Time: 10:00 a.m.
Date: 20 November 2022.
Place: Gold Leaf Café, Main Street, Kangaroo Point, Brisbane, Queensland, Australia.
It has been quite awhile since I wrote in my notebook. Here I am in a small café on a corner that I once roamed, on the corner, the early 1980s.
A classic radio station is playing as a coffee is brought to the table. Listening to the pop tune of old. Mind: I could have been back then in the roam around Main Street, not much different to the Sinclair Lewis’s novel (1920). Except that the experience of the Sunday morning coffee shop hour was just emerging locally. There are other historical differences; difference of culture which is forgotten in the stupefy gaze on the image of a forgotten materialised building. Critical heritage.
My body aches, 61 years, born 1961. It does not ache as it did in 1981 – romance and lust. A moment lost in an “electric dream” (released 1998; the personal 1990s reflection back to the 1980s). Imagining who I would be now? Trying to imagine life in 2030. I then thought 70 years was a full life; never to imagine my parents lived into their early 90s.
I never imagined the Neo-Conservative world that was just to emerge over those 40 years. In the 1990s I had thought the Neo-Liberalism would defeat the covert lust for white supremacy and isolationism. Globalism, however, prove even a better way to export and trade in prejudicial attitudes.
We were college young men, back then, wanting to do good in the world by saving it from the evils of culture. There were a few college women among us, but were they treated fairly? I think not.
Young people’s clicks just reproduce the prejudices of old. But who listens to history?
Together in Electric Dreams
Song by Giorgio Moroder and Philip Oakey
I only knew you for a while
I never saw your smile
Till it was time to go
Time to go away (time to go away)
Sometimes its hard to recognise
Love comes as a surprise
And its too late
It’s just to late to stay (to late to stay)
We’ll always be together
However far it seems (love never ends)
We’ll always be together
Together in electric dreams
Because the friendship that you gave
Has taught me to be brave
No matter where I go
I’ll never find a better prize (find a better prize)
Though your miles and miles away
I see you everyday
I don’t have to try
I just close my eyes
I close my eyes
We’ll always be together
However far it seems (love never ends)
We’ll always be together
Together in electric dreams
Source: LyricFind
Together in Electric Dreams lyrics © O/B/O Apra Amcos
Image: Alcorn College in the 1980s, old Kings College, River Terrace, Kangaroo Point, Brisbane.
Neville Buch
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