Heart

Core, 'ngrato.  There's this tight band around my pericardium, a couple of kilos weight squashing my right ventricle.  It's interesting how little I care.  My father had an MI at 53 and genetics are a bitch. Whatever.

I'll soon be swearing the 'straya oath with my mayor, and will take the opportunity to swear at her too re: the planned severe opportunistic tax to be imposed on local health workers. 

It will be one week short of thirty nine and a half years since I stepped out of a DC9 into the tarmac oven of Brisbane airport.  I remember the fly spray in the face that was the custom of the day, the reinforced cardboard suitcase containing my preteen life, and the long drive along a segmented concrete highway to a new world.

Our adopted kiwi dog lasted six months before his unblemished several dozen score of brown snake executions was complicated by an envenomation.  I had blood drawn by a lion cub as he ripped the seat of my jeans the same week as snake strike found my patella spraying poison only externally. Education meant something in those days as flash floods turned to drought, forever blue skies over black dusty soil.

At heart I'm probably always kiwi, always Qld as state of origin, and always Vic as source of best childhood memory. NSW is just where I earn a crust, pay my tax, buried my father, and domicile with my family. Home is where the heart should be.

Pavlova.  That's means 'straya.