my weary bones head out at 9am ready to meet my cousin at town hall. he's in town for five days so as i wait outside basking in the glorious sydney winter sun, watching the tourists in uniform, watching the vast cosmic purpose obscured by moments of consumerism. invisible structures imprison and contain us, keep us eating the jungles and oceans, we are all in pain, life is suffering, we all hurt in the unbearable weight of unknowing. except me. everything i know aligns this evening, my day has a trajectory, a nexus point where like the best drug, the best hit of bliss, the most powerful orgasm, all points converge at the enmore theatre.
in the meantime i see a man waddling along in a puffer jacket, we shake hands, hug etc, it's been a long time. he's en route from florida to tokyo, and in the mood for buying puffer jackets. maybe it's a weird phase. we go to a few stores, we talk to a few puffer people. i watch them, wondering what the allure is, to me they look ridiculous. but my cousin loves them and stocks up. he says he owns seven already, some very expensive ones. 

me i don't like them at all. they are the weirdest form of clothing i have ever heard off and those colours!
we eat average food, average service, drink sub standard coffee, now that's unusual for sydney i think. maybe we are just unlucky. we catch up on family stuff, it's good to see him but i am jaded and tired. i just want to sleep but can't, so i drink coffee and attempt to motivate myself towards the vortex of love a few hours away. 
i split from my cousin as i have to get moving. alone i wander nude town eating my blue stripes whole cacao dark chocolate bar (coffee flavour), i get a energy drink, buy a turkish coffee, eat an ice cream, pop into a buddhist shop and end up buying a rare book,  i also pick up from a second hand seller an equally rare tesla book, which i'm very happy about. 

i wander into an art gallery as i am magnetically attracted by the two paintings on display. just a long white paper with a charcoal marking, that from a distance looks like  cardio graphic graffiti, but upon closer inspection looks like some weird alien language. i love it, not just for it's simplicity but for the energy it contains. the lady running the gallery and i chat about experimental art, she takes my number for her next opening. i dunno, old captain mission at the art gallery openings, all that pretension under one roof, these days there are far to many artists and not enough art. although free drinks and canapes. what is a canape anyway?

then i meet my church friend agent wilde. 
agent wilde is being challenged with some heavy shit right now, the type that could break anyone, but she is graceful, good humored and brave. 

i know she is in pain, a lot of crippling pain. to have even made it out tonight is a massive effort. but she was motivated for the same reason i am.

we get to a restaurant and have a lovely meal, then we enter the enmore where various church friends meet and greet us, mostly her, i like to fade into the shadows in awkward social situations unless we are talking about books, but everyone is super friendly and cool, and when i see the merch desk i turn all hyper-sonic and mainline it straight for the beautiful baseball cap on display. yep, that will do me perfectly.

it's so weird as i wear a lot of different hats, literal ones baby. i have a great collection but i have not got a baseball one and they are my fave type of hat / cap. 

all last week everyone around me was buying hats, and i kept saying how i want a baseball one but it would have to be kinda perfect, then lo and behold. 

we sit in the second row and then it begins. 

for the first time i am sitting in front of ian and can watch his playing, discerning his style, his playing technique and contribution to the collective. i'm amazed at how he uses his machine, it's very sensual and elegant, he's got a very english style that came from the post punk days but he owns it, he's made it his own. interweaving with ash on the other guitar they do blend into one another in that classic church groove, it's marvelous to focus on what ian does. i kinda like his energy, it's very surfer like, in fact all through the show i ride the sound waves like i would ride water ones, they are beautiful. 

this incarnation of the church is perfect, two drummers / percussionists also interchangeable. there's jeffery cain in the shadows multi tasking with extreme commitment, to me the beating heart to steve's brain.  i always felt steve had an ideal in his head that he never quite felt satisfied with, it's nothing tangible, it's just my intuition speaking. i always felt he may not really quite ever be satisfied or at least rarely. i mean the nature of the beast is collaboration, very few musicians work in isolation. and perhaps in the past steve has just felt he fell short of what he held in his vision.it's the curse of all creatives, to execute the vision exactly. 

if indeed that is the case, he achieved it tonight. 

this was a church that transcended all expectations, took a cold sydney seated crowd and ignited them  to the point of a standing ovation. the new songs from the hypnogouge were perfect live, the way the band delivered them was with a professionalism and style that borders on elegance and mother fucker prog rock and roll.  steve talks us through the tracks. the church have made prog rock very cool with this album but also with the way the old songs sound, like new ones. 

at the interval a sexy looking woman in front turns towards me and whispers about hearing me muttering 'wow' and 'amazing' at various parts of the show. it's true i was blown away by the musician ship, the tight virtuosity and creative aural architecture, and sometimes i just said unconsciously, 'wow!'

anyway she said, it was like hearing her own thoughts at exactly the precise time she thought them i said them.

we chatted a bit and she confessed how she was actually crying in parts of the show. i said i was to, because in the face of something so beautiful what else can you do.later she went to buy a tee shirt and showed it off to me, beautiful.

the new songs were my fave but the old ones sounded new so i don't know what to make of that except it was the best live concert i have ever seen. it really was.

i wanted to let each member know that, afterwards we were invited backstage but i always feel like an intruder, everyone else is uber cool, in croiwd types whereas i am just a triangle peg in a round hole. i did manage to thank ash naylor, ian haug, tim powles, steve and the second drummer as well who was lovely. but i never got to connect with jeffery cain whom i really love is part of the church. anyways next time. 

i was pretty stoned and steve gave me some very good edibles which managed to get me in all sorts of trouble on the way home.

what a night!

i'm still on a huge high. 

i wake up in roseville city limits, do a hard days night and then return to central coast where sunday sees me whale watching, drinking beers while listening to bill withers in the sun at a huge sunday chill out sesh, it's spectacular sunday, as i trek up the hill frontwards, to the old lookout where the ocean spawls out in perfect symmetry, blue water, blue skies, everyone is playing, everyone. i don't know, for a winters day it certainly is fine. a great day for the inevitable i think to myself, a truly perfect day.