wealth, it knows me not.
Wealth
You’re about 35+ years old, married with a few sprouts, chained into a lifelong corporate career – barring takeovers – and living like a king in a 20 year-old Meriton two-bed tower west of Bankstown.
You’re into the bank for multiple zeros and for a thousand miles around you the property values are going south compared to the rest of the city in their happy race to unlimited wealth and tax-free capital gains.
Your parents have just cashed in on their 3-hectare Hunters Hill estate and are now living on the 99th floor of some needle in Southport that will be knocked over in the next 100-year cyclone.
They never answer the phone
Your sister is Director of Medicine in the Leicestershire Infirmary and is being paid in POUNDS STERLING and your younger and rudely uneducated brother is doing mysteriously well from his commercial import/export base in northern Thailand.
They never answer the phone either.
Last year you copped a 2.5% increase in gross and a tax audit, and the bus route to the city has been changed so it’s out by 6.30am and back by 8pm @ plus $3.00 each day per way 48 weeks a year.
Your company’s division has eight management meetings a month and lately nobody’s even bothered to copy you on the minutes.
Your cubicle has been downgraded to 3 walls only and everyone walking past on the way to a coffee break can check-out what’s on your monitor, your old monitor – they must have forgotten yours when the flat-screen order was put together.
You were christened John and you Supervisor has been calling you Jim for 6 months.
– but every other Saturday a bloke is able to get away from all this shit and go surfing.
Travel the hour or so to the northern beaches and try for a little dawn solitude at Avalon, or Newport, or Narrabeen.
Try to wear away a little of the ordinariness of just doing a working life.
Like seeing the sun rise from the sea.
Or just riding a wave.
Not much to expect, and nothing to ask for.
Nobody has the right to deny you any part of it.
So sweat on localism, get in for your goodly share, there’s more of you than them.
petebowes.com 
You and me both, mate!
But it’s the road back to Bankstown that would kill me . . .
Thanks for the perspective, PB.