Trying to catch the bouncer deluge in a paper cup...

A few years ago, when I was in Glasgow, a red T-shirted woman who was big of chest but displaced of morality pushed into me and demanded that I signed her petition. This was far more pushy than the normal Glasweigan mall approach of engaging you in conversation about your day until they lower the boom. Her petition, on a regulation brown issue clipboard, was against the proliferation of Irish theme pubs. I was busy, I had a lot to do, so I dragged myself away from her chest and wandered off, but now, I wished I had signed and signed more than once now that Irish Murphys is now Hobarts worst pub. It's been turned over to them...the bouncers...the black T-shirted mafia now assigned with full self importance. One of them demanded, to prove my sobriety, that I tell him how many people were at the Crowded House concert, almost poking me in the chest and asking if it was a billion, and then when inside a blonde haired male model was pushing people out of the way to clear a space, while a girl with her pants down was allowed to display her junk in the trunk to everyone. It was this point I wondered exactly why I wasn't in bed - the onset of drinkers remorse it was not, it wasn't even the onset of middle age. It was the demeaning of a fine drinking establishment by officialdom. There's nothing you can do, if you are pushed out of the way by a bouncer, the responsibility is yours to cop it, the reversal of general service standards. Outside the Quarry, two T-shirted men are in a punch up with a small bouncer, swinging blindly, one with a T-shirt over his head, while his girlfriend pulls him away tenderly and plaintively by the arm. We stop and watch, aware that it probably wasn't his fault, after all The Quarry is the place that once said someone with MS was drunk and wouldn't let him in, despite the production of a medical alert bracelet, so we don't expect much these days. Be a blonde, pull your pants down, and you are fine, but you are labelled by age and jumper, and the city belongs to them. My enthusiasm for going out is at an all time low, and can't be continuing if this is the life we lead now - crammed in while Sven the enforcer physically pushes people out of the way, listening to Kings Of Leon covers with changed lyrics, spinning down an endless black hole until we all tumble blindly into a taxi. A girl sprawls outside the Commonwealth bank ATM, rolling from side to side until she comes to rest against the glass of the newsagents window, her legs pointing in different directions, her eyes tightly shut. I wonder if her physical attractiveness meant she got to drink more than she should have, I wonder where her friends are, and I wonder why we don't stop to help, as we ply into another moderately cool venue to hear moderately cool songs, and the venues don't know the bouncers outnumber the patrons these days...can't think why...

Of course, such bleak assessments are reserved for the morning after - at the time, everything seems normal. Hobart seems even exciting after a serious session on the 8.50 cans of UDL, and Crowded House can sound like the most amazing band in the world. Next to me in the field, as I sulk my way through a session of Josh Pyke support songs, is the Liberal leader Will Hodgman, in what can only be described as politican casual. He looks a bit bored, like I was at Wolfmother, and luckily leaves before a beer can hits me on the legs. You can never tell at a concert if you are enjoying the band or enjoying the fact you know the words. Will Hodgman doesn't even know the words to Don't Dream It's Over, but he looks like he'd prefer the Sixpence None The Richer cover version anyway. We assign to ourselves the memories we want to anyway with certain bands - my girlfriend told me a long time ago that she always thought the perfect way to end a relationship was just to put Don't Dream It's Over in a tape deck with a note attached to play it and never speak again. We didn't even get that far. I get completely lost at one point, whether it's just through an interminable song from the new album or trying to not throw up from the 8.50 UDL, and people are trying to get me to join them, but I think it's kids bumping into me, and I ignore them until they think I'm sulking. It's a strange evening, both quite great and weird at the same time. One minute I'm happy the next I'm bewildered. My sober friend is excited and drinking the 8.50 UDL, and my excited friend is drinking water and preparing for exams. I don't know what to say anymore, I've lost my ability to enjoy myself in a series of self doubting moments and strange self analysis. Drinking makes me unwell rather than drunk, my friends are all over the place, wanting me to join in but talking to someone else when I do, and if you peek over the head of the beanie in front of you, Neil Finn can appear to be the greatest rock star in the history of the world. That's not to say driving through the streets of Glenorchy, heckling passers by and singing It's Only Natural to disconnected passers by with your friends isn't somehow glorious in the right circumstances, but my natural state is discontent, it always has been, discontent and concern, and I'm too old to change that no matter how positive my intentions. I know the concert was good, I know my friends are good, I know I'm having a good time, but I'm still edgy, and I always think someone more successful is going to get the attention. It's because I'm Scottish...we aren't happy no matter what, we feel the need to be on edge in case we are cut down to size. On cue, my Dad texts me to say St Mirren lost 0-2 to Dundee United...my sober friend is now tremendously excited to be going out, which throws me even more. Would my life be a lot better if I was able to drink without the girly problem of a stomach ache and a much greater capacity for enjoyment? Perhaps, but I wouldn't be me, and I probably wouldn't be where I am...for better or for worse, this is where I am, this is who I am, and these are the songs I will listen to forever...St Mirren, of course, will seemingly never score a goal again...

Hours pass, things fall into place, people stay, people go, and here we are, dancing in Syrup nightclub, with no one around save for those with nowhere else to go. I wonder, at least for a moment, if there's somewhere better than this, somewhere I'm missing out on, someones list I should be on, maybe the place Will Hodgman went to. The DJ has a blue shirt and the hurredly shaved off remains of his Movember moustache. He looks as bored as the rest of us, no doubt dreaming of a summer session in Ibiza instead of trying to segue Reel 2 Reel into Young MC. Fat girls are on the stripper poll, and I'm dancing not quite drunkenly enough to convince myself this has any merit. Time passes, more people come in, another person pushes me out of the way, but I'm not drunk enough to protest. The DJ never changes ocuntenance until he becomes even more compelling than the tunes he played or what my mother would rather optimistically call the talent. He hates us, and suddenly I notice that there's now a charge to even ask for a request, and I turn right over mentally to the TV page, just as the bouncer tries desperately to salvage the diminishing returns by dancing from the shoulders only, just as some other painfully ironic self aware early 90s hit is spun. I can't dance, I've never been able to, but I'm hamstrung even more by my opting for sensible clothes. On the stripper pole a girl in a white shirt who's shape is that of a sack filled with billiard balls is throwing sexy shapes, and pointing to everyone demanding they join her, even that badly dancing chap in the sensible jumper. No one joins her, and the shapes become even more desperate, at one point they are even barbeque...there's no more demeaning climb down than the jump off the stripper pole at a Hobart nightclub at 1 in the morning when you haven't picked up. A middle aged man in a work shirt walks through with a whistle trying to get everyone to join in with the whistles tempo, but he's reached the end of his road travelling, if not with me, at least near me when a girl asks to stop and says it's lame. Chastened, he puts his whistle down, and leaves, just as the DJ, in a desperate act of self animation, waves his hands in the air like he just don't care. At which point, when he realises no one else is watching, he sinks back into his seat, takes a painful discontent sigh, and slumps back in his booth, sitting down on his chair like he really does care...at least, about where his life is going...

In the middle of the dance floor, just underneath the flabby left armpit of the latest pole dancing wannabe, who has managed to attract the attention of another T-shirted stubbled paramour, is a girl in a black cocktail dress. In the context of this club at the moment, she's the most beautiful girl here, and she's staring at me, although in fairness it's only because her attachment has spun her in my direction. Attached to her back like a tortoise shell is her boyfriend. At least, I think it's her boyfriend, he's got a shaved head, a full beard, a T-shirt from the discount rack of Just Jeans, and he's not counting the steps to the door of her heart but another part of her anatomy. She's paying him absolutely no attention, but he hasn't noticed, he's hugging her and letting his mind wander, shutting his eyes and holding on tight. She looks at me for a moment, just for a moment, with a sort of strange expression on her face, a kind of desperation for help, that alarms me for a moment but there's nothing I can do as she disappears into the crowd, or at least, to the bar, with her shell attached. It is a mixed blessing that while the bouncers at Syrup are as bad as their fiddly-dee counterparts, and you may find yourself wondering exactly why the bouncer clips a velvet rope across you when the club is only half full, the people selling the drinks ply you until all hours with no regard...that means the girl is going to have to work extra hard to shed her shell, a weird and strange metaphor for trying to break free of torpor. Maybe she could hook up with the whistle blower. By this time, the club is one third full, and I can see everyone individually, except cocktail dress girl and her shell, they must have the traditional Tssie outside Syrup bust up that leads to a girl in tears, a man swearing and a passer by with a kebab stepping in and getting a smack in the teeth judging by the last expression I saw her throw me. On this particular night, the battle is well and truly lost. It's not them, it's me, I'm drunk on self consciousness, and painfully aware that this isn't me anymore. I feel the freedom of liberation and release as I leave my friends dancing in and around the podium to the strains of Bon Jovi, aware that I'm unable to fulfil the dual demands of being wanted and being left behind, and I slide down the Syrup steps with a world weary air, soon to be engaged in fitfully animated conversation with a tip hopeful taxi driver who probably says he had Nick Seymour in the back of his cab, and drift off to an uneasy sleep, knowing that being outside my comfort zone and going out is becoming, for the moment, increasingly difficult and tiring but not wanting to live my life like my auntie, devoid of friends and sitting at a table saying this is my life...complexities and dualities, of course, that only strike you in the morning over toast and regrets...

Don't dream my youth...chances are...it's over...

Let's all meet up in the year 2000, won't it be great when we're all freezing cold...

