I rarely felt at home in Brisbane, even though it - specifically the Albion Love Den - provided me with more of a stable home that I'd ever experienced in my lifetime. There was always something a little daggy about BrisVegas which never really allowed me to adopt it as an identified 'home city' (the term BrisVegas and it's ironic connotations give an insight into that quintessential 'daginess'). No matter, Brisbane was just as much a city of internal refugees early on in my time there - thanks to the catchment of the state's two major universities - and then later on as my maturing friends extended to interstate and international migrants in search of a better and cheaper lifestyle.
And so went the conversation on Friday night (before the cocktails and scotches took hold), as I enthused to Jinna about the life on offer here compared to there. I had felt no pangs of regret at moving, there were no second guesses about if it was the right choice, and there was certainly not a drop of any sort of homesickness. Until yesterday.
There's nothing like nature coming and parking its bus on your doorstep to make a community come together, and watching the shit storm in the past couple of days has me longing for the place. Sure, seeing the old haunts in danger is concerning, but seeing the spirit of the place has hit home what it was I left behind. Agreed, the place is as boring as bat-shit sometimes, and those fkn poisonous dog-days during summer are enough to make a man spend an afternoon setting up a kiddies wading pool in a baking concrete courtyard just for a few moments of sweet cool relief (only to have it get torn apart from a stray fkn fox terrier). Anyway, I guess what I'm missing is the "we're all in this together" mentality which is shining through beautifully right now. Oh, and the absolute ease in which life's rich tapestry is approached and absorbed, perfectly encapsulated by a mate's pic:
Yeah, I miss it.
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