Sinitta, Soundwave, Sad Silences, Serenity...

So a friend of mine lost her job today - although the word friend, with it's implication that if you were in trouble they'd come save you true blue arm around the shoulder conotations, may be a tad extreme. She's a girl I know quite well, although our conversations are entirely superficial and based on things like she knows Soundwave from Transformers (she has a Soundwave T-shirt you see) and so do I, and I leant her a Bananarama album once upon a Venus, so it's a very Grade 2 kind of friendship. Anyway, being that she's one of the few people who's able to call me darling without me wanting to deck them, I guess I do feel some kin to her, although not enough kin to really offer sympathy in cases like this. I sometimes think that unless you know me really, really well, this is the kind of friend I am. If you need cheering up, I'm your man, since I'm trained by all Scottish reasonableness not to pry or discuss emotions. Anyway, she lost her job because her shop got new owners and they fired everyone to rehire people they knew - which is a bit harsh, but all I could think today was, maybe if that happened at my work I'd get off my arse and do something. I was actually in quite a good mood today though - not just because some advert about seasalt actually managed to conjure the greatest radio jingle of all time. It's probably because I have two days off next week to waste blogging and drinking juice on my deck, with the time on the clock irrelevant, the meetings unattended and the stereo blasting unquestionably uncredible pop songs, sitting in my lovely Hamilton Academicals retro shirt, listening to something maybe something from the Sinitta ouevre...ah, Sinitta, in her own mind, the first ever black pop star. I'm looking forward to it immensely. I also have to brave the wilds of Cyber Hair to get my hair cut, braving the wilds of amiable chit chat about my weekend and the massed ranks of school leavers in amusing novelty polo shirts gathered around drinking shakes from Wendys, too high on malt to care about the future...and some of us, like me, just never get round to such concerns...we just take the malt...

Speaking though of the kind of friend I am, it always makes me think of my trip to Launceston about 4 years ago. They, being the monolithic company I work for, decided that my future would benefit from sitting in a windowless conference room in a big wooden chair drawing concentric circles and making lists of my 100 favourite songs that start with F, and they would send me on a two hour drive and make me stay for a week up there just for the hell of it. I never pay attention in training courses, my mind is too active to play the what TV show are you type bonding sessions that make up day 1, and too dis-engaged to play the lets be company people game that makes up day 3-5. Being let loose in Launceston is hardly the kind of treat you queue a lifetime for anyway, even with a mildly endorsed company credit card to pay for snacks. I remember sitting in the Launceston mall, with my corporate cup of coffee, and wondering how it all came to this, but still enjoying the coffee nonetheless, as well as Launcestons amiable service providers hustling me into buying the wrestling figures I was looking at. I'm sure that my contributions, when called for, in the training course were crisp and amiable, but I wasn't entirely convinced, even then, that this would be a course with listening to. I'm sure the course moderator knew that I wasn't interested, but he was very nice, and since he invented the entire job interview process for the whole of Tasmania, not a bad person to know. I'm sure that if I really thought about the course, I might be able to remember something useful about it, but I can't. The only other thing I can remember about the whole trip was a particularly depressing and horrible quiz night at the local pub where the questions were horrifically difficult (ie. they weren't about Sinitta) but from what I can gather they were pretty repetitious to ensure strangers never one. Having attended pointlessly as a group to try and bond, we left in the face of the double immense difficulties of 6 dollar beer and questions about Wittgenstein (which AFL team did he play for?) - I left my group standing in the middle of the street, having made my excuses to go back and get some sleep when I wasn't being zapped by the nylon sheets, and the last I heard they were plotting to go to a 3am seance. I can only assume they were desperate to conjure up the ghost of Wittengstein, and see if even he knew, as apparently five regulars suspiciously did, what his middle name was...

At night, I would retreat to the budget travel lodge with the nice foyer (never judge a lodge by it's foyer) to drink mini bar whisky with Travis, my travelling companion who's driving nearly killed me about six times on the way up to Hobart. I like Travis, but his once cheerful belief in human nature was fractured and broken by a marriage breakup, which was the elephant in the two bedroom with basic cable and nylon sheets room we had been randomly assigned by a computer based system. To the disinterest of my prying knowledge, it seemed like he'd come home from work one day to find all the mutual stuff in the house had been moved out, including the family dog, and even worse, the TV. While he didn't talk about it too much, his face betrayed a thousand emotions, especially as someone who had been renowned for his love of life had suddenly developed a taste for calling everything fucking rubbish, including, oddly enough, the pile of fucking rubbish the cleaning ladies at the travel lodge forgot to clean up every day. The major problem as it happened was that one of the girls who worked in Launceston, a girl called Amanda, also had just broken up her marriage, and once particularly gruesome night, while I was trying to watch, I don't know, Steve Bunces Boxing Hour, they let loose over some rapidly congealing pizza and fortified wine from a bottle, about how horrible marriage was, and how horrible the pizza was, and then a bit more about how horrible marriage was. It was like being trapped in some horrible play, and I don't know why I didn't get up and leave, as the conversation was as acrid and bitter as the receptionist at the front desk, and the language was ripe. I was completely depressed and wore down by the relentless, relentless downbeat life is terrible someone get a Morrissey record conversation, but it got a lot worse when they asked me what I thought - I was put in a no win situation - even though my reference point being a horrible break up caused by lamingtons could have helped me join in the slough of human despond that was engulfing our little room, no doubt it wouldn't have been enough to be on the level of human suffering they believed they were on. We sat for an eternity in a sad silence while they waited for me to look up from the New Idea and contribute. So, I did what I could - I said I wanted to go to sleep, Amanda left the room, and then I suddenly woke up and decided to take Travis out on the town to cheer him up. It was about all I could think of to do, and it wasn't a bad idea...

Well, it would have been a good idea, had we made to the end of the street. I had plans in my head of some sort of supportive group endeavour in which perhaps Travis would pick up and realise life was worth living (or at least shut the fuck up, either or) through an entertaining night out at the Saloon. I wouldn't leave a slice of pizza and a stick of garlic bread served by the hottest girl in Launceston (no jokes) back in my hotel room for just anyone, I considered it a genuine act of friendship. I didn't really want to go out after all, let alone in Launceston, but hey, if there's drinking to be done, I step up (someone grab a lampshade). As I patted myself on the back though, I noticed that I was patting alone (matron). Travis was still at the top of the street, illuminated by a neon street light for some store that had a malfuctioning S. I figured perhaps there was some outdoor moping going on, but when I came back up the street, he in fact was pointing to something in the window. A slide night. A slide night of someones kayaking holiday. And he wanted to go. So, I did what any true and dedicated friend would do in a situation like this. Left him to it. There isn't any part of me that would want to go and see kayak slides, no matter how exotic the locale. So I went back to the pizza and curled up asleep. I had a wonderful moment of pure blissful serenity, so quiet and still, that I still remember it, at least until the nylon sheet sent out a shocker to my funny bone. A lot of people think friendship is being there for people, but in Scotland you learn it's also about leaving people alone - sometimes. I sat on the little balcony bit (a generous description) and watched Launceston go by, while Travis, for what it's worth, enjoyed his kayak slides and probably made some new friends. The next morning over a breakfast of lumpy bacon and surprisingly crisp and fresh toast, we didn't say much, but we knew that we had done the right thing, leaving each other alone for the night. Travis dug into his scrambled eggs, and began to tell me all about his night, albeit in truncated sentences, which was good, as I wasn't listening...at least until he told me until the end of the slide show, the guy hosting began rolling big giant joints...

So that's the kind of friend I am - if you want to talk, I don't listen, but if you want to smoke joints, I let you...in return, all I ask is you let me enjoy my pop...and of course, my cheesy pizza...

Emma Dundonian

So last night I had this really vivid dream that I was going out with Pink, but she was mardy at me and decided to, with the help of one of my friends, to make a list of all my faults and all the things I had to fix about myself to continue going out with her including ditching my Transvision Vamp T-shirt...as it happens, remembering the details of what happened in this dream kept me sane today, incarcerated as I was with a man who was telling me one to one about his job and giving me an outline of his day. Nominally, this was to help me do my job better, but I could see out of a window, see bright blue skies and happy children with chocolate ice creams that, hopefully, were chocolate ice creams, and his banter was rehearsed, his every gesture a calculated and practiced smirk or gesture of re-assurance. By the time I remember to nod and pretend to be interested, our meeting is over, and for some reason he is pleased with my responses. Funny, I was completely out of my body and watching a film at Village, and I think my out of body self is far more professional than my normal state. Incidentally, we later have another meeting, another airless room that smells of marker pens and impatience, but my mind is still elsewhere, composing blog posts, thinking about toasted sandwiches, trying to remember the first line of Girl From Ipanema. Anything other than the desperate realisation that no matter how many hand outs we get, we'll never be a team as long as no one cares. Deprived of anything in particular to complain about in a serious context, I assign my grievances quite wilfully, and make sure that being here right now, stuck in this office, struggling to breathe, so close to the end of the day, so close to a grilled ham and cheese sandwich and a Blue Heaven Big M, listening to figures so boring that my brain has shut down, I sit with absolutely sense of context and think my position is worse than a passenger on the Hindenburg. After all, this is my grievance, a grievance born of boredom, no one elses, and it's utterly personal....