If I go out for a walk at the moment around the shops, I can guarantee one of the following things will happen - at least one of them, by the time I get to track 3 of Circus on my IPOD, a small child will have ran at full pelt into my lower leg, one of either a trolley, wheelchair or pram will jam up the top of the escalator and everyone behind them will have to jump out of the way, this trolley, wheelchair or pram having pushed themselves just in front of me as I got to the bottom of the escalator. I can guarantee that if I go to go around someone, someone will come from the blind side and cut directly through the pair of us (this is usually by track two). I can guarantee that I will knock something off a shelf and it will be something really embarrassing like a copy of Lindsay Lohans Just My Luck and I'll look stupid, and most of all, the absolute certainty is that whatever item I am looking at will become the most popular item in the shop, even if it's Lindsay Lohans Just My Luck. Yes, I'm in a rut clearly. I'm not in a bad mood about it, it happens from time to time. Not even the prospect of a moderately pleasant evening of moderately composed Crowded House tunes seems to be getting me any more than moderately pleasantly excited. As I look outside my house at the moment, there are no cars, no people, I feel like the only person on the planet right now, and I'm pretty bored. That said, I'm contrary because I'd quite like to just sit here for a while instead of meeting friends for lunch and the playing of moderately pleasant tune. The nature for me of being in a rut is that there seems essentially no way out of the boredom, when in fact there's a whole exciting world out there to go and embrace, if only it wasn't raining, crowded, boring, or whatever excuse you want to ascribe to yourself. I think there's something wonderfully Scottish about similtaneously seeking solitiude and stability and then saying you are bored. It's what my auntie does all the time, is impeccably rude to anyone who stays with her than wonders why no one comes to visit. The complexities of my emotions are sometimes strange - yesterday at work, I said 0 words to anyone, and I couldn't work out why, I was painfully self aware I was being a jerk. Then I realised it was because my Itunes didn't properly download the last four tracks of Circus and I had been sulking about it all day...that's not a rut, that's a justifiable reason for immaturity...me and Shaun Udal, united in having a lousy day I'd think...

A long time ago, the last time I was in such a rut, was incidentally the last time I had to properly go home for Xmas - no, not Scotland, a combination of snow (not the singer of Informer), paranoia, football postponments, David Jason trying to be funny and family disputes means I won't be going down that road again - but Penguin, the home of the big Penguin and the Penguin shaped rubbish bins. I felt really bad because I genuinely considered, having failed uni, myself washed up and finished at 22, and so any time spent outside my room sulking and whining and not doing some tedious work for Yahoo was never going to be productive. I was at least well dressed for the elements but emotionally, I was pretty naked, and spent most of my Xmas sitting on a couch watching television and hoping to be left alone. If someone put a DVD on, I would watch it and the clock until I could go to bed. I know this was staggeringly immature behaviour, but I didn't really care, because I was upset damn it! With such a narrow world view, it pained me to have to be nice to people, especially my cousin (the one I don't like) and his girlfriend. His girlfriend had struck me in the middle of one of my more disatrous pity parties, and I had to make it up to her by being nice and asking her how her day was and you know, the usual rubbish that envelops a family Xmas, laughing at whatever crappy joke she pulled out of the cracker. It probably says a lot I can't remember her name, but I can remember her joke. Says a lot. Anyway, point is, that I was one thing or another for that whole Xmas, deliriously fake happy about the whistle in the cracker or whingy sulky bubba wants a boo boo. If you know Tasmanians, you'd be aware that mostly, and I do say mostly, they are incredibly nice people, as long as they aren't bogans, so no-one said anything that could be construed as a rebuke towards my behaviour, but I don't think they needed to. When the ramaki was passed around, I was usually the last to get offered the tray, or at least that's what I thought. The worst thing was probably being asked what I was doing with my life...I didn't know, I really didn't, so how I was meant to verbalise it to people I hadn't seen in five years wasn't really going to be easy. I usually muttered something about Triple J, and hoped it would do until more ramaki went past my nose and I could get away. Now I think about it, I should have behaved far worse, it would have been a lot more fun than watching Xmas pass me by one Chubby Brown DVD, sliced bacon tray and terrible cracker joke at a time...

As far as feeling like a failure was concerned, it wasn't helped by having to spend Xmas with Russell Robertson, the all conquering Penguin born (well, they came 2nd, so I guess not all conquering, but semi conquering hardly fits the story) Melbourne footballer who had just played in the Grand Final that year. Obviously, it was a completely contrasting homecoming for him and me - he came back a hero, I came back a slightly washed up couldn't hang on to a girlfriend ex Triple J employee who was feuding with a gay guy at work over the right to go and buy bubble gum after the doors were shut. You know, just a slight contrast. No one was making me free ramaki just for gracing the pub (which was celebrating Xmas with a pool tournament and that traditional Xmas song The Gambler by Kenny Rogers) with my presence put it that way. Of course, he was also incredibly nice, and it wasn't his fault I had failed uni - I mean, who knew turning up to class was a pre-requisite to passing...we had a lovely chat about the time he accidentally broke my calculator before he was swamped by people who's connection with him with on slightly sounder footing than a worn out anecdote about the smashing of Texas Instruments. I know that standing inside a pub all alone isn't really my favourite thing in the world at the best of times, but when the only people who talk to you are asking if you know Russell, well, you might as well do a runner. And so eventually, tired of mid strength Boags and amusing stories about footballers, I decided it was time to go for a wander. In situations of social discomfort, especially when I was that age, I always do a runner, usually to a swing park, and to be honest no one would have noticed I had buggered off anyway. Outside the local chemist, that was where it started to rain, a brief and terrible downpour that made me do a runner for some shelter. In the rain there was a homeless guy, swigging wine from a bottle. It probably didn't surprise me the way I was feeling that I actually thought, wow, even he's happy...yep, no one more happy than the homeless. That was my thinking, my self pitying thinking, and it was exhausting me. No wonder I was in a rut, my thinking was so tedious it was like a giant weight, and I couldn't dig my way out of it with a pithy reference to a popular band like I normally could. I decided that the only way to get through it was with at least some positive thinking, even if it was forced, and what better way to do it than to wander through the rain, shiver in the cold, step over the homeless guy, go and get a terribly overpriced item of fast food from the convenience store, and get out a video for everyone as a show of good faith...obviously not Chubby Brown, I like to think I have some standards...

Penguin video store used to be a terribly small and painful place - a Mom and Pop video store with a tiny glass door, Police Academy perenially in the new releases and tapes everywhere across the store because the place was so tiny, it was like the videos were stacked in a phone box. Reaching into the pile could, just like my local KMart used to be like, produce any combination of videos - Deliverance and Bambi say, or Just My Luck and Gone With The Wind. It also never shut, at any time of the year, it would stay open every day until midnight, with weary staff propping up the desk with a cheesy smile and a tag on about Jaffas on tap. As it happened, I ended up just about making it into the video store just before it closed, soaking wet, with a strangely upbeat point of view about the homeless, and at least some sense of Xmas cheer. I can't remember what I was looking for - maybe Deliverance, a good old fashioned Xmas treat. The man behind the desk had a bewilderingly patterned Hawaiian shirt, brown, white and floral, with a droppy moustache that hung to the south and the west, his hands busy with paperwork and his eyes inattentive and tired. I was scared to ask him for any help since he was clearly a man burdened with stress, but eventually I had to, as I couldn't locate anything suitable. I thought I was pretty reasonable in my request, but he didn't listen, so I had to change accents to go to a more aggressive Scottish tone, and he looked up, both furious and exhausted, the physical embodiment of my own mood, and said something terse and unintelligible. I repeated my question, which was again I thought quite reasonable, it wasn't like I asked where the Guttenburg titles were, and he said under his breath and his moustache "this is progress, this is Xmas..." - I had no idea what he meant by progress, but I think from his paperwork he was going broke, and he pushed his paperwork to one side angrily and helped me as best he could, and there we both stood, frustrated, out of time, freezing, bewildered, done in, left behind, tired of living on lifes edge, with not a good thing to say as the holiday season rolled in...

It felt, oddly enough, a lot like Xmas...

It's beginning to smell a lot like Xmas...

So I'm wondering around today with a big Linda Perhacs fixation on the IPOD - irrations are numerous and lasting, even without the minor irritation of a poorly prepared sandwich settling on my stomach, mostly because it's Xmas and no shelf can merely be browsed without either the application of serious sales pressure or a trolley shoved into your leg by an errantly wandering and befuddled father. There's a lady in Big W, she's on her mobile phone, she's loud enough to scare the blue shirted staff away from her, and she's all denim and slightly desperate attempts through trendiness and hair style to reclaim her youth. On a shelf somewhere near her there sits a solitary and lonely Valentines Day Bear, the most terrifying reminder of commerce and the march of time a chain store can muster. She's talking on her mobile phone in loud boisterous sentences about which book she should buy her son, positing between a selection of those tedious sporting titles that tell you nothing or a cook book written by a celebrity chef of the moment who's brandishing a smug smile on the cover. As she talks a little too loudly on the phone about her sons many accomplishments, needless to say a proud mix of academic, sporting and community awards, a girl I hadn't seen before working there who was neither the fat exhausted girl nor panda eyed girl looks at me and rolls her eyes. I shrug indifferently as I try to negotiate my way around mother of the year to get a look at a book by a sportsman that will pass the time one day and hopefully rekindle the love of reading that Toby Young has killed in mee, but I can't shift her and her continuing list of questions to the person on the other end of the phone about exactly what her son would want for Xmas seems a little depressing to me - like she doesn't really know her son at all, just his list of accomplishments. Even my Mum in the midst of my mid 90s unresponsive grunting phase could quickly pick up two or three items she knew I could at least partially feign interest in. I leave her caught between a Schumacer book and a hard place, talking even more loudly and more irritably on the phone, just as she's about to be trapped by an eager beaver helper in a blue shirt. As I walk, a woman who fits the classic Glaswegian nickname of 1690 (she looke 16 from the back but 90 from the front) sweeps past me at a million miles an hour with her strangely patterned grey and black streaked hair, just as Linda gets to the end of If You Were My Man, muttering something about a customer who can't tell the difference between one price tag or another, and she swears about it. She looks to me almost apologetically, but over my shoulder, is the customer she's swearing about, who only doesn't hear her because she's muttering about the same thing but from a different perspective. Caught between the two ends of the argument, I briefly think that I've been embroiled in this what's on special and what isn't fiasco and may be required to adjudicate, but just as fate seems destined to make me pick a side, an inattentive child clatters into my legs trying to get a Violet Crumble, and I lose all track of where I am, blinded by rage as I always am when small children annoy me...the rage is ultimately impotent however, as the child runs away, excited by the possibilites of Xmas, and I shrug, turn up Linda and wander off into the distance, just glad someone still cares December is coming...

