Someone at the place that used to be Michel’s Patisserie but is now called something else and is in fact something entirely else but despite efforts seems more generic than Michel’s Patisserie with its new mint green and blonde wood is wearing a red Free Julian Assange shirt. Maybe 12 years ago I saw Julian Assange walk right from where I’m standing to the counter of Woolworths, which might have been called Safeway back then but was essentially the same place as it is now even down to the lighting system buy or request to buy a SIM card for a prepaid mobile phone. That’s Julian Assange, I thought. He is buying a SIM card for a prepaid mobile phone. I knew as much about him then as today, which aside from the words Internet and Freedom is zero despite or perhaps because of the fact I once watched a poorly made biopic about his early life in Melbourne. Something about Dandenong or is it the Dandenongs. Good at the Internet. Something to do with war and America. Or is it sex and Sweden. The Internet, which I can’t explain but am always on or is it always in except for when I sleep and being in the Internet is so like being asleep or is it a dream. I’m here because I’ve been working my way up to this moment. Not that there’s anything wrong with me, or wrong with this Shopping Centre. There is, but that isn’t the point. The point is I need to buy thrush medication to treat the UTI medication to treat the unprotected sex which I suppose I had as a treat. Chemist Warehouse of course is a dream and a curse to the germaphobes and to the racists and the way I live in the Internet is like the way I live in the coronavirus, perfectly well in those correlative ways without understanding anything at all about it but receiving this information or is it this dream. Life ebbing or is it flaring in Chemist Warehouse, a fact of life I ascribe to the general paranoia between the different customers and between the customers and the staff though I don’t feel paranoia between the staff themselves. Weeks later I’ll see the security guard remember and describe what will seem like one of his big nights to the young woman behind the checkout counter. I’m not surprised there’s some aggression between an old man on his bicycle and an unseeable driver in a grey vehicle and I take the aggression on board because it feels like mine to take. Even though I only came for the thrush medication my backpack has other items I purchased and took from Chemist Warehouse and also Woolworths including: a Twix, a surprisingly square carrot, an expensive coconut water I didn’t want. I have been working up to this moment or is it that this moment has taken a lot of effort. I didn’t want this moment or is it that I don’t understand this moment. It is aggressive, expensive, sick with this moment, this moment, or is it that I’m here.