My Saturday mornings are usually quite lazy, and unless I've actually made plans, I'm lucky to have gotten out of bed, showered and dressed before noon. After all, there's nothing that can be done in the morning that can't be done after lunchtime. No alarms are set on a Saturday morning - I'll wake up when my body clock decides it's appropriate.
This morning, however, I had the pleasure of carrying a washing machine up four flights of stairs at 7:30am, which was not exactly how I'd envisioned I'd shake off my hangover. Once that was all taken care of, it was far too nice a morning to go back to bed* so with a sufficient amount of coffee flowing through my veins I took the very short walk from home down to the Fitzroy gardens.
Saturday morning at about 8:30 is probably the best time to be there as it's practically empty and you've more or less got the whole place to yourself. The joggers/runners/fitness junkies are long gone - they would have been here not long after dawn. And it's still far too early in the day for the general public to be taking a walk through the park just yet. I find a bench somewhere in the middle of the gardens and sit and read my book for the better part of the morning, where my only company comes in the form of middle-aged women taking their dogs for a walk, and the birds chirping in the trees above me. Sometimes the occasional jogger who overslept, and then an Eastern European couple who, I deduced from their broken English, were staying at the Hilton hotel nearby. Aside from that, I was completely alone and it was bliss.
I honestly don't think I'd mind being stranded on a desert island, at least for a small period of time. My pasty Melbourne body would adjust to the tropics pretty quickly, and I'm sure I could learn to hunt and forage for food before too long - I have, after all, dined in cheap restaurants in Chinatown on many a Friday night so I know a thing or two about fighting for my food. I'd grow my beard and sit in peace and read a whole bunch of books and write and just enjoy my own company.
In between the daily commute back and forth, the stopover at your local caffor that imperative caffeine hit, the elevator at work, the office with its meetings and customer emails and phone calls and lunch breaks with colleagues or friends or family, the gym** after work, the trip to the supermarket to get groceries for dinner and so on forever and ever, it seems impossible to just get a minute to yourself, and yet it's surprising the amount of people I know who simply can't stand to be alone for longer than 5 minutes. I love spending time with my family and my friends and my girlfriend but I also love solitude, and sometimes the idea of a desert island doesn't seem all that bad (as long as there's Wi-Fi, of course).
With no overseas trip planned in the immediate future, the likelihood of me finding myself on a plane that's going down and subsequently stranded in such a place is very unlikely, and spending the morning alone in the park was probably as close as I'll get for now. But alas, it was short lived - I packed up and left once a pair of lovesick teenagers set down a picnic rug only metres away from me. The whole goddamn park and they chose this spot.
JV
*As much as I hate this phrase, I am really not a morning person except for roughly one week a year - the first week of spring. After which I promptly get over the new found sunlight and warmth and go back to hating anything pre-10am.
**Obviously I've never, ever done this but apparently some people do? Weird.
CURRENTLY LISTENING: Right Thoughts, Right Words, Right Action - Franz Ferdinand
Shields - Grizzly Bear
You're A Woman, I'm A Machine - Death From Above 1979
The Satanic Satanist - Portugal. The Man
Commit This To Memory - Motion City Soundtrack
Nag Champa / The Oval - The Townhouses
CURRENTLY WATCHING: I'm a few episodes into Hannibal, the new TV series which is a re-imagining of the novels and films. At first I was very hesitant - I'm yet to see a TV series do justice to what used to be a movie. However, once I found out Mads Mikkelsen was playing a younger Hannibal Lecter I had to check it out, and I was not disappointed. Really dark stuff. The other lead character is FBI profiler Will Graham, and his character is very neurotic and paranoid which I always find interesting.
Full Post
No comments:
Post a Comment