Post #99 (Nick Maxwell vs Blondie vs Pram Valley vs Competitions what I aint won)

So I had this strange weird zen moment today, let me set the scene. I went out of work, across the road, down escalator, the girl in the flower shop who doesn't know everyone can see down her top when they go down the escalator was pruning, the guy in Angus and Robertson who gets huffy if you read too many books was huffy, the girls are Boost Juice were smiling contemptously, blue eye shadow girl was on her lunch break, and life was ongoing - except that it's school holidays, which meant that it was pram valley time. Sure enough, every single time I turned a corner, it was right into a ruck or gaggle of small children running blindly in all directions while a harried, harassed single mother tried to shout a series of generic names with no enthusiasm, hoping the child would respond to the simple two syllables adorned to it at birth (everyone today seemed to be called Brayden). So I'm looking at Underbelly and just praying that generic indie chick #3 at Sanity isn't going to start sales pressuring me to buy an MGMT CD (if one person tells me they are the future of music...) when I see one kid just absolutely cane himself and trip over. His mother, a pushy woman with a purple face, a clear gym junkie, has sprinted over to him and tried to pick him up, but the kids clearly hurt and no matter how much she pulls his arm, he's lying on the ground motionless, and getting in the way of her regimented schedule. Meanwhile, out the front of the ABC shop, another kid has tried to steal something by Ian Parminter (obscure reference #102) while his mate is screaming at him for being a dickhead and security is giving chase. And outside the front of Boost Juice, a couple are having a full on argument, probably about juice, although they were both about 12, so I don't know if that counts as a couple? At 12, you can be boyfriend and girlfriend just because you both like The Ting Tings. And in the midst of this triangle of chaos, on my IPOD comes the Blondie song Fade Away and Radiate, which if you don't know, is this really lovely lilting little Bond theme style ballad song. So that made me perfectly calm and relaxed, like those teachers in a Cup a Soup ads, while everything else was falling apart. It was either zen, or a mild out of body nervous breakdown, but at least I wasn't breaking up because of juice and The Ting Tings...

My Mum has bought me a packet of Milky Ways today, and I've gone, er, why, and she's pointed out that it's got a competition coupon on it to go and meet Strauchanie at a BBQ hosted in your honour - now, I will say, the only reason she bought me this (Strauchanie if you don't know is a comedy character of Peter Helliar...you can hold your excitement) is because there's a promise to meet five of Strauchanies mates, which she presumes is Collingwood players (and it's one too few for him to bring The Pussycat Dolls). A friend of mine became Nick Maxwells friend on Facebook and now he gets invited into the rooms after Collingwood games, just because he's his Facebook friend. I wonder if the Collingwood rooms are like the Penguin football club rooms where women with Paddle Pop sticks scraped the mud off the players boots. Anyway, this kind of thing just doesn't happen to me anyway - the best I got from any of my Facebook friends was a picture of a cheeky midget chuckling (maybe that was better than Nick Maxwell now I think of it). There's a book in KMart which is basically a guide to win competitions like this one, I don't meet many famous people and if I do it goes really badly (let's not talk about Jimeoin) or they think they are far more famous than they actually are (lets not talk about Candice Alley...oh lets). Until that particular night in Adelaide, I had never actually heard anyone ever say "don't you know who I am", let alone say it without anyone actually knowing who she was. I of course knew who she was, the singer of falling and the missus of Grant Hackett, but she was certainly not impressing the bouncer. For reasons that are lost to time, we got into the nightclub she was trying to get into, and she didn't. She looked right at this bloke who got in the same time we did and hissed "I'm famous! Why aren't I getting in! Why is he getting in! In a flannel shirt! The little shit! Why him why!" - the blokes response was "cos I work here, I've got a bar shift in ten minutes..." - in fairness, she didn't have an answer to that....