It was obviously different in the great Scottish summer of 1990. Unsure, to be honest, of what a summer in Scotland would be like in the 90s (it wasn't much different, but it had a lot less Fairground Attraction) I was pumped up and ready to party. My circular street would rock to the play of incompetently played tennis, moderately intermittent sunshine, and the sounds of Beats International. Of course, it wasn't all great - I mean, everyone wore a big white shell suit, random urchins would demand "twos" on your can of coke, whatever that mean, and there was also the small matter of Beats International at #1...if everyone, by law, has one great summer, then this was surely to be mine. After all, the World Cup was going to take up most of it, a football festival the likes of which the world have never seen before. We collected, for seemingly a year, stickers from the local newsagency (the one with more soft core pornography and packets of Chewits per shelf than any other newsagency in the world) and would pretend to be players from the countries heading to Italy. In my case, my penalty in off the traffic cone that won my team the inter-class-world-cup for "West Germany" ranks as my finest sporting achievement - the only rival to that is a hat-trick against Natone, so that's not going to count. I spent most of the first part of the summer filling in my wall chart, and listening to my Dad explaining in great detail that wrestling wasn't real. In particular, a portly Mexican wrestler called Paul Perez was carried out on a stretcher after his match with the Earthquake, and when poor Paul was being checked on by the medics, Dad was all "Ye eedjit! If a 40 stone man lands on ye, ye'd die! Look! He stops afore he lands on him and makes sure he disnae hit him! Ye eedjit!" - being called an eedjit over and over by my Dad wasn't exactly a promising start to the summer, and Scotland were wonderfully useless at the World Cup - prompting even more rabid anti English sentiment. Down the mall, I bought a copy of "Smash the English Way" by local ned band "Foolish Hit" (get it?) and played it in my room, dreaming of tearing down Thatcherism armed with only a spider painted skateboard and a poster of Texas...simmering with resentment, labouring in the kitchen doing dishes, England in the semi finals...this wasn't how the summer was meant to go...

For what it's worth, Dad had booked Mums 40th on the same day as Scotland played Sweden in the world cup, which annoyed everyone greatly, but inadvertently, it gave me my summer romance - Debbie. Debbie was a Dundonian, from Dundee, a town that I had only been too once, but which my Mum assured me was "full of chuchters" - Debbie was helping her parents at their travel agent or something, and we met on a bus travelling into town. I was on the bus with my cousin, talking about something or other, shell suits starched to the max, when Debbie leaned over and joined in, essentially just to rib me about the fact she could see my pants. Ah, shell suit elastic, how many times can you let me down. Her haunting tones repeated in a clear crisp Dundonian accent that she could see my, as she put them, white Y fronts (I don't believe I would wear such a garment, but I was too embarrassed to check) and if you know my cousin, well, you'd know that he wouldn't miss an opportunity. Given they both were ready to go me for the whole journey, I was so embarrassed I got off about three stops before the swimming pool and ran off, almost getting hit by a bus going the other way. I tried to put it behind me as best I could, but my cousin naturally told everyone. I slunk off one night to go and sit on the swing (rather than watch Belgium) that was round the back of my house and for some reason she was there, rocking back and forth, frizzy perm entirely in place, really cool shoes, rebellious attitude. And out of a conversation that had very little to do with Enzo Scifos midfield mastery and more to do with parents being, you know, so bogus, we became boyfriend and girlfriend, albeit in that "you have a pencil case, me too, let's go out" kind of pre teen way. The relationship mostly consisted of coy glances, meaningul conversations about how Stock Aitken and Waterman were on the decline, would we would do if Scotland became an independent country, and of course, Texas. I tried to make a clever joke about Paris, Texas, but she didn't get it. She gave me a big Valentines style card covered in poems and Elvis lyrics, and I bought her some blackcurrant Chewits off the van. Yes, indeed it was love, and even though her position on where Jim Bett fitted into Scotlands Euro 92 midfield remained neutral, it was the way she spoke that really got to me - that and her amazing blue eyes, so clear, so bright, so innocent - she had such optimism that the future, the far off future, was going to be absolutely and completely amazing. I think she was a bit too obsessed with robots doing everything though - including making Chewits...

Of course, England lost in the World Cup semi finals - we did a conga line round the street - and inevitably Debbie and I broke up. I don't think it was anything in particular, obviously listening to six weeks of robot talk was enough to put anyone off. We just kind of stopped meeting at the bottle laden little circle rockery that was pretty much our home (we would sometimes even have a stray dog for a pet), particularly after I had to miss an apparent anniversary (the third week anniversary of the time she bought me a pencil or something) to go and watch a monster truck show with my neighbour against my better judgement, and when pressed sort of got a bit flustered and said I had to watch England v Cameroon on the telly and ran away to avoid the pressure. Our last conversation, she took a cigarette out of her bag, and smoked it, and talked really deeply about how life was short and time on the planet was precious and she would never waste a moment. I was kind of inspired by her words, albeit in a sort of I respect your opinion and I find you fascinating but god I hope you stop talking so I can go get a sandwich (it's all about the sandwich today) kind of way. She's the only person I've ever had who's given me that speech - I'm surprised at that, because it's a cliched speech, but she really believed it, and she had plans and ambitions, and I'm thinking, well, you're only 11, what's the rush? She looked at me, piercing me with her perm and her thousand yard stare, and sort of tried to get me to articulate on my dreams, a desperate reach for a maturity that in fairness I didn't think I was supposed to have - I shrugged when she asked what my ambitions were, and said, er, well, um, I want to go home and watch some wrestling...she smiled, patted me on the shoulder, and said something akin to we were two different people and walked off, to be never seen again - well, apart from that time she slept with a bloke I went to school with Colin, who had thick round glasses and thought he could transport himself out of his body to have mid air sex with another ghost. I'm not sure where that fitted in with her whole Carpe Diem outlook on life, since it was more like Carpe Nerd, but ya know, I wish her all the best, and that wherever she is in life, her arse is parked on a velvet cushion...

I could absolutely murder a Chewit right now...bloody Tasmanian sweet shops...can't even get a Freddo these days...

The désespoir of the book keep

Not even my newsagents new haircut can cheer me up - he's gone from tough guy hard ass to slightly effiminate hairdresser in a comedy sketch in the course of one floppy trimmed fringe. Not even...the wood from my desk has infected my soul - most people would settle for a new challenge in life, but I'd settle for a new car park, it would enliven my day. I'm not cut out for a life of pushing sales and middle management anymore. All that keeps me going is the daily beep of a friendly e-mail, the daily disentegrating magic that is marital hell, unfolding before my eyes (todays couple actually changed buses to get away from each other), and the wit and wisdom of the crackling blue work radio, counting down the hours until I can go to America one traffic and weather report at a time. Since last year, I haven't seen the local radio van around here for a while. The last time they were here, a beautiful girl in skin tight blue shorts looked me in the eye, and said with heartfelt angst and despair "We're out of New Ideas" with such unpardonable sincerity I felt awful and didn't want to make a fuss - I took my free can of V and moved on awkwardly. It just broke my heart when the rain came and she stood despairingly with one finger in the air, judging the wind and sighing - if the wood has infected me, the Lleyton Hewitt articles had infected hers. I'd love to care when the numbers come out or a report is printed, but I don't. I care though when a fat girl leaks on the chair - just in case I have to clean it up. I get home as soon as I can, cherishing my space and my freedom, put Chungking on exceptionally loud, ignore the opinions of Damien Fleming on the story of popular television shows, and tick off another day as passing. It's not a system designed to impose a challenge on my life, but it's my system...my manager, she has her horses, her boyfriend who looks like popular former cricketer Mark Ridgeway...others have their keep fit classes, their kids, their zany outer life where they push themselves forward into life and it's myriad of options, but me, I sip a glass of orange juice, let the little voice inside my head that says I should be doing more die out for another day, and resist the temptation to punch my neighbour in the head. I lie down in my hammock, and know tomorrow we'll all pretend we care about systems and numbers and that a store bought donut will somehow convince us we're some kind of magical hard working team rather than a collection of dis-interested individuals a Jason Mraz triple play from hometime...for now though, we're free...

No matter where I go, the system of coping with work fascinates me. If I'm on holiday, I love how the Scottish worker is completely allowed to be as grumpy as they want. Mum said when she was on holiday, everyone was tip-toeing around the bus driver because "he doesn't like this route" - it makes you wonder how we got through the war. My favourite coper in Scotland was unquestionably the wee woman who worked at Irvine train station when I went through there about five years ago. Irvine train station isn't a glamorous locale - it's pretty much a big draughty hall and rubbish tip where occasionally trains pass through. It also remains the last bastion of the dreamer, mostly a bewildered and grumpy ticket issuer in a standard issue black cardigan oblivious to the presence of a queue the size of Lithuania, making it through the day with a haughty air of disinterest and three packets of Rolos. I was on my way to see St Mirren play, I don't know, Arbroath or something, and I decided that what I really wanted was to be completely sick and unwell for the rest of the week, so I went to buy a square sausage roll and a can of Tizer. Inside the solitary cubicle no bigger than the average key cutting booth, there lay a world of melting chocolate bars, cans of suspect "ginger" with dubious sell by dates, and magazines not quite as risque as the pouting cheesecake covers would have you believe. The lady there was rosy of cheek, unguarded of emotion, and hefty of bosom, her standard issue hairnet at a jaunty angle as she clearly and quite publically, how shall we say, enthralled, by her Fabio covered romance novel. Oblivious and completely forgetting she was public, she had obviously transported herself off to a fantasy world where she wasn't actually in a tiny cubicle listening to Dougie Vipond and hoping every sixth caller wasn't trying to steal a Caramac bar. I took in the scene for a moment, and decided that I would leave her alone. I would have felt bad disturbing such a vivid and erotic fantasy involving no doubt a swashbuckling adventure with my face and a request for a can of Tizer. I sincerely hope that when she did have to return from her wonderful created fantasy land, she didn't have to look on a pasty faced local saying "Haw Missus, geez a can of ginger and a scud mag"...I mean, that's just cruel....