No one seems excited by Xmas this year, the exhortations of how many days there are til Xmas replaced by flat outright complaining about the tedium of everything and the re-release of the same Xmas albums as ever. No one is making an effort, except one of the girls in the florist. It's not the girl who doesn't know everyone can see down her top when you go down the escalator, but the older woman with the black hair who seems to be the only one who does any work. By choice she's dressed as a cross between an elf and a pot plant, and at first I had no idea what she was supposed to be. Closer inspection revealed she was meant to be an elf, but the only reason I knew that was because she had elf written in white letters on her chest, and I probably looked like a dirty pervert trying to figure out what it said there. Other than that, the only other people on a Xmas footing are the staff at Sanity. I'm scared of Sanity, it's an aggressive CD store with narrow shelves down which they can trap you with their wily sales techniques and American style smiles. I know they are on a Xmas footing because two steps inside the store are staff pretending to stock the shelves, just ready to make sure that if you pick up Weeds on DVD you buy it. I take a step inside the store, forgetting myself, trying to ideally get a quick look at the tracklisting of Circus, and a neutered male in tight trousers with a Zac Efron smile turns his bodyweight subtly towards me, ready to infuse my experience with as much manual taught charm as possible. Luckily I see him and get out just in time and he turns his attention to some American tourists who have made the fatal mistake of picking up a Hamish and Andy CD to assess who's cuter. Last Xmas I purchased some blank CDs from Sanity, and the girl inside the store took it upon herself to look at them as if I was personally responsible for the decline of the importance of the singles charts and was really dismissive of my purchase, snarkily asking if I was going to burn some CDs. Her supervisor was really offended at her rudeness and chewed her out quite publically, while a queue of people shuffled awkwardly behind me - I was just wondering why I got bagged out for buying blank CDs while the guy behind me was buying an Akhmal Saleh DVD and got off scot free. Just as I left their day in tatters, and shuffled off embarrassed, the same bloke from today jumped out of the shadows to tell me all about a special edition of Die Hard, so I'm onto him and his line of patter...the Americans though are falling for his charms, and are hanging on every word, and don't realise they are being shamelessly pressured. They think the nice man has come to help them with their Hamish and/or Andy dispute...

It's a far cry from the festive preparations of Burnie. Then there was no expectations anyone would buy anything, no sales pressure, just a collection of poorly selected Santas, limited decorations on the street that seemed to have as much to do with Xmas as the local transport museum, and of course, the radical transformation that would come over our resident busker, Fat Bob. I saw Fat Bob being asked to move along by the Toyworld purple bear once, and I was screaming at people for a camera. Yes, Fat Bob, who looked a bit like Roger Whittaker if he took up smack, could be found outside a variety of local stores, usually Chickenfeed, slumped up against the wall moving only sporadically as he busted out a series of downbeat downtempo numbers with all the excitement of...well, Roger Whittaker on smack really. He would sing these songs with a small cardboard sign propped up against his legs that said in badly scrawled black marker "For The Kids"...the implication being that he might he shit, he might not be moving, but you'd have a heart of stone not to donate funds because he was busking for charity. However, local legend suggested that the kids in question weren't bewildered poor orphans but actually his own kids who, Screaming Jay Hawkins style, were too numerous and dispersed to keep count of. It didn't do much for my self esteem that Fat Bob pulled the ladies and I...well anyway, at Xmas, he would completely change. Well, by completely change, I mean he put on a Santa Hat and did downbeat downtempo versions of Xmas songs...entire schools of children would be bussed in just to hear his magical version of Rudolph The Red Nosed Reindeer, and the particularly wonderful way he'd do that "loike a loightbulb" line...you always knew it Xmas in Burnie when the response to the question "Mummy what's that smell" asked by a kid forced to chuck 10 cents in Bobs box o'fun was "eggnog" and not "gin"...it was like the gentle passing of the tides when Bobs distinctive scent went all Xmassy...get the advent calendars out kids, Santas a coming...wait, is that Santa, isn't that Doug from the hardware store? Get in the car kids, you are being grounded for you lack of a sense of wonder and mystery...

They haven't forced Blue Eye Shadow girl to wear anything Xmassy yet, but I'm sure she would wear it with great style and dignity if asked. Soon there will be an installed Santa to wander around on my daily walk, obviously heavily supervised by a female elf because we can't have Santa going nuts on cheeky kids like the ones at Fitzgeralds used to do. About three steps away from me as I walk and stalk, a kid is being told they are going to put straight in the car and driven home instead of going to Grandmas for a present because they'd been cheeky. The girl, who seems cute for her age didn't appear to do much wrong - she's got Hi-5 deely boppers on and little chubby cheeks, and her crime appears to be a little too much whining about the present she wants for Xmas. I don't think it registers on her face that she's done something wrong, as at her age all she's done is see something she wants and ask for it. A lot. Her bewildered face as she trails into the distance is quite sad, and in time she will associate Xmas with disappointment by the stern example of parenting her mother seems keen to set. I begrudge no one the right to a happy Xmas - I know that I am often upset by the way that a fat family in matching leggings will park themselves in front of me, shoving me out of the way in the pursuit of the latest Adam Sandler DVD, and I know that when I have to roll out of bed for a cheap jumper and a book about cricket and then sit with a family that isn't quite mine, I'll be whingy, but I know that one Xmas, 95, I was genuinely alone, adrift in a Scottish snowstorm while the people I was staying with had a massive fight, and I was caught in the middle of it. When I spent Xmas day slumped in an armchair, having been given a soccer top of one of St Mirrens mortal enemies (the loathsome Airdrie) as a hilarious mix up involving my Gran, completely drunk and shattered and exhausted, so self aware that the world I'd spent two years idolising "back home" actually was kind of rubbish, I remember thinking Xmas really had to be better than this...luckily, the years since have been better than that. As I walk back to work, there's a little kid in the card shop, who's screaming about a Lance Franklin poster and spilling bits of his sandwich everywhere, and he's so happy, his father celebrates his wonderful moment by...completely missing it, in a pointless attempt to flirt with the Austar sales lady...

If Xmas is all about family, the Dads mind is definitely on the January sales...and his eyes are, well, not on his kid...

My First Date

So today this girl has trapped me in conversation, and she's happy, over the top happy about everything. It works for her, and even though she's in her 40s she could with make up pass for mid 20s. She has a thick David Bowie in the late 90s (I think when ...Hours came out and he was always wearing his blue T-shirt and smoking?) shock of hair and with a natural inquisition that seems at last partially genuine, but she still alarms me because I'm not good with naturally peppy people and I never will be. We've got this family friend who is alarmingly happy and will give you hugs and she always says she has the same sense of humour as me which I don't believe to be true. Today as the female Bowie was going her usual routine of disarming friendliness and over the top laughter I was thinking about not just how to get her to put a sock in it, but also what would happen if she met our family friend - would they get out or would they forced to put on an ever more epic contest to decide who was enjoying the fondue more. I was a pretty happy child, and I was prone to excessive socialibilty, but nothing like this girl, who is still continuing to overly chuckle at a partial joke I made three minutes before. It says something about my workplace that I'm currently the happy one - as the rest of them bicker and argue, I'm the serene one looking at images of cute kittens on Google Image and trying at least partially to work through the animosity, but I've got nothing on this girl. The FemBow eventually leaves, and as a parting gift with a huge expectant smile on her fizzer she's demanding that I have a great day. Not a good day, a great day. As Ross Noble is want to say, thats just too much pressure. Great days are few and far between, and to be honest, she's thrown me with this, because a great day would mean that I wasn't working, that I was out with my friends, in the sunshine. As she leaves, she's looking over her shoulder for some kind of agreeable response, nearly putting her thumbs aloft like Paul McCartney, but I don't have anything other to say than a brief mumbled platitude and she looks a bit miffed. I know I should say you too, but her overbearing happiness has thrown me too much, and besides, I don't wish great days on just everyone...they are too few and far between to just randomly assign...and by sad definition, the days you think are great suck and you don't realise you are in a great day until it's gone...besides, I couldn't trust anyone with a FemBow haircut...or with foundation on her collar...

There used to be (and I think still is) a leisure centre in Irvine called The Magnum. At one point in the early 90s it was Scotlands #1 tourist attraction, mainly on account of it's wonderful space age waterslides, or flumes as they were called. I spent many a childhood day soaking wet on some poorly carpeted stairs shivering behind an equally cold skinny pasty white Irvinite as we slowly climbed to the top of the magic staircase for the right to jump on a piece of carpeting and go down the slide which was incredibly unsafe but immense fun. Sometimes a kid would just stop going down the waterslide and sit there to cause trouble so you would crash into him, and sometimes a kid would go down with the carpeting and smack their head off the top of the pipe. Good times. The Magnum was the place to hang out - we never had, say, a diner or a cafe or a milk bar to go to, the nearest equivalent was a chip shop called Mamas where you couldn't breathe due to the squashed nature of the tables and the fumes and stench that came off Mama herself. Plus you would make a twat of your early teenage self trying to flirt with some Ayrshire slapper with streaked blonde hair who was clearly not interested in you or your theories about The Soupdragons, and then you'd drop your chips on the floor and she'd tut. The Magnum was a bit of a late 80s wonderland in comparison, and there always seemed to be bits of it that were sealed off and mysterious, little conference rooms or little offices full of sports equipment or the cinema where it was always showing My Girl...it smelled of chlorine and smelly feet to be honest, but it also smelled of the future, and everyone was really proud of it. It was exciting for me to be there because when I lived in Penguin, if someone came to visit, there was nothing to show them or take them see. Well, there was a Mitre 10, a ludicrously dangerous flying fox and a machine that crushed flakes into ice cream...anyone lucky enough to come and visit me in Scotland though, we had somewhere magical to take them, a world of disgruntled lifeguards, fuzzy yellow balls that you weren't quite sure which sport they belonged too, and an ice skating rink that always had a doctor on it tending to someone...this was the future...this was the early 90s...it was the sound of now (truly the Soupdragons of leisure centres)...

