Its owner had transformed the car into a force for good - a Don Quixote of automobiles. And I was little more than Pancho Sanchez, ascribe destined to tell of the passing of this vision of steel and rust. What made this car so extraordinary was the wide array of sentiments plastered over its rear. Here was a car wearing its heart on its bumper bar.

I feared the driver might have been blinded by his political views, only because there was a real danger he couldn't see out the back window: I am an Australian for reconciliation! Say sorry! No uranium mines in Kakadu! Vote for the Republic! And the saddest of all: Rabbitohs - we'll be back!

As I read I realised that in each of these cases, although the wars were far from over, the battles had all been lost. The forces of good had not prevailed and here was their silent, yellowing legacy.

I looked around, filled with the spirit of Christmas, but there were no "fish" stickers in sight. Just the John the Baptist of Hoonmobiles, a six-cylinder saviour, a solitary station wagon crying out in the wilderness. While other cars stood as mute accomplices to the status quo, one lone, rebellious vehicle rattled for social change. While other vehicles idled at traffic lights, here was one car that could never be idle. It spoke its message without the need for sound and it could never be silenced because it will never be heard. But for how much longer would it be tolerated before a fleet of overpaid government cars was sent out to hunt it down for its rusted skin, to dispatch it to the auto graveyard?

The noble sentiments the stickers espoused stood in stark contrast to the usual array of vulgarity found on the chrome rumps of cars: The avaricious - My other car is a Mercedes. The obvious - if you can read this, you are too f**king close! The cruelly misogynous - Wife and dog missing: reward for dog. The curiously bestial - I love my German Shepherd. The long-suffering spouse's rejoinder - If you think this car is a wreck you should see my failure of a husband.

The only other competition for my attention at the traffic lights was a compact runaround with a single sticker adorning its tail. At first I couldn't believe what I had read and had to look twice to confirm the disturbing vision: "I love line dancing. " There it was, as bold as brass in black and white with an enormous red heart to confirm the emotion.

I needed to see who was behind the wheel. I had to know whether the owner of the car was stupid, brave, or possessed of a perverse sense of humour. It's one thing to meet in the still of night in crowded, distant barns for this cowpokes' equivalent of Morris dancing; it's another to admit to such a bizarre practice in broad daylight. What would the children think? Would questions, difficult to answer, arrive unbidden at the dinner table?

Then the sheer genius of the sticker struck me. Surely this was the simplest form of automotive protection. No need for an expensive wheel lock or complex tracing devices. Who in their right mind would steal this car? Who would run the risk of being jeered by their homeys as they spun around the corner in a mauve line-dance-lovin' Daihatsu? And what child would want to borrow the parents' car if it meant their friends might discover the old folks' sicko passion for dancing in lines wearing cowboy boots and checked shirts with press stud buttons?

I'd lost track of time when, finally, the lights turned green. How long had we been there? How long had we been trapped in that desperate Christmas traffic jam? I've no idea, but the strange intersection that forced us together began to clear.

In a flash the Daihatsu was boot- scootin' its way toward the city and, with one last contemptuous blast from its exhaust, the car of lost causes disappeared into the future.

It left behind too many questions to answer, and a thick black cloud of carcinogenic smoke. I wondered why someone so interested in the environment and important social issues couldn't be bothered fixing his car's filthy tailpipe.

I remember reading somewhere once, probably on a bumper sticker, that "magic happens". Unfortunately, sometimes, so does shit.

Perhaps I could ask how that slip of paper managed to stretch itself, like a stealthy black cat, across my doorstep. And how it so effectively insinuated itself into my world. I picked up the paper knowing one day it'd come in handy, and that night 1 slept uneasily with visions of redemption and salvation oscillating in judgmental tones of grey.

Then (in what I prayed was a totally unconnected incident), I received two bibles in the mail the following morning. They arrived from separate parts of the country in brown paper envelopes with no return address and no sender's name. Just a gift from the gods.

