Train station truths

It's been a long time since I've posted, having switched to Linux recently and spent months fiddling around with that instead, but I'm back, at least for a while. (Not that anyone is listening, I should be calling this my personal rant page because that's more or less what it's for.)

It's been an even longer time since I caught a train into the city, having grown up, moved to the country and learned to drive cars. But I caught one in the other day, to take my son to his pediatrician, and it bought back some amazing memories of being seventeen with a group of friends and a skateboard, of being nineteen with purple dreadlocks and twelve up Docs. Melbourne is like a great, dirty carnival. Flinders Street station is constructed of cream, wooden, bowed architecture, with old-fashioned font pronouncing the station names, empty red brick buildings, and red iron railings with curlicues at every entrance and exit. From Flinders Street you can just see the colourful trams chug along down Swanston Street, a road that looks grotesquely fun-fairish in appearance with its phantasmagoria of lights and shop sizes and colours, even the people are sort of fun-fairish, strange and eclectic creatures, as dirty appearing as the city: as if it had rubbed off on them despite their morning showers and favorite clothes.

I love it all. What a great city.

At Hawthorn someone has spray painted the words:

"Capitalism is Cannibalism."

I couldn't help thinking about it over and over again as I stared out the train window, about how true it was: that the nature of capitalism makes us eat each other to survive. It was an ugly piece of writing, with ugly words in it, but it was profoundly true.