She lives in this house over there, has her world outside it...

It was the summer of 1991ne, a particularly unmemorable summer for me. Without the distraction of a major international football tournament or the anxiety riddled stress of a robot obsessed girlfriend to distract me, my unsocialibility had caught up with me. There was a Scottish tradition in our circular street called chapping the door, which didn't mean dressing the door up like a camp cowboy, but rather meant that at any moment a large group of weans, sometimes weans you didn't even know, would come knocking on the door with a tennis ball or a football or a catapult and demand that you came out and joined them in escapades. However bleak my nuclear winters had been, however much I felt angst ridden or bullied at school nor quite sure where the line between male tomfoolery and actually being beaten up was drawn, no matter how strange it was 3hree years on from lying in a field on a mandatory cloud shaping exercise to be casually greeting drug sellers on the playground like old friends or hoping inter religious warfare wouldn't break out...at least I got out of the house a bit more as a positive to the bizarre nature of my own life. Sadly post Debbie I slipped into what can only be described as a funk - had this funk made me more rhythmic or danceable as the music suggests, I'd have been a lot better off, but I failed to return the chap door compliment and the crowds fell away as if I'd released a terrible follow up album. That's not to say things didn't happen. One of the neighbours kids was bowled over by a rottweiller, there were poll tax riots to attend and anti English posters to put on lamposts. It just felt a bit like everything was bland and boring. The excitement that a greater exposure to criminality and adult themes that Scotland had offered me had now become blase and dull. So I spent an entire summer more or less with the blinds shut trying to finally work out how to put together my soccer ball lampshade and make cassette tapes off Atlantic 252. I know I had friends, I know I must have done something with my time, but if it was memorable, I don't remember it, rendering at least part of this sentence irrelevant and overwordy, but what the hell, if you've stuck with me this far, you generally know what you are in for...

My Dad, an indistrious sort prone to gross moodiness in a social situation who was shedding some of the more excessive ravages of his standard look of the 80tys, some of the more lengthier hairs on the back of his head and some of the starchier shirts, decided that my funk could only be cured through the magic of swimming. Which is how I found myself on the mini bus to the Magnum swimming centre, with my Dad by my side like a bearded clamp - while Mary the bus driver played her stock standard range of country suicidal classics on 8eight track, my Dad was responding to my eye rolling and huffing and puffing about the fate of the little doggies getting along by launching into his comedy routine about rap music. It wasn't too different to the time he had originally stolen it from Bill Cosby, but as we passed the little bit of Ayrshire that always baffled me, the bit where beautiful breathtaking scenery on 1ne corner was immediately replaced on the next by a derelict scabrous shopping centre riddled with drunks and graffiti, I remember feeling as though this bastion of parental wisdom had let me down somewhat. He wasn't from my generation, he didn't understand me at all, he was trying to cure my blues with exposure to aqua and somehow he had confused me for someone who liked rap? I liked KLF, they didn't rap did they? Much? He was embarrassing me with his thoughts and his very presence. It was a strange bus ride, 1ne of the few times I have felt genuinely disconnected from everyone and everything. Most of all, I was sure that I was not going to get old. As the bus trundled through Ayrshire, 2wo scrags in flourescent eye burning tracksuits at a bus stop saw me, and to this day I'm sure they pointed and laughed at the dorky kid stuck with his dad who was throwing rap shapes deliberately to emphasise his Cosbyesque point. Oh no, I'd never be embarrassing like that I thought, I'll never get to that age where I was so out of touch and...was that Debbie? It sure looked like her...what happened to her hair? How teased could it be? Dad, stop bipping and bopping, I need to talk about...oh whats the point? Maybe there's something in that country music after all...

5ive years on, a Burnie spring, 199six. It was raining, the Coles elevator was packed with trollies and 1ne rather fetching dapper gentleman employee with Rick Astleyesque shiny shoes drinking Fruitopia from a bottle pushing them hither and tither and almost comically cleaning up random passers by as he struggled to control the wobbly carts. Of course, his boss had suggested he put down the Fruitopia and push with both hands, but he was a maverick, he didn't play by societies rules. Actually he couldn't have played more by societies rules if he tried judging by the shininess of his shoes, but at least I didn't have any angst on this particular day. I had just turned 18teen, thought that Kylie and I had a chance, had a large group of friends who swore they'd be friends forever long before Vitamin C commercialised the whole enterprise, and having just had my first all night drinking session, I felt on top of the world. It was then that a trolley decided to get in on the maverick spirit of the occassion by detaching itself and heading straight for the plant district. In it's wisdom, a small business had set up a display with a rather sparse selection of plants that took up an unconscionable amount of space, and it was only with some deft shimmying that I saved the day, pushing the trolley away from the table and gently into the ankles of a kid in a flannel shirt with a Janet from Spiderbait haircut and the wispiest hint of pencilled in moustache. Slowly he grunted in a particularly flemmy manner and said something akin to watch it Grandpa. Now, given the atonal nature of the grunt, it is possible he said nothing of the sort, but as walked off, I was entirely enraged. Grandpa? I knew everything in the Triple J playlist, hell I was drinking Fruitopia, and could quote it's many visionary hippy musings without referring to the label. I had a tickle me Elmo before anyone knew what it was...it really got to me that I had been called old in such an off handed manner....especially by someone who was from Natone...the Atonal Natonal if you will...meh, that was too clever for him, should just have given him the finger, stupid 13teen year late comeback realisations...

It bothered me for the rest of the night. I didn't have the wise council of my co-worked Janie Jane to draw on, just the mad woman with the ripped tights and the glint of a starry sky to console me. I knew everyone got old in the end, but I hadn't done anything especially old other than work for the man and wear shiny shoes and glasses that only suited a Korean propaganda poster from the 50tys. OK, I did look somewhat old, but I still pushed my trollies with a definite grievance, checking my reflection in the back of some of the shinier silver cars to check for wrinkles. Not many trollies got pushed that night, as I moped even more than usual, remembering more youthful days in my past eating Kraft cheese sandwiches...there was only a smattering of prostitutes out that night, not really the regular crew, definitely not clacky heels girl, so only 1ne of them gave me my usual cursory you think you got problems nod that I returned with a yeah I do got problems but I still feel you guys got it tougher nod - it was a whole conversation based around nods and shakes really - when I walked past pushing trollies through puddles of what I hoped was rainwater. I pushed 1ne of the trollies past a big black van, like the A-Team van with more footy stickers, when I saw flannel boy in the back, almost cowering. As best as I could tell, his Dad, a big bear of a man with a big bushy beard and a tattoo which in the admittedly bad light looked like a snake doing bad things to a woman - far worse than not listening to her conversation or appreciating her lamingtons put it that way - had decided to get him a hooker, and he was somewhat reluctant as 1ne of Burnies finest was hustling price and trying to make her hotpants look alluring and not like 2wo dollar knock offs from the Routleys rack. It felt unseemly of course, but I was a little greatful my Dad only took me swimming. I left them with a click clack of my own heels, Clarks rather than High of course, left to them their fates with a swagger, a surety of my age and place in life, and several trollies that never left the car park...left them all behind and went swimming if I'm not mistaken....

