1nce, 2wce, 3hree, 4our, 5ive, 6ix, 7even times A September...

It's a hot afternoon in Melbourne. I've drank all the water the liberal bag checkers on Virgin blue have allowed me to carry on, I've worn the battery out of my IPOD and read my football clubs sanctioned account of their latest miserable failure - I've wandered and ambled around an airport terminal until a suitable time for me to leave has passed, and been faintly embarrassed as a minor celebrity has passed her own time in the airport by throwing a ridiculous hissy fit about Subway sandwiches. I briefly think about taking a picture, but there's no value on it, much like eating the sandwich. I'm now in a taxi with a portly Indian cab driver. I've shown him a grubby piece of paper with an address on it, and I've got nothing more to say other than short grunts and nods of direction. To compensate, he puts the acoustic version of Cry For You by September on 7even times in a row on CD repeat, and taps the steering wheel in tune each time with pudgy fingers it comes on as if it's a surprise to him. For all I know that's all he does all day, drive around, not finding where he's supposed to go, letting the sweat stains accumulate on his work shirt while he plays Cry For You for tourists in the hope of creating a convivial atmosphere. He certainly seems happy enough, but I'm relieved I never have to hear the song again by the time he dumps me seemingly miles away from my destination. I'm outside a hospital, forced to ask a scrunchy faced freckly intern for directions. She's helpful, then returns to her Sudoku, her face even more scrunched as she clicks her pen in a frantic motion. Later, I see her out and about free from such cubicle puzzle based restrictions, throwing such strangely odd shapes on the dancefloor her face unscrunches and she almost tears a hamstring. I try and tell my dancing companion about my interest in co-incidence, the strange way in a city of millions I've seen the same person 2wice in a matter of hours but she's not listening. She's not an intellectual, she's not bothered by the notions that I am, the random nature of the universe, just things that are shiny, things that are basic and simple - beats, rings, how some drinks are like so expensive. That's fine, it's not the night for universal discourse. I can't help feeling though she should meet the taxi driver, I could see them together some how, just never letting a thought enter their heads, just eternally listening to September over and over again until the end of time. She asks me what I'm thinking about, eyes gleaming between songs, but I can't articulate fully, and unless I could display it in interpretative dance, she'd get bored with it anyway. So, I simply queue up to get some more drinks, because truthfully, this is my thinking out loud outlet - the rest of the time, I'm as confused as the DJ was when The Vengaboys came on 3hree songs too early, and his entire night seems ruined by a moment of disappointment, his face never 1nce recovering it's early poise, bounce and hope...

I'm weighed down by the eternal notion I can tell when people I'm staying with have had enough of me I should say. I blame my mother. She used to load me up with so many things to worry about any time I stay with someone - from the time I was a kid -I can never really relax. I'm staying with my cousin, 1ne of those people who's link to me through routes of adoption, through quirks of fate and the fickle way someone in Asia picked a particular baby out of a particular cot because Mums sister was their on a particular day are not as thought about as often as they could. I think by day 3hree of my visit, she's had enough of me. I can't be certain about that, but I think so anyway. I at least get a toasted sandwich out of my visit, and am able to pass on several impressive nuggets of popular culture I've gleamed during my time on earth. I can't help but feel as though somehow I'm cramping her style. Maybe I'm being unfair. It's still best to move on though so she can do something more glamourous with her day. There's a bewildering tram junction outside her house, and a mysteriously glamorous but sad looking woman in the pool at her block of flats just swimming up and down all day as if she stops she'll cease to exist. I would ask my cousin, but I've probably exhausted my conversational stock. My cousins flat mate I never see due to poorly matched schedules. He seems to love photos of himself, they adorn the assigned spaces on the wall he owns, the kind of accumulated memories males like to assign themselves. Pubs, cricket, arms around minor celebrities with startled uncomfortable expressions. My cousin has no wall, no photos up, just a Gossip Girl DVD on the table in a sea of cricket books, and a mug on the balcony. Other than that, there's no real evidence she lives here. Maybe she is never here, and I've stuck her inside for a while, and if I had anything to say, I should say it now, should perhaps be a bit deeper in conversation, but I'm too tired. I came, I saw the thing I wanted to see, we had a drink, and it's as far as it can ever go. The lady in the swimming pool shakes all the water from herself and looks utterly morose as she ploughs back into the pool. I have so many questions, and somehow no inclination to ask them. I've mentally checked out, and I don't even realise it. Maybe somehow in 2010 I'll connect with all these dotted around cousins, ask them about their skating trophies, their sexy but depressed looking neighbours, their lack of personal effects inside their own house...maybe...or maybe it's just too late, and I should stick to Lady GaGa talk...it's too much for 1ne backpack lugging tired male in a BK Hacken top to work out on 1ne tram ride...