So you can imagine how alarmed I was when my best friend, Tony, told me that the Magnum was yesterdays venue. Tony sort of slummed it being my best friend - I don't mean that in a bad way, but he was definitely cooler than me, well, he knew a few more bands than I did. If there was one thing I learned from Tony, it was the power of reading an opinion in a magazine and passing it off as my own. Tony also taught me the value of not wearing a shell suit when no one else did, so he was a good friend. As far as Tony was concerned the reason we didn't have girlfriends was because we weren't being intellectual enough, we were being kids spending far too much time jumping on pieces of carpet and having a swim rather than young adults talking about important issues. There was a much trendier place next to The Magnum that we had to try he said, the Harbor Arts Centre, in particular their little bar and bistro part that served salad with their meals and weren't fussy who they sold shandies too. It was, as Tony put it, the kind of place that hummed and crackled with intellectual debate and discourse to which I said what about The Soupdragons and he said would you not mention to the girls about The Soupdragons. Now, this was the first time girls had come up, and Tony had procured us, gasp, dates. Real dates with real girls, from a school that wasn't our own, and they were a year older than us. This was a problem for me because I was kinda sorta going out with Debbie, the optimistic girl who thought the future was going to be nothing but robots. What I had failed to grasp was that my presence at the date was simply to furnish his paramours friend with someone to talk to while they chatted about art and literature and I said and The Soupdragons and his response was unprintable. This I didn't really understand, I'd never come across the concept before, but it was patiently explained to me the whole wingman concept, and then I patiently explained it to Debbie who patiently told me to get fucked and I said well I won't go and she said no fine go and I said well OK if you are sure and she said The Soupdragons suck and I said how dare you....it was a rough week. It rained all week and Debbie wasn't talking to me and the way the date was being talked up, it just seemed like really high pressure. Tony even bought a book to read, some high concept French story, and I was absolutely amazed at the fact that we were properly adult dating at age 12...I would have pointed this out to Tony, but for the fact he was practicing his thoughts on Alfred Sisley and his contribution to modern art...looking up only to tut at me putting a sticker in my Panini album...

Of course, the date was a complete disaster, as is pretty much everything in life that's hyped to the extent this date was. The Harbor Arts Centre really didn't have much intellectual discourse - Henry Kellys Going For Gold was on the TV in the corner and the patrons were absolutely rapt, so we figured that the nature of the conversation wasn't so much The Left Bank as the Left Behind, and the girls weren't exactly the intellectual stimulation that had been so promised in Tonys brochure. My date, so to speak, was a girl called Kathryn with a funny sharp upturned nose (she's been living in an upturned worl...sorry, that joke always makes me laugh) who said absolutely nothing to me and sucked her coke tersely through a straight (boo) straw. To try and break the ice I told Kathryn my Bono story and she said who's Bono and I said he's a singer and she said like Jason Donovan and I said, well, technically...Tonys date was a 6"7 amazon called Mary Anne, with Pantene hair and a big grey coat and weary opinions on the state of the government that came straight from The Guardian word for word. She complained about the seat, she complained about Henry Kelly, and mostly she complained about our opinions, which weren't nearly intellectual enough. The only thing she liked was the sound of her own voice, and by the time she started complaining about the quality of the mini beets I figured it was time to get the bus home. Tony stuck it out to the end in his pursuit of intellectual boob, while Kathryn tuned out many hours earlier, many long hours earlier, once the steady supply of free coke ran out. The only four person breakthrough we had sitting in our little wooden corner was when (you guessed it) The Soupdragons came on the jukebox and we could talk about them...I wondered why we had put so much effort into pretense when if we'd just talked about, you know, stuff that was normal, we'd probably all have got on. I never saw those girls again, so the whole thing plays like a bit of a fevered dream, but I do know Kathryn shook my hand at the end of the date (that's never good) and we all walked off in four different directions, me to my strange local video shop to buy a big packet of Strawberry Hearts, and when I got home, I spoke to Debbie for about four hours on the phone, and she told me that anyone who didn't like the Soupdragons was an idiot, and that we should hang out the next day, on the swings, talking about life and how close the government was to building robots...

And you know what? When we did, that was a great day...

Smiling always with a never fading serenity of countenance (in K-Mart or in Art)

There's a song out at the moment - not The Feminine Complex one soundtracking my watching of lowly Setanta Sports shows - something about being alive and how the singer was moping about the house until she picked up at a nightclub and there was a bitching dance track on , I think it's the new Izzy single - and I imagine it makes total sense in a nightclub, you know, power of redemption through music and all that. Where it seems immensely wrong is blasting over a tinny PA system in the middle of K-Mart at 1 in the afternoon, where it's feel good charms don't match up to being trapped in the middle of a pincer and pram movement round the DVD section just as someone does something to make the entire aisle smell terrible and a little kid arcs directly and unerringly into your lower leg. Alive? That's an ironic joke, tell that to the staff, they don't seem very alive. It's like at work sometimes when you are feeling horribly depressed and down and the radio starts playing Get The Party Started on a rainy Monday afternoon. The best thing about my local KMart these days is they've equipped the shelf fillers with flourescent yellow jackets as if they are about to go cycling in the dark or something, which is almost as alarming as the fact that today blue eye shadow girl was rocking a quite alarming pair of nerd glasses (meh, it's still blue eye shadow girl). Our KMart used to be beautifully disorganised, the DVDs assembled in some sort of surrealist jumble on a wooden table where by any random selection seemed was certain to be a Jim Carrey film, but now an efficiency expert has swept in and it's lost it's shambolic character. There used to be a girl who worked in there, a blonde characterless girl with an alarmingly sharp nose, who's primary function used to be minister of morale - it might just be happenstance and co-incidence, but on the very few occasions I went into the place, she always seemed to be telling some sort of acidic or slightly libellous joke to the shaven headed middle aged man who was supposed to remember cash could be exchanged for goods and services. As I'd stand impatiently armed with a fierce pout and no where else to go (I'd hope they didn't notice that), she'd calmly and casually finish her joke, and then turn on her Clarks issue soft shoes at which point the man behind the counter would finish a sandwich and then serve me while she went elsewhere to tell someone else the joke. Now, she's in charge of putting wrestling figures and soft toys on the shelf, and walks with the embittered air of the disconsolate nostalgia freak, furiously throwing the toys and wishing she could back to her old job, and sometimes it's just fun to watch her as she puts the trolley back in the stock room, reloads, and sees the glory days of her youth and her high fliration beams fade one Powderfinger song and one stacked trolley of board games at a time...

My school that I went to in Kilwinning wasn't exactly a glamorous school. It wasn't terrible, but it was kind of crumbling, there was a much exaggerated threat of inter religious violence, my diet for a month was three packets of M&Ms and a can of coke and no one really minded, and chancey characters with names like The Big Yin, Interscope, MacSexy and Sarah would freely sell drugs from underneath whichever giant block of concrete they could find to hind under. However what was good about it was, for the most part, the people would conjure up stoicism in the face of what could have actually been quite depressing circumstances. Kilwinning wasn't exactly Las Vegas, but on certain days it felt wonderful to be there when, say, someone would read a particularly outrageous story in English or would cheek the Maths teacher in a way that just didn't happen in Tasmania. I think the main thing I got out of Scotland, apart from losing my permatan, was that sense that even though you were ten, you were incredibly adult, and I liked that, something I really remember thinking when little eleven year old girls in pig tails were discussing oral sex and alcohol. That was the biggest adjustment I had to make when I was in Scotland - especially at school discos, which were a sort of Degrassi like experience compared to the more genteel world of Burnie where someone would hand crank a gramophone and play some sort of waltz and then everyone would get a packet of Twisties. In Scotland everything seemed like preperation for real life. The discos were inside a big assembly hall, and you would be ruthlessly assessed for pash (or winch as it were) suitability. I was completely off the ball though and thought that these events were for dancing and chatting, and so, with the lack of accumulated wisdom that all my twelve year old self had, I would get on down to the latest hits of James or whatever without realising that I should have been cultivating a much more enigmatic image while staying in the corner, buying bags of candy hearts from the DJ that he assured me were drugs, and maybe just deigning to speak every so often to comment that everything sucked. I was certainly dressed well enough, in my expensive Italian FILA boots, but clearly something was missing, an education of sorts, maybe some kind of life lesson, because my winching days never seemed to materialise in Scotland. The closest I ever got was with a girl called Nicola, a slightly nerdy but still pretty cute girl, but I blew it with some sort of terrible joke that she didn't get and then I had to cover the situation by saying that we had pashed...it was lucky I was moving away back to Tasmania by that point, because there were only so many dances in a circle I could ruin with my over enthusiasm...and to be honest, while I loved the place, there was part of me already thinking that if this was all there was in life, sorry Peggy Lee, I really shouldn't keep dancing nor break out the booze...mostly because the DJ sold me the booze and it turned out to be iced tea that smelled funny...

Art in Kilwinning was a subject you survived - our teacher was an alcoholic which from a school where the Chemistry teacher had a vision impairment wasn't so bad. He had a lot of rough days and behind on the shelf above his head were a number of empty and clean vodka bottles that he claimed were an installation. He would quite often nod off at his desk, and he had a ruddy red face and jet white (well jets aren't black if you think about it?) hair and a big wart on his cheek. One thing you couldn't fault was passion for art, which was big as his passion for concealing things in hip flasks. He was very firey if he was motivated, and I know that he was always angry at me because he thought I was good at art and wasn't trying, and then he found out I actually was rubbish and went on to other things. I did get an A off him once, but I didn't have the heart to tell him what he thought was a hippo was actually meant to be a rocket ship, and claimed it proudly. The days he was asleep the art room would descend into a biblical anarchy - mostly involving a student going to the toilet and coming back and sitting on their chair which in their absence would be covered in paint. My memory for a long time told me we drew a nude model, but then I remembered it was just some girl took her clothes off for something to do. Our teacher understandably sick of the disrespect he received would come in his tattered suit, judge the mood of the room and give up if he sensed any untimely rowdiness. I always remember that suit, a strangely stained number that spoke entirely through the streaks and marks, but I also know that no matter how his body or addiction failed him, or how hopeless the situation was trying to teach the classic painting styles to Kilwinnings future crack addicts and petty criminals, there was also dignity in him, and oddly, it was in his tie...it might sound stupid, but no matter how messed up his suit was, or how unkempt this hair, his tie was always straight and perfect...funny how that sticks in my mind...guess you have to focus on something in the midst of flying paintbrushes and sights out of the window that no blog should have to repeat...

