Judgement Day Read Free Page B

up with this huge sack of weed.
Hanging out with Silk was always fun, he had a lot more friends
than me, I always just hung around with the same few guys, but I
saw his friends regularly enough that I became moderately well
acquainted with some of them. The night Silk told me the name for
his son was Isaac, I said “that’s a very Biblical name.” Silk was
wearing this coloured stripey poncho thing, it could have been a
jacket. I was sitting on the lounge looking up at him and for a
moment I had a vision of him as Joseph with his technicolour
dreamcoat and the ceiling light shining behind his head like a
halo, standing there with arms outstretched like some sort of
saint. I rubbed my eyes and removed the image from my mind, and I
thought nothing more of it.
    I started to
smoke a lot more pot on my own, usually when I was at university I
would just roll a joint and walk around the perimeter of the uni
until it was finished and then come back into the uni grounds, I
just thought it was better than having issues with uni security.
Smoking on my own, it made me a little paranoid, and I began
talking to myself a little.
    Talking to
myself started off as mumbling, I wanted to be like Hunter S
Thompson in the movie of ‘Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas,’ the way
he mumbles things to himself all the time. The talking to myself,
it got more and more pronounced over time, it went from mumbling,
to talking, to singing. That’s right, singing, and I don’t mean
humming some tune, I would walk around the university campus
singing Tom Waits songs, and not quietly. I did this all the time,
I would spend a lot of time at home memorising songs and then
wander around the campus singing them as if I was alone. At the
time I didn’t think it was that strange, I had always liked singing
along with my CDs, but singing in public was something I really
started to enjoy. I was proud that I had learned all the words to
these great songs.
    In the early
days of talking to myself it was like I wanted to be crazy, it was
as if I was pretending to be crazy because I thought it was cool to
be crazy, but when I couldn’t stop I began to wonder if I really
was crazy? I used to like singing at work at Coles too, I had a job
there packing shelves in the middle of the night. In particular, I
learned all the words for ‘Step Right Up’ by Tom Waits, it’s a song
with a massive number of sales clichés, I loved singing that song
at the supermarket the most.
    I used to
drive a friend of mine around in exchange for pot, I also used to
drive to the Nepean River on my own a lot and smoke bongs in my
car, and I began to think I was under surveillance because the cops
thought I was a drug dealer. It seemed to me like this black Holden
Commodore with tinted windows was following me around. I would see
him behind me in the McDonalds drive-thru a lot, it seemed like
wherever I went there was always this black Holden Commodore
nearby. I never thought to check the number plate, and because of
the tinted windows all I would ever see were the hands on the
steering wheel, he made me think of the truck driver in the movie
‘Duel. ’ All I ever saw
were his hands as he followed me around at night, he was my
nemesis. Of course it was completely paranoid.
    W hen I saw the towers come down on September 11 of that
year, I knew that it was the beginning of the end. We've witnessed
much worse things than September 11 since 2001, but at the time I'd
never seen anything like it. It shouldn't have been as big a deal
as it was, it was the act of a small terrorist organisation and
should have been treated as such, but that was the day that the
world changed forever.
    I didn’t
realise it at the time ,
but September 11 affected me more than I knew. My brother Tom was only a few years old at the
time, I remember watching him crashing his toy cars into the lounge
and making explosion noises and thinking “that's pretty fucked up.”
He must have seen that footage hundreds, if not