I don't win many competitions - aside from the block of chocolate I mentioned that I won at the casino, I can list quite easily anything I've ever won in a competition or raffle situtation. Two meat trays at The Victoria Tavern, and tickets to go and see Crossroads at Crown Casino. Yes, I won tickets to go and see the Britney Spears movie, at it's second ever showing in Melbourne. This was back in Britneys salad days, and how I won them was by guessing how many jellybeans were in a jar...no wait, that's not right...it was basically for being able to complete a series of song and movie title....no...alright, I won a colouring in competition. I had a bet with a friend of mine that colouring in competitions were all completely random and not actually judged on ability to colour in, a theory I developed whenever Penguin had it's Easter displays up and 1st prize in the colouring in competition always went to a kid who went psycho with a purple texta all over the egg and their work was outside near the post boxes while the meticulous kids were shamefully displayed inside the post office (akin to a book in a uni library sitting on the sports shelf - no one is looking, believe me). I said to him that I would prove this by submitting a large amount of single colour scribbles into colouring in competitions and betting that I would win at least 1 in 10. I didn't even need to get to 10, I won first go, with a lovely coloured in Britney that I called "Spears in Burnt Sienna", a mixture of mushed up scribbled crayon and little bits of Cherry Ripe. I thought I was going to win her CD and instead, won tickets to go and see her movie...I'm not really embarrassed to say I quite like Britney, but it was definitely a huge stretch to jump from I like half the first album to sitting through her movie, but I went anyway because I had nothing better to do (honest) and I was the only person there without an attached child. Yes, it did look incredibly dodgy, especially as I seemed to be the only person who knew the words to the songs...I was able to sort of turn this into a positive by claiming to quite a foxy woman who looked a bit like that woman singer out of St Etienne that my bitch of an ex wife had let me down on an access visit and that was why I was all on my own...I was thinking on my feet, these days I'd probably have said I want to hear Not Yet A Girl, Not Yet a Woman, back off my step, but I wasn't sure if that was lame or smooth, and I was a little insecure in such blatantly uncool musical steps so I played the safe option and scoffed a little at the movie...not unreasonably, our quite flirtacious conversation might have gone further had I been able to reasonably answer the question why was I staying til the end of the movie...well, I wanted to know what happened to Mimi...and so did she, if she was really honest...

I think the only other thing I've won - well, let's set the scene first. My auntie (big red headed woman, very Scottish realist, married to my uncle, who's an expert in conspiracies against Catholics) took me to her works family fun day in Glasgow - now, when my own work had a family fun day, a bloke threw a backpack at the singer and the whole thing was abandoned by security - but this was definitely like a big carnival, a bit sponsor friendly, but with clowns, and big tops, the kind of worker reward just don't get in the profit shaving 00s. Anyway, I wandered off to go and see, I don't know, Hue and Cry sing on the big stage (they never stopped looking for Linda) at the back of the showgrounds, when I perchanced on some local radio DJ toolshiner types playing the yes no game on stage (which if you don't know, is a game where you can never say yes or no...we didn't have no Internet, but we sure made our own fun in 1989, right Kid Rock?). I am brilliant at the yes no game, it's second only to Go Fish on my list of mad skills. So I got on stage, and was cruising through easily, live on whatever Glasgow regional radio station this was, when I answered one question "I don't know" - this little pimply shit of a kid has gone "he said no!" and I said "I said know, it's a different word, especially written down. I am aware this doesn't translate to a fascinating conversation now, but one day it will fill in some blog space, so keep arguing"...so we had an argument live on radio which resulted in me calling him a spoon (imagine if I've called him a spork, he'd have jumped off a bridge). The DJ decided that I had said no, after some call and response, and called a girl up on stage to punish me with tickets to Hue and Cry...actually, he called her up on stage to put a custard pie in my face. As she bounded on stage, all pigtails and Rexona, the DJ said "No, you are putting the custard pie in her face" and that's what I did, and I realise now it's all stage managed and hilarious DJ patter, but at the time, I did feel a bit bad, but not as bad as I would have felt picking flan out of my eyes. My reward for all this malarkey and shenanigans was...a Delltones T-shirt. It said "The Delltones Make Me Smile"...and it was bright pink...

I also won some crayons for writing to Fat Cat, but that's another story...