The thing they don’t tell you about changing the timing belt in an old Subaru wagon is you gotta change the water pump as well. It’s a waste of time putting in a whole new timing kit if you don’t also put in a new water pump because as sure as God made men to work 70-hour weeks, it’s gunna blow in the next 10,000 kilometres. You’ll be driving along listening to the 40 hertz static between your ears and you’ll see the temperature gauge deep in the red and you’ll think to yourself, somewhere between Cotton Tree in Queensland – where I live – and Sydney – where I’m going – that you should have changed the water pump, like I did.

Cotton Tree’s a lower rent suburb of Maroochydore with cheap condos. Think of a shoebox with holes for windows and put people in ‘em. The old King street shops with its bakery and corner deli are ripe for baristas, gourmet restaurants and web marketing specialists. Cotton Tree-on-sea. The rents will go up but it won’t matter to me. I’ve got a ticket to ride.

It takes a six pack of stubbies to grind the motor number off an engine block. It’s a bastard. You have to jack the car up, crawl underneath and with one hand, hold the grinder at an bloody awkward angle and grind away. I’ve also put in new heavy duty shock absorbers and springs and welded some supports for the axle. If you’re carrying a heavy load, you need that. The last thing I want is to break down and attract attention from the highway patrol somewhere out of Coffs Harbour, with their death’s head caps, leather jackets and boots, the Smith & Weston swinging off one hip and the cuffs and truncheon swinging off the other. They’d be suspicious why the car was so low on the axles, as it if was carrying something contraband, something spectacular, something that needed to be investigated.

My girlfriend comes over every now and then and we have indifferent sex. Fifty shades of vanilla. She practices the drums in the lounge. I spend a lot of time at the beach or pub. She’s sort of pretty but her hair cut makes her look dowdy. There’s a touch of Princess Diana about her and because she went to a private school, she talks like she swallowed Sloan Square. A minor turn-on but nothing to write home about. She’s a collection of mannerisms imperfectly performed and reckons Hilary Mantel’s ‘Wolf Hall’ is an Airbnb.

I’m a big fan of The Beatles. The Fab Four helped me through tough times as a kid. The first thing Dowdy says when I take her home and play, And your bird can sing, is ‘The Beatles are boring’. She wanted me to put on some alternative music, made for wrist-slitting depressives. Her job now is to bring me cold stubbies and shut the fuck up as I get the car ready.

It’s bloody hot under here but I’ve got a soft spot for this rust bucket. It has driven me up and down the east coast half a dozen times, over the top end to Broome and back and around the Daintree. It’s reliable in a world where most people aren’t. I call my car, Brum.

As you get older, you feel the heat more. Some years ago I lived in a tree house in the tropical Daintree: one large bedroom, a lounge and a view of the forest to die for. Solar power. Did a lot of reading. I worked as a fire watch on a tower on top of a mountain. 12 hour shifts. Did a lot of reading there too. I also had a job counting cassowaries in the rain forest. They’re like an emu but with an head coloured in by Timothy Leary with claws big enough to draw and quarter you. I learned to climb trees real fast. Anyway, those jobs were bloody hot but I enjoyed them.

Dowdy reclines on my old red sofa and reads stuff by women writers where the lead character is disaffected, cynical and irreverent to the point of being irritating. If you’re into novels about peri-menopausal women in their 50s who are aching to break free of their marriages and children and move to a country town or a sea side village, and lead a life which would make De Sade proud, to ‘find their true self’ through their vaginas, then you probably know shit about cars. Let’s leave it there.

Some of my girlfriends had mental health problems. It’s a red badge of courage now. If you haven’t been assaulted or don’t have half a dozen kangaroos bouncing around the top paddock, there’s something wrong with you. One threw a pan of boiling water at my face, another took a drug overdose and another pranged my car while out of her head. Some years ago, I arrived home late one night with a woman I’d picked up at a bar to find my part time girlfriend at the time, naked on my bed. She’d handcuffed her wrists to the stanchions. Not easy when you think about it. I’m often bored with bourgeois women. They want to eat the cheese but won’t milk the cow. Reckon the world is made of Tim Tams. I learnt one valuable lesson. Never give them your house key.

All sorts of things go into making a magical childhood. Mine was full of love and violence. Loved by an overbearing mother and violence by my grandfather, who taught me to box by punching me in the face. Keep your guard up, he’d yell. Protect your face. After a year of this, at the age of eight, I protected my face by knocking his left eyeball out of its socket. The boxing lessons ended. It taught me another lesson: the cops come after someone has been assaulted or killed. Get the first punch in.

In my early teens Mum always wanted to know where I was, what I was doing and who with. As she was chewing through a cask of wine a day, and as we were living with her mum and dad in a small two bedroom house, it couldn’t have been easy. On my 16^th birthday, I borrowed $500 off grandpa – who was glad to see me go – and moved into a flat on the other side of town. I poured beers and on weekends, I’d restock the pub. I like pubs. Like the smell. The walls talk of generations gone. You can pick up a lot listening to old bastards sitting on a midi in the front bar.

So where’s all this going? At exactly 8.30pm tomorrow, MacArthur Bank will transfer to Dedalus Corporation, eight figures of funding to start their research into tracking the neurological pathways of children. They’ll use this data to create AI-driven implants with self-evolving commands. These ain’t cute robots you can fuck or who will do your homework. These are small voices in your head who will get you home loans, control your finances, diagnose your medical issues, mediate in domestic disputes, provide counselling and much more. Got a broken heart? It’s not your fault your little bytes buddy will say. Never, ever. Feeling a bit down? We’ve got a pharmaceutical for you. The voices will learn how you think and why you think the way you do. Everyone in the next 15 years will have one. As a form of entertainment, as a voice which appears in your head more frequently when things go wrong, who soothes and pats and offers advice, it can’t be beat.

