Only five days back from Fiji, but as everyone who has travelled knows, it seems a lifetime away already. Or maybe that only happens when you return to a place like Brisbane. or maybe it only happens when you use with two hours of returning. So many variables that could be affecting my perception of time since return, it's hard to say categorically why it seems so long ago. But it does.
After waiting a week I received Blade Runner II from Toowong library yesterday. I'd read them before, this spin-off by K W Jeter, written nearly forty years after "Do Androids..." was penned. Maybe five years ago? But something lingered in my brain telling me it was a decent spin-off, not some half-baked cashing in on the movie (though that was back in '82 so it wasn't exactly a cash-in I guess). Jeter does a lot more than Dick did, and he ignores certain central themes of Dick's book (e.g. Mercerism) that no doubt irks some loyal Dickians. But I love this series. Not quite William Gibson but close.
I stood on the front verandah before waiting for the water to dry on the windows before I sprayed Windex on them (five years since last clean...) and I looked up the hill to Sly's place. I wondered what he was doing right now. Being a Sunday I guessed he wouldn't be having a great time. Junkie's are notoriously broke on Sunday's and they all try to get tick till the next day. Comes of living in a six day economy. And on the seventh day he rested, whilst the junkies all freaked out.
I remember Sunday's, trying to get $500 together to get a weight, juggling the small fifty dollar buyers with the impatient half-weight clowns. Always a nightmare when you get that close to the bottom that you are turning over weights one by one, dreaming of the good old days when you had ounces buried. Your emotions swing crazily as people pull out, and you don't know if it's a bluff to test if you are just holding out on them (why?) or if they have somewhere else to go in reality. Juggle juggle juggle. Weekends when I was down that low were nightmares, going back to work on Monday was a relief.
But for sly on the hill with his permanent scoring life, there is no relief coming. No warm safe job to go to, no guaranteed income save the $400 a fortnight the government doles out for being fucked up. And that lasts about ten seconds, the one day in fourteen you can wake without the stress of needing to score hanging Damoclese over you.
I found a short essay I wrote in 1999 the other day about what I did on the way to work - seeing ten people between 8 and 830, phone going manic whilst i prepped and got dressed. I'd like to say it seems like another me but it doesn't really. Some sad part of me always hangs on to those memories, filtering out the bad, the junkie part of my brain trying to talk the rest of my mind into resubmerging itself in that narcotised life. Hence my writing the article I guess, to remind my sane part that things weren't so great in the good old days, no matter how much moolah there may have been floating around.