Stephanie, running on the spot while putting bottled water into a hessian shopping bag, 'I am NOT disabled, so we gotta, like totally roll on this one,'
For the next 10 minutes we walk from homeless person to homeless person offering the salad in polystyrene containers, the tuna sandwiches, the peanut butter and jelly sandwiches and the bottles of water.
'You want some dog food?' says a woman a who has no teeth, and no dog that I can see, 'Someone gave me so much dog food,'
Stephanie smiles and laughs and says 'WOOP, no thanks, you hang on to it, we've got dog food' and walks on.
Then we go back to the car and, while we are driving around looking for more homeless people, Stephanie talks about how she's becoming Jewish because she's marrying a Jewish guy.
'I call it How to Become a Jew School,' she says, of the classes she is taking to convert to Judaism.
Then she tells us how expensive it is to become a Jew, $2.500 a year for temple fees, another $500 for ground fees, $250 for classes but that he fiance's father, who lives in Beverly Hills and is 'minted', is chipping in.
'You should see the temple,' Stephanie tells me and Phil and Destiny, 'it is BEAUTIFUL,'
Then, just as Stephanie is explaining the similarities between Buddhism and Judaism, and telling us that Jew school is on Thursdays so she won't be able to do the homeless food drop for 6 months while she becomes a Jew, sees some homeless people gathered at the side of a windowless convenience store, and parks the car.
I look out of the car window and see, on the footpath at the side of the convenience store, a very fat black woman in a white dress, sitting in a wheelchair.
In her white dress she is glowing under the light that drops on her from the one light on the street.
On the ground, in the shadow around her, people are lying on dirty piles of blankets.
On the corner there are more people standing around a rubbish bin.
'Wooh, let's rock those salads,' says Stephanie and me and Phil and Stephanie and Destiny get out of the car and cross the street and ask the people standing around the rubbish bin if they would like a salad.
Some say yes and we give them the salads.
Then I ask the woman in the wheelchair if she would like a salad.
'It's the only thing we have left now,' I tell her and she smiles, says yes, she would like a salad, and then says 'bless you,'
And then I offer a salad to a woman lying on the ground next to the woman in the wheelchair.
The woman on the ground says yes, she would like a salad, but she doesn't move to sit up so I put the salad on the ground next to her and she says 'bless you,' also.
It is night now, and except for the light falling from that one street lamp, it is all dark around us.
So we walk around, handing out the salads until all the salads are gone and then when we have no more salads we cross the street, get back into Stephanie's car, and me and Phil and Stephanie and Destiny go home.



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The New Kitchen

On Sunday at the Buddhist temple in San Diego, where I have gone to hear my first ever Buddhist service, a woman tells me that for many years, non-whites had been forbidden by law to buy property any closer to Downtown than Market Street.
'That's why the temple is all the way out here, away from Downtown,' the woman, who had married a Japanese man and thus become a Buddhist, continues to tell me as we eat our lunch, 'because this was agricultural land, and the Japanese workers could afford it,'

During the service there had been a ribbon cutting event for a new kitchen and I had been invited to join the Buddhists for lunch in the big hall.
I am eating tofu in sesame seeds and white rice and a kind of vinegary cabbage salad that reminds of the sushi place where me and the wife had liked to eat in Hilo, Hawaii.

On the table in front of us are little paper cups of green tea and sake and non-alcoholic cider, so that when suddenly a man at the front of the hall begins talking into a microphone, we are ready to make a toast.
The man begins to talk about the building of the kitchen and how important fund raising had been and how the kitchen belongs to not just the temple, but to everybody.
And then he says '...and we couldn't have done it without the help of our builders, who will please stand up now,'
2 big Mexican looking guys stand up and one takes off his baseball cap and they both bow while everybody claps.
And then, when the toasts are over, there is much smiling and clapping and commemorative cake is passed out by smiling teenage girls and all of us are given a commemorative rice paddle with the words 'San Diego Buddhist Temple' burned into the handle.

On my way home on my bicycle, under an unintentionally vicious California sun, I think about how on this Sunday a random Australian was offered lunch by a bunch of predominantly Asian strangers, whose temple kitchen had been built by some Mexican construction workers on land that had once been considered by white men to be far enough away from them and theirs as to not cause offense.

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Flowers

Last night, at a bar where I've gone to serve celebratory ice cream and root beer floats, a woman interrupts me as I'm laying out the plastic cups, plastic spoons and plastic straws.
'Um,' she says, 'have we, like, met before?'
'I don't think so, I've just gotten back from England,' I tell her, standing there with my hands full of plastic, 'and I don't know many people in the area,'
'Oh, wow,' she says, 'you look, like, so totally familiar,'
'Well,' I say, 'sometimes I am in the ice cream shop on the corner, and I have a little shop there where I sell my art, but...apart from that...'
Then I ask her if she is the owner of the bar.
'Nooooo,' she says, 'I'm here with Onions and Orchids,'
'Oh,' I say, 'what exactly is that?'
She tells me Onions and Orchids is an organisation that informs people of what is ugly and what is beautiful, architecturally, in the neighbourhood.
'See,' she says, showing me a brochure and pointing out different buildings and roadside features, 'these are the Orchids and these are the Onions,'
I look at the brochure and everything on it looks the same to me-modern buildings with glassy facades, an inoffensive parking sign that Warhol might have liked to silk screen, some other buildings with wood stuck to them, a park bench, a black and white tiled mural.
All of them unremarkable.
'So,' the woman tells me, 'we have our booth here and what you can do is, like, vote for an Onion, or an Orchid.
I turn to see they have what look like polling stations set up, with iPads in them, so party-goers can record their onion or orchid verdict on the work of architects or civil engineers or street sign designers or artists.
Standing there with my hands full of plastic feeding implements, I want to say to the woman that someone probably went into debt to go to art or architecture school and they've graduated and designed these things so that people like her, people they've never met, from the suburbs of San Diego, are now going to pass judgement on.
But I don't.
Instead I look out over the tables of people in front of me.
And feeling slightly uncomprehending, as if I have just come-to from an MDMA blackout, I watch them push and pour burgers and fries and beer and Coke into their mouths while I passively listen to the woman from Onions and Orchids as she continues to tell me what, according to her, is worthy.
And what is not.

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Baseball

On Sunday we went to the baseball.
On the way in a security guard asked me to open my bag.
'Would you mind opening your bag, ma'am,'
I knew it was not possible to 'mind' and still be allowed in, so I opened it.
Using a drumstick, the security man poked around at my camera and the tampons and dirt in the bottom of my bag.
Then he let me in and someone immediately gave me a Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtle eye mask.

The way to the seats is paved with food and merchandise and beer stands.
The baseball ground smells of boiled oil and sugar.
On Sundays military people get free entry and there's a whole section of the stand way up high that is ochre dots.
People in military uniforms.
At the beginning of the game a person in a dark blue military uniform sings, her face projected on to a gigantic screen.
The announcer thanks all the military people and the military people in the seats stand up and everyone else stands up and claps and woops.
Then they sing a song about the USA and people stay standing and some put their hands where their hearts are.
Throughout the afternoon people woop and cheer when the military is mentioned.
Intermittently baseball is played.

It's sort of like a beer and junk food fueled church sermon.
The announcer is the preacher and we all follow.
Stand up, sing.
Sit down, eat.
A man in front of me comes back to his seat with 4 gigantic containers of coke.
The man in front of us wearing a camouflage Padre's shirt drinks beer.
I eat two hotdogs.
I fall asleep.

'I wanted to like the baseball,' I said to K last night in the car, 'I wanted to really like something stereotypically American, have something to go to that I really enjoyed.'

But I didn't.
Cricket it ain't.

*******
Look at my shop and get a print.

Motivation and inspiration

Yesterday I got an email from my best friend and the topic was motivation.
She wanted to know if I had trouble staying motivated.

