In the pose of a David

On the way to the shops this evening, not wanting the man in the upstairs room without curtains to notice that I'd seen him from across the road, standing in the pose of a David (one hip up, one down) -- which these days connotes less an expensive threat to a neighbouring city state than an artist contemplating a canvas on an easel that he might have to change or destroy -- I only turned to look properly a couple of steps on, and so saw the flat screen television he was fixed in studying, and behind, in the Vermeer yellow light further back in the room, a small installation of sideboard, mugs, some cords and the oily black shine of some rock band poster on the wall.

The suited man's smile

Just now I described how, as I approached Yaama Dhiyaan and could see the television vans parked on the raised part under the Carriageworks sign, I reasoned that there must be an event going on and, since it was less than two weeks before the election, an Aboriginal political event, or at least a political event that attempted to connect itself with things Aboriginal, and when a suited man smiled at me as he passed me on the path, I decided that this man had smiled because, either as a politician or as a journalist, he had assumed that he would be recognisable even to someone who never watched television – and how, while reflecting on these kinds of thoughts I went to cross the road and, happening to look back in the direction he had gone, I saw that the suited man was talking to someone who would have been behind me on the path at the moment he smiled, and I could see that there was really no way of telling whether the suited man’s smile had had anything to do with me at all.