As I tore the second package open I wondered whether someone was trying to tell me something, but couldn't for the damned life of me figure out what it was. It was unsettling, and as I sat down to write I felt totally unstable. Perhaps some well-meaning minion from the legions of the faithful had decided I was godless and in need of instruction. Let me assure those caring Christians flinging bibles willy-nilly into the postal system, I'm adamant we shout the name of God loudly and frequently at every opportunity.

After all, if the name of God were forgotten, it'd take all the fun out of war. I'm full of praise for the oxymoronic idea of Holy Wars. When a higher order gets dragged into our petty earthly struggles, it substantiates the conflict. War is always more inspirational when the name of God is called upon. One can hardly imagine charging into battle and certain death as an atheist. (Apart from liberating the oppressed from the oppressor, maintaining regional stability and establishing mutuality beneficial economic systems, what's the paint?)

If God is forgotten, whose name will be called out in moments of ecstasy?* And whose name will you cry out when you smash your thumb to smithereens with the claw hammer or when you miss the 8.25, or when you discover the fish you've been eating at the vegetarian banquet with your politically correct comrades is really delicious slivers of lovely, lovely, soft-as-a-baby's-bottom veal? But there's one positive aspect to this saga - as long as blasphemy exists, so will God.

*I'm in accordance with the Pope on this issue. If this vulgar act of physical union must occur it should do so only between consenting adults, in numbers no greater than two, with one being representative of each sex for the sole purpose of reproduction (that, of course, means to the exclusion of wild beasts).

Afterthought One: My current surplus of bibles could be due, in part, to Michael McDermott. Over the Christmas season my shameful namesake in the States shot several co-workers in a psychotic rampage. Perhaps people confused the two of us. This can happen if you stay up all night waiting to be saved by Benny Hinn afteryour mind is fritzed on an overabundance of infomercials.

Afterthought Two: The slip of paper that began this journey is now neatly folded and sitting under the right front leg of my desk. Where it's precisely the right size and shape to bring some stability to my work. Praise Him.

"The success or failure of your small business is locked within the coded sequence of your ABN. I can predict the future of your business, its successor failure, by unravelling that code." His face creased below his nostrils in what I took to be a smile. "Give it to me," he said.

A week before I had run into a friend of mine. He was euphoric. He'd seen the light - the same fluoros that now flickered above me. He had been baffled by the BAS, confused by the GST and virtually destroyed by the TAX he kept paying. He, like so many of us, had enlisted the aid of an unscrupulous accountant with the moral backbone of a box jellyfish. He'd paid outlandish amounts of money to update his accounting systems yet was still losing the numbers battle.

Then, at 2.37 on a public service payday while waiting in line for four hours at an uncaring sub-branch of the bank that was about to foreclose on his business, grasping the pathetic earnings he had taken for the week, it came to him. Like an epiphany crashing through his mental-stability, he realised there was divination in the numbers. And if there was order in the chaos, then perhaps, just perhaps, there was a way to untangle the mystery of this new and terrifying tax system. Perhaps the num bers themselves held the key to unlock the door to financial security. Perhaps with the right numerical combination one could not only survive the GST, one could profit from it.

Thus he found himself one sentence away from a straitjacket at the door of an oft-overlooked mystical accountant, trembling from a five day caffeine rush, a wet patch the size of Florida in his strides and a well-thumbed copy of Foucault's Pendulum in his pocket.

He'd been told straight up his business would fail, it was in the numbers. There were too many zeros (nothingness, the person without power) and a surplus of twos (conflict, ambivalence, division). A single five suggested hope (marriage between Heaven and Earth, balance, a stable centre), but the final grouping of sixes was too much (daamnation, destruction, poverty, isolation). The only way out, the only way to secure future happiness was to find a new number. Something with a scattering of threes (the universal, the godhead, the trinity), nines (gestation, birth, exertion, success), and with an isolated 21 if at all possible.

He left the office feeling elated and that was how I found him and that was how I found myself in this office, about to hear that judgement on my ABN.

That thin, high voice spoke again. "They're beautiful," he said. "The harmony of the eights juxtaposed against the chaos of the zeros. The symmetry of the twos is almost sublime, but... "My small business would fail in the first six months of 2001 and, guess what, there was nothing I could do about it - it was all in the nurnbers.*

I was to realise later that everyone received the same prediction, in fact the only small business that was booming in this time of crises was his. Plato called numerology "the highest level of knowledge" but, thankfully, he never explained the levels of idiocy that 3000 years of human development in the field of taxation have produced.