I remember at my studio in the UK that people would stand in my doorway and say-
'I feel really unmotivated.'
But I don't think that was the real issue.
They WERE motivated because they too were in their studios but they were confusing motivation and inspiration.
Motivation is when you perform an act to fulfill a desire or need.
Like you're hungry, so you are motivated to find food.
After you eat, you need to poo, so you are motivated to find a toilet.
Later on, you're tired so you are motivated to find somewhere to lay down and go to sleep.
You wake up the next day, you draw a picture which makes you feel hungry so you are motivated to sell said drawing so you can eat and start the eat/poo/sleep/draw cycle again.

Inspiration is something entirely different.
I see inspiration as falling through a hole in the top of the head and landing in the feet.
Inspiration comes from how I am wired up, how I was brought up, what I have seen in my life thus far, how I receive information through my senses.
How I react to situations and how sensitive I am to my surroundings.
The root of the word inspire is to breath and by paying attention to everything and everyone I encounter in my day, I am in some way inspired.
I breath in and I am breathed into and whatever I produce is like an exhale.

I am inspired by many things-
I am inspired by family disputes.
I am inspired by people who do things selflessly for others, like my friends Denise and Bob who foster children.
I am inspired by the homeless people who walk around the streets of San Diego at night with shopping trolleys collecting rubbish for recycling.
I am inspired by light falling on yellow houses.
And most of these will end up in a drawing in one way or another at some time.

Motivation and inspiration are in league.
I am motivated by hunger to find food.
I am motivated by the need to poo to find a toilet.
I am motivated by weariness to find a bed.
And I am motivated by inspiration to make art.

Carlos the Charismatic

Carlos doesn't live next door, Eddy does, but Carlos is often there talking.
A lot.
Carlos likes to talk.
He hangs his phone from the light fixture in the ceiling of the porch and listens to music and talks.
To Eddy, Priscilla and some other guys who sit on the porch next door.

A few days ago Carlos comes in asking if his son, Carlos Jr, can use our microwave to warm up his sandwich.
I stand in the kitchen with Carlos Jr talking about the football world cup while Carlos stands at the front door talking to Kimberly about the spirits in this house.
'You ever hear anything?' he asks us.
'Like what?' I say.
'You know...,' he says, 'like noise, like something in the night, you know, stuffs like that,'
I tell him I have never heard anything.
He tells me that this is good.
Carlos had told me that an old evil woman had lived and died in this house and that if I ever hear anything I should tell it to go away.
Carlos then tells us that if we do hear anything it's probably just in our heads.
'Sometimes you make it true only in your head,' he says, pointing to his forehead.

Carlos comes and goes from next door.
Sometimes I won't see him for a week or two.
I'll ask Eddy or Priscilla if they have seen him and then we will all wonder where he is.
The he will show up again, full of tales, making Eddy laugh.

A few weeks after we met Carlos told me that his wife had been shot, by the police.
'Not too far from here,' he told me.
'10 times.' he said.

*****
The image above is from South Park.

July the 4th, 2014

This evening I was cycling home thinking about the 4th of July and what an utter mongrel Dick Cheney is, when I stopped at the lights and waited for a slow man to cross in front of me.

He was very fat and was wearing a black tee shirt with a massive head of Mickey Mouse on it and sloppy beige track pants and a baseball cap and his nose was so sunburned that skin was coming off it and his eyes were very very pale blue.
Like a husky.

He was going very slowly because he was pushing a wheelchair loaded with 4 green bin liners stuffed with what looked like blankets and sheets.

The bin liners were tied to the wheelchair with a piece of rope and he was pushing the wheelchair with his left hand and with his right hand he was pulling a wire trolley of the sort generally used by old people for going shopping.

In this he had a tall plastic laundry basket, full of some items of fabric and on top of this was another green bin liner which was also full of some kind of fabrics.