It seemed as though we would just go one like this forever, on some sort of alcoholic rollercoaster where one day you got to paint and the next day you were lucky if you weren't covered in paint. One day though he came in with a briefcase, a new suit and a steely resolve. Even out smartest kid, a bit of a twat called Brendan with a smart mouth who was always pretending to be stoned when the strongest drug he ever had was a Halibut Orange, was moved to a blissful period of silence by this new man who had wandered in. His twelve steps were all in the direction of us, and eventually he pulled up a (thankfully not covered in paint) chair and eyeballed us. He looked like a televangelist to be honest, and I half expected that he was about to launch into that story about the butterfly and the fisherman that my parish priest in Penguin used to always go on about. Instead, he let out a deep mournful sigh and said absolutely nothing for five minutes. After five agonizing minutes, he loosened his perfect tie a little, looked out the window, and said something along the lines that he had disrespected his teacher at school, and then woke up one day realising that his teacher was right all along, he didn't know everything, and now here he was in the twilight of his life, rotting away, wondering where the time went. He then directly looked at one of us, all I know it wasn't me, and said that his job was to teach us to value our youth, and respect our futures, and he wouldn't let us piss it away on stupid pranks and fights and drugs. And with that, he pushed his chair back into position and began what actually quite a productive lesson. It was a genuinely moving speech, the subtext imparted that he didn't want us to feel regret like he did, the last battlecry on a worn out man with problems. However, as a moving speech, it was in the category of a eulogy, because for the rest of the year he never cared again, and was soon back to wearing the coat of a thousand stains. Of course, we didn't realise that at the time the potency of his words, but now, maybe more than ever, it's sort of resonating in my head, the eternal sin of regret, best expressed by an angry and confused alcoholic...expressed by the angry face of a girl who's seen better days at work...

And expressed by the fact that I still can't find any lamingtons in the shop...

18 and (friends for) life

It's not often I have to set foot in my local library anymore - I had my fill of the local library when I was unemployed, enough flirtacious conversations with single mothers, run ins with thin skinned Aboriginal home boys when a computer came free and ten minute time limits to write an e-mail. The one in Kingston used to have quite a depressing little computer about the size of an Atari Lynx where you could punch in your details and look for jobs, which was just fundamentally depressing as you would wonder how your life ended up like this, sitting on a plastic bucket seat while a flannel shirted nicotine junkie paced up and down impatiently behind you, wondering whether a career in butchery was for you. There's none of that kind of despair in this library though, that's all in the bus mall where fat girls in tight black T-shirts with skinny husbands wearing smaller versions of the same band on their chest coated in stubble and a poor grasp of the English language push soon to be despairing kids back and forth in a pram. As it happens, this local library is calm and sedate, but what interested me today was a new batch of school leavers jumpers. Every November at the end of a Tasmanian school year you see a new batch of blue or green or white or yellow rugby tops out and about with a humourous nickname imprinted across the back in big letters - the wearers of these rugby tops, as today where three boys all in blue sat trying to hide their illegal searches from the not really that bothered librarian, a feeling that can only be replicated by feeling excessively guilty buying porn from a newsagents and looking shifty, are very rarely spotted on their own, they move together in their social groups, all dressed exactly the same in their school leavers jumpers, completely unaware that the shifting passages of time, the drift away from home and the rich experience that is being dumped into the room of a share house and watching your parents drive away will render their friendships as past experiences. I know that we all hugged each other and said we'd be there for you (it was very popular at the time) and then one day we weren't, and my nickname on the back of my tattered leavers rugby top just stopped meaning anything one day. The librarian eventually wanders over to make up an excuse that their time is up, out of a sense that, while looking up bikini clad models isn't anything that scandalous, it is making the old lady sitting next to them learning painfully key by key to type the word "dear", just in case she progresses to e-mail some time in the next year, uncomfortable. They slink off, giving the computer to another grey haired one finger typist, leaving behind a Kathy Ireland print out on the computer, a story to remember that only they know, and laugh without ever knowing that the time they have together, by definition of their leavers tops, is ever shortening...meh, Marion Raven on the IPOD always makes me cynical...

When I had my school leavers top in mint condition, several million bottles of water ago, I was a young and nervy eighteen year old with a weary air of cynicism and a job washing big silver trays at a popular supermarket. Every Tuesday night I'd go to indoor rock climbing at another schools gym and me and my friends would crawl through a secret tunnel to a secret little room that used to belong to the janitor and sit and play cards and gossip about everyone. One night, I dutifully walked in having inevitably been rained on by Burnies changeable weather (it was either rain or heavy rain - like I said, variable) and suddenly everyone stopped talking. I knew something was wrong when people took an interest in rock climbing. I mean, no one other than this completely ace kid called Nick, the one who scientifically disproved personal jinx, ever went to rock climbing to climb the bloody wall. I thought perhaps some sort of secret shame had been uncovered, that maybe I wasn't as big a fan of The Eels as I made out or that my secret crush on the librarian had been discovered...but it didn't take much to work out that my friends were planning a surprise party for me. That it didn't take much was down to a girl called Lara, who I only otherwise remember for some incriminating photos of her and a blow up sex doll that were posted on the school notice board, just underneath my request to sell some CDs (no one rang), and her giant coke bottle glasses. Lara asked me, as everyone else looked like the board of Enron and whistled idly that they knew nothing, when my party was. Now, I should say I have a morbid latenight fear about throwing a party and having no one turn up - so obviously there was no way I would have thrown a party - therefore, gasp, everyone was throwing me a surprise party for my 18th birthday. I shrugged meekly at Lara and said that I wasn't having a party, at which point she turned around and looked at one of my friends and said something akin to I thought you said you were throwing him a party...at which point Nick hit her with a basketball accidentally on purpose from the top of the rock climbing wall. I don't think it's an understatement to say that I was incredibly moved, after all I'd just gone through roughly three years of friendless summers while everyone around me dropped the fri from that feeling, and I didn't want to blow it by telling everyone that I knew or that I knew that they knew or that I had wanted to stay in that night and watch an episode of Friends...it was probably one of the few times in my life I've been genuinely and completely happy. After all, I had friends, I had a social life, and now I had my very own party...what they don't know, since I liked to maintain an enigmatic image, is that I went down to the janitors room for some quiet time to sit and take it all in, how touched and happy I was...and to steal the Belinda Carlisle poster out of the room...amazing no one ever noticed it was gone...

The party itself was at someones house and it was secondary the quality of the party, which was obviously an incredibly mid 90s affair where everyone put on the Rembrants and drank West Coast Coolers and put on VHS tapes and then sat drinking watching Rage and pretending they were drunk when they really weren't and then someone would put on Spiderbait and pretend that they really understood the deeper meaning to Old Man Sam at which point someone would say they preferred Regurgitator and a big argument would break out, especially if someone said Spiderbait had a better chance to break America. My friend James, the one I last saw selling drugs out of his living room at 9 in the morning, was so faux drunk all anyone had to say was green dog and he'd start giggling and making stories up about the green dog (which, I'm sure if he typed them, would be properly paragraphed) and it's adventures. Eventually, the party stopped being about me, since I think it was mostly held to try and get me drunk and when I was eighteen I could have drunk petrol by the gallon and still been sober enough to discuss rational economics. As the tape deck rolled on with approved music that only I liked and everyone chatted, I realised this really was as good as life could get...which alarmed me, since I'm a cynic at heart, but I let my momentary moment of unease pass because I was genuinely happy and because there was a Bananarama clip on Rage. My presents were stacked up in a little pile in the corner of this girls house, a house seeming entirely made of oak, and I remember distinctly thinking that the party was grinding to a halt at one point and trying to get a dancing competition going but no one seemed to be biting. I then tried to show everyone the dance steps to Everybody Gonfi Gon, by Two Cowboys, but again everyone seemed to be more interested in the antics of whichever bunch of scruffy indie herberts were picking the film clips on Rage that night (preliminary research indicates it was possibly Custard). When I was of that age, I was quite an emotional and moody person, so had this state of perpetual battle between dance and non dance continued, I may very well have chucked a bit of a mental and stormed out of my own party, but luckily, there was some sanity in the room (mental sanity, not a popular CD store of the same name). Her name was Kylie, and like the guardian angel that she always was, she took me by the arm, smiled, and said "no one wants to Gonfi Gon" and lead me outside, so that we could for a nice calming walk...she wouldn't even let me kick over a West Coast Cooler in disgust, which was a bit mean...

Kylie and I used to always go for walks around the school. She was a really cynical girl who just seemed to dislike everyone at the drop of a hat, so for me with the mentality that I had when I was eighteen she was fantastic to know. Our friendship was pretty much entirely based on walking I think, so given my lack of physical fitness it wasn't built to last, but we had many deep philosophical conversations. This walk was a really long one though, through what I consider in my drunken everybody Gonfi Gon mindset to have been a jungle or a forest but which in reality was probably just some shrubs in Mrs McGlumphers garden when we took a short cut. Eventually she showed me a small replica wooden boat in the middle of a park, somewhere in Burnie that I never went again. So, with so much effort invested in the pursuit of a monument, we sat in opposite ends of the little wooden boat replica, got out some cigarettes and had a conversation that I wish I could remember. I know that the stars were incredibly bright, I know the sky was incredibly dark, I know we were unbothered by public vagrants, which was a bonus in Burnie, but the words that came out, well, I know they were meaningful, but I can't remember the context without being that person again. It's one of the few conversations I wish I had listened to more closely, because it meant a lot to me and I never really told her that. What I do know is that as the sun came up and before I realised that I probably should go to work at some point pretty soon and that neither of us knew where the hell we were is that the conversation turned to what we were going to with our lives - she was much more adult that I was, she had plans and ambitions, and I had a Tickle Me Elmo and a PHD in Kick Off on the Amiga. So I didn't know, I winged it, I made something up about law and mumbled something about moving to Hobart and she said she was moving there too, and all this good stuff that we'd always be friends and everyone else was a dickhead except for us two...just as the new day revealed the beauty of Burnie through the blooming of flowers and the stirring of homeless people, she passed me one last cigarette, congratulated me on my maturity, and smiled as she got out of the boat wearily and said "You know, I think I'm going to ask Mark out..."

