2019: Buddha Of Suburbia
"Buddha Of Suburbia" (The Buddha Of Suburbia)

Kang agreed without argument; indeed, it seemed to Pao that she was actually enjoying these insanely dry and barbarous regions, or at least enjoying her complaining about them. The dustier the better, her face seemed to say, no matter what words she spoke.
- Kim Stanley Robinson's The Years of Rice and Salt (Book Six: Widow Kang: Three. Waves Slap Together)

We are only as honest as the world allows us to be. I guess I'm an optimist about people. I'm sure compulsive liars exist, but most people will tell it like it is, as a first inclination. Maintenance of deception is an expense, one that the world justifies by making the truth more expensive.

I live in a room where I can hear trains on a nearby railway line (as Bowie once did). They're loud enough to be a presence, but not an annoyance. The room is centrally-located in this house, and I hear conversations in which lies aren't hard to find - I heard one just yesterday, actually. Whenever I hear one, though, I usually understand the facade it was intended to support, and usually see that it's pretty harmless. It's an indication of a place with people who face pressures imposed upon them by a world in which honesty is often not the best policy.

2. Blue, Blue, Morning Blue

    Blue, blue, electric blue
    That's the colour of my room
    Where I will live
    Blue Blue
    - "Sound And Vision" (Low)

We are only as calm as the world allows us to be. I think it's a nice room in a nice house, but your mileage may vary.

LEONARD: So how many rooms am I checked into in this shithole?

The hex code for the colour of its walls is #7D8A9A. Of all the named colours, the closest I could find to that is Morning Blue (#8da399). As a room it's nothing special, but here is a calmer existence than any I've had before. One that reminds me of O'Leary's characterisation of the "Heroes" cover: 'god in a universe of one'. Except that I'm not quite on my own here - I share this room with an intelligent, funny, sweet girl -

- Selene, an Indian ringneck. Cutest thing ever.

One of the previous tenants in this room attached glow-in-the-dark stars to the ceiling. It makes me wonder who they were and what they were like. This house is, like, a hundred years old, they could have been from way back, with every occupant of this room since looking up at their constellation, wondering who they were. I like their style.

We are only as sane as the world allows us to be. Then there are the housemates. There's a certain sort upstairs, and a very different sort downstairs. I'll start with upstairs.

Some of the top results in a search for "bogan" mention or show Victoria Bitter.

. . . And if VB indicates a bogan, we might have a few.

These people can get into fights one day, but on the next day be mates as if nothing had happened. It's easy to dismiss them as drunks, but at least some of them face challenges that explain their behaviour. You won't always hear it directly from them, but there might be a terminal illness, long-term unemployment or the death of someone close.

I was telling one of the guys upstairs about how I'd be getting rid of my wisdom teeth, and asked whether he still had his. He said he didn't have any teeth. Ask him what the time is and he'll stick his head outside to look at a nearby clock tower because he doesn't have a watch or any other kind of timepiece. Ask him about his family and he'll say they could all be dead for all he knows - he doesn't have a phone so he can't contact anyone.

And take the guy who needs to go to hospital every few months because he has seizures. He has them because he doesn't eat - he prefers to drink (see above). He's telling me, 'you know what happens when you don't eat? You go to hospital', as if it's advice I need to hear. And then 'you should come upstairs more often and talk to us - you might learn something.' Which I might, if I didn't have a problem with cigarette smoke.

While there are some who have a problem with these guys, I don't mind them at all. They're definitely bogans, but still better people than some you'll find in well-heeled areas. And mad, to me, but I can't hold that against anyone. Actually, I'd say this is the first minimally-acceptable existence I've ever lived. Maybe I could just stay here, with all the madmen.

4. Criminal World

    But no one knows about your low-life
    I know a way to find a situation
    And hold a candle to your high-life disguise
    . . .
    The only thing that she enjoys
    Is a criminal world
    Where the girls are like baby-faced boys.
    - "Criminal World" (Let's Dance)

We are only as innocent as the world allows us to be. When you're in places like these, elements of the criminal world aren't far away. It will usually leave you alone unless you go looking for it, but there are incidents that bring it out into the open. At one of the places I used to stay at, the first indication I had of drugs in the house was when a housemate overdosed and we had to do CPR on him. If the police come around wanting to search the house for a fugitive, you know the criminal world isn't far away. If you then try to find out what it was all about and people aren't very forthcoming, it's probably better that you not know.

One of the most striking observations is how normal some of the people who are connected to this other world can seem. We had a Moldovan lady (but we called her the Russian lady, and later, "the mysterious lady" - after this movie) who took one of the rooms, she was very hard to reach for a few days. When we finally caught up with her, the excuse was that she'd been in hospital and that her phone had been stolen. I spoke with her, and she seemed nice. But I did hear her talking on her phone about how she would get to her boyfriend's place. She said she didn't have money to pay for the ferry, but if she could go by bus, that was okay because she could "jump" it.