As I watched him cross I realised he was stuck at the curb and couldn't get the wheelchair up onto the footpath.

'Oi,' I called to him, 'wait, I'll help you.'

I got off my bicycle and put it on the footpath on it's stand and said-here, I'll take the wheelchair and you pull the trolley.

He agreed and we got the things on the footpath and he started his walk down Market street and I got back on my bicycle and waited at the lights again.

But he really wasn't getting anywhere pushing the wheelchair and pulling the trolley so I got off my bicycle and said-'here, I'll lock my bicycle to the fence and I'll help you get your stuff down the hill,'

I started to lock my bicycle to the church fence.

'Hang on there's an easier way to do that,' he said finishing off the locking of my bicycle to the fence.

'I'm not very good at locking it up, it's confusing,' I said.

'Don't leave your helmet on your handlebars,' he told me, 'there are dishonest people around here,'

I put my helmet back on my head and then said-Shall I take the trolley or the wheelchair?

'Take the trolley,' he said, 'the wheelchair is too heavy,'

So then we started walking down Market street, me going behind because, really, I had no idea where we were going.

After a block all of his bin liners full of what I now saw were sheets and towels and blankets and rags fell off the wheelchair.

I stopped pulling the trolley and we spent about ten minutes tying the bin liners back onto the wheelchair.

'Sometimes they let me take these on the bus,' she said, 'but other times they won't even stop for me,'
'That's a bit shit,' I said.

Then we started off again.

We didn't say anything to each other, we just walked.

 Even though I had run into a hedge twice and gotten the trolley stuck in a hole, at that moment I was rather pleased that I had been working out so much in the gym because my new muscles were coming in handy manoeuvring this old person shopping trolley down the hill.

After about ten more minutes of slow going due to the appalling state of the footpath I asked him-'where are we going?"

'Corner of Market and 19th,' he said.

As I was walking behind I had a chance to look closely at the man and saw that the back half of Mickey Mouse was featured on the back of the man's tee shirt as if Mickey was draping himself across the mans shoulder.

I was also conscious that a piece of what looked like a red dressing gown was scratching up against my tee shirt and I wondered if I might get fleas or lice from it.

I was also conscious that I was wearing my gym clothes, a 2 dollar pair of sandals that smelled like sump oil and my undone bicycle helmet was wobbling around my head.

After a while 2 young Mexican men came walking behind us, one playing a guitar and singing.

They passed us and said hello and I said hello back.

Then, just after we crossed 20th street the young man's wheelchair lost its bin liners again and we both stopped.

'I'm not going to bother tying them on again,' he said, as he non-methodically loaded them all back on to the wheelchair.

'I'll just hold them on,'

'Okay,' I said, and then we walked on, him holding the top bin liner by a piece of stretched green plastic and me following with his wonky trolley.

Suddenly, at 19th street the man pulled his wheelchair up against a fence and stopped.

'I just live around the corner, so I'll be okay from here,'

'You sure,' I said, 'I don't mind going to yours,'

'No,' he said, 'it's okay,'

'Okay,' I said, 'it was nice to meet you,'

'Hey,' he said, 'I don't got much, but I can give you a dollar for helping me,'

'No way, course not,' I said, 'you don't need to,'

'Okay,' he said.

Cheers I said and turned and walked back up toward the corner of Market and 24th to get my bicycle from where the young man had locked it to the church fence.

I went for a walk in my neighbourhood this evening.

I went for a walk in my neighbourhood this evening.
I took my camera and this is what I saw.
Next up, I want to film people and edit it in the same way.

I get some advice from a young man

Tall Yellow House

While I was drawing this a young man dressed in a white shirt, black pants and with his hair slicked back, came out of the house behind where I was sitting and said-'Hey, do you sell those? That's awesome, man,'
I told the young man yes, that I did sell them, and then he offered me up some advice.

'You should go down to S.......,' He said, telling me the name of a place that I did not quite hear, 'there's loads of tourists down there, and you'd make lots of money,'
'Cool,' I told him.
'Yeh, man,' he said again as he walked off down the street, 'you could make lots of money.'