And with that one sentence began the process by which we all ended up shipwrecked...

Kingstons Melancholy Wall Of Nothing

My petrol station with the cheerful local mechanics closed down last year in the name of progress. They dug up the road outside it to put in a roundabout and you couldn't get in unless you negotiated a complicated twisting series of roads upon which bewildered and harassed school age kids mothers would suddenly veer dramatically to the left without indicating because while little junior was telling an interesting story about the dream they had last night about a cake monster, they had completely missed their stop. So it went out of business due to lack of funds, and now I have to get my petrol from a more corporate source and the charm has subsided. Behind the counter works a middle aged woman, with a wistful stare and a slightly fierce black cardigan, encased in her world, unsupervised and reading the local paper until the time comes to face a paying customer, at which point she switches to the second of her two emotions, rigid disciplined friendly charm. An old man in front of me has mistaken emotion B for flirtation, and is telling her a story about his garden, which he plans to mow with his two stroke Victa lawnmower. I resist tapping him on the shoulder to ask where he got it from since it sounds amazing compared to my own lawnmower, which some days I'm sure is actually just a Fisher Price one I bought by mistake (I swear I've seen it blow bubbles) but I don't, I patiently wait until he's finished his story, and paid for his petrol and his swathe of chocolate products which he's bought in a dramatic fit of if I buy more I can talk for longer chat up daring, like a male who hasn't pulled a girl into his bed yet on a second date who orders a dessert he can't possibly eat in the hope at least one of his stories amuses the paramour. Eventually, he leaves, she wasn't listening at all, and I step up to the counter. She asks me without looking at me how my day has been. I've only just taken my IPOD off Icarus by Santogold, so I'm trying to work out the chorus and I'm not really listening, but something about her question strikes me as odd - it is after all only 8 in the morning, so I mutter something about it being far too early to judge whether I'm having a good day. It's a wasted thought though, because she's talking through me, and says thats super. She hasn't listened to a word I've said, and soon it's back to wistful out of the window staring just as I get back to Santogold. I used to think she was watchful and attentive, maybe paying attention to see if a car nicked off without paying for petrol, but she's chronically and unbearably sad about something, and passes her time in my company with the barest of attention and the maximum of efficiency, one customer at a time until knock off hour when her day ends, another unfilling moment surrounded by cheap chocolate and interesting stories from taxi drivers she doesn't have the heart to interrupt at a time...

I go for a walk later - not out of any motivation, just because the cricket is over and I want to wear my St Mirren top outside, which I guess actually is motivation. As I walk to my local shop, there's a family walking past me - in their fine Sunday best, clearly on the way to church. Since my involvement with Kingston religion involves our old Kiwi neighbours trying to save my soul and pimp me out to some girl at their church, I'm wary, but they seem fine, they aren't going to pamphlet my soul to hell for disrespecting the Sabbath with the drinking of chocolate milk and a blatant plug for the Braehead Shopping Centre on my top. As they walk past me, they almost smile some sort of friendly recognition, but they don't, and keep on walking. Most of all though, they don't notice their third child clearly pulling uncomfortably at his collar. He has a look on his face that he'd rather be anywhere in the world than out in his little mini tuxedo and he's eyeing my chocolate milk as if it's some sort of forbidden item, the way I used to look at video cameras in the early 90s. He looks old enough to have come to his own conclusions about the merits of singing from a hymn book, and they aren't favourable. His Dad sees a flock member across the street, a slender hipped Maori woman who he embraces with tenderness, his booming voice confirming they are indeed religious and not just dressed up for some time with Nana on a Sunday. I think briefly for a moment that as the only person in this mini street theatre not attired like a member of The Rat Pack that his booming accusatory tone about the strictness of Sunday is some sort of minor chastisement, but he's talking directly to the Maori, and it's a positive conversation. His wife, a woman as tense of mood as of pony tail, is shifting uncomfortably from foot to foot - whoever the Maori woman is, she doesn't want to see or talk to her, and eventually she steps into the conversation with a platitude or a joke, and pulls the family away, leaving the Maori woman looking confused and a little hurt. The kid in the tuxedo sight unseen spits directly on the ground as the family walk off, his own little protest at his temporary divorce from the television, but no one can see him through the family frost, as Mother and Father and the two younger kids walk off about three steps ahead of him and his now hopefully dry mouth, aware that something is terribly wrong with their world, but no one is keen to articulate on it on the day of our lord and they walk off in strict dutiful steps...

Two old women are sitting at the bus stop. I almost don't have the heart to tell them that there is absolutely no chance of a bus coming to Kingston on a Sunday. In my amazingly miserable second year at uni, I used to try and get a bus into town under the pretence of going to study but if I made it into Hobart I would generally head to the casino or some other happening place and try and look arty in the hope that somehow that would make me pass my studies, or at least I would if I got one of the three buses a day that came past, and I would generally just sit there with my heart not in my own life. The first old woman says something about someone called Todd, and how ridiculous he would find something. Instantly I recognise from the tone that Todd is no longer with her, in one way or another. She says it to her friend with just enough jocularity that whatever happened to Todd is OK to talk about, but the pain of it hasn't gone away. I move quickly on, just as her friend, a very old woman in a spectacularly funky orange coat, with darting eyes and tenderness in her voice simply confirms that yes Todd would. Across the road, three Sudanese migrants are trying to fix a car in the middle of a front garden, hitting it with a spanner. They are suspicious and defensive of people who walk past the mini garage sprawled out on the road, particularly the wife, a huge woman in a pink dress with more corn rows than I have hairs. She stops what she is doing, pouring juice or telling an anecdote or offering her expert knowledge of the intricacies of the 1984 Holden Ute, just to watch anyone who walks past with a wary eye. As soon as the man walking his dog has passed, she resumes as if nothing has happened, picking up her anecdote as if someone had pushed her pause button. The old women catch her eye at the same time she catches theirs, and they stare at each other with just one road, but an unfathomable amount of cultural difference and life experience between them. The staring contest continues until a bus, a mirage in the desert around here, pulls up, and the old women get on quietly, leaving the two Sudanese home boys in the Chicago Bulls gear to continue their hammering, and me relieved they didn't ask me for any kind of mechanical advice...I fixed a Tonka truck once, that was about it...

Just to confirm my suspicions, I casually glance in the direction of the petrol station, and sure enough the lady in the black is still there, with a barely flickered expression of bemusement, starting out the window. I walk towards the supermarket, past the health store that's always closed for stocktake, past the peg frenzy that is Chickenfeed, past the bakery where the purchase of more than a bread roll is cause for considerable staff elation, and past the bottle shop where manly men will fetch you your beer out of the fridge for nothing more than the public slight on your own manhood that always seems to register on the face of the blonde girl who doesn't have to wear a work uniform. I continue to my corporate local supermarket, where everyone wears green, and the staff mingle and mix with a yet to evaporate hostility, those who are casual and yet to escape failing to properly mix with those trapped and older and without hope of getting off register four. There's a particularly weary young girl without make up or an ability to blink, stacking canned fruit as I pass, her shirt too big for her, her expression blank and focused on the repetitive task in front of her. As she goes through the motions, a clumsy and awkward ginger kid in a flannel shirt reaches for a tin of peaches with his big farmer hands, and he fumbles it and it falls poetically and surprisingly softly to the laminate floor, at which point he steps over her again, gets another tin, and walks off telling his mates about the party he went to without missing a beat. It might just be me, but as the girl scrabbles under the bottom shelf she looks amazingly sad and depressed, a sort of Lily Bart of the fruit stacking world lit up by the poor quality flickering light of aisle 12. She reaches down to get it, despondent and tired, and eventually leaves it rolling on the floor, shaking her head and disappearing down the aisle with slow, agonized steps, her body slumped and sad. It's never a big blow up that makes you snap, it's the simplicity of a tin falling at your feet that normally finishes you off mentally, something which to the outside world seems utterly trivial. Eventually, I move on, aware that just as quickly as these mini dramas blow up, they pass, and just as Yelle comes on my IPOD and I pack enough fruit to feed a small army of one into my standard issue red basket, she comes back, gets down on the floor, and fishes out the tin. It would be a triumphant moment, but for the fact that if you looked really closely, she'd clearly been crying...

I move on, through the queue, through the people, through the rain, and go home, where my only contact with any kind of melancholy world is a sad reminisce with my friend about old bands, and collapse back into the hammock, everything shut down, everything finally relaxed...