When I was walking around today listening to Cibo Matto on my IPOD, I went into my favourite book store. I know the person who manages the store will usually listen to classical music on his own IPOD (I wonder if he'd like Cibo Matto) and isn't happy if there's a patron who over-reads a book in his store, and by company directive has to get up and pack books onto the shelf in front of the recalcitrant customer until they either leave by embarrassment or he has to pressure them with a sales technique to buy something. His neatly trimmed beard and his désespoir air of melancholy infect the shop as much as a single mother smoking, possibly turning sales away at first, but making up for it in inspiring people to buy some depressing Russian literature to cheer themselves up after visiting his store. Today an old boy in nothing that wasn't blue, including his mood, was obsessively reading the Michael Parkinson autobiography, and chuckling at some of Parkys more amusing anecdotes (oh Parky, will your anecdotes never cease to amuse). I could see the cloud of wistful depression begin to grow on our bearded friend, the Vivaldi or...some other classical composer (we only got to Volume 3 of the 80s magazine series The Classical Composers) having to be turned off in the service of the store and the public. With the barest of effort he lifted up a pile of Mark Thomas books and placed them wearily at the feet of old boy blue, hoping that his mere presence would inspire him to leave. To his amazement, it did, the old boy ruffling his blue beanie, leaving Parky mid chuckle, no doubt just as he was recapping some amusing incident with Raquel Welch, and going to get a muffin. The book keep almost, almost smiled as he picked his pile of books back up, got touchingly close to his classical music and his half wagon wheel...when the old boy came back just to finish the chapter, unable to enjoy his bakery produced product until he knew exactly what Parky thought of John Wayne. Were I a better writer, I would love to be able to more aptly describe the slough of human despondency and fatigue that came over the book keeps face, but suffice to say, it really, really had to be on hell of a Wagon Wheel and Wagner combination to make up for the inconvenience...

My walk today (and the spotting of a Fabio novel in a book store) meant that I was able to observe the method of coping everyone was adopting in the store, just to get through their day. Luckily, blue eye shadow girl was a complete model of professionalism, but as I walked, I almost crashed into the two slowly-walking-at-the-pace-of-the-feet-off-the-old-credits-of-the-Bill mall security guards walking around the shopping complex with the diffident air of two people who really couldn't accomplish much in a serious situation. Disrespected, bored, her as portly of waist as ginger of dye job, he with a Russell Brand haircut, a misguided sense of complacency, a hopeful air that a sixteen year old girl wouldn't sully her private school by stealing a tank top from whichever fashionable pumping out the Sneaky Sound System trend store the kids were into today. As they walked, clearly paying attention to nothing, never mind seeking to stamp out horseplay, which was rampant by the way, they began to amuse themselves by passing somewhat ironic judgement on the walkers fashion sense, and then just blatantly shopping for clothes instead of paying attention. It wasn't so much a job of security and danger as an amusing amble in a comfortable uniform with a walkie talkie - in other words, like being in the scouts or something. Eventually, the woman, poisoned by the boredom and the Wendys Dagwood Dog she's been eating, turns to the guy and says that she's always wanted to be an archery teacher, and she hopefully waited for his response, which was sort of supportive, but also a bit "I'm not listening". I completely and utterly missed the context because I was once again gypped in my need to find Weeds Series 3 on DVD and took out some minor frustration on a Sanity girl, but I found it a wonderfully human moment, the perpetual gap between dream and reality summed up in one sentence. Instead of living out her dream, seeing the joy on kids faces as they began to realise they could apply arrow based skills not just to targets but to deer as well (who let Sarah Palin in?) and her voice was completely heartfelt in declaration, she was frisking women in leggings to see if they had stolen a pair of slippers, and that was on a good day. As they walked off to discuss whether a jumper in Millers would fit her ample frame, I kind of hoped that one day she would teach archery, one day she would leave behind the world of ugh boots, prams and vomit in aisle seven, and do something with her life...as I might...one day...

Not that I could teach archery though...maybe I could be in charge of the camp sing songs...I think that'd be more of a thing I could do...

Isobarred (the ironic continuing study of people wearing lampshades who aren't me)

So you know when you are tired and exhausted and grumpy and the fattest girl you've ever seen in your life sits down on a seat and pees...um, OK, that's a specific frame of reference that only applies to me today. Actually, I'm feeling pretty good apart from the chafing and urine - and god knows who has to clean it up - there's something quite touching and exciting about having friends good enough to have your entire 2009 planned, even if the phrase "a week away" keeps worringly coming up. I need to go home you know people. We found a picture of my Mothers 21st the other day, a photo that she wasn't in because she'd already gone to bed, and I can be like that sometimes, sometimes needing to get away from everyone. Other times, it's lampshades and spilled beer a go go. I got out of going to see Pink though with some carefully constructed financial mistruths. I've spent most of the day looking at brochures to go to America, the home of the wry sideways glance at life and the hamburgers the size of Cooeee. I don't know why I want to go to America - maybe because it's not Scotland? I've seen Scotland, I've done Scotland, now I want to go to a taping of the David Letterman show and eat different tepid hot dogs that aren't served up from the St Mirren canteen. It's actually kind of sad in some ways - this won't mean much to most people but St Mirren are my team, and they are moving ground away from Love Street, the football ground I spent most of my childhood at, to some other dump. I think this is a sign that in many ways Scotland isn't going to be an ongoing concern in my life, it's going to be somwhere where I stop off rather than some sort of fantastic wonderland. That is apart from Greggs Bakery, where you get the best fudge filled donut in the world...once you negotiate the complicated and confusing two queue system. It also says a lot for my day that not only did I have my entire year plan for me, but I found out that my big toe has a really stupid shape to it. Yes, the future is bright, but the present, well, it's all out of shape...

So anyway, the big news down here is that local underage club sensation Isobar (where the queues are long and the bouncers are less punch happy than syrup) has re-opened, to the delight of people who normally have to use fake Idents on MSN and 15 year old girls everywhere, after being shut down for 48 seconds due to a problem stopping patrons punching each other. To the universal embarrassment of everyone one of our politicians went into the nightclub to, er, talk to patrons about the situation. Yes, your eyes meet over a crowded table, you raise an eyebrow, she nods, then she takes your opinions on waterfront violence on a scale of 1-10. It wouldn't have made a lot of difference to me if Isobar (or Isobar, The Club, as it's marketing would have it, as if the multi level stair case and Bicardi model saleswomen are unique to the wharf) had closed - I've only been in there twice, at least one of them as sort of ironic joke (and the other time I was so drunk I could have been talked into eating a burger at Mykonos) and as I said my study into post modern Hobartian sub cultures ended with some girl I was sort of talking to blankly started vomiting in a pot plant, and the only other time I was there it caught fire. Yes, I smelled smoke, because I was on fire with the lad...oh, no, hang on, it really did catch fire. This wasn't entirely verified because there's a better than average chance some dickhead just set the fire alarm off or someone was just reallly upset about the pot plant being vomited on. As it happened, my cousin worked at Isobar (just to keep track, she's the one adopted from Asia who said the problem with Australia is too many Asians...they don't do irony in Seoul) and, in the midst of what can only be described as the Hobart version of a hubbub (a lot of bogans wandering around going "nerfuckin sucks") I decided to take charge of the situation and find out what was going on. I was cool, I was calm, I assured my friends all would be OK, I was aware that wearing a novelty retro T-shirt with a cartoon character on it was a horrible fashion trend, I was realising that girls licking their fingers so wasn't a turn on at all, given their bogan little faces. I went up to my cousin in the midst of a bewildered panic and a loud fire alarm and asked what was going on...she pushed me in the chest and said Sir you have to leave, the fire alarm is going off. She didn't recognise me. And I looked like a bit of a dick. I stood there and had to justify myself and we proceeded to have a massive 2am argument...the point is, of course, she was entirely right, we really had to leave, but family disputes just won't wait. As we looked around after about a ten minute argument, every single person had vacated the club except for me, her holding a clipboard, and a girl on E in the corner who was trying to lick her fingers in a seductive fashion with no one in particular paying her attention, her denim jeans fully stretched around her industrial thighs. As a social study of Tasmania, it was nigh on perfect, especially when we both realised that the music that was playing at about 1/2 speed on the pre recorded PA system was The Last Good Day Of The Year by Cousteau...who could argue, we thought, as we left the Colonel to her finger licking fun, one day building to chatting up her dream apparition...

Actually, the most significant thing that's happened at Isobar is that a particular Australian cricketer pashed a thirteen year old, but that's just libellous. Imagine letting a thirteen year old into a nightclub - that'd never happen. My mate told me that once at Isobar, one of his mates actually hired a prostitute to flirt with in view of his girlfriend (they'd had an argument about dimmer switches) while the dancefloor throbbed to the hypnotic beats of the sneakiest of all the sound systems. As it happened, the prostitute was a dominatrix, and he was late because of the giant queue, so in front of his girlfriend the dominatrix instead of cooing and flirting and laughing at jokes about airline peanuts actually gave him a complete mouthful about his timekeeping and poured a drink about him. He then had to watch as his girlfriend left with a flight attendant. I'm not sure that, despite the mythology, that too many delighted and fulfilling relationships have begun amidst Isobar (or any other nightclubs) bewildering multi layered system roof or it's mirror ball while thumping Ministry of Sound compliations throb onwards. Obviously in my own experience it ended with a girl vomiting in a pot plant (nightclub girls just don't appreciate my conversation about the demise of the Egg Flip Big M) but there was another time at Syrup - in fact, the night Tasmania won the Mercantile Mutual Cup and me old mate Brendan Julian had to hold up the sponsors sign because it was about to blow over the fance - when I was about to go home and this incredibly vacant but pretty promotions model looking girl grabbed my arm and demanded that I came and danced (I was tired so I just danced...eh...eh...ah forget it) and we were all set to dance face to face when the DJ in a fit of absolute fatigue played a techno funked up The Rose by Bette Midler. I believe my face betrayed my emotion, which was well this has all gone horribly wrong, and we silently parted ways, her to, I don't know, probably go and sell some Bicardi, and me to talk about football, in a far more comfortable setting, with a falling asleep taxi driver who was close to swerving into a Southern Outlet wall....

