Last Day in Perth

So the next morning Geoff and I drag ourselves from bed around 0700 like a couple of trolls, and with a bit of cursing and mumbling and plenty of blinking and a bit of tea, finally get ourselves in a car and head for the airport at 0810. There we meet Solomon, Geoff's incredibly cool son, who is about 5, and Jackie, Solomon's mum.

We stand near the baggage conveyor and talk about their trip and do introductions while Solomon, with a strength that belies his frame, stops the first bag (larger than himself) until his mom can lend a hand, and pulls the second two (one of which I carried, and appeared to be full of bricks, books and cannon shot) from the conveyor on his own. To use an American expression, the kid's a hoss. If Geoff doesn't break down and start training heavily again just so he can teach this kid to rip people apart with his bare hands, I think it will be a significant loss for the martial arts community.

Since peak traffic in Perth on a Monday morning is an unfriendly thing, we decide to head back to a cafe very near Geoff's house, which is only 10 minutes from the airport, and have a bit of coffee and breakfast before we return them to Jackie's place on the other side of downtown.

The restaurant is excellent, and serves a bacon and egg toasty that Geoff and I agree is the best bacon and egg sandwich we've ever paid for--though with the arrogance of all domestic chefs, we both admit that we think we've made better ones ourselves at home.

After breakfast, with traffic mostly clear, we head over, drop off bags, woman, and child, and hit the road back to Geoff's part of town. Rather than heading for the house, we instead decide to run a few errands and head for the local forum, a combination of malls and outdoor shopping centers where Geoff wants to check some prices on fish, pay the rent, and pick up cigarettes.

En route, Claire calls and says she's had a very efficient day and is able to knock off work, though it's only around 11AM. I'd told her I was in town for a couple of more days and wanted to catch up more thoroughly than our hasty Dim Sum exchange, and so we agree to meet for lunch at the forum, and after we've run our errands she meets us at a local secondhand bookshop.

We spend perhaps half an hour there, pouring over their sci fi and fantasy sections. Much of the time is spent discussing the likes of Stephenson, Niven and Dick. It's fun conversation, and I'm reminded that most people who were as vocal on the internet as frequently as we all were in the late 1990s share this common bond--a passion for genre fiction, be it fantasy, history, absurdity, cyberpunk or sci fi, and a love of the written word in general, especially when it teaches us something new while feeding our imaginations at the same time.

When we've exhausted their meagre selection and all picked a book or two and paid, we head for the food court. There, in between discussions of red drawf, monty python's appeal to the the modern generation, miscellaneous training stories and encouragement that I go and visit Rat (ne Pheonix) in Brisbane--though it's an additional airplane flight away--Geoff and I order really great kebabs and Claire (with a comment about rice being a necessity for all Asians) gets a salmon and rice box from an asian deli. Geoff also hunts up a couple of Brownes, a local cold, sweet, milked coffee drink served in a carton that's an oversized version of the milk one you get in educational cafeterias.

We sit there for perhaps an hour, conversations weaving and threading through personal stories, talk of the various experiences and adventures we've had in the past 5 years since we all sortof drifted away from posting regularly to MAAC. It's an odd shared experience to draw from, but it informs us of each person's character, their motivations, and their peculiarities to a surprising degree.

If you've never made friends through fierce and impassioned discussion of a shared interest, in an open forum where you will one day be expected to back up everything you've claimed you can do with physical demonstration, and where every assertion is challenged, panned for truth, and tossed aside or kept based on whether it holds its own in debate against the assertions of others, I can't recommend it enough. The fest events in Knoxville and Louisville seemed just as valuable but less odd, since at the time I was still regularly conversant with the community, but sitting at this table, half a decade after the fact, and still knowing these people and respecting them as friends really drove home the way that good public debate can influence your choice of company for the better.

I also drag out my phone, since I've not brought along the Canon, and get Geoff to take a blurry here's-me-with-the-mythical-creature shot of Claire. See, she is real!

Around 1400, we have to start going our separate ways. Claire is on a 6AM flight to Adelaide the next morning for work for which she has to prepare, and Geoff has to start work around 1530. I have writing to catch up on, and for the first three hours that Geoff is gone, I pound away at my tiny keyboard, cataloguing my experiences in Perth up to the previous day while they're still fresh in the mind.

Around 1900, a couple of hours before Geoff will be home, and just before Joe and Daniel get back from her busy day at Uni, I head out to the back patio. All our discussions about training had made it impossible for me to avoid the temptation of the heavy bag any longer, and so I change into shorts and t shirt, drag the drinking-and-talking table out of the way, and go to work on the bag for a while, trying to dredge up old knowledge of obscure strikes, remind my body how to put power from the ground, through my legs and hips and shoulders and all the way out into the varied surfaces of my hands. Because it occurs to me I might not see Geoff again, I realize I'll need at least one picture of him in a drunken posture, and so I play with my camera and the bag a bit, ensuring that the picture will at least come out.

When Geoff gets in though, I tell him my flight details for the return from Sydney, which give me one day back in Perth before I head out to Hong Kong, and he says "well that's great, because I was thinking it was regrettable that we didn't take some time and do a little training during one of the days you were here, and I'm not working that day, so this way we can do it when you come back!"

So now there are plans to meet up again when I return, and one day during which we can spend the day talking technique, actually trying to show each other a thing or two from the distant past along the way. Plans laid in, we spent the remainder of the night on a couple of nicer bottles of red wine (a Tayman's Shiraz that's incredible, and a Barking Owl that's not half bad) and a youtubing session, showing each other video to convey stories and impressions.

He showed me Tim Minchin's "White Wine in the Sun" (just audio and a freaky photo of Tim) which conveys with delicious poignancy how an athiest and an Australian feels about Christmas and the ties that bind families together, as well as some music video work for which Geoff did the video switching and directing. I showed him Rob's Paranovian's Pachebel rant, and Taylor Mali's Def Poetry "What Teachers Make" which is the sort of thing that puts your heart in your teeth every time you hear it. In between we told stories about how much we love to rant, and how we share a common character trait that we both have very mixed feelings about--the habit of unintentionally picking up other people's vocal inflections, energies, and accents when we speak to people we like or respect as authority figures.

We also discuss our various levels of flexibility, and how Geoff is naturally flexible, even when he's not training. He's surprised to discover I can't touch my toes unless I've been stretching regularly, and so he puts his face against his own knees, and this is a man who hasn't trained in years.

It's ridiculous, really, and it makes me jealous. So, as a passive aggresive response, the first picture of Geoff to be posted to The Road is this one, of him getting his face as close as possible to his own unmentionables.

We finally cut our talk short around 1AM and forced ourselves to bed so we could get a decent bit of rest before tomorrow's trip to the airport--I was off to Sydney.