This is a footnote in the book - I am in Brooklyn overlooking not much at all in my new apartment (been here two weeks) trying to recall what happened in 2000. I have diaries and letters for most every year of my life except for 2000. There is a box of about one hundred CDs but nothing goes past mid-2001. Old websites have been replaced so many times I cannot find any that goes back to 2000 though I made hundreds of them. I found a few astrology charts and from them I try to recall what I had believed was reality just six years ago. Blogging would have been so much easier than lost CDs and Internet sites and notebooks. But is blogging truth or just what our online persona wants someone else to believe? In the worlds of the often reinvented self – we see this with the criminal who, after being caught and sent to the gallows or prison for life realise, at the end of their rope, literally/emotionally/psychically/physically that they are cactus and, usually (seventy-eight percent of the time according my research if I had done it), in the hopes of being believed by a human element before the inevitable death follows their shit lives become converted to Christianity. Their new self-invented character will witness the divine powers of God who has touched their suddenly significant life and they are not hand in hand with Jesus come what I may. Blogs are as stupid as the chatrooms which preceded them (chatrooms - which I wrote a 150,000, 475 page, thesis on).Of course Christianity and most religions are based on faulty memories of followers who wrote something that was told them by some passing strange type of person or from their own ‘this-is-the-way-it-is’ thoughts ‘because if it is my thought it must be right because I am divine’ type of thinking. Where were eye-witness-news and the investigative reporters two-thousand years ago? What a long history of deceit and grief we could have saved, but then again we are in Iraq based on lies and deceit and Colin Powell standing before the United Nations assembly with a vial of liquid – probably water – and saying Iraq had nukes. Maybe even with eye-witness news and reporters on the spot we cannot get the straight story.

There were only three players who had been chosen for both the Schoolboy National and the Australian National teams. We could not afford both and I told Leigh that but somehow we managed the money and Leigh went first to Florida with one other Australian player then met the Australian Under-18s in Toronto to begin a trip across Canada in preparation for the World Championships in Vancouver.

Southern Districts Baseball Club had held a dinner and raised two thousand dollars which paid for the Florida part. The mother only had to pay one-half of one international trip and I still needed to come up with a few thousand for the Canadian trip. I worked for the Family and Community Services with adolescents in government care. These were kids that had really been given the raw deal of life. One child I looked after had been found with his brother sleeping on cardboard boxes in Brisbane when they were four or five years old. Another adolescent, one who I looked after for a couple of years and who became quite a good baseball pitcher had been put into government care at age ten. He had gone to a neighbour asking for food for his four brothers and sisters; ages 2 – 8 and the neighbours rang the police. Apparently the ten-year-old was trying to look after his brothers and sisters on his own as the parents had both disappeared due to drugs and what not. I got to use a new government car which was good as I did not have a car. I managed to use it often for my own personal life too. I was supposed to just use it when I was with one of my charges but having the keys to where they were locked up I would just take it overnight and bring it back before folks got to work. I learned how to ‘burn rubber’ which entertained the adolescents I looked after. Sometimes we would pretend we had an off-road all-terrain vehicle and we would go bouncing around at very high speed on dirt paths in the countryside. I used it for my times to be with Kris/Chris too. What was especially kool was that the government got new cars every six months and I would just take the big Commodores saying I was too tall for the compact cars. No one ever questioned how I would put several hundred kilometres on the car each weekend or why I used so much petrol. I suppose I was lucky, as I did not have any accidents. I did hit the gate of where I collected them once and scraped the paint off the front of a car that was only a couple of days old but luckily I managed to find some paint in a department store that matched close enough and then I splashed mud over it as it was a rainy weekend and no one ever questioned it.

March to July were rare regular living months. I seemed to be getting along with Kris and Leigh was doing his schoolwork. He missed a lot of classes due to baseball practice though we were not very concerned. The ‘alleged’ mother seemed to have issues about school and we ignored her. I was spending a lot of time at the University of South Australia working at times on my PhD.

I spent most of my time sitting in my office making webpages and contemplating what the hell was it that I was doing writing a PhD thesis. It seemed not long ago that I was a high school dropout, then I was wasted on drugs for years, had a couple of kids, lived on welfare, had absolutely no plans for the future and here I was sitting in front of a computer spending hours a day making webpages about my poems and not doing anything toward my PhD. I spent months doing nothing toward what I was supposed to be doing. The reality was that I had no idea what to do. I made some outlines and read some articles about computer-mediated communication. It was somewhat interesting but I was stuck. I was mainly stuck with the specifics of the date. 2000. I was not sure what that meant. If the universe is a lot of billions of years old and our solar system is billions and our sun is billions and there were humans maybe a million years ago and for hundreds of thousands of years, then thousands, then hundreds of years there was little movement in communicational techniques. Now all of a sudden, in just decades, it is going so fast. We talk about the 1800’s as a long time ago, five hundred years ago some white folks were just starting to probe North America. A thousand years ago? Two, three, five, ten, fifty thousand years ago. If we live just one life it is all so depressing – what if our one life was in the year 1213 and we lived in agony and pain and died after being raped and tortured by passing Christians, Muslims, Buddhists, Zoroaster monks at age 12? Is this it? I have no choice about this being my life? I would sit there in front of the computer worried about the next thousand years.