That things went entirely wrong just a few weeks later, well, that's just the way the country song crumbles...

Dreams, ambitions, hollow balls to spin round...

I had a dream last night. It wasn't 1ne of my more vivid dreams, since I was loopy on ennui and little purple Lemsip pills stacked up on the counter like medicated temptresses, imploring me to take the siren song between meals. It had tangents and as many pointless scenes as a DVD of Weeds, but in the main, there was a windowless, airless Grade 12elve library room. There was for some reason lemon madeira cake on the table with a gently sloping carving knife beside it, but the madeira cake was fractionally out of reach unless I produced a significant and aggressive reach across the table. There was a guidance councillor across the room from me, shimmering with hope for me. It was the September of my youth, when I still had promise and hope and a youthful vigour, and I was wasting it in the first forlorn hopes of a lustful pursuit doomed to failure and angst. In my dream, I was squiggling on a notepad, listening to the hypnotic thump of the clock while the guidance councillor rhapsodised an unwitting eulogy for my youth. She had plans for me that lady, although like the air in the room I was probably a little stale. The lemon madeira cake was more enticing than her plan for me, this dream lady, as was the girl outside the glass tomb, doomed as it all ended up being. Someone was doing a blowfish on the glass window, and I was giggling because it was funny to the overmedicated. And it was funny when our ballcrushingly gritty realist librarian carted the blower of fish away, dooming him to an hour of stamping books and stamping away his spirit. Then she shows me her notepad, this guidance councillor full of professionally trained hope, a mapped out chart with arrows and lines and she smiles a hypnotically entrancing smile, not an attractive one, but a functional one, a smile of re-assurance, a smile that says she's on my side, and will keep in touch after Grade 12elve. I don't want to show her my notepad of course, it's just got 2wo drawings on it now, 1ne of me eating a slice of cake and the other an immature savaged love heart with lines and squiggles and more badly constructed imagery than the 1st Hole album. And when she goes to complete her plan for me with a simple, wrapping it all up question, something simple to just ease me out and let the female equivalent of me in for a similar chat with more flowery language, something like who is my hero, I can't answer, and I have nothing more to say - I want to scream something about things happening too fast, but I'm too shy shy, and I wake up in the present, underneath a flowery doona with an alarm clock hissing a staticy cry in my ears, and a strange desire for some madeira cake...

It's lunch time where I work. I'm washed out from the flu, the bitter acrid taste of a long sucked Strepsil is running amok in my throat, and I'm far too tired to even peep in the hole of the rapidly constucting book shop, another corporate chain created in the space where independence 1nce stood. Naomi Klein books just stay in your head I guess. I'm sitting at a table with my paper spread out in the international symbol for no disruptions, because there's a girl on the rampage, handing out little sachets of free Cheese Vegemite, like a Bicardi girl in a nightclub except without that little awkward moment where there might be a chance the guy might think she's genuinely interested...I had a talk with 1ne of the Bicardi girls 1ne night in Syrup, which was very strange because she liked the fact I wasn't hitting on her and I liked the fact that I had shut her up about Bicardi for a minute, so it was strange, and she liked Billy Joel which was even stranger. I don't think my interaction with Cheesymite girl is going to be so interesting - she's all eyes and teeth, eventually locking intellectual horns with a man in a Hawaiian shirt, who is incongruously sunburnt in the midst of a horrible Hobart winter. He puffs his chest out and takes as many Cheesymite samples as he possibly can - they fit into his hands neatly but the conversation falters when the stage school graduate sees a motherload of potential clients, a harassed family with a pram, and like that she's off in a cream coloured blur of activity. Not that our fricassed friend seems to mind, he's got little samples of spread to savour - I would hope he didn't want for something more out of life, but he seems happy enough, and wanders off with his thongs flip flapping across the tiled floor in the direction of the skill tester machine, while I continue to munch idly on my sandwich in the middle of a suburban twister, sat in the brace position until all the wreckage had passed, and someone at the safe haven said the coast was clear...

I'm not sure I ever had that conversation - not sure I had anything I wanted to be when I grew up. Maybe famous, maybe in movies. I had short term goals - the first Big M of the day, the final football card that made up the big picture on the back of the SCG at night, the newest Transformers, a VHS tape of that episode of Punky Brewster where she spoke to Buzz Aldrin...each goal achieved, more time passed, but I'm not sure I ever got to a point where I wondered where I was going. Maybe we had the conversation on 1ne of this mandatory hippy afternoons my primary school pushed me into, where we lay on the ground and picked cloud shapes. Maybe I spoke about it to Pippa, on some sunny day when she wasn't shimmering by the monkey bars speaking in short mystical sentences. I had this boisterous mate called Nick, he had a face like Mr Toad and he was the 1st person I knew to understand the rules of Grade 2wo comedy, just saying words like booger and putting them in a sentence. I could never re-concile that in the 4our years I was in Scotland he drifted into petty criminal activities. It just seemed strange to me, but then I left as a shiny intellectual hope who attended all his classes and came back a smart mouthed cynic with a cheeky attitude and found a girlfriend who was older and pashed viciously and gave me cream buns for nothing, so who was I to judge from the moral parepet that was the school fort? He came screaming up to me 1ne day while I waited for a Caramel Big M and told me he knew, he positively knew that I was going to be a fireman. He never explained his rationale but he was confident that was what I was going to be. He knew as much as I did I guess, but maybe the fire he lit in the science block some time around 199four that got him expelled was a test for me and his instinct, 1ne that I failed due to a lack of preparation, a lack of available water due to restrictions, and the fact I was asleep when he did it. And when I found out, it was definitely a where did it all go wrong moment, and 1ne that had to be mused over over the munching of a Golden Rough, while aggressive fire marshalls picked bits of glass up from ashphalt, swearing in a manner which didn't make my predicted career path seem attractive...