Daydreamin' (Contentment and the Sliding Door)

So I woke up really late today, which made me realise that I have absolutely nothing to do today. When you live alone, there's usually something to do, but my odd jobs are all done, the DVD player is hooked up, the groceries were bought, there was not a dish or a cup out of place, the drought and the rain conversely take care of the lawn and the car wash, and so I sat on my deck reading the newspaper and I realise that at this point I should have felt desperately unfilled there wasn't a wife to wake up with or a small child showing me a drawing that allegedly was me but looked like three lines and a cross, but I wasn't this morning. My neighbour, Barry Tosser, was fiddling around in his back garden, all beard and wasted motion, talking aggressively to his lawn mower while small children round around the back garden listening to Eminem directly across from my deck. Next to wear I love is a giant vacant block of land they just forgot to build a house on, where harried single mothers and people who are now regretting that a puppy wasn't just for Christmas now it's a giant labrador mingle in perfect safeness as they go about their day. As I sat drinking my juice this morning, a particularly and suspiciously made up middle aged woman in leopard skin track pants stood outside my house for about fifteen minutes, just standing idly in the vacant block, looking at her watch, tapping it, making sure it worked. Eventually, she threw her hands in the air (and she just did care) and walked off, clearly disappointed that the expected action she was waiting on had not occured - a lift, a transaction, perhaps picking up a child from an errant ex husband - and swearing into the general direction of the sky, just a giant labrador with big floppy ears and a bewildered smile nearly bowled her over from the opposite direction. All across Kingston - which is hardly New York mind you - a million different dramas are playing out rapidly, some beautiful and some tragic, but for me today there was no drama, no unpredictability, no real reason to even be awake, which sohuld really shame me into doing something, but it's beautiful sitting down at the moment, resting, thinking, maybe doing a crossword or unpacking the Super Nintendo if I'm feeling radical and adventurous...meanwhile, the Leopard Skin lady is back, she stares intently at the ground, pouts and throws her hands skyward again, before retreating in a final surrender and flouncing off, just as a blue Nissan comes hurtling round the corner, pulls to a stop, and wonders why there's no one there...I'd tell him, but from the look of him, best not to get involved...

Contentment is pretty hard earned anyway not to appreciate lazy Saturdays. I was initially a pretty contented child. I was pretty resillient too, my emotional immaturity usually followed by cloud based thinking and an ability to get up and try again. Contentment was easily attained in my school anyway. One time, I got a stopwatch, which pretty much brought the whole school to a standstill. It was a classicly 80s watch with a stopwatch function, and everyone was amazed that I could now time, say, how long our lunch orders took to come back in the basket or how long it took the fat kid to eat a packet of Samboys. It was a glorious day for me when we had to do a run around Burnie and I was able to get out of it by just offering to time everyone with the NASA watch. My girlfriend (if you can say that in Grade 2) was a girl called Sarah, one of a pair (obviously) of twins, and we were boyfriend essentially because she liked She-Ra and I liked He-Man. The best day I ever had at school was one day in about 1986 when it snowed and they abandoned school. I'm sure that it was just sleet, and if someone showed me a video of that day the teachers were just bored and sent us out to play in the rain so they could have a smoke or eat the better quality saveloys we were deprived, but I remember it being pristine white snow and Bing Crosby crooning from underneath the caterpillar. I do know that myself, Sarah, a girl called Kasey, a boy called Adam and another boy called Todd all huddled together (easy) under the bottom part of the music room, a little bit down a sloping ramp where you could sit and do things that were banned like publically trade cricket cards (two Yallops for every Boon) or play marbles. As we all sat together, Sarah held my hand and looked out onto the snow/rain/sleet/drizzle and said, and I remember this very distinctly, "does life get any better than this"...it sticks in my mind as the most adult relationship moment I've ever had in my entire life. Even know it seems quite strange, and I know that I said back "no, no it genuinely doesn't" and we all sat in utter silence gazing out in the world. In no way does the fact that Sarahs defection to Rainbow Brite completely ruined our relationship take away from the fact that's it's not only one of about, oh, four moments in my life of complete beautiful contentment, but she was so beautiful at the moment, if she'd asked me to run away with her and steal some Twisties, we'd have been off like a shot...

Not everyone I went to school with was contented though. The first kid I ever knew with what you would these days call issues was a kid called Daniel I went to school with - he was a freckle faced kid, bright ginger hair, about the size of a 5c coin, and I know he didn't have any friends at all. I'm not sure how this panned out, whether not having any friends made him this way or he lost friends by being an aggressive little runt, but I know that his public persona was very much like Scrappy Doo - he was always on edge, always looking for a grievance, and just like Scrappy Doo you kind of wished he wasn't there. He was just an easy outlet to get yourself out of social hell as well. In hindsight it was no wonder he was such a miserable little gimp, as his life was one long string of harsh abuse and being pushed over, but he made it hard for himself just by his actions, and his sheer lack of social ability. One time everyone, as an act of macho daring, had to jump off the top of the school fort. I couldn't do it, I was scared of heights (although subsesquent visits to the fort at an older age revealed it was hardly the Grand Canyon) and still am, and so after everyone else had jumped, I had to do it from the second top rung of the wodden fort ladder, which would have had me condemned as a complete gimp until I left the school except for when I landed, Daniel was still sitting at the top completely terrified and almost crying. He was just that kind of kid - a kid called Nick at my school said philosophically once that if you peed your pants Daniel probably pooed his - and things weren't helped by his mother, a big fat woman with a funny smell off her, sort of acrid coconut and bushfire, taught us singing. She loved her job, she was incredibly enthusiastic, and would jiggle up and down like a lava lamp while she taught us the actions to the latest Peter Coombe hit. She wore these horrible light pink tracksuits as well, which looked a bit Sadidas on her plump little self, and I'm sure she thought she was helping, but she wasn't helping Daniel adjust at all. One time, he chucked a massive spaz just after PE, a real three Taz outburst, because his lunch order bag had chocolate milk in it instead of banana. He threw his lunch order bag, and Nick came over and said "imagine if they gave him strawberry" - I miss Nick, I wonder what happened to him after he got expelled for breaking into the art class and trying to plant a bomb, he used to be so wise...

The last day of Grade 2 was a great day, it was sunny, an entire summer watching Australias rubbish cricket team was upon us, Sarah was talking to me, everyone had brought in board games, was wearing casual clothes (or, as a girl I work with calls them, home clothes), drinking milk and swapping footy cards like anarchic rebels, we had about ten minutes of basic classes before we could run amok (quick, someone grab a cricket ball, it's anarchy in the PE!) and best of all, we got to cross a great divide. Between the Grade 2 and Grade 3 class was sort of sliding door thing, one of those big grey ones in a concertina style, with quite an emphatic clunk when it was locked in place. This was the most exciting moment of all, as we were allowed, nay, privileged enough to cross the great sliding door divide into the Grade 3 classroom, a real and almost mythical paradise city where the chalk was green and the desks were pretty. The problem was, and we don't know if this was the moment they chose to tell him, Daniel was kept back a year. He didn't make the leap, as his emotional issues and outbursts and inability to colour in the lines (Nick again) meant that he had to repeat Grade 2. We didn't know this until, like a hapless mouse caught in a trap, we all got up on the count of three to move and only 29 little ducks came back. So, we all sat at new shiny desks, while he sat at his old one, forced to watch us. I can't begin to imagine this was in any way a positive moment for him, and he watched us with the most hateful and hurt look I've ever seen one human being give. He was grey, he was embarrassed, and if it was these days, frankly, his Myspace page would have been the giveaway for a future rampage. If Sarah had taught me something about contentment, this was the exact opposite, absolute discontenment taught at an early age - a moment so ineptly handled by the school who should have at least taken him away to an office so we couldn't throw stuff at him - and as we sat in our new desks waving to him, while there was nothing he could do back to us, until inevitably someone had the good sense to shut the door with it's emphatic clunk, leaving him behind in his own miserable world, desolate, alone, and only some nasty white chalk for company...given the circumstances, some of the things he wrote on the board about us all, well, I guess you could forgive him for that...

As for today, I've ended up drinking a delicious lime spider, watching cats wrestle in a basket on Youtube, and leopard skin lady finally got picked up, fuming...I guess for everyone, it was a contented day all round...eventually...

The Happy Pants and Softball Disaster of 1992

A lot of people I know don't really like traffic jams, but even though I don't choose my road or my precious time on Earth with the terminally bewildered who drive either end of the speed limit, four wheel drive drivers hunting big game down the middle of the Southern Outlet and a tedious Jessica Mauboy interview which boiled down to giggling and makes you want to smash your radio, I do like the time and space I have to think as we inch towards the edge of the point of the turn of the road slowly - what I think about, well, it's not clear, it's sometimes a bit like the half forgotten dream where you remember why you went to the stand at the fair and bought a big fuzzy wig, but not who you were with or how everything fell apart. In fact if I do remember what I've thought about, it's remarkbly unimpressive, a collection of forgotten musicians and what they sang, the time Gabe Kaplan raced Robert Conrad on Battle Of the Network stars, song lyrics, wrestling storylines that went nowhere, maybe the odd footballer or Adam Hills joke, but sometimes the thoughts are crystal clear, so clear that I almost plough into the back to the sticker laden Camira that's just come to a crushing halt, almost putting their sticket based thoughts about saving the trees (plural) directly into my consciousness. The driver of the sticker mobile is ignoring his kid, a mini domestic drama I can see playing out through our trapped short derm destinies, as the kid is trying desperately to make some horribly failing point about a book and the Dad is completely dis-interested and concentrating on the traffic or maybe Jessica Mauboy or something. The kid eventually gives up and puts the book down on the seat and stares out the window, and I lose them at an amber light, to go off onto their day, but my thoughts are definitely still with me, inescapable little thoughts as stuck in my brain as my mid price family car is in the gridlock. Now that I'm pretty old, the shot through regret of my mid twenties is fading and infrequent - sure, the odd moment of wistfulness and head slapping awfulness will stab into the back of my brain sometimes, and yes, I do regret the angry immature letter sent, or the gossip of the classroom, or the days I've wasted watching DVDs when I should have been seizing the day, a sort of fair trade that I seized the remote control and a packet of Samboys instead. I'm not worried anymore - three steps to my left as I sit, there's a smiling school girl, clearly bullying her friend, and her friend responds with a gentle slap. They argue, and then walk off, the smiling girl still smiling but awkwardly, while the bullied girl huffs and puffs and pouts, and I wonder if they will regret this conversation or if it will be immediately forgotten...that's really the problem with my thoughts, what is important or should be remembered or acknowledged is supressed and lost in the midst of a thousand stories, and a pile of trivia...and most days, I'm really thankful for that...

