What Miles Did Next, after sickness, more Melbourne, and more sickness...

There's a kid who lives around the corner from me who looks like I used to look. He pays as much attention to his clothing as I used to do, he has his hair swept up in a surfer do just like I used to have, and he has a girlfriend with impeccable vacant eyes who shimmers in the light, even if she just has a tracksuit on. They are impossibly young, and they always in my brief interactions with them seem perfectly happy with themselves, not in a smug way, but in a comfortable way - they don't seem to notice anyone else or anything as they hold hands quietly or just watch the traffic go past with a smile on their face. That traffic would usually just be me of course, driving with a less than spring in my step, the bitter acrid taste of coffee or sour cereal milk in the back of my throat, a bland commercial tune playing inoffensively on the radio, and air conditioning whipped into a frenzied dance of recycled air and cool slaps on the face. They usually lift my spirits those 2wo because whenever I drive past and things are bleak they look so optimistic - until today, because I drove past, in a cold morning chill, completely unsure as to what setting I should put my air conditioner on, and she was standing with arms folded like a 60tys model, pouting into the middle distance while he stood in trendy jeans with his fringe over his eyes, while a new 3hrd girl seemed to somehow be intervening, standing across the road perhaps innocently, but like the time my Mum wore a jarring bright Xmas cardigan with a snowman on it, everything feels somehow wrong, just from their posture and body language. I have a flashback to all those youthful post argument stand offs in carparks when I was younger, the horrible feeling when your relationship is going wrong and nothing you can say can fix it because you don't have the life skills to fix it...I hope I've made a misjudgement because I'm miserable that there's nothing but Nickelback on the radio, but I'm sure that they won't last. In fact, I drove past again today, and only he was there, and I might just be a little bit down about it, or maybe I was drunk on cough medicine, but I'd swear his fringe looked a little uncombed and his eyes looked sad as he looked straight ahead, his bag thrown on the road, the cares of the world outwardly manifested through poor hair care...

At the other end of the age spectrum is the Kingston nightmare. A shambling old man in denim with an eye patch for effect who wanders around the edge of the doctors surgery in a series of ill fitting cardigans and a suspiciously put on limp telling people walking past he had swine flu, and in great detail just how long he had been in isolation in hospital. He's telling this on this particular day to a long chinned receptionist with horse teeth who couldn't care less, since she has a pile of paperwork bigger than her teeth to complete and a telephone that won't stop ringing and ringing and tormenting her brain and getting in the way of the paperwork...so she smiles politely and is completely unaware of the potentially life threatening tale Captain Germ is spilling. She dismisses him with a wave of a manicured hand and he turns his grim face around and shuffles initially in my direction - I can't even lift up a copy of a New Idea to shield my face from him and hide, but he sees an old woman in the corner he hasn't yet annoyed. Just as he gets to the perimeter of her conversational wall, a girl in a grey top storms out of one of the offices in bitter desolate tears, kicking the door open and holding a face too young to be pained in her hands, running quickly and desperately into the street while a doctor with a clipboard stands a little upset in the corridor, twisting a St Christopher medallion in her middle aged fingers and shuffling awkardly while a receptionist with a horrendous 80tys perm shuffles papers and tries to pay attention to the radio until the faint air of melancholy has truly left the building, pairs of eyeballs swivelling in the direction of the childrens television show on the big screen in the corner. None of this deters the man in the eye patch - like an experienced campaigner he simply announces to the room that he knows exactly how the girl feels because when he was told he had swine flu and had to face up to 10en days of isolation...

It's a late night bar - the kind you don't want to go into without a sense of wariness or at least back up better than a friend who's response to physical threats is a concoction of stammers and shrugs so ineffectual it's positively jarring, especially compared to his later recount of the situation in which we was 1ne step away from delivering a roundhouse kick to the head. There's a pool table going unused in the middle of the bar, and my chatterbox friend is trying to set me up with someone, a girl with a bored expression and no signs of emotive life. The connection is an alleged mutual birthplace, but her recollections of Scotland seem so overwhelmingly negative, you have to conclude she truly is Scottish - although it is interesting the way our accents seem to get stronger and stronger as the conversation goes on, but she's bored and I'm unimpressed, and we drift apart at about the same time I get a strange craving for some Strawberry Milk. The only thing sparkling about her is a shoulder spangle that glints under a flickering dingy light at around the same time the threat over my shoulder rises, floundering arguments and counter threats somehow out of sync with the good time music the DJ desperately tries to spin. He's positively vibey, bouncy, articulate, as if he's convinced himself in his own mind he's a magician and everyone is listening to him exclusively, working up a sweat stain while the tapestry of life unravels around him. Eventually, the threatener storms off, whatever slight there was on his honour assauged by repeated apologies and the need for a drink which incongrously has a big slice of less than manly lime in it. I don't know what became of the bored Scottish girls - I presume they had to stand and look cool somewhere else. In midnight drizzle you can convince yourself it was them that was boring, when maybe it was just you. I look across the road outside the club, and a very minor celebrity is posturing desperately, trying to get attention through loud overuse of a mobile phone, and look at everyone around me throwing desperate cool shapes, and I can't be bothered. I throw myself into a taxi, and drink the strawberry milk, while the taxi driver spins me a tale of how he really wants to be a writer, and I slump against the vinyl seat, unsure of myself, unsure of my age and my place in life, and suddenly fully aware that somehow in the conversation with the bored Scottish girl, we both switched accents about 25ive times in a minute, and reflecting on how close I probably was to a pool cue over the head...

The strawberry milk finds it's way mysteriously into my fridge - something I know I bought, but I have no idea where I've bought it, or if a 7/11even owner saw the distant light in my eyes and ripped me off for it. Possibly. I'm relatively free of hangover and my annoying perpetual cough, so I put Movits on the IPOD and go for a jog. I'm trying to look a little less rough than I do at the moment, my orange shoes and aching calfs splash in Kingston puddles like a disruptive perpetual fault crashing into a watery world. There's a girl sitting on the path as I jog past - she has a Hello Kitty T-shirt on and pegs in her hair. She smiles at me and I smile back, although I have very little that I could possibly say to someone with pegs in their hair. Other than why do you have pegs in your hair. My hood is up, and an old woman sitting at the bus stop is glaring at me through the means of hissing teeth and fired up eyes. Nothing makes me feel young like the disapproval of an old woman, so I try and look at least a little menacing as I jog past, maybe increase my gait so I can look like I'm running away from a shop with something under my arm. The old woman folds her arms, pressing her arms against the buttons of her tightly restrictive coat, her purple/grey old woman hair bouncing with indignation. It's entirely the hood up I find, the old women around here don't like it. I leave her behind and run past the real deal, a kid no older than 12elve in a hooded top trying car doors to see which 1nes are unlocked. The old woman clocks him and gets up to tell him off, jabbing her umbrella as she does so. She turns to me, and suddenly I'm on the side of the man against the kids - she motions to me and points, as if we're suddenly all adults together and we need to fight crime. All I can say is it'd be the worlds most poorly dressed crime fighting unit. The kid disappears into the bushes, and I don't want to stick around for the moral indignation, thrown as I am into which side of the age gap I really belong to. The girl with pegs in her hair watches me all the way down the road, I know that because I keep looking back and her eyes are following me down the road, and they continue to do so until the old woman with the buttoned up coat catches her eye and decides to deliver a lecture about modern society - I leave them both behind in a less than gainly flurry of leg burning running, the closest I've felt to doing anything interesting in 2wo whole weeks...

I don't think she was Scottish you know...when you don't know where Irvine is...I mean, we have The Magnum...