Rogue’s Yarn with ’Arry Driftwood - Long Days Journey into Night
  Rushcutters Bay, Sydney. The dock at the CYCA and busy. Busy, busy, busy! At the end dock an ocean greyhound; mast and rigging towering, the hull eye-catching in dramatic colour. The logo of a household-name Corp emblazoned. Yacht apes clambering. Pomp and circumstance, but since then, the Corp now a commercial corpse.
  Such is life. The dogs bark and the cara van moves on. A frail slowly sauntered along the dock to farewell her macho skipper. Old men caught their breath as their carnal memories caught the wind. It was Roxanne de Medici Isabella-Smith. “A woman of interest.”
  Frail? How silly of the Septics to refer to wimmin as Frails. How silly! Weak and delicate the Oxford says. Hallo? Is this the real world of macho plonkers? I turn my head to hide my amusement.
  Tall. Slim. The fluid grace of one of the great cats. A dress of some rare and expensive scarlet weave that revealed as much as it concealed by the mysterious skill of the haute couture. Not in a hurry. Why can not wimmin be suave?
  Charming, confident, elegant! Roxanne is simply suave and that is what inspires me about modern women … they are so confident in their power and themselves and their destinies. So beautiful … even the ugly ones and why can we not have a goddess for a god instead of some sad old bearded man in a bloody caftan? Well, think about it!
  A simple wide-brimmed hat topped Roxanne’s Anatolian tresses; white hat except for a scarlet ribbon to match her dress and shoes. Her raven black hair flowed like shiny black gold and framed a face of humour and experience and, although vibrantly young, now showing tiny laughter rays at the eyes, for was not LIFE an enjoyable farce? She continued onwards along the dock towards the Sydney/ Hobart hopefuls.
  Roxanne was blessed with one of those articulated derrieres which mesmerised the watchers. The hips subtly swaying and the buttocks writhing in contrapuntal rhythm. Some crass bugger once likened such to a pair of ferrets trying to exit a flour bag. Her décolleté not so crass as those common floozies with the busty substances forced up by wire engineering until bursting into grotesque view and inviting a red sun-spotted craw at 40?
  Cover up you hussies!
  At the end Roxanne stood elegant and relaxed as the boys, for they ARE only grown-up boys, scuttled like professional mice until everything that could be done was done and dock lines were cast off.
  The beautiful watcher languidly raised a hand in goodbye to her muscled lover as the vessel parted from the CYCA dock. There, it floated, a cliché in plastic racing modernity of multi-spreader towering rig, fin keel and lead bulb, water-ballasted, twin rudders and carbon fibre. So, as the brummy keel dropped off and the ocean greyhound turned turtle it happened with a modicum of grace. For which we may be thankful.
  Beautiful Roxanne raised a white gloved hand to hide a smile as she casually turned her back and inserted a black Russian in her 30cm jade cigarette holder and pirouetted away from the rush of hopeful males eager to light her ciggie.
  Back along the CYCA dock, bathed in male longing she went, where her locum lover awaited her in her red Aston Martin DB9. Roxanne … a cliché of Sydney Society? And an end to ’Arry’s boyish fantasy … or is it … ?
  “I was on The Squarehead, square-rigger, bound for Buenos Aires. Full moon in the Trades. The old hooker driving fourteen knots. I lay along the bowsprit, facing astern, the water foaming into spume under me, the masts with every sail white in the moonlight, towering high above me. “I became drunk with the beauty and singing rhythm of it, and for a moment I lost myself, actually lost my life. I was set free! I dissolved in the sea, became white sails and flying spray, became beauty and rhythm, became moonlight and the ship and the high dim-starred sky! I belonged, without past or future, within peace and unity and a wild joy, within something greater than my own life, or the life of Man, to life itself! To God, if you want to put it that way.
  “And several other times in my life, when I was swimming far out, or lying alone on a beach, I have had the same experience, became the sun, the hot sand, green seaweed anchored to a rock, swaying in the tide. Like a saint’s vision of beatitude. Like the veil of things as they seem drawn back by an unseen hand. For a second you see, and seeing the secret, you are the secret. For a second there is meaning!
  Then the hand lets fall the veil and you are alone, lost in the fog again, and you stumble on towards nowhere for no good reason.
  “It was a great mistake, my being born a man, I would have been much more successful as a sea gull or a fish. As it is, I will always be a stranger who never feels at home, who does not really want and is not really wanted, who can never belong, who must always be a little in love with death!”
  Ooer, methinks I’m reading too much Eugene O’Neill!
  But just had to share it with you.
  Keep smiling and beware racing yacht hubris! Or Roxanne will scorn you too.