APOKALIPSIS

Adelaide has a reputation for being Australia’s least exciting city. Sydney is where the action is, Melbourne is where the alternative scene is, but meanwhile Adelaide is “the City of Churches.” Can you get more square than that?
However, perhaps because I’ve spent most of my life in towns that give new dimensions to the word “boring,” I’ve found Adelaide to be quite charming and vivacious. I’m staying in Kim’s apartment in the middle of the city, on the corner of the main thoroughfare and a small alley of boutique clothing shops and pubs. Right across the street is a small empty square of urban landscape that often serves as a blank canvas for local artists.
There’s been graphitti and chalk drawings, pasted up pixel art from Commander Keen, scribbled posters of squid, all sorts of wonderful things done to the square. Eventually it all gets erased or taken down, but something else always crops up in its place. The best of these urban exhibitions happened last Tuesday. We were driving home from playing poker out in the country, just about to pull into the parking garage, and I saw this:

Someone had turned our square into a cardboard menagerie! There was no artist’s signature that we could see, no further information given, just this gift of cardboard animals to the city. The most remarkable thing, to me, was that whoever put this little diorama together must have known that it would be gone in the morning before hardly anyone could see it. Drunken revelers would certainly see to its destruction.
What we were seeing was like the raffelesia flower in Borneo … something that only blooms occasionally and for a short period of time, but is spectacular to those fortunate enough to see it. Thankfully, unlike the raffelesia, the animals did not smell like rotting flesh.

I went down to see what was left in the morning. It had been rainy and windy that night, so if the average citizen didn’t destroy our little patch of jungle, mother nature certainly would have. Sure enough, just about everything was gone. All that was left was this elephant head: