'I'm writing these words in the days after the ascension of a vainglorious braggart and swindler to the most powerful role on the planet, and evidently I'm not alone in feeling that the ground has given way beneath our feet. Those of us who came of age in the years after 1989 could be forgiven for feeling cheated. Hadn't the end of History come with the fall of the Berlin Wall, with Pax Americana the rock on which global peace and prosperity was to be founded? We grew up and accepted as eternal something that has turned out to be built on a fault line, and now the earthquake has come.' (Editorial Introduction)
'Awareness of this predicament dawns with a distant memory of being exhibited like a monkey in front of my peers. And the other kids being told I'd stay behind when they moved up a grade, probably til the end of time. It was lie a weird Japanese animation flick where someone puts a curse on the main character, and they're fucked for all time and forever. Years later I learnt the teacher has told my mum that I would never learn to read or write, that I was just dumb; it was as if I had never been anywhere or seen anything; it has the feel of Dostoyevsky's idiot about it.' (Introduction)
The author describes his experience with being called 'stupid' on account of his dyslexia ever since childhood, and the ways he pushed back against this definition.
'It's not the humidity, it's the heat. Keep your furnaces and hell-hinges and Adelaide in December. You wish to know true, suffocating, dehydrating lip-chapping cookery? Go to the establishment formerly known as the Tattersall's Hobart Aquatic Centre in winter. Wear trousers and a cardigan because the outside temperature is hovering between six and nothing degrees Celcius. Stroll in like an executive, dressed like this - a manner you thought sensible - a you will know warmth, writ large and equatorially cloying, if the equator depended on trench-warfare quantities of chlorine to stay clean, Yo will struggle through the conversation with the girls at the front desk without fainting, then run into a guy you went to high school with as you pass the lifeguard station. He is jovial, and apparently unaffected by the appalling heat.' (Introduction)
We leave her hotel room
The corridor is empty which is lucky but I have seen a few of them in the hotel they are down in the bar and near reception where I am not allowed to go
'Septembers end sadly. Fuck the flag made sweeter by waiting, fuck the home and away highlights revisited in January as you sweat through your tee-shirt, and fuck the death-less myth of the noble loss. Our teams are designed - once a year, every year - to fail us.' (Introduction)
'Through a suddenly lit arch in the cave of the mind, images of salt-dusted plains open up; winding paths along cliffs torn high above acidic tides; desire-lines scrawling away through serrated uplands and beyond to a tar horizon. The cave of the mind we leave, so dense with bats and thoughts, a subterrain of the senses, has offered us this: our two legs, scissors cutting away the dross; our feet, padded sensors returned tot he earth's slow philology; our heart, cradled in its basketry of ribs, sending a receiving prey and game from the brain.' (Introduction)
'Saturday, market day. As usual, mum and dad ride their bikes wit us kids riding behind. Dad calls it single file. My little sister is always placed second from the back with my big brother tailing the pack. I'm somewhere in the the middle. Mum rides at the head of the family. Her bike is rust and her brakes squeal as though they hurt, and she can never keep in a straight line.' (Introduction)
'While walking has spawned much literature, cycling's literary offerings appear few. Here Saskia Beudel adds her contemplation of cycling. writing and urban landscapes.' (Introduction)
'After the doc's we take a walk round the park like we always do. It's cold and the pond is fuckin filthy, full of ice and dirt and shit. When Aaron was a kid he asked me what happened to the ducks when the water froze over. Did they get trapped under the ice and die? I had no idea, so I told him they went on holidays to Bali.' (Introduction)
