Of the many pleasures that I indulge, the one I am perhaps most fond of is walking. I walk—everyday if possible. Mostly I walk by myself. At this time of year, the streets of Canberra’s north are marked by the fall of autumn. Amidst their rustling the trees shed their leaves, and so many seem aflame with the turn of the season.

To walk is to leave all that confines me behind—for a time. The walls, curtains, and ceilings of my house bound life fall away, and the light and the sky and the clouds pour in and push me on from one street to the next, along one more path and another.

Lately, the northern suburb of Downer—what a name!—has come to fascinate me. Downer has a good supply of alleyways that strike paths between streets, like much of the city’s north. I have set myself the task of navigating them all, in the hope of at last finding the fabled north west passage out of Canberra. Thirty years I have searched. Near the border of Downer, one such path (what I have come to think of the suburb’s true gateway) was once marked, appropriately, by some particularly striking graffiti—translated words from a Rimbaud poem: Now is the assassin’s time.

Occasionally I spy someone gardening or tinkering in a yard. I am struck by their situation while I am passing. I am not opposed to their attentions—how could I be? But I ponder the various ways private property shapes our being and fixes us upon the phantoms of ownership and possession. The details, the maintenance, the endless renovation of a vanishingly small décor, in search of a life sold off for a wage that can never truly be recompense for what was lost.

Private property tends to foreclose the possibilities of the drift or denigrates our wandering into a strictly formalised ritual—the holiday or temporary escape from the drag of work and home. In contrast, last year during lockdown, I found that the streets of my suburb became more alive with drifters. I had never seen so many people walking the streets of this town on weekdays. It was strange only because I am used to the quiet of the streets as work and school takes hold of the day.

I have had the good fortune of having the burden of wage slavery mostly lifted from me over the last year. Unlike times past this has not resulted in crippling poverty and a humiliating relationship with social security. And so now when I can—which is most days—I drift. And while drifting I dream as much as pick over the present anxieties that bother.

Today—yesterday, what does it matter—I struck upon a game to play while walking. Inspired by the surrealists and the clouds above.

On the vapour trail—aka Follow that cloud!

A game for one or more. This is a game suited to cloudy days, preferably with a sky full of lively cumulus. However, do not disregard the chilly serenity of the far-off cirrus, perhaps even more conducive to poetic revery. Take heed also of the possibilities of the sharp shock and squalls of the cumulonimbus. Note that this game is not suited to the dreary stratus, that overwhelms the sky in suffocating monotony.

First, pick a cloud. Now follow it. Negotiate all obstacles—pathways, roads, fences, creatures animate and inanimate—to keep it in sight. The game ends upon the whim of the chaser, or the coherence and evanescence of the cloud.

The game can play out in two main ways. It is first of all simply a question of following that cloud—no matter what. Keep it in sight and turn to the task at hand. Or, secondly, the chase can combine a fanciful accompaniment. For instance, once chosen, the cloud will provide ample material for fantastical confabulations. Whether by recourse to paranoia-criticism (is that a face before me?) or a fable more attuned to the ephemerality of the cloud itself (and so the necessary decline and demise of every sky palace), you must remember that any and all clouds in conscious relation exceed their objectification as mere phases in the circuit of convection and fluid dynamics. The materiality of this object is not a question of its independent existence—which it has, no doubt—but rather what one makes of it beyond the travails of alienation and utility.

An example: Yesterday, while walking south along Atherton Street toward the corner with Durack I sighted a nice plump squarish cloud with rounded edges. It immediately appeared to me as a continent undergoing the terrific transformations wrought by plate tectonics, millions of years telescoped into moments. In the north, the continent took on an anvil shape, while to the south of this peculiar peninsula a vast river delta opened. To the south east an archipelago spun off from the continent as the coastline fractured. In the utter south two lumps become great promontories broke off and formed independent islands, not long before one crashed back into the south east, and the other sunk for ever—perhaps—beneath the indifferent waves of the sky. And then, I reached Durack Street, and this nebulous continent passed from my grasp. All that remains I will to leave to the speculations of those psychopaleogeographers I once met in a dream.

And so, another game to play within and against the alienations of the present as we plot and plan the insurrections to come.