Drawing and listening to Rodriguez

While I was drawing this nothing really happened.

Nobody parked in my way.

Nobody stopped to talk to me.

Nobody went for a wee behind a bush.

It was just me all alone with my pastels, feeling happy drawing, listening to Rodriguez and singing along to this.

The Rollerblader and the Pothole

While I was drawing this a young man came around the corner very very fast on a pair of roller blades, hit a pothole, became briefly airborne, and then landed on his front on the road.

His phone had left his hand at some point and pieces of it were strewn across the road and his sunglasses were even further up the road.

When he rolled over I asked him if he was alright.

'Yes,' he said, 'but I have torn my work trousers,'

'Oh, dear,' I said.
He was sitting up on his bottom by this stage and looking at the hole in the knee of his trousers.

I felt sorry for him because rollerblading isn't that easy and I think he looked like he was doing quite well at it until the pothole.

So I said- 'I did something like that recently, went over the handle bars of my bicycle and landed on my knee,'
He didn't seem to really care because he was now crawling across the road, picking up the bits of his smashed phone.

'I wasn't even wearing jeans,' I called out to him as he crawled about, 'just took the skin straight off, blood everywhere.'

While I was drawing this 2 men stopped, at different times, to talk to me.

While I was drawing this 2 men stopped, at different times, to talk to me.
The first one, who was carrying 2 plastic shopping bags, wearing flip flops and shorts and sporting a pony tail, complimented me on the drawing.
'Hey,' he said, interrupting me so I had to take the headphones from my ear holes, which made me slightly annoyed, 'I just wanted to tell you that you really captured that, like, you know, you really got it,'
I told him thank you and that I very much appreciated his compliments.
'Well, I better let you get back to it,' he said.
'Okay, thanks,' I said, feeling very happy that he was now leaving me alone.

Then, about half an hour later, with my patience levels shriveled to zero by the relentless sun, I was interrupted again by a buckled shadow casting itself across my drawing.
I looked up and saw another man with a pony tail.
This one was wearing a baseball cap, also, and some kind of American football sweater and was hunched over, the cane he leaned on seemingly keeping him upright.
Looking into his face I saw that he was drunk and he had sores all across his face, as if he has been attacked by someone with long fingernails.
He leaned down toward me and said something I couldn't hear, forcing me to take my headphones out which made me want to scream FUCK THE FUCK OFF YOU DRUNKEN FUCK, I AM FUCKING MOLTEN UNDER THIS SUN AND I WANT TO GO HOME AND SIT INSIDE WHERE FUCKERS LIKE YOU WON'T DISTURB ME.
But I did not.
I just asked him to repeat what he had said.
And what he'd said was- 'That's really gorgeous. You really are so talented. Bless you.'
Then, feeling like an utter bitch for having such vicious thoughts, I thanked the man and smiled and said 'Well, I'd best get back to it, I'm really hot out here and I'd like to get home,'
'Of course you would,' said the scratched-up buckled drunk man, 'yes, of course you would.'

The Lesser of Two Evils

Q-Show us those fancy tricks of yours, tell me, how do I get a life like yours?
A-You won't do it with just money.

This must be what they call the American Dream

This morning while I was cycling back from the gym under the freeway overpass, I saw, sitting in a fold out camp chair on the footpath, a lone woman.
The woman, who looked to be around 60, had neatly brushed hair, was wearing a dark red sweater, a pair of glasses and holding something in her hands which as I got closer I saw was something like embroidery.
Some kind of needlework equipment, wool or yarn.
Sitting there in her fold out chair, with her needlework, the woman looked as if she might be on a seaside holiday.
Or that she might enjoying a quiet afternoon listening to the radio while her husband was out watching the football with his pals.
Except she was sat on a foldout chair in an underpass, a freeway full of motoring humans speeding away above her.
And shopping trolleys were parked all along the wall of the underpass and there were empty food boxes, plastic soft drink bottles, overflowing bins and, as the day was already hot and blowy, the intermittent odour of human urine on the dusty wind.