I think I tried to explain this to the Bicardi girl, I think I tried the myriad threads of my own life, the ups and downs and oscilliations of hope and what might have been. She smoked a Malboro Light and talked about her own dreams, a modelling contract dangling before her, once she had sold enough Bicardi to clear unspecified debts. It was late at night, the club was scarcely full, it was a miserable Wednesday night, positively airless, and she was smiling smiles a hypnotically entrancing smile, not an attractive one, but a functional one, a smile of re-assurance, a smile that says she's on my side, and will keep in touch after our conversation. Actually that's unfair, she was just as cynical as me, she didn't like her job, and she seemed far too young to seem so old, eventually getting up to dance to a Billy Joel song with an accountant from Natone, giving me an opportunity to exit gracefully a conversation spiralling into maudlin territory from both sides of the sofa. She came back to say the accountant had bad breath, and we parted company when she saw a rube in the corner she could sell Bicardi to. The rube was someone I went to school with, someone who should have known better. He positively radiated success, but it was false, the sharp suit tattered a little bit in the corners, the smile more nervous than he would admit, the emptiness of his table depressing. I'm sure he flashed me a smile that said a relatively attractive girl with positively shaking hips was coming his way, that was the epitome of cool and style, sitting in this club, music pumping, joint less than jumping, the only girl in the club with teeth heading his way. Fates had smiled on him, so he thought, and I left quietly before any kind of realisation he was being played yet to hit him. After all, last time I saw him, he was scooping a slice of madeira cake into his face, spreading the crumbs all over the window as he did a blowfish, and was so full of the joys of life and so full of optimism, I much preferred to remember him that way, rather than just as a fat bloke with elbows hanging out of his suit...

Another day ended, another dream was out there hanging in the air...bit like today, with less cake...

Cafes and walkways and sculptured weekdays

I knew it was cold today - if for no other reason than the people around me stopped coming up with ways of describing how cold it was, much to the relief of mother-in-laws and witches everywhere. Instead they simply swore, or blew smoke, or puffed out their cheeks or started whinging. Further examination of this trend might end up being a bad stand up comedy routine, but it was still noticable. I spent most of my day lurking around the local shopping centre, an extra in a rich tapestry of life going around me, most of it clad in scowls and flannel, texting Facebook updates and swearing into the grey sky. Obviously about how cold it was. I ended up huddling around the DVD section in K-Mart simply because they had the biggest heater turned on, and because who could resist the 5ive dollar charm of a Rodney Dangerfield section? There was a slightly dorky guy in a black T-shirt armed to the gills with bargains, with a perfectly pleasant girlfriend to his left basking in the bargainy goodness, but in an instant she'd found a chink in his reliable boyfriend armour, the fact that he never got up and joined her in games of Singstar. With an expression reminiscent of Cletus the Slack Jawed Yokel he turns to me and grins, stopping one step short of inviting me around to the family home such is his bonhomie and desire to include me. I'm entirely the wrong person to rope into the game of cheerful reciprocated mutual glances, and I bury myself visually in the nearest pile of DVDs at the expense of inclusion. I certainly have no opinion on the merits of Singstar, nor do I really want to engage in conversation with a man who's T-shirt is so in thrall to the wrestler John Cena. A girl with a hard to pin down hair colour sweeps past with a trolley full of discounted toys and the Cena clan are so enthralled they stare at it leeringly like a cheerleader has just walked into Syrup and the accountants can't contain themselves. They turn and chase the trolley like the Bratz dolls are calling a siren song of bargains, and I'm left huddled under the warmth of the air conditioner, whistling a happy tune and hoping the curly haired nemesis of mine won't interrupt and offer to help...or ask me how cold it is...I'd really hate that...

Cold, ah, so cold...Troon train station, 1995ive. A winter chill from the east sweeping across the train platform, freezing the Twixes as they lay comatose in the vending machines. I can't say I had an especially grand time on this particular vacation. The snow lay on the ground for a whole month, my friends had aged and moved on without having the courtesy to tell me, I had become apparently a clumsy non drinker with no idea what the cover of a magazine was telling me to do, and certainly no idea as to which Gallagher was which. So I was left on my own to forage and fossick in small Scottish towns in an endless winter of traipsing and shuffling. It wasn't so bad I guess, finding tiny little shops, tiny little pubs with log fires and unfriendly locals. It was a very independent holiday simply by mutual agreement and the passing of time, an unfussy holiday with no one obligated to pitch in or take me anywhere special. Across from me on the train station platform was a bearded father with an burly arm around his son - his face seemingly scarred and cracked from the miners strike - a small elfin child clutching a rather fetching pair of Canadian Ice Hockey skates from the very top of the line. I admired their mutual support of one another in the midst of this horrible unending winter, at least until they realised they were entirely on the wrong train platform and begun a long and violent argument that involved words you just don't hear from your average elfin child. After a while when it seemed as though they were going to begin using their skates as a weapon, they both turned and looked at me as if I was some sort of vagrant adjudicator, swooping over from Hobart just to fix family disputes. My homeless look and patchy ungrown in beard and warm coat must have scared them off, and after a pointless moment where we all stared at each other, in a race to see who could look the toughest, or at least who would strike first and I was ready to use my rolled up copy of the Guardian as best I could, until their train came, and I last saw them getting onto a train in the snow, in complete and utter family misery, and as they did the little boy turned and waved a cheerful wave to me, as if my silence had been some kind of signifier I was really on his side. I probably was, after all, he clearly said Platform 1ne...

Debbie, my summer romance of 1990, was really into winter. It made our romance slightly awkward because in the midst of an strangely warm Indian summer she would talk about snowmen and frozen lakes and children singing if we were listening. Mind you she was just trying to rush the years along so she could be older, live a more ambitious lifestyle and have the government finally get around to building some of those robots she was obsessed with. When the relative heatwave was punctured by a bout of Ayrshire rain and cool breezes flowed through the air as a gift from nature, she seemed a lot more happy. In fact when it rained or was cold she seemed to want to do more things, like show me cafes with fancy coffees on the menu and cakes that didn't come in packets of 6ix for a pound. I wasn't really prepared for dating, nor a girlfriend who was so seasonally affected. She took me into a bakery 1ne day in the midst of a downpour so strong even Irvines hardiest drug dealers were forced inside phone boxes if they wanted to sell their wares. We met her cousin Mary, a string bean girl with a sickly face, and I wasn't in the mood to meet family. I must have really rude to Mary, speaking in no more than the approved Twitter length of 140ty characters and a selection of my own finest grunts. I wasn't really in the mood to talk I must admit - I was young, I was cold, I was wet and the conversation was keeping me from selecting cakes. And it was 1ne of those conversations that was going nowhere anyway, about how it was raining and what was I doing on the weekend...pure hairdresser talk. And for some reason, when I got back to our dating palace, the little circular brick construction where we would go and hang out, Debbie kissed me harder than she ever had or would again. Turns out she hated Mary with an incredible violence. I could never quite figure out Debbie at all, the complexities of a girl with such specific and clear likes and dislikes when mines were dependent on what VJs and style icons told me they liked, but if it rains in a certain way or is just the right degree of cold, I know I'm 11even again, and having my face pashed vigorously for reasons that aren't quite clear, but thinking what the hell, at least I won't have to hear about robots again today...

