Dear Friends and Amigos,

Picture me as I am: surrounded by scraps of paper, dying pens, crumpled up bills of currency from countries on the other side of the world, and journals filled with handwriting too laden with the emotions of the moment to be legible. You might propose that this is my native element, and you've got solid odds of being right. I look around the mess, smile though things I was going to write are now gone, and just mouth the words: que bueno.

Nonetheless, know that I am all scattergories right now, but this doesn't mean I should bail on you. Australia is everywhere and you deserve a few words on it.

Strategy 1: Start with random trivia - Australia has 8 of the world's 10 most dangerous snakes.

This is not to neglect the potency of the spiders. I was walking back from the subway one night and (hey look! I'm at full speed again!) I noticed a shine coming out of midair. Recognizing that this is a land of dangerous creatures I took good measure not to run into what certainly was a spiderweb from the spider of doom, Shelob herself, waiting for an extranjero dolt such as myself to play her little silken harp. But lo, I managed through a rather flamboyant twirl to avoid it and at the end of my little spin there I stood gaping a few centimeters from a rather cunning and threatening greyish brownish spider. It had spun this web seemingly sitting in the middle of nowhere, right in the middle of the sidewalk. I felt like nature was setting me up. But that night, I survived. Of the rest of the evening, I would only be disturbed by a possum hanging from a power line.

CIA Funfact Number 1: Australians love sport. So much so that they have more medal-winning Olympic athletes than any other country in the world per capita. Twice as many as the next best country in the world. They take it seriously! Reference: Rugby World Cup match between Australia and Scotland, televised, kicker goes for a field goal, advertisement comes on, man tries to sell you something, is slammed by a rugby giant. Man come son to ask, "Don't you hate it when someone interrupts your rugby," then a short bit about the company. Back to game in 10 seconds.

CIA Funfact Number 2: Australians seem to bear a precarious competition with their sparsely populated neighbors to the east, New Zealand. Reference: the evening tellie advertizes a show of freeway getaways from the police: "When you're up against the finest New Zealand police, you don't stand a chance... of being caught."

Following the CIA's orders, I decided I needed to solidify my understanding of Australia by joining in some sport, and begrudgingly learning some New Zealand jokes.

This brings me to the Rugby World Cup. More than likely, you haven't heard anything of it, however, here in Australia which is hosting the event, you really cannot escape it. Caught myself, I was invited by my friend Phil to a match here in Brisbane. The stadium was a sea of yellow and green, as the loyal Wallabie fans came out to cheer their local heroes. They wouldn't be disappointed, and easily handled the Scottish squad. This experience was a bit more civilized than my Argentina futbol experience of earlier journals, but nonetheless entertaining in its own right. It is much like American football (or gridiron as it is referred to here) in that the object of the game is to reach the endzone while carrying the ball. But from here, the comparisons fall apart, because a rugby game is much quicker and more dynamic than your average gridiron match. It's a confusing mixture for an American such as myself to grasp: players don't wear padding or helmets, but due to this they accrue a penalty if they hit each other too hard or too high. They generally rip each others jerseys, boot at each other and bloody each other (thereby sending the perpetrator to the "sin bin" and the victim to the "blood bin"). Yet at other moments the ball just sits there while the defense has to wait for the offense to pick it up and throw it - always backwards. Running out of bounds in gridiron can be good, here it is always bad. Complicate this with the fact that there's two different parallel worlds of rugby: Rugby Union and Rugby League, with two different rule sets. But heck, if I'm in the land down under, I figure it's finally time I make a go at understanding rugby, where everything is the reverse of my intuition. And I do think I've almost sorted it out. I nearly know a bad scrum when I see one.

Scrum? Yeah, scrum!

This weekend was the much anticipated meeting between New Zealand and Australia, and by some deep-hearted effort, Australia managed to pull off the upset. You should have seen the pub erupt into cheers and chants of "Waltzing Matilda" at such a victory.

Of course, I'm not here to pub crawl. Boobera Lagoon will have to wait until the return leg visit to Brisbane, however I visited the University of Queensland, and met with an anthropologist here who has suggested a visit to Stradbroke Island, nearby Brisbane. You should read about this episode in the next month or so as I take the ferry out there. In the meantime, I have a venture up to Cairns to begin. Ever onward...

Oh yes, and while taking this break here with Phil, I noticed an advert for a movie named The Lost World. Sure enough, it was not for the Jurassic Park sequel, but actually a legitimate reproduction of Arthur Conan Doyle's famous novel that has had so much to do with the propagation of interest in lake monsters. Naturally, I dutifully gave it a viewing. Much of it revolves around chasing dinosaurs, but really all I can say about it is that I need to find the book to separate what is cinema from what is Sir Doyle. I later discovered that there have been cinematic versions of Doyle's novel seven times! 1925 (silent film), 1960, 1992, 1997, 1998, 1999 (by two different movie teams!), and 2001. I cannot think of any book that has been made into a movie so many times. I suppose that the spirit of monster-chasing is a popular movie theme.

All right, that's all for now. And, after almost two months of negligence, I've managed to put 30-odd new photos up for your perusal. Enjoy!

Oh blast, I can't stop myself.... for fair dinkum sake, here's a tidbit of what's lying scribbled out in front of me:

::THAT::

yesterday i finally threw away those old worn travelling soles. they said to me the same old thing each day and that was that madness is the opposite side of schizophrenia, when one voice goes silent, doesn't have the fight left in it, and you feel as awkward as an ice cream man hopping down the street with one leg. when you're not already recovering that morning after, that glass of water from an Ikea glass that smells like wet dog, that bacon eggs, that too much sun, that too much time, that feeling that sense that you still might not fully chew that realization that the only meaning of life is the one you give yourself. yeah. that one. recover i will, cover it up one more time till i open the top off it again when i'm stumbling in the kitchen lookin' for walnuts or soy milk or beer. that's when the thought reaches you that you don't make your own thoughts, and you might as well stop, turn round, go back, back to that shack back in castro just to see if its still there, smile when you see it, then walk back again. there's your soup du jour, captain jack. time to walk the dog and dream some dreams. bcuz a walkabout is that. important. it's the reflection in your wanderer labrador's eyes. go. trundle off to that.