grumpyPortrait of the artist as a young man
February 14th 2008 11:40
Sixteen years old I was, when this picture was taken; sitting on the front doorstep of an old deserted house in the Dandenong Ranges. The Yardbirds had just released “Shapes of things to Come”, Pet Clark was banging away at “Don’t sleep in the subway, darling,” and the Easy Beats were on top of the charts with “Friday on my mind”. I was in the first year of a Radio & Electronics apprenticeship, unconcerned about my economic future (we didn’t need to be then) but living through what I can only call now the mythical years, where everything I was to become still lay only “in-potentia”; in images of the possible, in golden teenage dreams of glory and dark boyhood fantasies of desire.
In a way I feel like I have been away somewhere, lost in some dream world and have now returned, only to awaken and discover, to my utter amazement, that everything I was remains mine, everything I might have wished for during those long, secret nights is still possible, and that the thing I was truly given by the life I led between those years and now is the freedom to choose – to choose now without the pressure of the need to conform, without the still small voice of unconscious desire whispering my choices to me in ways which made me believe I was the chooser.
I feel like I have come home, to find the light is still on… and the young man, whose life I thought I had left behind, was still there, waiting for me.
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Link to the song!