'Oh, look, I said to myself as I cycled uphill against that pissy wind, 'this must be what they call the American Dream.'

A Handshake With a Man Wearing a Helmet.

This morning as I left the gym, a wild-haired though tidily-dressed man, pulling a small, wheeled, carry on luggage and wearing something similar to a hockey helmet, stopped me and began looking me up and down.
'Where'd you get all those tattoos?' he said.
'England,' I said back to him.
'Whereabouts in England?' he said,
'Oxford,' I said, lying.

Then, not wanting to be unsociable, I stood there letting him look me up and down for a bit until he suddenly stopped, stared right into my eyes and said- 'I think there's an English professor from Oxford.'
And then he began to tell me a story that I could not understand.
A story that might have been about a trip he had taken to Oxford and that might have involved something about his family.
I stood holding my bicycle and saying 'uh-huh' until he finally stopped talking and held out his hand.
I  took his hand and shook it until he let go.
'God bless you' he told me 3 times.
'Thank you,' I told him, 'very much.'

I thought about that meeting most of the way home, about how I'd immediately wanted to wash my hand and about how the skin on the man's hand had been so much softer than I'd expected.

What was she doing in the garden?

While I was drawing this a woman approached the house, opened and went in through the gate, turning right into the garden.

I could see her behind the hedge, flashes of the colour of her clothing between the leaves, doing I did not know what.

Then, after only a couple of minutes the women came back out of the gate, looked left and right, and then walked off, tucking her shirt in her trousers and tidying herself as she walked, leaving me to wonder if she had entered the garden, which might not have been hers, to have a wee.

Someone took our vegetable box and someone else brought it back

This morning, at around 7am, someone knocked on the door and when I answered it I saw a man holding a biggish cardboard box.
There was a woman standing down on the footpath looking up at us.
The man said hello and then began to explain that he wasn't a delivery man, but that this was our box of vegetables.
'I live over on G street,' he said holding the box out toward me, 'and we found this in the street outside our house,'
'Oh,' I said, looking inside the box , 'we were wondering what happened to our vegetable box,'
Inside the box was a cauliflower, a carrot, a bunch of beet root and a small plastic bag with mushrooms in it.
'We recognised the box because we get a delivery from the same company,' said the man, who had a black moustache and was wearing a baseball cap and a blue polo shirt with a name tag of a solar installation company pinned to it.
I took the box of vegetables and stood there looking down at the few vegetables left.
'They have only taken, which would make sense if it was a homeless person, the things they didn't need to cook, like...all the fruit,' I said.

The man and the woman and I all agreed that it was probably a homeless person who had taken it and then we chatted for a bit about the box, about the the neighbourhood, about how good the Mexican take away on the corner is, about where was the best place for the vegetable delivery to be left, and then laughed and said that we hoped whoever had taken the fruit had enjoyed
it.
And then the man said, 'My name is Robert,'
'Hello, Robert' I said putting the vegetable box on the porch and holding out my hand, 'my name is Toni, and thank you for bringing back our vegetable box.'

A Conversation with Roberto Della Rosa-The condensed version

This morning, as I left the house I said hello to a man pushing a shopping trolley down the edge of the road.
He said hello back and then he called out-'I am happy today, I am so happy today. How are you today?'
This made me smile and feel happy, so I said- 'Well, seeing you so happy has made me happy.'
Then I walked over to him so I could hear him better.
'You live in that house?' he said.
I told him yes, that I did, and had just moved in.
'I'll see around a lot then,' he told me, 'I'm always up and down this road, I'm always working,'
His shopping trolley was a tower of what looked like recyclable material- a gigantic see through plastic bag of cans in the bottom, picture frames, a mop handle, a green rubbish bag on top and various things poking through the cage of the trolley.
'I'm not like those other ones down there,' he said, 'those ones waiting for handouts, I am out there getting my own thing, it's how I was brought up, it's the kind of man I am. I am that kind of man,'
Then, because he had seen the tattoos on my leg, I listened while he explained a tattoo he had on his shoulder.
'It's my name, Robert Di Rosa,' he said, showing me the tattoo-a cross with 2 small roses above it.
'My daddy was a white man with Italian and German in him, and my mother was Brazilian, Mexican and Indian,' he told me.
I spoke a little bit of Italian to him, calling him Roberto Della Rosa, and he laughed and told me that because his mother was Mexican he was given the Mexican version of his last name.

