I sit on the step outside waiting for a cab. The black curly dog from across the street darts from its house and races growling towards me. It stops inches from my knees with its owner yelling: Barney, come here right now. She looks right at me but doesn't say anything. The dog cocks its leg on the ivy to my left and trundles off up the street. Ben says that his mum does a lame type of whistle at their dog while holding two fingers up towards her mouth but a few centimetres away. Apparently it makes a difference.

There's a grasshoppery thing on its back on the pavement trying to right itself. I flick it over using a Joh Bailey Myer one offer card from the Bruce Springsteen bag and hope for a change in karma. As it limps off I think that it looks more like a cockroach from this perspective and perhaps it wasn't the right thing to do. Still no cab, mobile phone battery flat and home phone disconnected so I go inside to call from the charger.

Later, on the bus home we pass The Vanguard and the sign outside says Tonight: Russell Crowe. I hope that everyone on the bus is rolling their eyes and being actively unimpressed like me.

There's chalk graffitti on the Sydney Uni campus that says Unfailing Cod and the picture in my head of an earnest fish makes me laugh.

Then I'm walking home across the park. There's a quarter moon and a tortoiseshell cat sitting on the path. The air has finally cooled but the house holds the heat of the day. I have to stand on a chair to open the top part of my bedroom window, stuck since the end of last summer. Even though there's the street right there I open the blinds up too, and the breeze flows in. When I lie on my bed that quarter moon is caught between the bars on the window. It comes and goes as clouds move fast across it.