"NOONE WILL EVER PAY YOU TO WRITE". WHEN PARENTS DON'T BELIEVE IN YOU

I was going to write an article about how my Dad tells me, every time I descend regretttably back into the outer- suburban wombsite, that no one will ever pay for any of my work and I'm a fool and have got to quit. But that's nothing new, instead here is a good story: I HAD BEEN READING CHRISTOPHER HITCHENS to feel less alone. His cadence and style are a little similar to mine but more importantly here is a man who is obviously obsessed with writing. Like Hitchens has said himself, writing ability always recommends people, and if we do something intensely we can generally pick out others who do the same. Comrades in madness if you like. I approached the home of my oldest friend and knocked; our lives had taken us in fairly opposite directions but we had the crucial, shared experience of making the school years bearable for each other. How quaint that, in those years, I considered a year without laughter unbearable. There have been many since. At any rate, we differed mainly in self regard, confidence maybe. My wits sharpened on arseholes, I cared about my gifts; she seemed ambivalent about hers. The flat was typical Adelaide: 70's, unmaintained, furnished like a drug experience. There were old movie theatre seats in the lounge, along with evidence she had continued smoking herself to death in my absence. I spied a pile of books and one of them a Hitchens. I always look at people's books when I'm in their house and she didn't notice me doing so. We chatted for a couple of hours and she smoked. Unlike my hero, I had given away the habit. Company was easy and I was again reminded of how just being really interested in each other and refraining from judgement was such an oasis in my teenage years. I still judged her not. She was one of the smartest people I would ever know. We argued lightly about intellectual property. The one flaw in the relationship was that she spoke to me sometimes like a junior, maybe because her family was educated. It was almost time to leave when she butted a ciggie and said, tangentially "you know who you remind me of? Christopher Hitchens. The writer. His mind" she clarified, unnecessarily. It came out just like that, the only compliment she had ever given me - we didn't talk that way - and maybe the greatest I would ever receive. I remember all that not in the service of my ego, but because so many cyclical patterns in my life have been the site of old wounds. The beauty of that one, it's fineness, makes me hope, and look forward to better times.

It also occurred to me recently that immediately after my generation, the entire model of "family" changed from one of being centred around the father, to one of being centred around the children.

Up until this time, family really served to give men who were virtual nobodies in the workplace an outlet for authority. It was a business structure, with women fielding secretary/cleaner duties and children taking on professional idiocy and providing class-based legitimacy for the whole hierarchy.

Flash forward, and parents are now philosopher/psychologists, reading books about sensitive parenting which consider not only the impact of violent discipline but deconstruct the family as a kind of template for fascism. Children are monitored and protected and institutions are the enemy. Developing fetuses are played Mozart, dubious childhood disorders are diagnosed and managed in four year olds. Parents are now considered monsters if they don't provide private rumpus rooms, cars and tech gadgets, along with a "head start in life", perhaps in the form of business advice or contacts. This model will continue, we now accept, until the child is 30, and has finished at least a Masters.