hunter street

perhaps it's because i never spent much time in the city's downtown, or maybe my years of absence had let the change slip by unnoticed, but hunter street in newcastle now appeared to be a veritable ghost town. in the eight blocks to my destination, the broken glass of empty shops led past boarded up pubs, to endless graffitied storefronts. the sidewalks were populated only with the occasional tattoo shop employee (this, clearly, still a thriving industry); markedly absent were panhandlers and undesireables, street kids and the crazy folk... even they had better places to be....

i arrived at the cambridge with time to spare, to find the boys in the midst of soundcheck. before long, lindsay and i set off to explore the surroundings, returning with a round of coffees and a pocketful of age-old hair beads from "the rock shop" that would be attached to the braids in lindsay's rat-tail extensions while under-agers scaled the patio fence. a few beers later and my silly-haired guitar-playing friend would encite the hundreds of sweaty, drunk aussie punkers to welcome his mate, "the girl with the funny canadian accent," before the band tore into a crowd favorite:

"never had so much fun."