Portrait of Tara, a girl that taught me to draw in the second grade in the Central Queensland town of Capella. We spent a lot of time drawing and colouring instead of paying attention. Star Wars was my stencil. Nobody drew a better Boba Fett. I didn’t feel the need to listen, having completed every $3.99 Literacy and Numeracy workbook they sold at the Newsagency up to 7th Grade level. So much did I enjoy drawing I took my pencil case full of marker pens, pencils, crayons and a bucket of chalk and drew pictures and cuss words all over the tables and chairs, the walkway along with the big green steam train in the park on a fine Saturday afternoon, even signing my name to my fine workmanship. Next day while out riding bikes my two buddies and I got picked up, having won a free ride in a police car with a complimentary tour of the Capella Police Station jail cell out the back for the effort. Not bad for a six year old. What bothered me about that cell/brick shed with bars was the silver toilet. Number one it had no seat and no lid. Number two there a big green tree frog in it. I asked the Sergeant to take him out before he got flushed. I was worried for that frog. Anyway, spelling and punctuation sure, sure, sure, but colour by numbers was the bomb. Those fresh ethanol-scented print-out sheets with the purple ink that made your head spin when you sniffed them. And the flavoured clag glue.
Then overnight without warning, as a result of acute family disintegration, I was transplanted to another part of the state.
Fast forward twenty years.
Seven thousand kilometres from home, and through an acquaintance of an acquaintance I was invited to come for a job interview to fill in for an employee that had left her position the previous week. With little money and little to do I obliged.
So, on that night with the deep blue sky filled with electrical lightning and thunder I walked into this College right, and there out the front of the entry was an A-frame billboard. What was on it? I'll tell you what was on it. On it was the picture of the pretty hazel-eyed girl I'd last seen twenty years before doing a colour-by-numbers on my last day there, smiling, the very one i used to draw with so long ago in that little mining town school.
Tara.
She was whose job I was replacing. I mean, what the fuck right?
The chances out of six billion people x time x places x potential for variables.
The randomness of life. Or is this thing we live in random at all? Is there a design to the lives we live? Perhaps each one of us a game piece on a sick fucking game board of snakes and ladders. Some rise, some fall, free will be fucked.
Perhaps all existence is supernatural, not in a ghost sense, but an unseen predetermined order that exists all around invisible to the eye in the chaos. An order to the who, what, where and when and how of what goes on in what we do.
Are we puppets being jiggled around on invisible strings by God?
One that throws a spanner here or a spanner in the works there
Just to see what we will do?
And if so, why?
Are we ants?
Ants being toyed with by a benevolent sometimes malevolent giant standing over the nest?
Watching to see which one he’s gonna squash,
Like the mangled bodies in the newspaper,
Of passengers on the doomed Turkish Flight 981,
In 1974.
A body in the wreckage,
Well dressed with socks pulled up,
Not knowing they were the last socks he was ever gonna put on.
Did they know what was coming?
Is Final Destination more than a horror flick?
Or perhaps it is random.
Perhaps it is nothing.
Perhaps all interactions are episodes of blind, stupid chance. Episodes that because we are so pitiful we try to juice some kind of meaning. Like a mouthless man juicing water from a rock to quench his thirst.
But then what about he who is struck by a car? Or has a branch fall on his head? Or chokes to death on a broccoli stem while Great Uncle Joe, survivor of three wars,blows out 101 candles on his cake.
Is there meaning in that?
What is the meaning when a child gets cancer?
What is the meaning in a ninety year-old, chain-smoking a packet a day for seventy years?
Is there meaning in anything?
Are we truly equal to ants?
Ramblers roaming, never stopping for rest.
Never a pause to reflect.
Onwards, upwards in service of that black machine they call Economy.
Forever crashing into one another on our random roads to nowhere,
Chugging up the wall as we inch toward the ceiling?
Or are we in control? Masters of our own destiny?
Truly a Gump of a question.
Truly a question without answer, because
Who knows?
Just another mystery.
Mystery of this greatly fucked-up sim.