The best advice that I can offer is do not succumb to fear - turn a profit by exploiting other people's fears. Presently I'm studying all I can about numerology because, if all else fails, at least I'll know when my number's up.

* Another unhinged business associate researched the day his ABN was "born". He then had a zodiac reading done for that day and he discovered his ABN was a Scorpio - fiery, opinionated and sexy. Its lucky numbers were 7, 32 and 113 but, unfortunately, its lucky year was 1922.

Over the next few weeks I listened to the records continuously. During the day they kept the modern world at bay, and at night I found that the marmonious, uncomposed songs of wildlife helped me sleep better. I'd drift into a trance surrounded by elegant nocturnal noises as visions flooded into my head. However, if I chanced to wake while the CD was still playing, I found myself in the middle of Apocalypse Now - sans explosions. The jungle was all around me, invasive, dense, close. In this semi-hallucinatory state I was terrified to enter the kitchen. It was alive with sooty owls and yellow-bellied gliders; brown snakes crowded for warmth in the microwave, taipans slithered underfoot through the leafy damp glades beside the fridge.

I'd been momentarily confused, but the CDs caused near psychotic reactions and irreparable damage to the creatures with which I share my home. The many pigeons roosting in the roof, obviously bored with the friendship of the filthy bin-loving ibis, were glad of the imaginary company. Their cooing became frantic as they eagerly sought a social encounter with the crescent honeyeater or the yellow-tailed cockatoo that burst into full throated stereo every few minutes. Tragically, the native birds failed to respond to their plaintive cries and over the weeks the pigeons became depressed, almost suicidal. (I noticed one hurling itself at the head of a statue protected by deadly barbs with something more than mere feacal defacement in mind.)

While the pigeons struggled with their lack of popularity, the mice had a totally different response. Their miniscule brains, barely able to cope with the complexity of a T-junction and only really useful for chemical experiments, were driven into a frenzy. They scurried about, filled with fear, as the house became engulfed by predatory beasts that had no scent and left no trail. These poor rodents, who'd never left the confines of inner-city Sydney, were unfamiliar with the array of invisible wildlife that was now competing with them for scraps. They were curious about the green-eyed tree frogs lurking in the subwoofer, cautious when the black butcherbird called to them, yet it was only when the wedge-tailed eagle began circling between the light fittings that they called it quits and fled the house.

I've since expanded my library of natural sounds and have travelled to numerous treasured environments around the world without leaving the safety of the house. I've experienced the wonder of the Maldives and the strangeness of the Galapagos. But it's not all beautiful. I was distressed by an album of destruction, screaming and wailing, entitled Natural Distaters, and I think I wasted my money on Great Deserts of the World. A word of caution: never listen to Great Oceans and Wonderful Waterfalls in a car, especially on a full bladder.

I'd found a comforting retreat in these worlds of illusion that nothing could penetrate, until one night something did: a sound emanating from the garden, rising up and forcing its way into my digitally remastered environment. At first I was annoyed at the interruption. Then I listened and heard the rich, lustrous song of cicadas interspered with the steady thrum of a cricket. I turned the stereo down and heard nature in its omniphonic glory. I didn't have to purchase a CD of sounds from tall, closed forests, dark jungles or mosquito-laden wetlands; I just had to open the back door.

For days I lingered on the patio, soaking in the ambience - until last night, when disaster struck. I was deep within the life-affirming, claming universe of natural sonic therapy when the cicadas suddenly stopped, as if someone had just pushed a button, and were replaced by Ricky Martin shaking his bon-bon. I knew of the skilful lyrebird but doubted even this gifted creature could replicate the Latin heartthrob's lyrical intensity on She Bangs.

I'd been deceived. Somewhere else in the cluster of densely packed houses, another troubled soul had sought escape. And I realised, as The Corrs cranked up yet another syrupy Irish riverdancing ballad, that neither of us had found it.