There's a whole other world in which that sort of thing is normal. She disappeared not long after that. We found that she'd raided stores of equipment around the house for anything she might find useful, evidence that she intended to steal someone's identity and that most of what she told us were lies. She ditched her phone and the police couldn't find her. A guy came looking for her, asking 'where's Russia?!' I knew he was after the lady (and not a geography lesson), but he was going to have to do better than that. 'You know, the blonde chick!' Anyway, telling the landlord about this gave him an idea:

We are only as old as the world allows us to be. The people downstairs are very different. Our average age is about two decades younger than upstairs, and we're mostly a mix of students and early-career professionals. It's a diverse mix; in the time I've been here we've had both locals and people from the Philippines, China, Bangladesh, Sri Lanka, Moldova, Sweden, Tanzania, Brazil, Venezuela, Argentina and Peru. We've had diversity in other ways too; the landlord says 'I'm not against anyone'.

We've had nurses, disability support workers, a journalist, a HR software trainer, a guy who cleaned skyscrapers by abseiling off them, hospitality people and probably some other occupations I'm missing. With the changes of personnel, there was a time when I was surrounded by Amazon women (all taller than me), a time when I was the only white guy (the only white, and the only guy), and inversions of these situations too. It's only a generalisation that people come here because they can't afford somewhere nicer - we've actually had people with plenty of money come through here who see no problem with the place, and I don't have to stay here anymore either. People have different priorities, and living somewhere nice isn't at the top, or even close to the top, of everyone's list.

People come and go so it changes, but I'm often one of the older ones, not that I look it. My age tends to be underestimated by about ten years, often more, which at face value makes my appearance misleading, but in a way, it's very honest, because my life isn't that different to a student's. It's possible that only now am I the person I should have been 10 years ago. And when I actually was the age I now look, I think I looked like a boy, which was probably also fair. That boy went to a party on this very street back when he was in uni - maybe I am just going round in circles.

While the people upstairs tend to stay rusted to the place, the downstairs people usually don't stay for more than a year. They tend to be busy, and are usually studying, working while looking for better opportunities or trying to figure out whether this country is for them (and if it is, finding a way to stay in it). So many of them are trying to move on to bigger and better things, and the rest leave anyway because they get bored and move on.

We are only as connected as the world allows us to be. I've had a few landlords, and even been one - as far as I can tell, landlords who are loaded, and possibly of the idle rich, are rare. In this place, for example, the landlord owns the place, but is paying a mortgage on it - it's a business in which he's made an investment, and in which the profit margin is thin. This means that some expenses get spared. I'm told that this place had a backyard before rooms were added out the back. When the rooms were added, they were put on the same circuit as some of the existing rooms, leading to 6 rooms - almost half the house - on the same circuit. Usually this is fine, but during winter, when people turn their heaters on, the circuit overloads and rooms on the circuit lose power. Almost as comedic as it is inconvenient, but not such a problem for me since I got a UPS for my room.

BRUCE WAYNE: I think my power's been shut off.

One day the whole house lost power - just us, the rest of the street was fine. One of us said she couldn't sleep that night because it was too cold, fridges stop working, phone batteries die without powerbanks and so forth. That time it wasn't a problem with private equipment, and it was sorted out the next day. There might have been a time in the distant past when it was acceptable to let rooms with unreliable power (what I'm talking about isn't that bad), and more recently, we've passed the time when it was acceptable to let rooms without reliable wifi.

With the young dudes, I'm "the professor, who has a parrot" (in the last place I stayed, I was "the bird man"). And the guy who fixes the internet. Before I moved in, this place didn't have internet, except for one guy in the room with the phone socket who wasn't sharing it with anyone. He said that before he moved in, there was absolutely nothing - to set his internet up, part of the street outside had to be dug up. So here was one of the last bastions of internetlessness.

Anyway, when I arrived, I had to bring the hardware (ethernet cable and wifi extender) to broadcast wifi to my room. This also connected other rooms in my part of the house, so the landlord started to market rooms with the promise of internet. The promise was fair enough because it was working, but we hadn't realised that the signal was weak at the back of the house, and not enough for anything serious. The short of it is that I had to fix it, and have ended up as the de facto internet Mr Fixit whenever things go wrong, which they do on an extended (twice) network. Not that I have any particular expertise on this, but one learns what to do after solving the same problems a few times.

7. I'm in the mood for your love

    Deep in your room - you never leave your room
    Something deep inside of me - yearning deep inside of me
    Talking through the gloom . . .
    I'm in the mood for your love
    - "What In The World" (Low)

We are only as attractive as the world allows us to be. It's inevitable that in a place like this, you'll think about getting it on with the cute guy/girl in room X. It's awfully convenient (or at least, it may seem that way at first), and longer term, since you're both compatible with the house, you'll surely be compatible with each other. What could possibly go wrong? Spend enough time in places like this, and it'll happen if you want it to. Maybe you think you know where this is going, but other people's relationships make far better writing material.