The he told me that he was not a thief.
'I always ask before I take something,' he said, referring, I supposed, to the content of his shopping trolley.
Then he told me a story about how he had learned to ask because the black people in his childhood neighbourhood would fill shotguns with rock salt and shoot intruders to their yards.
This, he said, had taught him to respect people's property.
Then, suddenly, he started to talk about spirits, about how he had good spirits around him.
'You got those good spirits too,' he told me, 'and you've even got my name on your neck,'
It was true, I have a tattoo of a rose on my neck and he told me for this I would never forget his name.
Then, when he was ready to go I tried to shake his hand, but he wouldn't.
Instead he held out his fist to me and we did that knuckle banging thing.
'I've been in the trash,' he said, 'I don't want to get you dirty, because you know, we get older, we get sick and we can't get rid of it, so I won't shake your hand,'
Then he told me to have a good day, and that he would be looking out for the house.
Then he started to push his trolley down the road and I said to him- 'You have been an inspiration to me today, Roberto Della Rosa.' and he laughed and said he would see me again soon.

I thought about the dignified Roberto Della Rosa all the way to a cafe where I was to leave some postcards for my tattooing, where I was going to drink a coffee and where I would end up seated at a table with a man called Mark, who, when I asked him what he did for a job, showed me a website for a new product he was selling-Swedish personal lubricant.

******
The tattoo above was originally an outline of an old skool rose.
Sarah, on whose arm it is, asked me if I would colour it in in my style.
I said yes, of course, I would love to, just up my alley.

This morning, cycling home from saying goodbye to Isaac, Tatji and Matti, I crossed the bridge over the Martin Luther King Freeway (freeway number 94) and saw, on the footpath, a human being wrapped up in blankets.

This morning, cycling home from saying goodbye to Isaac, Tatji and Matti, I crossed the bridge over the Martin Luther King Freeway (freeway number 94) and saw, on the footpath, a human being wrapped up in blankets.

The human looked like the exact shape of an Egyptian mummy, except whoever it was was wrapped in what looked like a blue nylon sleeping bag with another beige patterned blanket wrapped around that.

I was standing there, holding my bicycle and wondering what to do when a young man with a shaved head, wearing shorts and headphones, crossed the bridge toward me.

'Excuse me,' I said to him, pointing to the wrapped up person laying on the footpath, 'do you think that person over there is alright?'

The young man took his headphones out of his ears and looked back to where he had just crossed the bridge.

'Look, he's moving so I guess he's okay,' the young man said and then we both stood there for a moment, watching the sleeping person moving around.

'I wondered if I should call someone because whoever is in that wrap up is almost on the road,'
'They do that, they stay as close to the road as possible,' the young man told me, 'so they can be seen in case anything happens, in case they get attacked or anything,'
'Shit,' I said, 'that's terrible. Should we do something, like... anything?'

'No,' the young man told me, 'there's nothing you really can do, but it's really, like, totally cool of you to care.'

*********
I'm making a drawing about Tony Abbott.

It's called 'In Australia Not All Creatures Are Dangerous, However Some Are Extremely Poisonous'
Abbott's face will go in the little space bottom right, Gina Rinehart above, and then that left frame is for Rupert Murdoch.
Mr Poisonous, Mrs Greedy and Mr Power-Swollen.