Of course, there was every chance she was just a politician out to canvas my views. And as much as I'd like to put my patronage of these establishments down to some sort of irony or study of human movement, obviously going there is just the same strain of reality that makes me wear that famous lampshade - being pissed. As it happens though, both times I've been to Isobar, I've ended up on my own at the Salamanca bakehouse, Tasmanias premiere establishment for horrifically tepid sausage rolls and surprisingly custard tarts, all served by a wonderful racial mix of Sudanese refugees and bogan girls from Dodges with pink eye shadow who are "between jobs" and who painstakingly count every five cent piece. I sat outside there after the fire incident, for god knows what reason since it was so cold a penguin had a cardigan on and I was sitting outside another bakery waiting to be picked up, which was strange in itself, a bit like ordering a pizza from Dominos to be delivered to Pizza Hut, when I realised that across from me, two guys were trying to peer into the girls public toilet through a small shaft in the window. The right on PC warrior in me wanted to shout out for them to stop it, but since they had completely got the mechanics wrong and had the skinny bloke holding the fat bloke up to have a look (you need to put the fat guy on the bottom as the base of a pyramid, not the top) I was aware that soon, trouble would occur. Plus, there was something pleasingly-newsagent-judging-the-guy-buying-the-Playboy-desperate and pathetically sad about how excited they were to peer in the toilets. And of course, throw in the ice and the cold and the rain, and inevitably, to an inadvertent and somewhat surprising cry of "wa-hey!" from me, like some end of the pier comedian, they fell over and slipped and slid and crashed in a big pile. At which point, from out of the toilet, stepped a man in a giant black coat and docs, who took one look at their broken limbed form and said "Womens toilets are to the left" and moved on. I laughed so hard that I ended up taking a big bite of custard tart and sausage roll at the same time, choked, tried to drink water to fix it, and choked some more...at which point, my brain thought, what a way to go, dying in Hobart in the rain, looking at broken limbed perverts and I had a final, awful thought...that girl who was licking her fingers didn't have a top on....I hadn't even realised...it wasn't the comforting thought that I had hoped for...

I'd have banned it just for letting her in, and as far as I know, she's probably still there...it's an easy life you know...

The Impotent Fury of Brendan Julian (or BJ and the Bore, take your pick)

I hate being sleepy, I can't shake it off, it's surrounding my movements like fog at the moment, and I would like to try and shake it off by doing something spontaneous and interesting but it's not happening. I watch my country try and play rugby league, but I can't even raise a half hearted cheer. There's supposed to be cricket on, but someones sent me the wrong calendar, and instead I lie on the floor of my rumpus room surrounded by hoarded items of limited value, gourmet jellybeans and I listen to Icarus by Santogold on an endless loop, letting the day slip through my fingers like the Scottish defence lets tries in. Even the metaphors are unpoetic and flat as my brain hums until it falls asleep staring at my smoke detector and my slightly interrogation like tiny round spotlights. As my brain hums to a complete stop, my Zaire retro top gathering dust and crumbs as I lie, I consider not moving for the entire day, just letting my brain come up with stupid ideas. Not just how I would book wrestling shows, but proper blank thinking - I read once that if you let your brain go completely blank, the first think you think of is some sort of representation of your guardian angel. Clearly nonsense, but since when I did it, I saw the Taj Mahal, something I've never thought of since, maybe my guardian Angel is Kapil Dev? The way my brain works sometimes surprises me, but instead of creating wonderful and creative thoughts today, it flatlines and gives me nothing. My Mum rings, but I barely register, and instead of listening to her fabulous tales of inner city Ayrshire decay or her neighbours inability to keep schtum, or any stories of how much my Dad hates the nun who runs his school, my brain finally and wonderfully kicks into high gear - well, it sort of sputters into neutral, a big improvement. Our old Torana when I was a kid, coated in chocolate brown paint, would always make a satisfying roar when we got into second gear, and I'd love to tell you what happened when it got into third, but we never found out. The burst of energy is only fleeting though, like my brief time with Julie Fleeting oddly enough, and I slump back on the floor, into a beautiful dream where everyone has paid for their Crowded House tickets, and the DVD player on my floor has magically installed itself...

There was this kid at school called Andrew that I didn't much care for. I didn't much care for anyone in 1994, too clammed up with nervous hormones and raspberry Hubba Bubba to emote anything beyond the basic nervous small talk of life, but I really didn't like him. He was the addendum to life, the guy at the back of our bullying circles, the one who would always say "Yeah go on, do it!" if someone was provoking a fight. His main asset as far as I could see was that he would buy friendship, queuing nervously and fidgeting halfway through the line as he counted his change, working out how many friends he could afford for the week. He would load himself up with Redskin Splits and buy himself the privilege of walking around at the back of a group that didn't pay him much attention. I had been to primary school with this kid, and I had stayed at his house, running around his giant back garden and drinking Tang all summer long, but of course we didn't communicate much now we were older. One day, I saw him almost in tears because he was about 10c short of buying a Chocolate Big M to shore up a friendship in trouble. The last time I ever saw him was on the last day of school, he was near the kid throwing up pink spew as she kicked her leg like she was trying to start a motorcycle. He was more riddled with teenage angst than anyone I had ever seen as he sat with a deep set philosophical scrunity, observing the scene before him, a scene threating to lapse into some of sort of horrible parody of a frat film, and he walked past me, pausing only briefly to say "every one else is fucked" - I didn't know if I was included in the summation or he excluding me from the riff raff, or if perhaps he had been somehow dissed on the final day of school, excluded from a yearbook on account of lacking the funds for the last can on Fanta, but I didn't ponder his wisdom for too long. I appreciated his concerns if, perchance, he thought he and I were the only two people in the world who's fucked quota wasn't so high, but I suspect his monologue was only internal, and since someone has chasing a chicken around the backyard in a pair of shorts (the person chasing the chicken, not the chicken), a girl was amazingly sick as I mentioned, and I had to leave to go and try and enflame the dying embers of my Grade 12 friendship over cold steak and Boags, his words didn't really resonate until much later - he surely didn't appreciate the way I made Tang that much? His exclusion of an entire school body, if meant, could only and surely relate to one solitary incident, the unspoken bond that happens when only happens when two people see an incident and are not sure who to tell. I did also accept his point though, everyone there really was fucked. I mean, someone was chasing a chicken, it wasn't exactly the magical and terrific end of school wonderland promised in the brochure...

Back two years earlier, life was a bit different - I mean, Girlfriend were still Girlfriend, not yet GF4. Nothing, to me, suggests the futility and pointlessness of high school like a motivational speaker. Trapped like rats, we would shuffle into our assembly hall onto seats coated in a uniquely cloth based only in high school fabric, attached to the wall with table football like poles, and listen for the escape bell as a parade of moderately successful local identities would tell us about their moderately successful days and their moderately successful ideas. My own motivation was questionable at best, so I took nothing from any of these talks. They could have caught a half naked Tori Amos to deliver a speech about considering technological studies as an elective, and I'd still have been counting the spots on the roof. Our big guest speaker one year was Brendan Julian, a cricketer of modest repute who ended up forging a moderate career hosting domestic cricket on Foxtel and doing the non exciting stories on Getaway. He did some mildly humourous jokes, maybe even an impression of David Boon, you know how comedians like to squeeze in a local reference or two, before knuckling down to give us the benefit of his wisdom. As far I could tell the speech was bland and inoffensive, at least devoid of the awkward physical comedy of the man who spoke to us about the perils of arson. The speech was obviously written be committee, and Brendans act - for it was surely an act, all about hard work and dedication - was unpolished, didn't leave time for Q&A, and brought none of the subtle nuances he brings to his current television work. However, there was an awkward moment somewhere in the middle, when he went off on a tangential rant about friendship and the true value of friends without having to buy friends...it was his off the cuff middle act, and everyone, well, me and about three other people not asleep, all looked at Andrew, who pulled a defiant spazz face and mouthed to us to get fucked (always with the fucked that boy) but clearly a chord (and not just the pair Brendan was wearing) had been struck. He squirmed for a moment uncomfortably, until Brendan moved back to prepared notes. As we filed out in single file, uninspired, unless the inspiration was to try and kick the cramp out of our legs, we, and lets not pretend I had friends, I, shuffled awkwardly towards the direction of the lunch room. I studied Andrew intently, to see if anything had resonated, and for a moment I thought it had, because he bought his own bag of Twisties and nothing else. For my own part I bought a chicken and salad sandwich, coated in layer after layer of home brand glad wrap, and shuffled awkwardly out into the poorly lit corridor that joined our class to the more exotic subjects, like the ones where the bogan kids built great shiny things out of metal or wood. My salad sandwich seemed somehow more magical when it was coated in glad wrap, and I made a mental note to commend Angela the lunch lady on her presentation, and chide her on the taste...

For some reason, me and Andrew sort of shuffled out together, the only two people left who hadn't eaten, the last in line, and there, in the corridor was Brendan. He was on the phone to his agent, hopping from foot to foot. I didn't catch the opening part of his conversation, but it was the phrase "fucking unresponsive wankers" that really stood out. He caught our eye on the "ive" syllable and couldn't really back out. He was clearly unhappy with the reception to his speech, but still wanted to cling to the tenets of it that he believed children (children) were the future (future) of humanity. He had clearly lost Andrew already, who previously had had the kind of slack jawed gaped expression that can only come when a boy of a certain age meets a man on a Sheffield Shield Weetbix card. Me, I was still trying to work out if he was Brendan Julian or Jo Angel. He paused his conversation, looked us directly in the eye, and with all the sincerity of a graduate from Larry Emdurs charm school said "stay in school kids!" and gave us a big warm hearted thumbs up. We stood awkwardly waiting for further instructions, hell, I had nowhere else to go, but they weren't forthcoming, and I wandered off in the entirely wrong direction, munching on my salad sandwich as I went zombie like towards the metal end. Andrew went in the other direction, straight back to the canteen to stock up on supplies, and Brendan went home in his 1993 Nissan Camira to the airport, to fly out cursing and bemoaning a generation he had already lost touch with, a generation that probably exited the assembly hall wondering if we could get the arson man back (his impression of Bob Hawke was just gold). Andrew, I saw him much later down by the tennis court, animatedly telling the story to his "friends" as I read some sort of pretentious novel on the hill. They weren't listening, his delivery was poor and patchy and devoid of build, and they were already drifting off bored. At which point, he grabbed a few bottles of Oasis from his school issue backpack, and they became interested again, laughing in all the right places. There was something quite wistful and melancholy about the whole scene, but I couldn't put my finger on at the time - I can now though, obviously learning that true friendship couldn't be bought, and my own friends would come to be valued and loved for who they were, not for what they could give me...