This really isn't a place to show off to a partner (unless they live under a bridge), but I guess if you were to choose one room within it for a passionate rendezvous, you'd choose a certain room out the back - right at the back, the most out-of-the-way room we have. One of the girls to take this room told me a few times how good she thought I looked. I don't see how I could have turned her down - for one thing, she reminded me of someone I had a thing for many years ago. I know she wasn't just teasing me, but it's also clear that she was only really interested in men of her own culture. And there didn't seem to be any shortage of those, to put it euphemistically. She'd bring a different guy around every week, always introducing them as "my friend". Every night, we all got to hear just how friendly they were.

Ordinarily, what happens between consenting adults is no-one else's business, but she was really pushing it. The funniest of these episodes (to me) was when I was trying to help her connect to our wifi network (in my Mr Fixit capacity, as described above). We were texting about her problem, until she went silent on the text. Then I heard her loud and clear from her room, with one of her boys. And I'm not even close to her room, I'm three doors away - I don't think she ever realised how much noise she was making. The guy in the room next to hers was the sort who didn't like to complain, but after she moved out, he said that he had been on the verge of complaining, because night after night, he couldn't sleep.

There could be a whole post about her, but this isn't it. Another of the girls to take that room used it in a similar way. One night as I was walking past, I heard what sounded like a horror movie turned up loud - screams, thuds, desperate moans. So I thought she was watching a horror movie. I heard it on the following night as well. And again on a third.

On that third night it was really disturbing, I could hear it from my room and it finally dawned on me that this was no horror movie. It was her, thrashing around in there because one of her boys had dumped her. She'd completely lost it. The climax was when she came outside, screamed and smashed her window with her bare hands. This left broken glass and blood spatter across the path outside her room.

After an intervention, she was apparently good to go again. About a month later I chatted with a guy staying as her guest. We spoke, he seemed normal, they seemed happy. But something went wrong in paradise that night, and in the morning, the girl woke the house up about a fire at her room. One of us put the fire out with a fire extinguisher, and for the rest of the morning the house was a crime scene - firefighters, police and all.

Her ex had tried to kill her by burning her alive. The room was a charred wreck but she escaped with some burns. Her phone also survived, and on it were death threats from her ex. What a criminal mastermind. He's in jail now for arson, and attempted murder. But it seriously wouldn't have surprised me if it had turned out that the girl had actually set fire to her own room. After what I had seen and heard of her before, that wouldn't have surprised me. They were both crazy.

We are only as good as the world allows us to be. The world most of us are born into doesn't give us the time and space we need to become our best selves, even effectively limiting many of the qualities regarded as innate. To get better, we need both experience and time to reflect on experience. Many of us need to earn that time.

The first few times I heard "Buddha Of Suburbia" (not listening carefully), I heard 'Same, Same, Same' instead of 'Zane, Zane, Zane'. And since I heard The Buddha Of Suburbia before The Man Who Sold The World (doing everything in the wrong order, as usual), I wasn't aware of the repeated lyric. So I thought this was a song about dissatisfaction with slow progress, and with things staying the same 'Day after day'. Which is part of it.

I don't know whether it was too obvious to mention in the reviews I read, but the repeated lyric reinforces a deliberate inversion of "All The Madmen". "Buddha" is lovely, while "Madmen" is unsettling. The narrator of "Madmen" accepts that he is mad ('I'm not quite right at all'), and eventually embraces it ('Ouvre le chien'). The narrator of "Buddha" adopts the opposite point of view, namely that his world is mad ('Sometimes I fear that the whole world is queer'). The round peg blames the squareness of the hole it's being pushed into. But though he may disagree about where the insanity lies, he ultimately embraces it too ('Ouvre le chien'), because he won't get very far otherwise.

If the world starts you off in a chaotic environment, you need to face those pressures and climb out of that hole. This can take decades, and you'll probably think you've done it a few times, before you really have. Then you can see the big picture, and shape your world to suit you. When you have the time, use it to find your best self. Then decide what to do with your best self. Because the point at which you have that time will also be the point at which you have a choice: having secured what you need, you're free to pursue what you want. You don't get to choose what you need, but what you want is different.

The cliche: it's not much, but it's home. In "Buddha", the suburbs aren't enough, so the narrator goes to the city. When you trade tranquility for more, decide what you can hold on to from that earlier existence, because those things might give you character. Wanting more definitely makes us unhappy, but some things are worth it. Figure out for yourself what those things are, and how much of the world's insanity you'll endure for them. Once more unto the breach. Ouvre le chien.

Illustrations: The stars I sleep under (I couldn't get a decent shot of this, because the stars are too faint to show up properly, even with a five-minute exposure - so this is actually edited from the daytime pic to look like what I see); stills from Memento; my albino Indian ringneck parrot, Selene, after eating an almond; daytime shot of the glow-in-the-dark stars on my ceiling and how they look at night; title image from an article about bogans; a design that shows up in a few places, like here; our garbage; this really was stuck to our front door for a few weeks and I hope our landlord got calls from men looking for Russian women; still from the "Buddha Of Suburbia" music video; still from The Dark Knight Rises; xkcd: "Loud Sex"; xkcd: "Journal 5".