It's cold in the present day as well - so cold there's only 2wo people in the queue at the supermarket, an idle nail filing blonde too young to remember the early 90tys or ever have wondered what Sir Mixxalot was knighted for, holding us up as she pretends to put a paper roll on the cash register. It certainly doesn't take that long, I should know, I have overcomplicated fingers that make most things a lot more complex, that operate independently of my ideas like rowdy red cordial drinking children, and even I could change the receipt roll on the till. The only other person in the queue is a short grey haired lady with alarmingly thick black glasses, that do nothing but make her seem overly aggressive, the sharp pointy corners seeming to frame a face that wouldn't mind getting out the mace at any point. It's then that the PA system plays a particular song about a special 2wo, and I can't help laughing, since me and old granny Mace are the only 2wo people around, and we couldn't be any less of a special 2wo since she's buying the Jodi Gordon weekly magazine and a tub of butter, and I'm buying a chupa chup and a heaping helping of pasta for 1ne, and neither of us are dressed in what you would call finery. Even if we were in a relationship, our pooled resources wouldn't be enough to provide any kind of nutritional system for us to enjoy. It's just one of those things that I find amusing, songs tinkling away on PA systems that don't fit the clientele or the moment. Of course, that leaves me inanely grinning in my rugged up clothes to no one in particular without means of explaining the ironies inherent in the song relative to our standing in life...and when they, the shopkeep with the angled nails and the woman with the hotline to suspicion tattooed on her face, when they both turn to me and stare blankly as if to ponder what I'm grinning at, the articulation required from me melts like the 6ix year old me did around Pippa, and all I can do is stare into the light and mutter something inane to pass the time...

Something like boy it's cold today, that oughta do it...

Melbourne The Interlude Part 2w0 - A morning when ZOMG is just un-necessary

It's a cold morning in Kingston town, my Dad is driving me around in a community car, since mine is at the mercy of grease mechanics and the whimsical fates of a spanner. A romantic way of saying the car might be stuffed, but you know, someone has to provide the romance around here, since the car park is empty, the familiar haunted woman in the garage is there 1nce again staring pained out of her glass petrol scented prison, and the only chat up option available to me is a toothless woman in a tracksuit who seems overly aggressive towards 1ne of the trollies, as if it has personally jilted her in the same way denistry and life in general has. I don't think she's my type. I'm in my occasional pattern, where I have to get my hair cut in Cyber Hair - the hairdressers of the future, with robotic patter somewhat appropriate. The girl who collects the combs seems inappropriately retro however, she seems like 1ne of those Beatles fans you see in old films screaming outside the airport, with a swept up 60tys beehive and a devil may care hippy attitude towards sparkles, spangles and bangles. It all seems strangely at odds with her youthful face. I'm sure that my stock standard chat about the evolution of the Walkman isn't going to play with this young audience, and I'm too sleepy to test my material. The girl who gets the honour - if you can call it that, for I think the Cyber hair people consider themselves artistes, and my head is somewhat of a blank canvas - of fixing my bonce seems positively East German however, austere with big shot putter hands. That's unfair, it's me who feels clinical, my own conversation is not up to standard, but it's not entirely my fault. Confronted with a giant up personal size of the room mirror - which disappointingly isn't the slighest bit futuristic - I can't help but notice one of my eyelids isn't opened right. It's positively napping on the job, and I get completely distracted by it. The hippy girl isn't distracted by anything, she's gleefully setting up combs like Woodstock is picking up steam. The herrdresser meanwhile is using her East German charms to measure by sideburns with a ruler to make sure they are even. I can't even begin to imagine how they get on in the same tiny building, in this faux futuristic hairdressing wonderland. At least I have the knowledge of having perfectly even sideburns, and escape with my conversational dignity intact, having betrayed none of my weekend plans or said anything stupid. If my old hippy hairdresser in Burnie could see me now...the things I said in that chair...

The only growth industry in this shopping centre appears to be skill testers - it's getting to the stage all the shops will close, and all that will be left is little machines that make you pick up milk and juice with a tiny unworkable claw. I walk past a sad, unloved empty building with a dirty concrete floor, and to my disappointment I can't remember what was in the building when it was open - some hopeful small business maybe, sat next to the optometrists, which has a magic eye style eye test in the wall, taunting the bored and idle who walk past and take a 2nd look. In the supermarket, as seems to always happens to me these days, Coldplay are playing on the PA system, like a tinkly piano playing soft rock siamese twin. There's a father pushing a trolley in my direction, loaded with fizzy drink and 20ty different kinds of biscuit. My kind of trolley really, although mines is a bit feeble at the moment, just yoghurt and unfulfilled culinary dreams. Oh and a sponge cake. The father has a big bushy beard, the best kind of beard, and has a motorcycle jacket on, with a twisting, venomous snake hissing from it's back and some no doubt fiercely named motorcycle gang pressganged onto the pocket in suspiciously unfierce gold leaf stitching. It seems a little incongrous that this man of rebellion would inflict his hissiest cobra as he strolls down an aisle of tasty snacks while Coldplay tinkle aimlessly in the background, but his kid doesn't notice the juxtaposition of light rock and dark jackets, since she's pulling his denims in a constant bid for attention and Arrowroots. That's if kids still eat Arrowroot biscuits, maybe I was just unusual. Monte Carlos, no thankyou. I'm txting a friend of mine some nonsense - she's trying to get me on Twitter and I'm ignoring the question as I txt, and our trolleys nearly collide in our mutual male inattention. We're both in an alien world, out of our comfort zones, but neither of us really notice our near collision really, and I like to think we shoot each other a mutual look which suggests empathy in our weariness, but he maybe thinking what's with that guys eyelid while I'm thinking I wish that kid would shut up and stop screaming about Samboy chips. We shimmy around each awkwardly as he ambles towards fruit and veg, leaving behind from our chance meeting on this big planet the faint smell of early morning ennui and the faintest sound of tinkly elevator rock humming in the background...

