Monkeyrockworld

My van is still stuck at the repair shop, and this has made my days so gloomy, dark and slow I thought about suicide in a methaphorical way more than a couple times. World crisis or not, if I cannot work, at least allow me to do what I can do best: travel. Although the days are bright and sunny and the city is buzzing with life and entertainment, I don’t really care anymore and I don’t want to care anymore. I just want my van and I want to leave, I am stressing poor Kit every day with my crazy rantings and I cannot make sense because I am turning into a deadly schizophrenic couch potato. I hate this.
Even going down to the city for me it’s a problem, because it costs money. It’s almost 7 dollars to get a full day pass, and the choice is, ticket or food today? Usually I go for food, but yesterday night I decided to go for the ticket and fuck the food. I get dropped off at a remote train station on the Craigieburn Line and I walk through the doors looking for an attendant to buy a ticket and I find… absolutely no one. Great. So I am there, 30 minutes walk away from home at least, no car, no one around the streets, and no ticket. I just have a 10 $ bill that obvioulsy doesn’t work with the ticket vending machine on my left, so the first impulse’s just to start headbutting the counter and see who bleeds first. I’d probably be the one.

I already noticed that, altough I’m doomed, this city brings me some small luck; I am peeking inside of the open sliding doors to  figure out which is the right platform number, when I see it. IT’S THERE. It’s flat, white, coming out of the validating machine straight mouth. It’s a ticket. An abandoned ticket. I have the feeling I should take a look at it and with no more amazement, I find out what I already know. It’s bloody valid. It is! I got another free ride and an additional 7 dollars to spend on some food! Yes!

I definitely feel like a bum, a beggar, but thats’ also a nice feeling. It’s good to know you can slowly turn into a cockroach, if you need to. Traveling in a developed country it’s not like cruising around South east Asia: all of the things and experience you learnt in great Asia, here is almost useless, it doesn’t work. It’s a totally different karma, a different weight of the big scheme of things in the universe, a perception seen with differently shaped eyes. And I dont like it, I feel lost. I feel like an Asian would when coming here for the first time encountering the problems of the verge of starvation. But tonight I can wait for the train and feel lucky again, and enjoy the buzzing orange lights giving me a slow headache, since they flatter like butterflies’ wings at 300 mph.

The trip is just a breeze as I sit there and wander the air with my thoughts swung by Blue Oyster Cult savage riffage. It’s so good I just get to Flinders Station and I approach the exit gates in line to get out, I insert my ticket in the machine and I am about to walk out when… the doors don’t open. Those two friggin’ yellow things look at me like closed eyelids on an eyeball. I’m like, ma checcazzo, and people are passing around me. I dont know what to do, then I look at the ticket I just got before and I realize the expiry date is not the 28th, but the 26th! I have that particular moment when you don’t know what’s gonna happen and you feel like your wallet is going to be much lighter very soon. I feel some eyes crawling over my leg, from the ankle going up to the knee like small watery spiders with little hairy legs, I feel the attention trying to crawl up my butt. I am fucked.

I have no choice but to approach one of the opening gates, because someone is coming in from the outside. One of the agents is there, and this man in front of me is having a problem because also his ticket seems to be rejected. When the agent comes and the yellow lids open after a quick jerky movement of his hand I can just jump on and breeze through, starting to walk faster and faster on the street, trying not to think that someone is stalking me from behind to give me a fine. I walk fast without running to be like an invisible thief, I try to mix with the scarce groups of people when my heart starts beating faster. I am not born to be a criminal, that’s for sure.

I cross the street into Elizabeth and hide behind a liquor store’s corner wall. What was wrong with that ticket? Damn me and my eyes, I need a new pair of glasses or are my contact lenses rotten? I open up my wallet and glance through it, trying to find it and… it’s there. 28th of march, still valid up to 3 am. I was so clumsy I took out of the wallet the one ticket I didn’t throw away the other day… Marco, what’s wrong with you? Yeah, you’d better leave Melbourne very soon, mate. Your brain is going upside down and maybe soon you’ll shit it out in the toilet bowl, and that will be hard to put it back into place.