Thorny thoughts.

I get home from work at 9pm. I scuttle home because the way gets progressively darker and less visible the closer I get to my house.

As I get to my house, I look up at the coil of barbed wire hanging down at me contradictorily menacingly, as old as the haggard almost-impenetrably thorny hedge that covers most of it, that wasn't needed to finish off our fence. Contradictory this barbed wire is in all its insentience, for it scares me, and yet does its best to keep out the "pests" as one security company asserts that the desperate, hungry, roofless poor are (the security company calls itself "Bolivian Pest Control" with a red barred circle crossing out a fellow who doesn't look a little unlike myself).

I open the padlock of our gate, the spikes at the top and the broken glass cemented on either side catching my attention again tonight, as it did last night, and another contradiction screams at me silently (be as quiet as you can), in that my security is so similar to everybody elses on this side of the river - and the more secure we are, the less we are, pure and simple. It's been both theorised and proven in the community development field more times than I can count.

We had a burglar over for backyard shennanigans two nights ago. The downstairs neighbours banging on our door and ding-donging our bell made us aware of it all at 5am when it was already in full swing. That desperate, hungry blah blah might also have been cold because he started by gathering some clothes off the line. Our security guard saw Cold Hungry Man (CHuM) clamber over the deterrants (desperate he must be to go near our thorny hedge!), woke downstairs, CHuM jumped unwittingly into the neighbouring property, to the very alert and very big and very baseball-bat-weilding fellow who resides there. He dropped the clothes, jumped back over to our side, and that's why they woke us. They couldn't find CHuM and thought he might be hiding on the garage roof, visible from Luke's (my housemate) bedroom window...

Short story long, never found him (I think I'm happy to say - the baseball bat would have found plenty of lean bones to pulverise, for it's a police-less state with no laws here after dark, therefore law in own hands justice), found the clothes, and hopefully made him aware that our house, at least, isn't the one to rob (without having to break any bones or worse).

Tonight I have made it through the fence, and locked the gate. As usual. I'm more alert (perish the connotation!) and alarmed, but as I open my door, am greeted by Arthur with an open beer bottle and alight to the balcony, and as I look up to the open, starry sky I almost unconsciously (nowdays) find the Southern Cross among the throng. It occurs to me that we're still all on the same planet. That we are all living the same life, part of the same organism. I sadden, tears drop on my expensive shoes, and the anonymous safety and the separation of the balcony from the poor begs me to continue my mantra - "The World is an Amazing Place". And although I recognise a hint of jingoism in my connection to the Southern Cross (and, dare I connect the J-word to it, SBS), I hope that our CHuM is also looking up (perhaps still on our garage roof), and thinking some of the same thoughts.