Spoke too soon ...
You may feel like a horse that is cramped in its pen at the start of a race, Flip. You are pent up in a small box stomping your feet and anxiously waiting for the signal to go. You may feel powerless over the fact that your eyes are blinded and you have no control over when the gate will open. Be patient. Don't waste all your energy jumping up and down in the small cage. The gate will spring open soon enough and you will be up and running.
You'd a thunk that I'd let my New Year resolutions slide into the ether without so much as a sideways glance, but it ain't so. I was rewarded for my rant against technology with a powerful electrical storm that raged through Broome and took my wireless network with it with a single powerful zap. About $200 dollars and a week later, I am lighter of pocket and back online to entertain myself with my own pointless ramblings. Luckily, I have kept up the grind (mostly) so have an archive of delightful mundanities just screaming to be sifted through! Bar, of course, the several days when the computer's power cord decided to pack it in. And the battery in my mouse died concurrently. I have been chastised by the robotic world good and proper.
To play catch up, read backwards. Or stay unawares - it's all the same to me.
Court today was the usual kind of scene. I found phrases such as "over-representation of Aboriginal people" and "mindless violence" drifting through my mind, as offender after offender climbed into the dock to have their lawyers valiantly try to find causes for their effects: broken jaws, splintered arms, noses gushing with blood. There were pyromaniacs setting alight their lovers' houses just to get a rise, another guy who broke open someone's head because another someone claimed he was stealing a wallet; a woman waiting patiently in the public gallery as her partner's bloody deeds were described in callow language. I have become numb to these things. I found myself staring at the walls for much of it, practicing shorthand doodles using sentences I constructed myself: "The man is clearly guilty", "he should be given a suspended sentence" and "is he likely to be a recidivist?". The last one was kind of hard.
Having said all that, I walked out of the courtroom after one case with an eerie sense of foreboding. As one indigenous man sat there awaiting his sentence for an attack involving a meat cleaver and a whole lotta alcoholfuelled violence, suddenly a baby magpie appeared outside the window and began throwing itself at the glass. Thunk. Thunk. Flutter. Thunk. Even the judge glanced up irritated as it launched itself over and over again, a little kamikaze messenger. Thing was, this was at the exact moment the man's dead brother was mentioned - the very man he said he was trying to avenge.
The world went all cold and crystal for me right then. I wonder if he felt it too?