Today I was sitting in the Enmore laundromat, reading The Winter of Our Discontent and waiting for the dryer and I saw some girls walk by outside. These things I can’t help but notice, you know. Taking a closer look through the window I realised that one of them was, in fact, a girl called Anita who I worked with three years ago at the TAFE Admissions office in Perth and hadn’t seen since. Think about it. Years later and in a completely different city, she just happens to walk by the laundromat window while I’m looking up from my book late on a Sunday afternoon. The odds of that, I figure, would be a million billion to one.

I went outside, and she and her friend were walking off down the street. I thought maybe I should run after them and say hi, but you wouldn’t bother because it would be pretty strange and not much to say after running a whole block.

Now at this point you might expect me to wax lyrical about how life is full of the strangest coincidences. About syncronicity, and patterns that crop up from time to time with no seeming explanation. About the wellspring of wonder that is the collective unconscious. About the intricate wholeness and neverending mystery of the world.

Fuck that.

Strange cool stuff almost never happens to me. Even the aforementioned coincidence was an incredibly boring episode in a dull and mechanical day - a day brightened only by a bit of John Steinbeck and trudging a few steps closer to the end of my thesis. What I’m saying is that although I try to believe that life is not cold and bare, that existence is more than a meaningless succession of empty words and gestures, that love is more than a cold and broken Hallelujah (so to speak), I’m having a pretty hard time with it seeing as how nothing ever fucking happens. Call me a cynic. Say if you’re bored then you’re boring. How true. But just once I would like a sign that life doesn’t always turn out exactly the way you think it will.

If it has to be something bad, like an aeroplane engine falling through the roof of the apartment next to mine, then I can handle it.