I’ve got half a tonne of fuel-soaked fertiliser in the back of the Subaru and I’m going to drive it to Sydney and park it under MacArthur Bank. A cube of phosphorous will be exposed to air and burn its way into the core of the fertiliser. It will go off at 8.15pm tomorrow. Remember the port explosion in Beirut? It won’t be that big but it will blow up through the centre of the building and knock out the foundations. It will go down floor-by-floor. I’ll be on a ferry with my fake passport, heading from Athens to the island of Syro, where I have a small apartment in the Vaporia Quarter. See ya later.

Detectives and chocolate starfish-tonguing journalists always want to know the perpetrator’s motivation, aka the terrorist, the murderer, the devil. The real terror is loneliness but I digress. The media will say my mother put a peg on my penis as a child, I read Doctor Strange comics after church, I talked to dogs, rapped to the writings of Richard Brautigan, wanted to become a priest, masturbated over my cousin’s tam o’ shanter and pulled the wings off butterflies. Pick one or pick ‘em all. You might as well read the tarot. The media is a dinosaur trying to play canasta with a dodo.

I could rant about how banks are the fat and hairy visible hands which help keep capitalism alive. I could go on and on about Marx and surplus value, about how the working class is pacified with debt, wall-size TVs, sports utes, reality TV and trips to Bali. I could bore you shitless with Gramsci and Piketty and the role of the media in perpetuating class oppression or the fact American public debt is around $35 trillion and rising. If you’re worried whether they will make another series of MasterChef, you’re dead already. If you’re under 30 and do know what I’m talking about, then this story is for you. This is the age of Kali and the faecal matter is hitting the fan.

Here’s the thing which is made up of hundreds of other things. Artificial intelligence isn’t the truth. It’s an aggregate of algorithmic data. It has nothing to do with human consciousness. It’s being sold to us like a robot vacuum cleaner. Just sit back. We live in a world where trust is as rare as rocking horse shit. We distrust governments, organisations, the media, the church and much of the time, each other. We not only live in a post-truth environment, the bullshit is building up higher than bodies on the Somme. Here’s a pointy butt plug for you. If you don’t know any history – and I’m not just talking Napoleon – what chance do we have if we put all our trust in data aggregating machines? Talk about Year Zero. It ain’t Pol Pot (better look that up kids), it’s Gaggle, Macroprofit and CheatGPT. Some universities – and that includes Oxford – now allow students to use AI to write essays. Those bastions of the Enlightenment have rolled over like an old Labrador wanting a tummy scratch.

Here’s my motivation for doing some inner city demolition. Kierkegaard, Husserl, Nietzsche, Camus and Sartre, were big on freedom and liberty. The general consensus amongst these blokes is if God did exist, we would have to kill him or her or it. Praying to thin air ain’t gunna do nothing. Ditto writing letters to the editor. Here’s the good news for modern man and woman. While you’re not the complete master of your own destiny, in an absurd universe, you’re as good as it gets. You are not what you do for a job; you’re not a label or even a significant other. You’re an empire of one and anything that seeks to control you must be vaporised. You’re freer than you think and me and a few others are going to make sure you stay that way. Sous les Pavés, la Plage.

I’m getting all soft and nostalgic but in my 20s and 30s, there was nothing I liked more than being in a crowd of 90,000 people at the Melbourne Cricket Ground to watch a big footy game. I’d go with friends or by myself. It didn’t matter. The siren would go and the umpire would hold the ball up and the cheer squads and people would go batshit. Nothing could beat that, nothing came close and if I’m honest, what I felt for those seething half-drunk people was love. Individually, I wouldn’t piss on them if they are on fire, but on a Saturday afternoon with a pie in one hand and a beer in the other, I was with my tribe. But then after the GFC debt, fear and squalid social media wrapped itself around their necks. Something changed, like a black cloud passing over the sun and it stayed. People still go but it’s not the same. It’s like worshiping a shadow. AI will make the shadow permanent and people will think that’s reality.

People will die in the bank big bang. I apologise right now. Say goodbye to the executive of the bank and the senior researchers at Dedalus Corporation, who will be celebrating in the board room. They’ll be glad handing, back patting, clinking champagne glasses with smiles all around until 8.15pm when the earth will move. There will still be plenty of banks left to screw you over but why let them?

At certain points in time, it only takes a few people to act to change things. Most people bend over and let themselves be fucked up the arse by politicians, corporations and the media – there’s a queue of businessmen out the door with their pants down. I’m no hero. No trumpets will blow over my grave.

xxxxxxx

I like mornings the best. It’s 5.00am and kookaburras are telling jokes. The car is ready to go. A gallon of Si perfume won’t hide the fuel pong. So it goes. I’ve left a note for Dowdy who is fast asleep. A sick relative in the City of Churches and Homosexual Slayings needs a hand and I’ll be sometime. I’m taking the car. I’ve paid six month’s rent on the apartment. There’s cash by the toaster. Ta ta for now.

There’s something pleasing about starting an old car as it fires up first time. My fake passport and credit cards are in the glovebox. I’ve put most of my money in a German bank. One benefit of being in your 60s is you don’t look prepossessing. When I put my old stockman’s hat on, which I wore many years ago working as shotfirer near Bow River, I’m just another old bugger going for a drive. I’ll miss my books and paintings but I’m setting them free. As for Dowdy, she’ll find someone new. In six months, I’ll have booked into memory hotel. I’ll be conjured in a small anecdote: ‘I knew this guy once who liked The Beatles and he just disappeared.‘