home is ware(the)house(is)

I am minding a room in a warehouse. It is small and cold, this room, and it feels more like home than any of the rooms I've lived in for a long time. It is waxing midnight, and outside, now and then, the boomgates go down, and the bell goes 'ding ding' for a really long time. About the same length of time as the bells that the people outside my house used to ring at 5 in the morning. Until three days ago, when I left Nepal.

Yes, the bells ring at the wrong time, and they are mechanically timed. And the cars don't talk here. I miss their obnoxious honking voices. It is almost midnight but I can still hear them driving around, just the sound of tyres on smooth road, no bumps. It is a sound like wind or surf, but with a distinctly human shape. More than ten years ago, I was in a physics lecture, and the lecturer explained about static friction and dynamic friction. He was a man called Max, and he liked to talk about how stupid we probably all were. You see, static friction is that thing which makes it hard to move a stationary object along a surface, and dynamic friction is that thing which resists the motion of a sliding object, causing it to decelerate. He told us that a wheel, a tyre on a car for instance, could only roll because of static friction. When rolling, the point on the wheel that is in contact with the surface is, actually, stationary. Everywhere else on the wheel is moving, except for that point. In a geometrically perfect model, that point would be infinitely small, and it would be stationary for an infinitely short time. Max drew a very lovely diagram of the whole thing, and then told us that we were probably too stupid to understand. I didn't stay in that course for very long.

If a wheel was light enough, it could probably roll along the surface of water.

I've been back for two days, and I've become one of those interminable "when I was in Nepal" people. Really, it's a way of validating the experience, proving that it really happened. I lived there for almost a year, and now I'm back in Melbourne and everything is so different and strange, and yet it feels so normal. There are no barking dogs, no goats or monkeys. Even though I would decline, I wish someone would offer to polish my shoes.

Meanwhile, back in Nepal, the deadline for the new constitution has passed, the constituent assembly did not complete their homework, and so now the government will have to either resign or ignore the supreme court. For a government to ignore its own legal system is brazen, even upon the matter of an extension, and it doesn't seem like the general public has enough love for the Nepali government to let it slide. Static friction. I think they've gone for a "we're going to have one last extension to finish the damn thing and then we promise we'll resign" option. Things are likely to get hairy.

Here, though, no such problems. Someone tells me that Australia's prime minister is on shaky ground, and that the previous prime minister might come back, but it is hard to care when life is so quiet and predictable. One politician goes, another one comes, neither of them are particularly inspiring. The holes in the ground get bigger, the people and wildlife above the holes get pushed away and cut out. The things get more expensive, the economy grows, and then it will diminish again.