I saw this page in today's catalogue.

I was like, c'mon, you can't be a proud supporter of two teams. That's some bullshit!

It's either one team, or three teams. Two is wrong. Four is right out!

I saw you at the football.
Just the other day.
You were leaving the bar, head and shoulders above the crowd.

You began to turn toward me.
I flinched, I looked away.

It's not that I dislike you.
Only... I had nothing to say.
No updates that I would share
since ten months ago, last game.
That previous time we caught up
and talked about Robbie Gray.

You walked in my direction, four beers in one tray.
You stopped a metre from me. You said, "Hey."
I smiled. "How you going man?"
Turned out we were both okay.

Then the siren blasted.
We said goodbye, went to watch them play.
Never to see each other, or think of one another.
Until it all happens again.

I guess that being tall
makes it harder to avoid small talk.

There's only so many times you can leave the office at lunch carrying a notepad, sunglasses and headphones before people start asking questions. Questions like, what is that guy doing on his lunch hour with headphones and a notepad?

No one has actually asked me the question, yet. Which is good, because I don't want to answer it. However, if they ever do, I have already prepared my smokescreen. Here it is:

I'm sitting in nature, and writing poetry.

This seems genuinely believable, and as long as I deliver it with a serious face I can't think why anyone would ask me any follow up questions. Poetry is innately private, personal. No one would ever ask to read it in its raw form. No colleague would, guaranteed. So I'm quite confident that no one will ever know what I'm really doing out there.

Just in case, when I come back from lunch I try to walk and behave like I've been outside writing poems. I act poetically.

And a funny thing happened yesterday. I pretended to be a poet so intently that I accidentally wrote a poem. I didn't plan it. It just came into my head while I was sitting on the train thinking semi-hard about it and holding a pen and paper.

I guess you could call that self fulfilling poetry.

I think I understand why religion brings some people peace when they're facing the prospect of death.

I think I'm more comforted knowing that I was just an unlikely clump of cells on a tiny hunk of rock that spun around in an infinite universe for a little while. Dying feels less personal that way.

It was a glorious Autumn weekend in Adelaide. Normally ANZAC day is the point in the calendar that the skies turn grey and the months of drizzle start. Due to global warming this was the hottest ANZAC Day on record since 2011, when I was in Brisbane. I started recording in 2006.

This weekend the sky almost always looked like this:

Except for at sunrise and sunset... and at nighttime. This wasn't even a non-Hills thing as I was in Blackwood on the same day as the above photo and it was just as nice (although the trees on the plains are much less Autumny than they are up there.) It was ten degrees warmer here this morning than it was in Gallipoli. It felt wrong. The number of people crowding at the beach this evening was like a summer night. I'm not complaining.

I don't talk about other people a lot in my Journal these days. Cowan did get a lot of mentions, mainly in the archives, and for anyone who is following along for his story I can announce that on Saturday he was married on a sunny afternoon under some Autumny trees. I wasn't allowed to take any photos during the ceremony. It was really nice though.

I was thinking about other past ANZAC days of the past this morning, while marathoning NBA playoff games, and recalling how the time between waking up and the AFL starting used to seem so endless. Now I find myself silently rooting for the Cavs just to reduce the number of ongoing series' and reclaim some of my free time back!

Despite all the sun and basketball, some ancient ANZAC Day traditions continued as normal and Vanessa made me this biscuit that I got to eat for morning tea and, as it turned out, lunch and afternoon tea as well. I probably shouldn't have had a smaller ANZAC biscuit as an appetizer.

The sun has set now on a relaxing long weekend. At the going down of the sun, I remember all the ANZACs that have perished.