No, that's not it - the tightarse didn't even shell out for Fruitopia...no wonder they all abandoned him in the end...

That's when good neighbours drum for Jesus

My thoughts are very confused and muddled from a complete lack of sleep and anxiety related to the fact that my thoughts are confused and muddled - I pride myself on relatively constructed thoughts, even if I'm not the best expressor of these thoughts in succinct ways. The temptation today is just to post a picture of a cute dog with a smiley face or that AHA viral video from Youtube and it let it pass for constructive comedy. The laziness and sleepiness is because I had to get up early to pick Mum up from the airport. By the standards of Hobart airport this was relatively easy apart from the ridiculous fact you have to pass through security just to buy a copy of the Herald Sun. I love Hobart airport for other reason than the entire security system when you come into Hobart is set up to stop rogue bananas. There is no security off the plane other than a dog, a fat woman in a white shirt yelling about fruit, and occassionally a man not old enough to shave manning a bag check point. Today though for a break in tradition, they put the dog on the conveyor belt as the bags came off the plane (not just let him sniff the carry on luggage - I presume this was a long service reward) to hunt for the stray bananas. I loved the fact that the Koreans behind me asked their Tasmanian host family what the dog was looking for and were straight facedly told bananas. It is a bit of a cheek to be more tired than someone who's just travelled from Glasgow, but I was tired, and I couldn't hide it. The woman at the newsagents was making fun of my accent, and I didn't have the wit or energy to reply - this family we know in Burnie are Scottish, and this one time they were out to dinner and the waitress was giving it a bit of the och aye the noo and the brother of our friend said "And can ye make it quick before your fucking face puts me aff ma dinner"...I didn't say anything as remotely sparkling as that, but it did seem quite the ordeal to go through just to get that Mars Bar that comes in the silver packet (I told you I was tired) and read about Dane Swan. For someone who thrives on human study the ebb and flow of an arrivals lounge isn't the writing gift you might imagine - I tend the find most humanity comes from the lonely, rather than the people hugged by millions (or the girl I saw in Melbourne who went from sitting depressed no one had picked her up to being carted off by hundreds). There's something dispiriting about the people who walk off, get their bag and quietly shuffle onto the airport bus without a hug or even a man with a sign. Besides, the humanity inherent in airports was stripped away by that terrible reality show which given the gift of a million stories focused on Jeremy Spake. Please, who has ever seen a worker and airport who was...who was happy? Obviously he was a plant....

When someone returns from another country, I really never care what they saw, because if someone says they saw the London Eye, well, that's a story, but how can you relate to that? I'm interested in the human behaviour, and the presents I get if I'm honest (I got a boss Zaire retro top). My mum mostly fought with her sister about, wait for it, the way she turned off the dimmer switches in the house, to the point they nearly flew home without mending the fences. As I've mentioned a few times before though, it's never really about the dimmer switches. The street I grew up in in Scotland is essentially a closed off little mini planet, a circular individual street fully gated off from reality. In truth it's no different from the next circular street down the road, just change the names and a few dates and the same simmering resentments fester over car parking and who's walking who's "wee dug" - dimmer switches are the least of the problems. My auntie does worry me though - her solitary existence is quite frightening, it's driven her to a form of psychosis that approaches the levels of the great eccentrics of yore, where a dimmer switch being turned off without the manual recommended settings being applied can turn into an issue worthy of blowing up over. She lives at a table, smoking, gazing wistfully out onto the world, a world that's really go beyond the mini bus route to ASDA, passing the days until death with a less than cheerful gait, doing Sudoku at 2 in the morning. The list of grievances and potential grievances by which she lives is thick and impervious to resistence, but when you leave, she misses your company and feels bad about that. My Mum says that when I stay there, I'm just oblivious to all the drama she's trying to create, because my own constructions are simple and based on my own simple sense of humour, mucking about with puppets or playing cards on the IPOD. When I'm in that circle of life (Simba) I try and try to stay oblivious, but as much as I do sometimes appreciate the genuine way the people pitch in when, say, someone is ill, I do know that if I stay there, within about four weeks you can feel the strange pull of people who don't talk to their own grandchildren between 8am and 8:08 am because it's porridge time. There's a lot of good and a lot of bad in that little circle, and the bad is a suffocation and a bewildering insanity that minor details become gigantic and fearsome wars. I mean, the recycling man is probably still talking about the excessive workload he had in April when he lift up to ten extra newspapers...

The one thing that I did find out from Mum though, just to emphasise my continuing theme here of small strange communities, is that in my home town, there is a massive prevalance, perhaps far too many to be honest, of psychics and psychic nights (or "spooky nights" as my people like to call them). I've said before I a complete athiest with no belief in ghosts (aside from that night in Queenstown) or spirits or that Ghost was a good movie. However, all across various school halls, scout halls and pubs, there are psychics stating the obvious and turning it into cash. If you don't know, Rangers (the football team my religion, if I had one, doesn't like) adopted the Tina Turner classic Simply The Best as their anthem a few years ago, so chances are if the psychic says the ghost says Simply The Best, about 200 people feel a direct connection, just to give you a complete example of the genius we are dealing with here. Now, the psychic my Mum went to didn't endear herself to my Mum by saying she looked like her sister (didn't go down well) and spent more time apologizing to Mum than contacting the dead. However, mid way through the would be seance was disrupted by a psychic connection the strength of a painful migraine. The psychic, who I desperately hope was clad in headwear that made her look like the GE Money Genie, paused, put her full abilities on the line, and boldly and directly stared down one of the attendees, a wee woman called Sharma, and said "I'm getting a reading...have you recently changed yer brand of lager?" - and I think, obviously I'm not one to question the answers from the great beyond, that the psychic had seen Sharma down at the local ASDA and seen the kind of lager she was buying and putting in the trolley, put two and two together and came up with the magic. Of course, that might just be a cynical view point - but knowing my local town the way I do it's inconceivable a local psychic wouldn't have been able with even lazy googling not been able to find basic facts about Sharna. Sharna for what it's worth, even I know who that is, she's the girl who tells everyone she's bestest mates with the Rangers players and I would imagine that would have come up at some point. I find a lot of where I used to live a sort of strange mish mash of good intentions and spectacular moral judgements from people with not a lot of moral high ground to make the judgements, and I would imagine the psychic reading of Sharna was also some kind of knowing dig, as everyone knows everyone else. You don't have to do much to be a psychic where I come from - get on a bus, that'll pretty much do it...

All of this though is partially my fault - because I moved away. Once you do, you dislocate yourself from people who are essentially good people, but when you go back you just don't know what they are talking about, and the judgements I apply to them can apply to me in my own life. Plus I'm a great believer in my future involvement in a local community and events surrounding it, so I'm proud that my circular street at least keeps it's disputes to minor gossip and differences rather than violence and drug dealing. And as my Mum said when I said welcome home, "I was home" - I love the place, it's just a bit mad and insular. No madder than putting a dog on a conveyor belt I suppose to hunt for a stray tangello or selling a busted oven outside your house for a hundred bucks like my neighbour is doing at the moment. When I lived in my old house round the corner from where I am now, we lived next door to Keith Moon, a would be drummer who regularly practiced his wicked beats over and over again. The problem was he hadn't really got much beyond page one of the how to drum book, and his beat was regular and monotone, and of course wasn't accompanied by any kid of melodic band, so the for three years we had to listen to his ba doom doom da da doom time keeping work without getting the benefits of a more tuneful performance. Perhaps had we lived in a more gated community of people we could have gathered in some sort of pincer movement and asked him to stop but on our own we didn't want to turn into the kind of people who end up on Today Tonight. And it perhaps just as well, because he was, as I love to say in my lovely way, proper mental. The only conversation I ever had about him, he said that his flat was having police messages pumped in through his stereo, and that the store round the corner from where I live was actually a surveillance hut for the police (that I could believe). His theories on what was being put into the water were equally interesting, and he rounded off his state of the union address by telling me what he'd like to have done to Hilary Duff (and it wasn't watching her in Raise Your Voice). While I can appreciate both sides of the gated insular community debate, at that moment I was delighted that I didn't have to have him in for tea and biscuits as I would probably have to in Scotland, but I figured with his connections and obvious paranoid conspiracies, not to mention the speed like intensity of his drumming, the drugs at his place must be out of sight. However, any consideration that I might be his friend or indeed his buyer were ended when he said "And when I let Jesus Christ into my life"...no wants to live next to someone drumming for Jesus do they? Not even Jesus I would imagine...

I have to go, I'm starting a four year stretch for smuggling in a mandarin...that damn dog...

Latvian camping (we bring the philosophy straight to your tent)

A lot of believe that moving in decreasing circles is some kind of horrific fate - when I didn't have any friends for three years, my horizons were very broad and intellectual, I mean if I had friends and some cognac the Wittgenstein discussions we could have had - and I think sometimes I really feel a little uncomfortable with another year of AFL draws, Collingwood failures, pop tarts rising and falling and the little bit of the year when the road is free of school kids. Nothing is new, nothing is exciting, but I'm OK at the moment with that, secure in the knowledge that the people I believe in also believe in me - I would like a little intellectual stimulation at the moment though, perhaps a writers course (well, maybe not, I'll get to that soon). My auntie (the one with the living room of mystery) for a long time tried to parlay herself as the intellectual keeper of the flame, the true drinker of cognac, the listener of classical music, the reader of books that didn't have a list at the back of "my favourite cricketer" - she's always found me a curio, as if some noble savage had wandered in from the jungle just because I have a vast and gripping knowledge of Britney Spears singles. My mum and Dad went round there for a party once and she was positively thrilled to show them her friends, her intellectual friends, and start a game of charades (my Mum miming "get my coat" as a three word less than puzzling direction to my Dad). As I said before, stripped of this superiority by poverty, illness and desolate loneliness, the last time I was there she was watching Neil Diamond on TV, common as the muck she used to talk about me. It's probably struck a chord with me that I could end up like that, in the blink of an eye reduced to an ironic parody of my former self, so I've been a lot happier with my lot lately, happier than I should be. After all, contentment can breed it's own form of problems, a life fading quickly from a lack of decisiveness - but I was just happy to have friends when I saw her, to know that I would never fulfil the great fear of my life, dying alone in the armchair (which, since I don't believe in the afterlife, is an irrational fear, but anyway). Gratitude towards my friends isn't easily given on my part, since I'm Scottish and grew up in Penguin, not two of the great emotional heartlands of the world.  Jean Paul Satre said hell is being trapped in a room for eternity with your friends (don't tell my auntie I know that quote because it was the set up for a joke on Red Dwarf) - but it'd surely be worse to be in that room on your own, only two dogs for company, knowing that your moral belief system and sense of entitlement had been reduced to watching repeat performances of Crunchy Granola. I've learned to a be lot more patient with my friends too - it was a long struggle, believe me, to get to this stage of our friendships with acceptance of my fourteen year old girl music taste, to get me out of a life of Diamond...so hopefully, you'll understand why, just for the moment, I'm contented (mainly because I totally rock at Duck Hunt...wait, lost the intellectual crowd again...)