I'm in some pub by now anyway, by the time my brain works again, some strangely lit pub that uses it's big screens to advertise chicken parmas that look about 8eight foot tall and a strange mix of weird colours on a TV that should be showing rock bands or what the other TV screen in showing, a sporting star on the other side of the world looking disconsolate on the sidelines, having long ago given up on his own team. I'm between friends, 1ne having had to go back to work, the other held up by inefficient hotel standards. The sports star never recovers, looking on the sidelines like he's just been seduced by the giant chicken parma ad and been sorely disappointed. Time is moving very slowly between sparsely sipped drinks, the price prohibitive, the heat discouraging further exploration of other spaces. Most of the conversation is, like my first friends, faux ambitious, dreams, unclosed business deals, secretaries hot for their bosses, men in suits who turn playing on the same course as Tiger Woods 6ix weeks apart into some kind of personal meeting and endorsement from the apparently great man. Women, I suspect, are tolerated in this place, perhaps a table accoutrement stuck up the end, rarely prodded into conversational action while the men break bread. At the next table over from me sits 1ne such girl - she's got a stripey green top on and says nothing for almost an hour while the 2wo guys she is with talk endlessly about their work and their colleagues, and even when she leaves her farewell acknowledgement is clipped and cold, an irritant to the conversational flow. It only dawns on me later that the first guy, a sort of Robson Green a like with a flimsy November moustache, seems to be downplaying all of the office staff and over emphasising their personal flaws if the 2nd guy, a metrosexual in jarringly bright denim, talks them up as a potential girlfriend, and begins telling the 2nd guy without fail how he can do a lot better. It begins to dawn on me after a while the 1st guy is really into the 2nd guy, and is keen to just sit and talk and gaze into his eyes. I wonder if the 2nd guy will ever realise, maybe he likes the attention. Their world is only on show for a moment though - they leave discussing Glee, and their replacement family are as bland and boring as the 10en dollar pizza deal, and never for a second speak, but chew silently and quietly as a parade of Finn brothers replace the Chicken Parma on the big screen, while the sports star sits with his unchanged expression, only moving when the aggressively blonde barmaid decides it's time for the suits to see golf...

A day passes, a night passes, an entire Xmas parade passes before my eyes. I lock eyes with a man in a historical recreation outfit who looks like he's about to die in the heat, a man clearly uncomfortable his passion to dress like a gold miner has been hijacked by corporate stores who employ large men with big megaphones. He disappears from view when a Tweenie leaps in front of him to steal the spotlight and wave frantically to the crowd, while a Japanese man behind me tramples over small children to take a picture. He has a T-shirt which just says AWESOME DAD on it in large black letters, in an eye wateringly large fault. He doesn't seem to have kids with him though, if he did it would probably be bitterly ironic anyway because I think he'd stand of their heads just to get up close and personal with a Tweenie. I immediately become like him though, since I'm in big city mode, pushing grandmas out of the way because if I don't, I'll be trampled, I'll be swallowed up and that book that I've ordered will sit in some1nes pigeon hole forever. I don't feel especially fit, and I'm feeling sorry for myself, damned hay fever, and why did no-1ne appreciate my new Sierra Leone top? I mean I bought it specially. Philistines. There's people all around me, bumping into me, or I'm bumping into them, I can't quite tell. A Myer spruiker heads directly for me with a microphone, I think to ask me for the crowds amusement what I think of the parade, but I sidestep him with a deft swerve, and he's left fumbling in dead air. I think he had to ask the Japanese guy a series of stilted and awkward questions instead, I didn't really have time to work it all out. Meanwhile, outside an abandoned looking cafe, a homeless woman with grey straggly hair in a filthy blue and black tracksuit can't get up in the heat - she just lies in the doorway while a series of corporate messages and floats walk or drift straight past her. I know I feel completely uncomfortable when 1ne of the Tweenies casually waves in her direction, but I don't really have time to register how I feel. It's been that kind of weekend. Things happen, then apace it all changes, and thoughts only register much later, it's too hot, it's not my city, she wasn't that interested, she was too interested, the story was too long, too short, not punchy enough. And now it's all over, and I've ended up nose to jaw with a Tweenie, hand extended for a hi-5. What the hell, come here tiger. There's kids watching, and I'm part of some kind of experience, but I don't know what. I can't make sense of it all. The homeless woman slumps back in her alleyway, the Japanese man has moved on, and Melbourne won't mind if I quietly and subtly move on, back to Hobart, where what I do counts for something, if only because there's people registering my movements. Carefree time is over. Back to work. Maybe 1ne odd regret, but nothing to write home about...txt msgs can always be deleted, can't they?

You'll never see me again...and now who's gonna cry for you...over and over and over again...until the end of time...