The Ride
Ten days to go.
The bike waits.
Maybe the body does too.
Last rides were hard — muscles crying, lungs clawing — but maybe it wasn’t the legs, maybe it was the mind that quit.
Uphill is a state of mind.
Sometimes gravity’s in the head.
The Book
The files sleep in their folder.
I can’t touch them.
Not yet.
The hours weren’t wasted — they burned through the fog, showed me the boy I was, the one who ran until he circled back home.
Half a lifetime to make the loop.
The street boy found his mirror.
New words twitch under the skin — a novel maybe, something with a whiff of the Beats.
Burroughs drifting through Piccadilly, a ghost with a notebook and a habit.
He cruised the Circus; I just passed through.
Different missions, same neon.
The Notebook
Next ride — notebook and pen.
Paper, real paper.
Scratch out the bones of a story.
Except the world’s gone soft and censorious.
Everyone’s offended on someone else’s behalf.
Infantile times.
I remember Charlie Hebdo, blood on white paper, and the crowd chanting Je Suis Charlie.
Here, in Australia, you couldn’t even print the magazine they claimed to be.
Irony stacked on irony, folded neat like flags.
Freedom
Freedom of speech?
We mouth the words but there’s no such line in the Constitution.
You get the liberty the government allows, like a ration book.
Even thought is suspect now — Article 18, sure — but the wrong thought at the wrong time and you’re done.
They don’t need your confession; the algorithm will testify.
The Lawyer
I told a solicitor about the book.
He nodded, weighed the words, said: Two problems — defamation and child-abuse law.
I said I could dance around defamation; the other one was a trapdoor.
I told him about the scene:
A boy, Piccadilly Circus, leaning against the rail, waiting.
A punter watching.
Is that “sexual posing”?
He laughed, said he’d have to think about it, told me to send the manuscript.
I laughed too.
If there’s a crime in the pages, sending them would double it.
Maybe I should write about drunk mates in an outback pub, waving flags before shipping off to someone else’s war.
The Crowd
Laws are written with the next election in mind,
inked for the lowest denominator,
for eyes that skim and minds that trust slogans.
Most Australians can’t read complexity —
that’s the definition —
functional illiteracy.
So you dress the law in the right words: protect women, children, civil society.
No one argues.
Then the net widens.
That’s what they call usage creep.
The Old Debate
Nobody asks if these laws work.
They don’t.
Look at “adult crime – adult time.”
Any decent child psychologist would say: wrong road, dead end.
But it sounds tough,
and the crowd loves tough.
The Greeks worked this out twenty-four centuries ago in the Agora:
tougher penalties don’t make better citizens.
In democracies, they just make quieter criminals.
Umberto Eco once said Mussolini’s regime cut crime —
by becoming the biggest criminal of all.