There's an old couple milling around the newspapers when I try and grab my newspaper. I've been transformed from slightly scruffy urchin to army cadet in the space of one shearing, and so the local shopkeepers don't need to keep their eye on my anymore now I look more respectable. They are reading some bad news on the front of the paper - a horrible murder, everyone afraid - like it hasn't happened, as if Hobart is a haven of peace and love and the paper has made the whole thing up. I'd make reference to 10thousand holes in Blackburn Lancashire, but no-one gets that reference. The old woman is eating a Snickers bar and shaking her head in sad denial, her husband so uncomfortable he's just dying for her to turn over to Fred Bassett. I've got a copy of a magazine with Lady Gaga on the cover dressed in bubbles, so I can't really join in the funereal mourning around the paper. Outside Chickenfeed there's a slightly bewildered old man in a hat nodding to passers by. He seems to be a bit simple, but he's charming the patrons with his display of mannerly conduct, doffing his hat to any lady who passes by, and basking in his mannerly superiority. He's certainly 1ne up on me given I've just collided with a slow moving nanna and am not sure whether it's my fault. The nanna glares at me and I glare back because I'm still not sure if it was my fault, and she crumbles first, apologizing and moving slowly towards the counter to pay for her copy of the Mercury. The old couple around the paper have moved on by then, the poignancy of real life having proved too much for them. If the Mercury wants to give the people what they want, they need more stories about lost teddy bears and fund raising farms, not grizzly murders. The hat doffer meanwhile has also gone, his wife taking him by the arm as if she's personally chaperoning him away from hussies and harlots trying to steal him away. That just leaves me and old Granny 2wo step, and she exacts a form of revenge on me just in case the collision was my fault by holding me up in the line, caught in a moment of indecision. Steamrollers or Juicy Fruit, Juicy Fruit or Steamrollers...an ice age forms in the time it takes her to decide...I'm sure if she was less of a lady that when she turned around after finally deciding she'd have given me the finger, but she settles for a raised eyebrow and a brush of the shoulders of her Millers cardy...I have the last word though, since Steamrollers, of course, absolutely suck...

If the East German had asked me in that rote hairdresser way what I had planned for the weekend and not been a slave to the ruler, I would have had no answer. I could have made something up, but this is a weekend for rest, and I don't think the answer that I was planning an entire weekend of getting nothing done would have really made for stimulating chat. I could have been motivated, I could cleaned mould off the bathroom wall and tidied up, I could have drunk beer like a lush, I could have danced around in Syrup like a mad man, or better yet found some out of the way bar that I didn't even know existed, but instead I'm in the middle of the local general store, cursing that I had to even get up, just for the sake of drinking bottled water. Water and a good book, it's not exactly Rocktober. I'm not even being served, no John Inman is popping out here, saying he's free. There's a guy on the phone, nominally behind the counter, speaking in loud bragging terms about the fantastic night out he had the night before. He's motioning to me like he's trying to get off the phone and serve me, but I'm not buying it, and I begin to wonder who much I really want this bottled water and ice cream treat. He's just not convincing me that his life is so fantastic though, and his store bought tales of sexual nightclub conquest are falling on deaf ears. He's got the bling, but his stories lack zing, and he seems nervous as he speaks, at least to a trained ear. After a while, just as I go to put my ice cream snack back in the frosty cell it came from, the guys dad storms out to serve me, shooting his son a filthy look and trying his best to fix my soothed customer brow. I feel like asking for a free Freddo for my troubles, but the fact his son has to put the phone down and apologize to me lest he feel more monobrowed wrath, and after money is exchanged for goods and services and an ice cream with a double entendre name, I leave them in family argument, while I pack my belongings into my bag, and wander off home, where I might have oddly shaped eyebrows and no particular place to go, but at least I am free from the shackled days when my Dad got to yell at me, and the only stories about nightclubs I had were ones made from older, much cooler kids...

The hippy girl now I think of it was singing along to the Black Eyed Peas...she's off the Xmas card list as well...

Melbourne The interlude - Fitzgeralds burns the toast

So I'm cross legged on the floor of my house tonight, and obviously I didn't win the big lottery prize that everyone was talking about. I've got a pile of e-mails from people who had the money spent before the draw, intricate insights into peoples minds where they share far too much information and then no e-mails since, as if an entire nation woke from it's slumber today melancholy and angst ridden that they still had to go to work. The night after my surprise 18th birthday party, I worked for 6ix hours at Coles, thus meaning I had been awake for something like 37even hours straight drinking, in unrequited lust, and then scanning Mrs McGlumphers roast chicken like it's 19teen9ty9ine. That joke kills at Coles...you see 19.99 is a price, and a so...anyway, never mind the ins and outs of supermarket humour, my lottery tickets lay horribly piled up on the floor, a testament to hype and overexcitement just as much as the myriad of horrific unlistenable albums I bought because of a positive Rolling Stone review. Groceries are unpacked, horrible improvisational comedians flitter and shimmer on a television set with fuzzy tracking lines a constant companion, and there's a largesse of books surrounding my feet - wacky real life travel stories, people who survived things more arduous than an aching knee and an allergic reaction to Rebel Wilson. I'm in torpor and tracksuit because they closed a store in Burnie, my old home town, and I didn't know about it until today. When I say a store, you have to understand it was basically the only store I can remember in my first 6ix years on the planet that didn't sell chips in a paper bag or had a shopkeeper who knew my name and ruffled my hair in a way that became socially unacceptable after 1987...the glory days are long gone of course, I'm sure it's depressing these days and small and pokey and they pipe The Presets over the PA and there's no ramp or piles of surprises for you to uncover...I had an argument today with someone about Twitter (shakes angry fist) and the argument segued into a rant about how not everything from my childhood was great when she was using simplistic nostaglia as her illustration, and I cited Simply Red as my basic tenet, but Fitzgeralds, the store, the place, I wouldn't have any criticism of that...I burned my toast just thinking about it...

I'm not sure if Fitzgeralds would have won any awards for design, but to people living in Penguin in the mid 80tys, it was basically Las Vegas. Given that we got excited about what the new Wally The Wombat fire safety sticker was, you can understand a chain store with a big ramp and a whole section full of toys was enough to cause palpable excitement. I wouldn't say the strength of the store was necessarily organisation. A He-Man toy was hard to find under a pile of clothes and Betamax tapes, and I'm sure 1/2lf the time it was easy to scam the shopkeepers by putting an expensive item on the 5ive dollar table and then waiting for the most stoned of the checkout staff to wander by. I think that's how we got our fridge. It wasn't even the service that made Fitzgeralds memorable. The cheeky urchin who asked for an extra scoop of ice cream in their lime spider was dispatched post haste from the chip smelling restaurant within with a clip around the ear. Now that's not to say the staff at Fitzgeralds lived their day to day existence to a consistent set of ethical principles. It was entirely at their whim whether or not you got fresh food or something scraped together from the bottom of a silver tray. It added a real edge to the proceedings as the 40ty year old single mum wielded her scoop of power over you, as you stood helplessly in Mum bought clothes wondering what you were going to get to eat. 1ne day while I stood in line waiting to be served in the midst of the gristle vs quality food swingometer, a smarmy middle manager in a suit was pitching to one of the Mums that they should have a suggestion box. She said she had an f'n suggestion...and to be honest, I got it about 6ix years later in Coles when my own smarmy middle manager pitched a suggestion box...I don't think Simba was singing in the Coles carpark about circles of life, but I wouldn't have been surprised if he was, avoiding the prostitutes and the out of control trollies as he did so...