Eggs and Bacon Bay is one of the most beautiful bits of Tasmania I've been too. People go to camp, to relax on the beach, to get in touch with nature, and to fish and bushwalk. In other words, why I went is a complete mystery, since I hate camping, am a patently lousy fisherman, and pitching a tent was never going to earn me a merit badge even in the retarded scouts. Why did I go? I have no idea, and I have no idea why I was invited. I think it was the testing ground for new friendships, lets go camping and see if we all get on. I went with two female friends and one male friend - I would say as one thing they wouldn't remember is that the first time I met the second female friend they (being the other two, who I knew from work) desperately tried to set me up with, as much as they would now deny it, since they were desperately trying to get me to buy her a drink or get her some water - the basis for this ingenious would be paring was, get this, she was born in Scotland and so was I...but as I've pointed out to them a couple of times, I was also born in the same country as Sheena Easton but that doesn't mean I'm popping round to her house for coffee and canapes. Perhaps the camping trip was some sort of planned third or fourth date for us both, and they probably cursed that I didn't just get the damn jug of water. Anyway, since I sort of knew everyone that was going pretty well by then, I knew that my main fear would be an outbreak of camp zany. Let me explain - I love my friends, but the female friends I have scare me because when they drink, they are loud and prone to great eccentricity, by which I mean they are incredibly loud and bogany and likely to take a waitress at Tacos that no one understands their pain. I, myself, am Scottish, and we are terrified of eccentricity. We tell eccentrics to sit on their arse and weesht. We don't of course apply these standards to ourselves when we are drunk, running around the living room wearing a lampshade, but about six drinks in, the little Weegie voice in my head kicks in and says it's time to go to bed, yer making an arse o yersel. I barely knew these people, not really, what if they ran around nude, what if they got out drugs, or did something illegal or...it didn't bear thinking about...so I did what any rational terrified of the possibility of zany and loud never mind pitching a tent first time camper would do - I bought a book. Yep, that'll save me....when things are getting loud and zany and I feel uncomfortable, I dip a toe into the world of literature. I might as well have faked a headache.

I didn't behave particularly well on the camping trip as a result. I certainly was of no use to anyone when it came to helping out, apart from saving the fire by selflessly pouring vodka on it. What I thought at the time was being the moral compass of the group was actually just me being a pain. And most importantly, I was a horrible and terrible fisherman, unless you count the sitcom style hooking of a rogue sock as a catch (it smelled like a fish). As strange as it sounds, I just wasn't ready to have friends again - I wasn't used to it. I've always been a solitary person anyway, being an only child, and the only person within a fifteen mile radius to have seen Crossroads (I think some kid in Gagebrook got it for Xmas). I had, as my dad would say, my face tripping me, and it says a lot for my state of mind that I actually can remember one of the happiest times in my life was on that camping trip - when I was on my own. When I was five I said to Mum "Sure is a beautiful country!" as I looked at, I don't know, Mitre 10 or something, but my ability to be struck by the majestic wonder of the world (or popular hardware stores) has been lost along the way. However, as I sat on the beach, I was genuinely and quite shamefully (for a West of Scotland male) moved by the beauty and wonder of where I was. I can't explain it very well, but I was overwhelmingly struck by the smallness of the world and how unspoiled bits of Tas...and then, my friends found me, interrupting my train of thought before it sounded like the back of a Fruitopia bottle. It probably says a bit about my state of mind that I was a bit annoyed to be disturbed - I wasn't rude about it, but I certainly wasn't talkative, as I never am when I'm interrupted mid thought, perhaps the rudest personal state that I present to people. As we walked along the beach though back to our little mini world of tents and discarded lemonade bottles, I remember talking some absolute time filling bollocks conversation, and boring myself in doing so. I did wonder if there was any way that my behaviour wasn't quite registering, after all these were optimistic people, but of course it was, because their conversation back was equally tepid and meaningless, and if there's one thing I know, when I'm boring the arse off people...if we had called it all off right there, agreed to disagree, well, that would have been fine...but we only had a night to go, a pack of footy franks to eat, and a face to untrip...

As it turned out, when we got back to the discarded plastic village that night, past the dissolute Latvians struggling with the complexities of the Nokia phone system, past the little wooden shack selling overpriced crunchies and over heated Big Ms, and past the dissolving mute families who masked their hatred for each other by talking about how great the trip home would be, we heard possums, and my friends instantly and immediately backed away, but I just didn't care, and walked forward, oblivious to the possum related danger, stood for a minute, then lit a fire much to the amazement of myself and the Latvians (except Orba, she just wasn't impressed by anything). It was Survivoresque, without the script, and after that everyone (ie. me) was a lot happier and more relaxed. i suppose I was quite lucky that I was able in the final flickering flames of the trip that I turned myself around, and actually began relaxing around people again - lucky because I saw the alternative, the car journey home in total misery, from a family of bearded, burly Tasmanians who had, to my eyes, come to save their relationships. The son, well, he was a write off, because he was off trying to burn down the shack, but the husband and wife, Mr and Mrs red and black flannel 2003, were just not even speaking to each other. I watched them as I pondered the safety of two hundred degree milk the final morning we were there, and it was all in the eyes and the hips, they didn't even look at each other, their body language sullen and distant. As they loaded up the car, thankful that the son didn't have my obvious fire lighting skills, I know that the husband had one final look at his wife, a piercing, meaningful look, one that she didn't even register, as he blindly threw the esky in the rough general direction of their Holden ute. I know that look because it was the same look I exchanged with my my girlfriend when we broke up, the look that tries to find some tiny trace of the the happiness you once had, but fails, and says goodbye. I said to this to my friend (and officially, the three people in that car were now my friends, even though I nearly ruined it) and she questioned me, questioning my ability to ascertain such deep readings from a simple glance, and I explained, I explained my own broken heart, my own broken friendships, in such moving and genuine detail that they actually turned the radio off to listen to me speak, and we truly bon...oh who am I kidding, I had to fess up that I mostly gathered a lot of my information from the fact he went "You can get the nerfucking divorce papers out the fucking glovebox when we get home mole!" - I was lucky that I didn't have to translate for the Latvians, I don't know what Latvian is for glovebox...

So is hell being trapped in a room with your friends? Maybe - maybe it's being trapped on a bark riddled camp site in the middle of nowhere, but maybe it's not...as long as I actually remember to cheer up - now where's that lampshade...

The Show Day Trilogy - Burnie, 86, may contain traces of Bananarama

As it turned out of course, it could only end the way it did - on Show Day 99, Chris rang me up to say he was in town and wanted to go to the show, but never showed up, and that was the last time I spoke to him, or in fact anyone I was friends with at school, other than a rather strange and bewildering night out at the movies last year - the official moment I entered the friendless triangle of 99-02. My girlfriend incidentally told me everyone that she went to school with ended up a prostitute, so that was more heartwarming conversation from a cheery soul. Aside from show day 06, my fight with my physically disgusting boss, the kind of man who Fred West would say was a bit questionable, I never again have been to the show, never drunkenly once again partaking in the Hobart tradition of heckling the pig racing. I did consider possibly recounting the horrific nature of my boss and the disastrous night out I had in 06, when I thought I saw one of the Veronicas at Irish Murphys, but we'd all just feel embarrassed. Show day today means a day off work, a day to mooch around the house and watch old episodes of The Simpsons I've seen a million times. As I rapidly and somewhat depressingly age, there is a little part of me that wonders if I could still get excited about things like The Show - I have an auntie in that weird Penguin way where she's not really your auntie but you get told she is and go along with it cos then you get Milo and biscuits who is always incredibly upbeat, talkative, happy, laughing...and of course when she leaves we always go thank god she left my ears are sore, but she gets a lot of every day - her husband is equally happy though saying about seven words a decade and getting drunk on his boat, so it's win win I guess. But I do wonder what happened to my sense of mystery and wonder. Sure, I was impressed at Susannah Hoffs and her Bangles gyrations, but I'm cynical about everything, and while it was implanted into me by four years of relentless emotional pressure in Scotland, I would like to at least briefly be the wide eyed innocent boy who was always moved by those sap stories on Willessee, who cried when Molly died on A Country Practice, and who genuinely thought Santa was in Fitzgeralds and that it wasn't just some old pervy hobo called Kevin who, if he had elves, it was just his kids that had to work for their maintenance money...

