Melbourne, Day Off:1: Woken by points of light through the blinds at about 9am. Gradual consciousness. Wanyi noted that the drive to Apollo Bay to buy Scallop Pies would take 3.5 hours rather than the 2 hours I estimated. I thought everything in Victoria was 2 hours away. So we had to speed up into full consciousness. 2: Left home at 11am, across the city, then down the M1 West. Stopped and ate Hungry Jack emergency food at a petrol place. Took a left turn to the Otways Mountains somewhere and stopped for a cigarette and for daughter to be photoed doing a star jump in the middle of the road. 3: The Otways are tall and very beautiful mountains and forest and the narrow road along the high ridge was a perfect place for both terror and vomiting. 4: Exited the Otways down on Wild Dog Creek Road and joined the Great Ocean Road. 5: Found Apollo Bay and the Scallop Pie Shop. $12 each now, so bought 6. 6: Put on big coats and the 3 of us wandered along the massive empty beach looking with wonder at the Great Ocean. Beautiful. Sun comes through the mire of the sky and in the breaking blue pristine waves are shards of crystal whiteness lit by Mother Sun. 7: Watched with wonder as some girl went out to the near horizon on a surfboard. 8: Spent an hour in the freezing beachside wonder. 9: Drove back along the Great Ocean Road noting that it wasn't a Short Ocean Road nor a Wide Ocean Road but rather a Long and Winding Vomiting Type of Great Ocean Road. 10: Turned inland at Lorne to get just get away from the Fucking Great Ocean and its Road and got nauseous going up through the wonderful forests. 11: Emerged back on the M1 at Winchelsea and went flat out to Melbourne. 12: Mrs Fitz and Daughter having running arguments regarding navigation as I just drove along. 13: Arrived in Glen Waverley, which was wrong, and then tooled the car to Box Hill and arrived sitting down to dinner at 7.45pm. 14: Then came the Sichuan food. Daughter, sitting down first, possessed the menu and wrote down what we wanted, then Wanyi jotted down a few items. 15: then there came The Enlightenment as to why folk like Sichuan Food. We each had our own boiling soup, mine with pork bones and lotus root, and we sat bits of food, abalone, prawn, wagyu beef, pig stomach, and pig vocal chords, pig's blood, tofu skin, cabbage, coriander and whatever that was, into the soup then fished it out and put it in the bowl with the sesame seed oil, the chilli oil, the whatever it was...and we became fixed in passionate composition...3 great white sharks consuming everything in a blizzard of tastes and smells. 16: Then we drove 5 minutes home. 17: Best day Mrs Fitz has had for years, including the nausea. Tianshu was happy. I was happy, though tired of driving. 18: Fell asleep by points of lights through the blind. We don't go out much or often. Incidentally, the Scallop Pies, that used to cost $10 2 years ago now cost $12 each. At $10 2 years ago they were stuffed with fresh salty sea scallops and well worth $15. Now, in 2018, at $12 a pop, they were just as fresh and sea salted, but there were fewer of them in each pie, so worth around $10. 18: Will we go back? Will we venture along the Great Ocean Road again? Nope. Never. At the same time, we had a wondrous day and Wanyi had a great, magnificent and unforgettable birthday. We will look for somewhere else to go to next year, just 2 hours away. My favourite moments: Saying "Wow! Isn't that amazing!?" John exclaims. Looks around, Mrs Fitz and Daughter, studying their phones. 7 hours later...someone says "Wow!"

