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Tuesday, November 25, 2008

Here be monsters


The hunting in a pack strategy didn't work so B1 and B2 hid away while B3 came back disguised as a family man. A combination of implausible charm and gossamer thin affability bedazzled us for a while but ultimately character will tell - B3 may come back as a charity case next or might have got the message.

The last family member living at 72 believed in treating people with patience, tolerance and respect. The property will sell to someone with those values. Or with way better acting skills than B3. I don't mind being patronised - I find it amusing - but every hunter knows that target selection is 90% of the game, weapon choice 9% and luck the rest. If I end up on someone's trophy wall they will have more patience, be better at strategising, and be more driven and more determined than me - rat cunning rather than reptile brain reacting.

It won't be some Sub-primate greed-is-good conman reviving the 1980s. Those days are gone now.

MLK said"Let us realize the arc of the moral universe is long but it bends towards justice."



2 comments:

Anonymous said...

I am really inmpressed with your sticking to those values. I hope the right people come along

Fresh Local said...

When we moved next door I asked Ken whether I could use the land and he replied "You can do whatever you like as long as you don't build a house on it".

This then is his living will.

My daughters play all over the rock, they garden in the front part - watching for abandoned syringes - and slide down the stone. It'll always be Ken's land to them.

He and I joked a few years ago that he and my girls were the only locals in our block all three having lived in the area all their lives. He would have been 66 when my wife and I made the first panicky taxi ride to the King George Women and Childrens Hosptital and 71 during the next to the RPA.

We have an olive tree on the land, a lillipilli, lemongrass, a compost pile and a compost bin. One summer I set up a grey water filtering system using the raised garden bed an earlier tenant had built from old railway sleepers as a sump. There's an old wooden staircase leading from the top of the rock down to the garden bed which has gradually rotted away over the last twenty years. It's also recycled from a rail yard.

When we moved in neighbours were still throwing food scraps over the back fence for the rabbits that lived there. Greyhound racing is a popular local sport and owners would often keep rabbits to encourage the dogs - the rabbits would sometimes get away and if found by a benevolent spirit could end up on Ken's land.

The last one must have disappeared about the time we moved in but for some months lettuce leaves kept appearing over the fence.

The rock will probably go and some new structure be squeezed into the gap. We can only hope that it fits into the streetscape and that the occupants do too.