As I said in part one, one of the things we used to do at my old school was go to the Burnie show for free a day before it opened, when no one else was there. We had a magical two hours to run around and be fleeced by sharpening their skills carnie folk until our time was up and some less emotionally cognescent school was let in. Ah yes, we were free ride testers, no question, but we were too pepped up on Mello Yello, sponsor supplied, and over stimulated exaggeration of things awesomeness that to question was folly. The only problem was the perpetual debate and argument between the "ride" kids and the "game" kids. The ride kids would spend their two hours going round and round on the rides, and the game kids would...you know what, you probably worked it out, no need for explanation, it's hardly the enigma code. I had a foot in either camp - I appreciated the velocity of the Alpine Express, but I also found an intellectual challenge in pitting my wits against the rotating mouth of the clown or in doing horrible things to a slow moving parade of plastic ducks. Of course, the only disappointment was that we didn't get to fully participate in the show, since no one was yet chopping wood, our local MC Tiger Dowling hadn't started rambling like Grandpa Simpson on the soon to be turned off microphone, and no one was letting pigs run amok with their own sense of wonder and amazement, which usually involved bowling someone over, but hey, it was free, there wasn't much to complain about. Even the Dagwood Dogs were free, what a treat! The Alpine Express of course was the epicentre of all our excitement, a ride that went really fast forwards and backwards, almost daring you not to spew everywhere, especially after a free Dagwood Dog, but at the 86 show, there was also a fully working computer that people could go and have a go on, and that appealed to the inner nerd that is palpably in me - as I said before, my Mum spent an entire weekend getting my high score off Grannys Garden just because I put my name in as "Cheeky Bastard", but this wasn't just a common BBC Micro, this was a C64...the queue went round the block...it was truly a magical land.

Of course, two hours wasn't long enough to devour the cotton candy (fairy floss - honestly, the Americanisation of our language...I was saying to my Mom...see what I did there? Ah, forget it) and see and do everything, but it was enough to pretty much disburse the entire school day and render any attempt to re-focus minds on maths, even footy maths, was completely pointless. So they let us after our trip to the show go outside and play cricket or something. We had a game a nun invented for us called bootball that just far too complicated to explain so cricket it was. My cricket skills declined at the same time my eyesight did, so I presume I was just fielding. I wasn't concentrating anyway, I was too over excited by the glimpse of the C64 (maybe one day we would play cricket on a computer!) and too full of several foods that shouldn't sit in the stomach together to be a valuable outfielder, and I conceded defeat when a low to the ground cut shot from a girl called Samantha went straight through my legs, and went off to do what I did best, lie in the middle of an oval assigning shapes to the clouds. About an hour passed, and just as I was considering whether a particular cloud looked like a sheep or Keren from Bananarama, I was alerted to an almighty rucus over on sports field #1. We were all abruptly jolted from our slumbering dazes to a meeting at the assembly hall. Was I being punished for assigning the wrong cloud shape (I knew it was a sheep) - I was always righteously indignant at group punishments for the innocent, but clearly the indiscretion, whatever it had been, was significant. And clearly it had involved sports field #1, but what could it be? I was so furious and righteously indignant, I completely forgot to get my Bubble O Bill from the school canteen...that's a lie, I still had time to go and get the ice cream treat from Scott Parkers mum who worked at the canteen. I'm sure she had a thing for me, but it was highly illegal, so lets just move on from that...

As it turned out, our problems revolved around a kid called Scott, who was firey enough of temper and freckle without the added emotional stimulus of competitive sport and the rocket fuel of fizzy drinks. Innocently, one of our teachers, Mr Brendan, a man who looked like what would happen if Deane Hutton from the Curiousity Show let himself go to seed, had joined in the game, bowling his slow middle aged portly gentlemen trundlers, and of course, completely clean bowled Scott, who slogged when he should have swung. Scott had thrown his bat somewhere into the middle of Yolla and let out quite the curse word. And that was enough of course for a talk to everyone about the complexities of sportsmanship in a modern age, and while I was of course indignant when I wasn't playing, Mr Brendan was having none of it, and neither was our school nun - which was a bit of a cheek because when she used to come visit our house and play the home version of Sale Of The Century she seemed very grumpy when I used to whip her elderly custard cream loving arse - but it was largely taken with good humour. Such good humour in fact that it seemed it would all be over in ten minutes with lesson learned. Even I kept my big trap shut about the unfairness of it. The Nuns problem though was twofold, she expected Scott to apologize, and it wasn't likely, and time was clearly passing us by, time we could be spending staring into space or running off the last of the Tang. As she tapped her foot impatiently, she folded her arms crossly, bones creaking under our weak underfunded lighting, and said "Now Scott, you know Jesus would play fair!" - I don't know about that, his stance on games of chance seems to be unrecorded, but I guess she could have picked worse role models. Scott though was impressively and rather stoically unmoved. With a shake of his head that probably knocked off about twelve freckles, he fiercely and decisively spat that Jesus "probably wouldn't bowl such a shithouse delivery!" - well, the Bible does have a lot of spin (ooh, get you bitch). Mr Brendan then fired back that Jesus probably would have made contact with the ball, and it was on again, a fat teacher and a kid arguing over Jesus cricket abilities while we were all gently ushered back outside to leave them to it....and I went straight back to my position on sports field #2, to stare up at the clouds, contemplate that I had good friends, and conclude that, after all, it was Keren from Bananarama...the clouds still in the same glorious shape I left them in...

And 22 years later, I spent show day doing pretty much the same thing, lying on my deck, staring at the clouds, and marvelling at technology when I did go inside. Only this time, it was definitely a sheep. Almost certainly...

The Show Day Trilogy - Hobart, 97, may contain traces of Superjesus

When I lived in North Hobart, it was in a share house with a nutcase, an anal retentive, the worlds most comically nervous would be lawyer, a girl who always used to sneak in my window (not like that) instead of using the door, a fat thief, a lazy do nothing TV obsessive (oh that was me), and a girl who is now my best friend. Such a collection of people under one roof was never going to be the kind of amusing group of friends so popular of sitcoms of the era, and so it proved, with the year descending into anarchy roughly involving who didn't do what dish, who didn't cook what meal and who didn't turn off which Superjesus tape (me again). Apparently in between fights I was supposed to go to university, but that wasn't really happening. One thing that did mark the year though was we gained a rent free lodger, a mate of mine from school in Burnie called Chris who fancied my soon to not leave me alone best friend, and he pretty much moved in for the year to try and woo her with his collection of Lisa Loeb tapes and references to parts of the anatomy of a bee. There were times that I genuinely wondered why I didn't take a gap year and travel around exotic parts of Europe, as the tension piled up, particularly around exam time when we had a four or five hour argument about a set of keys that went missing. It was probably my first real taste of having to care about really trivial matters that I wasn't the least bit interested in, and I didn't pass the test very well. My entire contribution to the whole four hour debate was to make puns and jokes about locks and whinge that I couldn't see Lano and Woodley on the ABC. Essentially, they didn't find my contribution very helpful, althought I thought the humourous physical comedy of Frank Woodley would have been a lot more assistance to the day than a girl just screaming "MY KEYSSSS!" over and over again. Having dined of a self cooked meal of poorly gristled steak and chips that would make KFC ashamed, I wasn't really in the mood anyway, and the whole day collapsed with a weary sense of tedious inevitability. What could possibly stimulate the weary arguer the next day I wondered as I checked my fledgling e-mail system for e-mails the following day, and yes, it was an invite to the Hobart Show - or the Royal Hobart show, to give it it's full title...I mused whimsically whether Prince Phillip was a fan of the pig racing, but it fell on deaf ears...

Chris was a nice bloke, prone to moments of bewildered anger, and he didn't seem the show type, but when in Hobart, I guess do as the Hobartians do, apart from the stabbing at Target. It's fair to say that it wasn't an especially memorable experience to go to the show. My main memory of the entire night was going on an Indy car simulator where you got to race Nigel Mansell and then being incredibly angry that we didn't win the pre-taped race (a little too upset if I'm honest). It was also at this show that I actually heard someone say the phrase "Someone catch that pig!" which I always enjoy at a show. Chris was pretty distant, he was excited by the propelling motion of the ever touring and resillient Alpine Express, but not by much else. It was left to me to pick up the emotional excitement, which is not my strong point, but if I didn't, then perhaps we would have moped around and punched each other. I didn't really know why he'd asked me to go to the show with him, but I figured out later that he actually wanted my friend to come so he could keep wooing and I was just sort of the middle man who was still in the middle but didn't bring a left flank, so to speak. Once I realised this, I put my own distance between myself and him, pretty much out of a sense of half arsedness. Anyway, as he was moping and mumping around the showgrounds, I saw, I'm sure, one of my old school teachers dressed as a carnival clown. accepting good natured kicks in the groin from small children battling for a balloon. I went to tap Chris on the shoulder to tell him that our old teacher was suffering the kind of humiliation you want to see your teachers suffer until you grow up and realise most of them are desperately lonely but he was staring wistfully and lovelornly at his battered and bruised miserable excuse for a pie, and didn't respond. At which point, I decided enough was enough, left him standing like a lovefool, while I went off and won a giant inflatable novelty hammer, and a copy of Rambo for the Nintendo. When I came back, Chris was in the same place, staring in the same way, and I really did think he was drugged - I never did find out, but if the alternative is a healthy case of botulism from the pie, you better hope it was drugs...

It was the bus journey home from the fair that I always remember, and not just because nothing says fun on a bus like riding home with a giant inflatable hammer. We pulled into Glenorchy bus station, tired and exhausted, not really speaking to each other, while I sat and hoped that the mental patient up the back talking about football wasn't going to be a Collingwood supporter (and of course he was) and listening to bogan girls changing the lyrics of popular songs to include sexual references and adult themes. After we pulled into the bus station, the driver got out, and then...well nothing. The driver just got out, walked off the job and left us sitting there. I'm not sure if there was some sort of bewildering bus driver mix up and a woman was supposed to come and take over, but there we sat, in the dark, in the rain, in a rather dangerous suburb. The mental patient thought it was really funny, but a man across from us with a slightly effinimate curly mullet and big flicky ears certainly wasn't laughing. He announced to the bus really loudly that he was now late for work - as he was in shorts and wearing what I thought was flippers, this job of his must have been a curious one to be starting at 11pm, maybe illegal abelone diving, but he turned his attention on me, demanding that I give him my inflatable hammer. When I asked why, he said was going to take it, find a bus driver (where wasn't specified, maybe in a pool hall?) and beat him over the head with it until the bus started moving again. And it wasn't a wry sideways glance at our current predicament, he was serious. I, perhaps rather foolishly, pointed out with perhaps too much reasoning that I had spent at least three dollars to throw the balls down the clowns (not my teacher) throat to win that hammer and I wasn't for giving it up. Defeated, he turned his attention to one of the more firey flannel girls who was holding a walkman, and suggested that he was now going to beat the found driver with a walkman instead. He and the girl got off the bus to chase vengenance, and of course, when they were off, a new driver got on, put her foot on the gas and drove off, hilarious On The Buses style - leaving them both standing angrily at the bus station fuming. Chris, of course, paid attention to none of this...he was drawing love hearts on the window. I don't think he knew we stopped...