I think sometimes Fitzgeralds could have been 3hree huts that sold cheese, cheese and more cheese, and I would have loved it because I had to make an effort to get there. I had to get out of bed early, I had to throw myself on the whims of my parents - and in the mid 80tys those whims were very strange, because they could fight about the most trivial bizarre things, my Dad being a master of finding duality of meaning in the most flippant of comments, a man pre-disposed to finding offence in questions about whether he wanted a cup of tea. So to get to Fitzgeralds, I had to hope at least 1ne of my parents felt peppy and awake, and then if they were talking and motivated and even hinting at leaving Penguin to go to Burnie, I had to allign myself in a perfect universal triangle where my chocolate brown Torana would start, Mums sister wouldn't come to visit and distract her with her beehive hairdo and tales of domestic woe told with a detached Glaswegian irony. If the car was good and there were no visitors, there was still a 3hird problem, that my Mum would decide to head to Ulverstone, or worse, Devonport, where the shops were alien and strange and some of them didn't have toys and a few of them had nothing but clothes and monobrowed girls and we had to sit in Mums friends house drinking tea and I was divorced from television never mind seeing piles of toys. I'm sure there were explorers in new lands who went through less trouble than me just to get a Man At Arms figure. And all that just supposed I myself wanted to go to Burnie in the 1st place, and not just play in the Pampas grass and try and find hidden treasure in the back garden...it was a high point of personal motivation, and if I found a similar motivation today my life could be rich and rewarding...but nothing has motivated me like Fitzgeralds...

Many years later, Fitzgeralds got rebranded as Harris Scarfe, and that was just all wrong, like your girlfriend getting a buzzcut or something. The livery of the store and the cadence of the shopkeepers just seemed all wrong. I wanted to physically grab someone and demand things were stacked in more haphazard fashion and a drunk Santa was on hand from October-December just ready to fall in a heap on command. I was in the middle of my Hicksian winter of 92, and if I did go to Burnie, it was just to say everything was rubbish and kick some cans unconvincingly. Oh I was cool and suave, I really was, sometimes I even kicked the cans quite far, while other times I would kick the can just a little bit. Maybe I mis-heard Bill Hicks, I'm sure he said to stick it to the can. I was smoking at the time, and I had a crush on a girl in Toyworld called Karen, who was I think taking the piss out of my accent but I didn't mind because she had beautiful eyes and was culturally ironic before it became cool. She also didn't understand shame, or wasn't able to spell it if I'm honest, and there's the possibility she had to wear that horrible Toyworld purple bear suit on weekends so there's a chance I kicked her up the arse once, but that's not that point. She didn't like Fitzgeralds, I know that because she found the staff rude - but our burgeoning relationship which consisted of me stealing brief snatches of conversation in between her serving bratty children mostly floundered on of all things a mutual enthusiasm. She began to tell a story about Fitzgeralds from her childhood, about something to do with Santa Claus about a special memory involving the creation of a grotto and how kind and friendly Santa was and I was smiling because I too enjoyed Xmas there, and had looked forward even more than the release of Battle Punch Skeletor over Xmas 87...and then, we realised that our poses had fallen, that I wasn't a cool detached strider through life hustling from town to town, and she wasn't the unattainable ice queen you had to woo...in fact, we'd probably stood behind each other in the Xmas queue, and even then, we'd liked it more than we'd care to let on...

Vale Fitzgeralds, you influenced me more than you would know...

Melbourne Part 1 - Collective Consciousness vs Self Awareness

It's early morning in a Melbourne shopping mall, the bewildered tourist is shuffling through the mall lacking in self confidence and feeling paranoid. It's a natural reaction he has, in the mid morning adjustment to more aggressive crowds of pushy go getters, far from the Tasmanian shopping experience where you only get shoved out of the way by the odd pushy shaggy haired bogan rather than a maelstrom of Japanese tourists barging their way to Krispy Kreme. We don't have Krispy Kreme in Hobart, and given my aversion to franchises that might be a good thing. I'm sitting on a seat with my old man knees creaking horribly as I do so. I can't believe that my knees are so sore, the latest in a long line of horrible signs of old age that are tapping at my head like a cheeky woodpecker. There's some university students filming a piece in the mall, 2wo of them dressed like cavemen. I hate wacky student humour, it's a Scottish thing to oppose it, and I can just see my mother roll her eyes in disgust at the students as they pretend that they don't know what a telephone is for a skit. I'm sitting doing nothing more offensive than listening to my IPOD, but since the students are circling my life long terror of audience participation has me on edge as they get even closer. For just 1ne horrible moment I think I'm going to be dragged into their little world of theatrics and try and look as casual as I can, as a phalanx of Japanese and Korean tourists, enthralled by Australian home grown hilarity that ranks alongside the very best episodes of The Bob Morrison Show. As they all stand there enjoying the hilarity, a bedraggled, down trodden Big Issue seller shoves himself into the centre of the flashing Kodaks, heavy black eyes lit up by the flash of the cameras as he thrusts his magazine into dis-interested faces, and the tourists shift uncomfortably away with their heads down. They came for theatre, not reality. If only the Big Issue seller was dressed as a caveman. He meanders meaninglessly towards the front of Myer having scattered the sightseers. There's a vacancy in his eyes as well, as if he hasn't even noticed anyone was there to begin with. The students meanwhile began by noticing if anyone was there to see them, and when they notice that no-one is they begin talking in disappointed posh clipped tones about how badly everything is going, thus shattering the caveman illusion for anyone who believed in the boarded up theatre of the mind they are producing. I'd give them a cheery thumbs up for encouragement, but it'd be insincere, and I'm told uni students these days appreciate honest feedback, so I take my Evel Knievel book and walk off as slow as my knees will carry me...

