Stories along these lines make me to recall the nights and weekends working for state and federal electoral office and the Australian zbureau of Statistics … lucky I did not have to sell anything to the stars living at Darling Point, Double Bay, Point Piper, Rose Bay, Bellevue Hill, Vaucluse or Watson Bay …
The spare change help to keep the mortgage repayments at a time when both Sasha and Gabbie were in kindergarten, at Paddington and later Bellevue Hill, both places with astronomical fees … at a time when interest hit over 16% and during the recession we had to have. The salary at the NSW Parliamentary Library was hardly covering the mortgage and any extra money helped to keep the bills at bay …
Maps to the Stars: An Ephemeral History
For exactly one Saturday, in the summer of 1996, I stood on the corner of Sunset Blvd. and Ogden Dr. hawking maps to the movie stars’ homes. Earlier in the week, six of us, all immigrants from the former USSR, had been rounded up for the job by a Fagin-like fellow — stringy, squinty, coils of white hair sticking out like fried electrical cords from the back of his baseball cap. I don’t remember whether I had my mother sign a minor’s work permit or simply forged her signature, but I do remember that I sold exactly one map. Unforgettable too was the look of disgust on our Fagin’s face as he peeled a fiver off his soggy roll of bills at 5 pm: my salary. The pay was piddling, the task demeaning. There was little shade on the corner, and I was too easily wounded by the reactions of some of my potential customers, their rude sneers and pitying frowns. To this day I accept every flyer handed to me on the street with a smile, recalling my own unhappy turn as a peddler
I've been taking an unusual amount of solace from the absurdists these days. I reckon I quote Franz Kafka and his bleak universe more often than I did Godwin's Law back in 2020.
And I'm not the only one.
In the latest series of The Good Fight – the savage and surreal US political drama whose creators say that everything bad about the world today is good for their writers' room – justice is meted out in the backroom of a photocopy shop by a judge who scores the winning legal arguments with a chalkboard and a boxing-ring bell.
'I can't go on. I'll go on': The absurd line that guides a path towards hope
But there’s a price to pay for everything, and the price to not do anything would have been far more costly than a legal case.”
WELL, YOUR VISION GETS WORSE BUT YOU CAN SEE THROUGH PEOPLE BETTER: Key mental abilities can actually improve during aging.