It seemed very strange to me that one of my best friends would essentially have become a different person in the space of a year, but of course, we all had - all the friends forever messages in the world can't prepare you for growing up, moving on, moving away. As he stared mournfully out of the window with his little shaved head glistening in the street lights, I felt compelled to offer some encouragement, perhaps something that could save our friendship in the diffident times it found itself in. "Would you cheer the fuck up!" I said, helpfully and tactfully. There's always a great risk with saying something like that the person will turn around and say they have a life threatening disease or something, well, that's what I used to say to those old biddies who would say to me outside Roelf Vos to cheer up it might never happen, but even my best abrasive tones couldn't shake his weary spirit. He actually, and keep in mind this was a rugged and relatively tough in his own mind emotionally stable young kid, said "I wish I knew how to" without ever once moving from his adopted blank staring position, as he almost started crying. What could I say? What could I do? An hour later he was fine, bouncing around and talking animatedly about Paradise Beach, but what was I supposed to say? I had no idea, and I know why I had no idea - because we weren't really friends anymore. A year earlier I'd have known exactly what to say, hell I'd have known exactly what the problem was, but now, this was just another random person with problems. My platitudes, if I said anything, were probably not helpful, and we pretty much left our friendship on the bus, along with my Rambo game, which I forgot to pick up off the seat. As I got home that night, I slumped wearily on the floor of the living room, throwing my giant inflatable hammer to the side, stared up at the lights, moving after about an hour to finally put on a video tape of Worlds Craziest Pig Thieves or something, and just as the tape started, the anal retentive came in and said something like "Now about those keys..."

My response, as they say, will be recorded another day...

The Show Day Trilogy - Burnie, 92, may contain traces of Tom Cochrane

So it's a public holiday in Hobart today - ostensibly for everyone to go the Hobart show (if you don't know, big fete, loads of pigs, kids getting food poisoning), but of course, no one goes to that - besides most of the events are probably hosted by our breakfast radio toolshiner duo Kim and Dave, and after being stuck listening to their take on drugs and violence (she actually said "people used to take drugs to chill out, man" - I could not have been more embarrassed if I'd caught my Mum and Dad doing it, and believe me, my Dad is a horrendous waltzer...what, what did you think I meant?). Anyway, I got too drunk last night, too mouthy, however by current standards if no one is asked to leave that's a triumph, then had a horrendously vivid dream coated and smothered in failure. I tend to find the accumulation of guilt - guilt from a little bit too many words, guilt from the whiteanting - will manifest itself in lurid angst ridden dreams. Or maybe it's just when I'm drunk. As it turned out, the distinctly uncomfortable tone of the conversation, that is when it turned to me, by definition made me feel like going home anyway. It turns out most people think my working in a comfort zone is a bad thing and that I should be doing more with my life. They probably have a point - being the least mediocre fish in a stagnant swamp isn't exactly running up that hill, but it is easy. I respect their point, after all, I would love to drive around in a limo hanging out with Lolo Jones, and sometimes I wonder why I don't, but I've seen too many people chase career and end up destroyed. Besides which, from my desk, I get to see daily fights outside Village Cinemas and a wide collection of hot available single mothers...yeah, i probably should move on huh? I mean, the single mothers will age won't they? And there's only so much "nerferkin" enjoyment you can gain from a mother and daughter fighting in a carpark? I know, I should focus more on me, but self importance and thoughts of me aren't my thing...not now anyway.

As I've said before, I had a brief and undeniable run of being the coolest kid in the school when I first moved to Burnie. The only way I could have been cooler would have been to talk in grunts and sell drugs from a plastic bag. My thoughts on the wider world, my considerations on the relative merits of Life is a Highway by Tom Cochrane (which weren't positive) and my indifference to such matters as homework and dress standards were all widely appreciated and discussed. Without actually doing anything that was especially cool, and just regurgitating several worldly facts about Beverly Hills 90210 and Switzerland, I gained a cult following, especially on the school bus, a shiny Kergers coach full of dispirited dreamers and broken windows, driven by an angry and grumpy man with glasses the size of a dinner plate, who would never smile. By strict definitions of the time, I suppose his demeanour was cool, but I didn't want to draw attention to it. Whatever was going on, I would instantly and completely dismiss it as rubbish and not as good as we did it in Scotland. In truth, it was just the way I had lived in Scotland, and that was a survival act, the act of never putting your head above the parapit unless you were one hundred percent sure you weren't going to get a slap, but by the time I realised that I was actually posturing for the sake of personal approval, I decided to go with it. The only crack in that brief halycon summer of popularity was when I got a bit too enthusiastic over a bet with a girl in my home ec class and she called me weird, but she got a job as a mechanic, so what do I care about her opinion? Yes, times were good, the phone was ringing off the hook with party invites and my sleepover schedule made Kendra Wilkinson look depressed, and I hadn't even told them that I had a knife pulled on me at school...I wondered briefly if I should upgrade it to a gun, but I held off on the story. I didn't want to give my appreciative audience too much of a good thing. Yes, the self indulgence of a fourteen year old can be quite awe inspiring, especially since at night, I would go home and punch the walls that I wasn't still in Scotland and be desperately and pathetically home sick, but by day, well, life was certainly a highway...and I wanted to ride it all night long...

One night, I ended up being invited to the 1992 Burnie Show. The Burnie show essentially is a big agricultural celebration that Tamworth rejected for being a little too redneck, well, it was in 1992, it might be ultra sophisticated now. It was always freezing when I went as a kid, and our school always got in for free the day before it opened - as I realised in later life, rather dangerously all we were were unpaid ride testers, but hey, it was free. My main childhood memories involve a kid called Wes trying to climb out of the Alpine Express while it was moving and almost decapitating himself in the process. While deep down, I was quite excited to be invited anywhere as I enjoyed my popularity, I had genuine reservations about the Burnie show attending. After all, it would inevitably be raining, muddy and there was a chance of a rogue pig skittling me to the amusement of all. Of course, taken by my stance and keen to impress me and my sardonic charms, a procession of people told me that the Burnie show was rubbish, they were going just to stand around and tell me how rubbish it was. For reasons that are lost entirely to time, my cousin (the one I don't like) came with us. I don't know how this happened, but I presume that he just didn't have any friends at the time. His posturing was genuine in fairness, he really didn't like anyone, least of all me. This did put a little more on edge, as I hate it when family and friends collide, as they have different interpretations of me, and stories that don't quite add up. Just to put a little further distance between my self important cooler than thou self and "the pack", I made sure that I wore a specifically tailored outfit, the finest clothes and hat Joe Bloggs and the finest boots that FILA could make (I looked like a reject from EMF, but then it was cool). No one else on the entire show looked quite as pimp-my-show as I did, and I topped off the outfit with sunglasses straight from the Ian Ziering collection. I know I drew a startled reaction, mostly "who's that wanker?" - and that was my first mistake, inherent snobbery only has certain limits...because it was a fancy outfit, and it was a terribly muddy day. The bogans in welly boots had outsmarted me...as I sunk deep into what I prayed was mud, my friends, my dear friends turned up, and that's when things went really awry...

Naturally, my friends being the supportive positive fans of mine that they were, took one at me and proclaimed my wonderfully cool outfit. Even my cousin had to admit that I looked sensational, and that really stuck in his craw. The real problem though was, deep down, they actually looked forward to the show, and were palpably excited to be there. I only realised this when after about ten minutes of flat, ennui laden observations on the quality of the show, they immediately sparked up when they saw helium balloons. Prompted by my cousin, they gleefully and delightedly fired up silly helium balloon voices. Literally, I was the stick in the mud (you don't get to say that often in life) wondering just what was going on, what had happened to the kids from the Nirvana style catalogue, and before my rain splattered sunglasses they immediately transformed into eight year olds throwing mud and saying "balls" in a helium tinged voice. My cousin was loving it, and they were genuinely happy, but it left me in quite the horrendous bind. If I went along with this change of heart, what would happen to me, and my FILA boots? I should of course have thrown off the shackles and done what I do best, fake sincerity, but I didn't, proclaiming my aghastness loudly at their joy. I'd like to think they were vaguely chastened, but I was the problem, I was miserable and homesick and I couldn't change. I think I lost them when they went to bet on the pig racing. I felt desperately alone of course, sitting in the pavillion on my own, holding a showbag and the keys to the car. I wondered where my world had gone, I wondered all kinds of exetensial questions about my place in the world, and I did it while watching a lump of a lass chop wood like there was no tomorrow. At which point, a small cherub cheeked girl in pink asked me I wanted a lolly. Touched by her kindness, I agreed, and she sprayed silly string at me and giggled. The final indignity was complete - soaked, lonely, friendless, muddy, lolly deprived and outwitted by a child, I took the only positive course of action I could - I grabbed the silly string off her and squirted her with it, wnet down and did some supporting for the woodchoppers, then I went and found my friends and went on the go karts. They were fantastic. And as I was drove home by my out of her wits mother, who had to listen to my depressing homesick rantings, she touchingly smiled as she asked how my day had been..."shite" I said, but of course, it was unconvincing. I had, against all my cool judgement, been won over by a go kart...

I was able to save the day by claiming that I was drunk in charge of a go kart...it was a desperate ploy, a terrible exaggeration unless you accept I was drunk on silly string, but it worked. For now....