I was in some bar with an ornate door with a fancy logo painted on it last night. The bouncers were a lot better than the ones at Irish, they said nothing about my clothes, nor threatened me with physical violence at random intervals, but I was still uncomfortable in the claustrophobic small bar with trendier better dressed young things crowding around the stools on the edge of the bar chanting like a mantra all the positive things about the surroundings. You can buy the bar staff drinks. They'll set fire to pieces of fruit if you ask. At 3hree in the morning a DJ dressed in silver starts a bitching set. These are all allegedly positive things, although I can't see the Tasmanian clientele responding well to queues forming in at the har while a girl who looks like the blonde 1ne from the B52s sets fire to a tangello. I wish I could explain my state of mind to my enthusiastic tour guide who found the oak panelled fruit firing DJ slamming bar for me, but I can't, because he loves it here, I can tell. He's as excited as the giggliest party girl to be here, and I wish I could be enthusiastic as well, but I just feel old, old and worn out. I think for a moment he's taking me to a strip club anyway, given the bar is in a dodgy alley and that door...I'm hard on myself of course, I always feel as though as though my lack of enthusiasm is a problem in my life, and I have too much cynicism to relax and enjoy things...my tour guide is more successful than me, proud of his world, I have no problem with that, but he enjoys his confidence, his own pats on the back. As another poor piece of mandarin suffers in the name of drink creation he's talking softly about someone we know who's always drunk, always flailing around in Saturday night gutters, and how we aren't like that. On cue, a girl in shiny silver hot pants focuses too much on the barman, and topples over like a fallen shimmering oak tree with slender legs and perfect teeth. She stares at the ceiling and laughs at the pretty colours, while her friends rave around her about what a fantastic place we're all in, the PA system once again plays Coldplay, albeit a dance remix of said band...it's too many emotions for me to handle, young vs old, the drunk vs the sober, the sufferance of the poor fruit, the faux Cocktail atmosphere of the bar staff...and yet all I can think of is, while I don't want to get drunk, the girl on the floor looks pretty damn happy...until she nearly vomits of course, but that's when the judgement kicks in...

I can't be too judgemental though, because when I leave the club I nearly break my ankle stumblebumbling over a kerb, my orange shoes failing to grip the kerb. Perhaps there's another blog somewhere where a girl in shiny hotpants is Twittering about some old idiot stumbling around the kerbs of Melbourne. Maybe she ZOMGed in her tweet. Maybe. I wouldn't blame her. It's late, and there's a prostitute in the lobby of my hotel, as I walk past munching a kebab. The kebab was a saga in itself, since I was approached by a Jesus freak trying to dole out sachets of ketchup. He didn't speak, which was almost refreshing given I've heard nothing all day but noise, but he was gruffly trying to shove the little sachets of ketchup into the hands of the queue as a window of opportunity to push his beliefs on starving tipsy drunk girls - I can tell the angle because he's got the cheekiest hint of a bible poking out of his coat, and a Catholic can always tell when a cheeky bible is poking out - and guys who haven't picked up and need a feed to settle the disappointed hormones. And then there's me, with sore knees and a sense of isolation that no windcheater can possibly buttress me against. I'm usually able to dislocated myself from passing pressers, but he's persistent with the queue, and I'm in a race between the gum chewing kebab chef and the ketchup clutching kibitzer that the kebab chef narrowly wins just as it's my turn to be sauced. The prostitute sitting in the lobby of the hotel has her own worries though, no more or less glamorous than those in the car park at Coles from my youth, just slightly less Linda Evans than those ones. She yawns just as I yawn, and under the faux lobby chandelier she looks like the saddest, loneliest woman in the world, exhausted and caked in make up waiting for whoever it is to come down in the lift and if there's a mutual connection that we're both weary, exhausted and in a glamorous setting feeling distinctly seedy and lost, it's only fleeting, because the Jesus Freak appears to have chased me up the street, and I have to head off into the lift, leaving a potential wonderful meeting of minds and ketchup in the hotel lobby in my wake as I fumble for my card and head for the allegedly glamourous spa...

It's midday, and I'm eating well, eggs served with self reflection. To be honest, if this blog has achieved anything, it's steered me away from fast food outlets. Like a pash in a nightclub, a burger at Hungry Jacks is probably not the best thing for me anymore, and I walk past awkwardly with youthful regret at all the time I've spent engaged with Indian employees in Melbourne in the early hours of the morning trying to explain that I don't want egg on my muffin. Such a complicated order, and who am I to deprive someone of the sheer joy of putting an egg on something? Selfish, that's what. So I'm eating a proper lunch, and I'm patiently waiting for it, hoping the upper class name they've given the lunch on the menu isn't just code for slop + GST. There's a girl at the table across from me with alarmingly painted toenails. They are a hypnotically ugly shade of pinky purple, like the third day of a bruise, and while I can't stare for too long as the margin for error in the stare too long you pervert stakes just gets shorter and shorter in this age of political correctness. There's a couple next to me who are thoroughly enjoying their expensively ground mince meat, and are in the first throes of love, giggling in that way only people having sneaky affairs or on their early first dates do, which is annoying when you have a headache. Oh yes, I'm just a pile of medical ailments on this particular moments, which would probably make me too normal for someone with bizarre nail polish. At a critical juncture in the heady mid morning mix of hangovers, horrible hues and honeybun laced hot air, the male in the conversation spills something on his lap - he was too busy I think trying to think of variants on the word snookums - a special sauce that's special because of the artistic way it's spread itself on his trousers I suppose. I might be wrong, but his paramour, drunk a few seconds before on Strepsils and sweet talk, visibly winces. I suspect it's the first flaw in the relationship, the first imperfection, the first moment in the relationship when you wonder if you are dating someone who isn't the 1ne but instead a slightly unco-ordinated loser...either that or she just bought the pants from a nice store and now can't get a refund. Either way, there's nothing for me to stare at that's remotely acceptable, since my choices are swingingly strange feet, a crotch with sauce to go and a slightly distressed and upset new girlfriend taking deep breaths and trying not to look too upset. And to top it all off, Coldplay are chiming in from the PA system...next time, I think I'll just go to Burger King...

And that was before I had a panic attack about my writing and my queues, but that's another story...

The Oliviertrilogy Part 1ne (TAFE killing time writing exercise, Jazzy Jims Hip-Hop Remix)