Another good afternoon shift at work. After 4 days on, a day off together now. Usually, tomorrow, I'd just collapse but instead we 3 are having a day off together and heading off at the crack of 11am to drive along the Great Ocean Road towards Adelaide, I guess, to look at the Great Ocean along the way there... but mostly to find that small pie shop somewhere, in some town we have completely forgotten the name of, that sells fresh sea scallop pies. Best eaten on a cold rainy winter day. $10 dollars each and, unlike everything else here, actually worth more than what they cost. A big mug of tea or coffee. Snacks as we drive along, and Chinese pop songs, then come home, have a rest, and go out at night to a good Sichuan Restaurant in Box Hill, just nearby here, to celebrate Mrs Fitz's birthday which was last month during our Moving House Ourselves Whilst Working Fulltime Phase. I could say it again, Melbourne, here in Victoria, the Deep South of Australia, is a very Hard Town. It hits you in the face with its ridiculous expense, unrelenting unfriendliness, its bizarre aristocracy, its half-arsed false opportunities, its machiavellian pin prick dick head screw your arse to the wall employers and its 'well, go fuck off then' mentality. The weather is atrocious, although, I am not a tropical person genetically, so I kind of like the horror climate. The work is much harder, twice as demanding, and a third less well paid than Queensland or NSW. Services are fewer and more expensive than anywhere I've lived in Australia, including Mareeba even, due to the abortion of all health and human services done by the evil Jeff Kennet years. No wonder the man has profound depression. He deserves it, the cunt. Long may he live and suffer from it. May he never exist beyond blue. But we are here for a good temporal reason and making a go of it, and loving each other, and so, tomorrow, we will enjoy Our rare day together...and They can all, for one day, 'well, go fuck off then'.

Van Morrison - CONEY ISLAND

We have next Tuesday off together, the 3 of us, so that's such a lovely rare thing, happens once or twice a year. The plan for next Tuesday sounds like a good Van Morrison song. 'We'll get up at ten and scratch about, eat something or not, and then climb into the truck and drive 2 hours past the cold city along the Great Ocean Road, and stop for awhile along the beaches and bluffs there where the sea wind comes in all the way from Antarctica, and look about on the shores for nothing in particular, but just to look, have a smoke, and tie our scarves a bit tighter to warm. I will enjoy the driving and the girls will enjoy the views from up high in the Navara. Then we'll find that pie shop in that lost but for memory seaside town and we'll have a small feast of scallop pies, then, with sighs, and some warm coffee, we'll slowly turn about and come driving towards home and go to the Sichuan Restaurant in Box Hill for tea. That's a good day off. Wouldn't it be great if life was like that all the time?'

Night Watch Poem 2018

Night Watch 2018.

He hung out the clothes on the front line, 

& went for a brief walk around the cold dark block.

Coming back, the only way to the front door 

was through the

​translucent ​

washing.

He could see, between the clothes, the simple lights inside the house.

Lights, colours, movement, in the soft palette of a breeze 

held together by

​small wooden ​

pegs.

How easily we are

​made so​

beautiful.

Of the less-cost after shaves I think Tabac is the best. Of the most-cost after shaves Givenchy Gentleman is my favourite. Like Tabac it has that soft background hue of cigar smoke and full ashtrays, and sweat, and in addition, up front is the smell of dirty socks, burnt carpet, kapok rotted by red wine, and the faint redolence of stale semen. Much like an old man's hostel. It amazes me how those French folk got it so right. Olfactory Artistes of the Highest Order.

notes from palliative care book, regarding the narcotics... in the absence of heroin, morphine remains the gold standard for pain relief in terminal illness. Codeine is useless and is a bad drug. Oxycodone is very problematic and far less than effective in pain control than morphine in the terminal phase. Hydromorphone is ok, but you should add some methadone to make it more comprehensive. Fentanyl is ok if you like to see happy hairless rabbits in your room...but as time goes by, the rabbits can change into really awful things. Stick with morphine. First choice. Add some midazolam, a tad of haloperidol, a concomitant subset load of methadone for the bones, and you'll be right as rain. If you need far more than 600mg morphine subcut a day, with the additions of methadone, midaz, and haloperidol, then you may need to flush the body IV for a day and start again as the morphine metabolites, in a dying body, tend to eat each other when the concentrations get too much. have a day off, flush the body IV, then come back next day with 300mg morphine, subcut, 5 haloperidol, 30 midaz, 40 methadone...and then titrate up to the need. You can still be sitting in bed doing your crosswords, but you just won't be in massive pain. the human condition...Its not rocket science. if you haven't got good pain control within 3 days, then the people caring for you really don't care, or don't know what they are doing. You could need up to a gram of morphine a day, plus the other stuff, but usually only if you have let the oncologists and surgeons have done too much harm to your receptors by pointless, heroic (for you) and simply cruel interventions.