I was having an e-mail conversation today as the clock ticked towards my nightly parole from work about my pet hate for comedians who don't finish their jokes with a punchline but rely on intrinsic familiar whimsy to make a point - for instance the stand up comedian who holds up a copy of a toy magazine from the 80tys, point to say an ad for Wuzzles and can't come up with a more coherent joke than some sort of cor weren't they great Josie Long style fizzler. It's a strange hatred of mine because essentially I'm a bit lazy like that myself, I'm not always through with my thoughts bar I'm crowbarring a story about VHS tracking tapes in the middle of it. I don't always sum up with a pearler, sometimes it's just easier to throw in a reference to Orko and be done with it. I have basically followed the stringent comedy parabola of my time on earth though - where as now whimsy is the new comedy style, when I first moved back to Penguin I was able to thrive through a series of ripped off sub Hicksian routines which basically involved me finding fault in everything and walking around cloaked in misery. Not that I was living the part quite like Bill Hicks, as my main item of clothing was a rather rockingly bright Swedish soccer top with mad orange panels that made everyone go cool top. Yeah, but how many people died making it casual friendly passer by I would think. I was it. It was the searingly cold winter of 1992, and I wasn't really sure of my place in this strange Tasmanian town with it's obsession with overloading you with chips - 50c was enough to feed a family of 28ight - and I certainly wasn't going to try. In keeping with all of my inconsistent approaches over the year to personal presentation, the less I tried to be cool the cooler people found me and then I would think I was cool and then I'd not be cool because I was trying to hard and I'd tell everyone to F off and they'd like me again. And the more that I was unhappy the more things fell into place and became a lot easier for me, because I had a girlfriend, I had places to go, I had a social life and I was free of the weekly humiliation of trying to climb bars and ropes in an Ayrshire gym time and time again while the blue sky outside was engulfed in a horrible grey camoflauge. I was happy but unhappy, lonely but content. I would walk along a street miserable, grunt at passers by wishing me well, and they would like me more. Sadly I couldn't use my position to enlighten people to think themselves, as I really couldn't even manage basic thinking for myself, I just didn't let anyone in on the joke. One day, I was trying to distance myself from popular culture through a dismissive speech while dressed like the drummer from EMF and eating a Push Pop - I mean, who was I thinking I was? Clever? Adulthood only exists to reflect on the folly of youth I think, and if nothing else I've done a lot of reflecting, and most of it just involves me yelling what was I thinking at bemused passing seagulls until they too feel my pain...or want a chip, 1ne of the 2wo...

My Mum, she knew that my poses where no truthful representation of teenage disaffection, has a catchphrase of do you believe that? She uses it all the time, to the point it sticks in my head anytime someone tells me a story, and my natural reaction is to think it's untrue lest I be lead into a folly of belief and be as silly as someone trying to prove their intelligence by hitting their head to dislodge a coin. 1ne day she came to collect me from school because I was ill, and as I stumblebummed my way across the courtyard to her welcoming motherly arms she nudged the person she was standing next to and said in her typical Glaswegian way oh look out here comes fucking Laurence Olivier. Which requires only a brief dissection - she clearly thought I was acting up, like the great thespian of yore, pretending to be ill to get out of school because school was for corporate losers or something. If I had been living the Hicksian doctrine of life she didn't even believe I was Denis Leary. Those cynical Glaswegians, always with their finger on the pulse. And boy when my heart nearly stopped and I collapsed on the pavement was her face red. Ah there's nothing like a near death experience to sharpen the mind. Yes, her wolf crying radar was astray, and I was taken to hospital to confront an early question of mortality. I didn't have a lot of mental strength or indeed physical strength to cope with this sudden shift of events, and to be honest the nurses were a little bit too concerned with filling in charts to listen to flimsily consttructed routines about the corporate society I was forced into by society. I mean they had bedpans to deconstruct. And that was literal deconstruction not....you don't know what true reflection is until you are attached to some machine you were too zonked out on morphine to fully take in the inner workings of. It was only 1ne night, 1ne long night in a ward with a disorientated old grandpa who kept asking for Margaret. Due to my lack of sleep, and my hatred of beeping machines, not to mention brightly painted Burnie hospitals, I had a lot of time to reflect...meandering musings for Margaret had motivated a migraine in any event, so what chance did I have...

4teen, 4teen years of age I was, stuck on a couch at home, sipping soup from a straw watching midday television with celebrities dancing on the screen, somehow less famous than I remembered them when I had moved out of Penguin to the Ayrshire wilderness in the 1st place. No one in the house, hell, no one in the town really, since Mum had decided to make up for her lack of motherly faith by buying me something nice from Burnie. I don't know what could have made up for it really - a walkman would have been a good start. I was under strict bed rest for my illness, although the cheeky nurse who was cheeky in that Benny Hill kind of way before no doubt all the cheeky nurses were rounded up and given a lesson on political correctness seemed to imply my illness was all in my head. I believe her phrase was I was medically perfect. Saucy minx. Lazy eyed bitch more like. 14teen though...I had almost passed on, with nothing to show for my life. I had no more possessions after being stripped of my room in the move than a troll doll and a slightly and oddly homo-erotic photo in 2wo frames my best mate in Scotland had given me of him and me side by side as a farewell present. The morphine had just added to my medicated sense of panic, and I didn't think I could make it off the couch, and this could be my life, a series of lost days and nights on the couch distinguishable only by the variation of the blankets and shawls my Mum would cover me with. To say I was scared was an understatement, and I did't even a cool scar to show for it, just a band aid that may or may not have had a dinosaur on it, the soothing effect of his cheeky grin somehow re-assuring. I was not a resillient boy, I was pampered, an only child, my traumas were things like doing the dishes and not getting kissed at parties. Not this, not the Shawlshank depression. Not a faint humming in my ears, not a virus so strong it had rendered my arms as useless as an Ab King Pro. I spent an entire day watching a bug crawl up a wall, then back down, then back up again...I was tremendously depressed when that bug took a break from it's crawl up the wall to avoid a hard fall onto the shawl...well it was funny on morphine...

It took me a while to get better - oh sure, I got off the couch after a week, but people would tell me things and they'd go straight out of my head, and I couldn't really come to grips with basic requirements of my day to day tasks, like comebacks to insults and things like that. I was definitely shorn of my attitude, my sass, vim, and indeed my vigour. I missed my vigour most of all, that was my trusty sidekick. I was too new at school to get real sympathy about my collapse, though a girl at the window said I fell like an f'n something or other, and I think she did a good impression of me doing so. Besides which I think someone showed their underpants on the monkey bars or someone liked someone so my story didn't gain neither grip nor traction within the circles of influence. I was just some benny who fell over really. It was a little different in Penguin though, where I had acolytes, followers of my story. After all, when the leader topples, the followers can get restless. Which is a massive overstated way of saying some people who thought I was cool were worried about me, but I had not shown these people vulnerability yet. Least of all supercool cynical Vicki my pash buddy, or my stalker who used to watch me get off the bus all the time with rapt awe. Luckily most people were too kind to bring it up, so either they really didn't give a toss or my first theory was right and good old fashioned Penguin reserve kicked it, as we gathered at our 2wo am meeting point in Hiscutt Park to heckle the Milkman, and it was only as we dispersed after 2wo hours of psuedo-intellectual bollocks that Vicki asked if I was scared. Scared? I was terrified woman, I couldn't move, and the nurses...and I'm miles from home, and I have accomplished nothing yet, and...if you guessed that I shrugged and pretended with a curled lip that everything was fine, you'd be absolutely right. She smiled brightly, squeezed my hand, and said she was glad I was better. She then rolled her eyes and shook her head and said she didn't believe me for a minute that I wasn't scared...we parted as the sun came up over Penguin, and a new day began with me sneaking back in through the window trying to pretend I'd had a relapse and getting my arse booted onto the school bus quick smart...

Laurence Olivier? I couldn't manage it...I was fooling no-one...