As I've mentioned before, my first few months back in Burnie were a sort of hazy dream, the one time in my life I can say not only was I popular but I was cool - I was positively illin'. It came to pass that somehow I ended up in a place where the expectation that the school had inherited some kind of intellectual soccer playing poetic genius (not expectations of my own making I hasten to add), a cool accent and the fashion stylings of Tony whathisname from East 17 (thank god it wasn't Brian Harvey - is it true Tony whatshisname bought a supermarket and everyone from East 17 worked there, or did I make that up?) circa West End Girls all added up and made me the coolest kind in the school. Essentially, there was no way that a homesick moderately fit kind of cute but mostly lazy and socially awkward teenager still pining for the KLF in a town where Guns and Roses still had social catchet could maintain this kind of image without it all ending in tears, but seriously, there seemed to be no end in sight to my social observations. One time, in technical drawing, an observation about a water slide ended with the school cool girl, a girl who was dating a 17 year old at 14 (gasp, someone call the Advocate), literally gasping and saying that I was fascinating - Vicki, my pash buddy from Penguin, who didn't really realise that she was way cooler and more fascinating than I was, would often just storm out of the bakery with one of her co-workers while I stood smoking just to confirm my opinion matched hers, as if I was some kind of hot or not column walking around the streets nodding at stuff. I wanted to parlay this into some kind of local pride (Yes!) involvement, perhaps just judging cakes with a haughty air. Burnie was a strange place to begin with - I had been to school in a place called Kilwinning, which was genuinely depressing and upsetting and on which kids called Donkey or Milkdud or Sarah sold drugs on the school corner unbothered, and in Burnie as far as I could see, the greatest problem was the local milkbar running out of Big Ms - so free of a threat of violence, I was at least partially ecstatic - however, since they all thought Burnie was shit, I said it was shit as well, and completely omitted the drug dealers and the poor quality chips and the school trips that we had to the local pub from my Scotland critique. Making it an emotional paradise and myself the mayor of Kilwinning when I was barely the janitor, well, it made everyone impressed. No one who saw the homesick kid who went to bed at 8pm every night and wrote long letters home would have thought I was cool, but given an audience and an over exaggerated story about drugs in Switzerland, I was able to impress all and sundry with a clever phrase and a whimiscal phrase...if they listened to what I was saying, they'd probably have realised I was just talking crap, but I was talking through them instead of to them, and they were happy to take every third word literally, and everyone was happy...for now...

My major problem was my laziness, which wasn't helped by Vickis special home made concoctions. As it happened, the main manifestation of this laziness was in my home economics class. We had to make a pair of happy pants, which was sort of Tasmanian code for a big pair of cotton tracksuit pants made out of crazy material or something. Of course, there was no way that someone as robust and cool as me could actually, you know, try, even though I was too dumb to notice everyone else was genuinely trying their little sewing hearts out. Home economics was a doss subject in Scotland, all you could really hope for was that no one threw food at you or that your scones weren't poisonous and didn't kill the teacher. At first, this disdain for the class of the kitchen seemed to be mutually reciprocated in the other part of the world. I was gently prodded to bring in a swathe of material to make these mythically cheerful garments, but not particularly hard, and we spent a lot of our time telling each others fortunes or giggling at the shape of the Push Pop or doing that trick where you pretend you've stuck a coin to the head of the dumb kid and let him hit his head to try and knock it off...all in a powder blue room at the edge of my sanity, which you had to get to through a passageway so narrow the rats were on strike complaining about it. Eventually, the whole subject just became an excuse for me to have a nap and complain about stuff, even my more basic riffing now getting an audience. Had I been on the ball, I would have noticed that while I was doing the commentary equivalent of cup bal ball cup, they were all making their garments, and inevitably, the teacher, a woman who was endlessly patient but who had the air of a woman who was in perpetual argument with her girlfriend, snapped, and cut sick on me and my attitude. She was perfectly within her rights to do, after all, she was teaching a class while I was pondering what the deal was with airline peanuts, but there was a frisson of excitement...after all, I had in a quite mediocre way established some credentials as a rebel, a maverick, someone that didn't play by societys rules of needlecraft...and the frisson turned to dust when I apologized rather meekly, and said I'd be sure to try harder...maybe it's just my memory of it, but I remember some of the air had gone out of my blawhard balloon...it now needed some quick pumping up...

Luckily, we had softball that afternoon. One of my few sporting triumphs in Scotland had been a spectacular softball home run right at the end of Double PE where the ball sizzled through the air and flew into Mrs McGlumphers vegetable patch. So I was sure that if I did the same, I would get my air of emotional superiority right back. After all, there didn't seem to be any lasting damage from my happy pants disaster, and to be honest, I was able to scramble out of it by saying that the teacher wasn't worth it, have you seen the state of her car and so on. For some reason I can never work out, someone as we waited on the neatly trimmed but rather soulless patch of grass that we were assigned for that days lesson asked me if I could play softball, and I said, well, I hit a home run at indoor baseball...when the words came out of my mouth, I couldn't get them back in, indoor baseball must just have sounded more impressive. I just think at that time, if I had won a Go Kart race I would have bumped it up to I had lapped Nelson Piquet in a Formula 1 car. I should have said no, I was completely rubbish, but it was too late, and so I stepped up to bat, in my little helmet, with the air of Babe Ruth...I like to think as I walked up to the off white plate with the funny stain on it, that I pointed to the exact point over the fence yonder Montello that I was going to hit the ball to, such was my unfailing surety that I was going to teach the fat kid throwing the ball with less than fearsome ferocity that you didn't mess with...the problem was, that I had far too much thinking time, and by the time I got the end of my self diagnosis of my own awesomeness, the fat kid, hungry for a pie and sauce and without any kind of warm up rotation of his meaty chunks arm, had thrown the ball when I was wasn't paying attention, my mighty swing became a panicked bunt, and the ball rose up off the bat and hit me fair in the schnozz...I know that at the exact moment it hit me on the nose, I had the word "fence" in my head, because the internal fence became an anguished and pained external swear word, the emperor with too many clothes had been truly exposed, and no amount of sardonic observations could save me from myself...

Of course, I did, just about, somehow save the year and turn it around, for a while at least, but the traffic moved in, and I couldn't quite remember how I did it...bloody disrupted thoughts...now I'm thinking about a lime spider again...

Lunchtime (1 pm Eternal)

My Dad is an essentially uncomplicated man - his puns remain steady and constant, as does his politics, and so does his Xmas. In essence, all I have to do is buy him the same computer game year in year out, thus once a year venturing into somekind of geek filled games store to purchase said item so he can wile away his summer with idealistic thoughts of perfection, a left wing government and move little circles from left back back to right back in his computer quest to make Elgin City the football champions of the world. Todays purchase was an easy one, made difficult by the constraints of my lunchtime, the configuration of the store (small little basket store made corridors, perfect to trap customers for sales pressue) the terror of venturing into the geek lair, and of course by the fact that it disrupts the walk and stalk flow of my lunchtime. The guy who sells me the game is a ginger haired pasty and bearded D&D player up from the dungeon to pop briefly into my world and key numbers into a cash register. He spruiks a loyalty program to me, and I explain with what I consider friendly patience that I only buy one game a year, and he looks sad, a sales technique I'm not familiar with - he's turned this single act of cutting off his spiel with a basic fact as if I'm turned him for a date. He rebounds quickly though, although the smile doesn't match the eyes. Next to him is a guy in a work shirt who looks too polished and trendy to be here full time - I imagine he's telling people he's only working there until his screenplay gets published - and next to him is an overweight girl with punk rock hair who is so disdainful of life that even assigning her a character in an anecdote would probably make her disgusted with me. They are all trapped together by the vagaries of chance and sturdy job interview techniques, and the geek, recovered from my crushing rejection of his offer to be my friend...sorry, to join his loyalty program...goes to get a pen, and makes an unintelligable joke, I know it's not about me, you can always tell, but his cohorts just aren't listening, and the punk rocker, too cool to wear flowers in her hair, stares vacantly into the middle distance, straight into another store. I try and see what she's looking at, but I can't, and soon I see that once again, the rejection of his joke has upset the geek, who hands me my bag with a weary and mournful sigh. His sensitivities are a little too open, his manner a little too over emotional, but his heart is in the right place, but there's nothing he can do to make the punk rocker care, and she keeps on staring, not even noticing the continuing loop of their world that is about to continue, with another customer queued behind me, ready to buy some sort of addition pack to the Sims, and maybe make himself a new friend...

In Big W, the fat and sweaty girl with the eloquent diction is distracted by a conversation, the conversation could be about anything, work, play, how soon she can get a chip, but she is dilligent in her duties. She directing the younger, enthusiastic but alarmingly thin trainee to do something in the aisle that sells those little tins of those little rolled up wafer...the lolly aisle. She's puffed out, not just from having to walk from her desk, but with pride, she's clearly very impressed with herself that she's going a fantastic job of training the waif, and the waif is responsive. Neither of them notice a rough, impatient single mother, a tattoo of indistinct quality on her left shoulder, slight gut and cleavage showing in a white tube top, scrunched up angry face, kid in one arm, basket in the other. She has a question, and the question needs an answer now, but she can't get their attention, and eventually storms off, unseen, or, let's be honest, seen and not helped because of her appearance, all the while the puffed out supervisor is standing surveying her world and completely in control. As I stand in a middling and grumpy queue of people just to purchase some tepid unecessary DVD because it was 8 bucks and had sale on it in big red letters, an old lady tries to engage me in conversation - I don't know why, but her basket is as meagre and threadbare as her conversation, inane and persistent about how cold it is, containing only a packet of mints and a card with a monkey on it - and I reply, figuring that soon I'll be free and she's obviously lonely. Our captain of the queue is the pretty girl with the panda eyes who swears a lot, and she's off in her own world, and after a while, the old lady with fury and venom in her eyes says to no one in particular some words that express the desire that the queue moves a bit faster. I realise at that point that I myself am standing with my arms folded, and am tapping my feet in impatience. Panda eyed girl looks at us both, for a moment a little hurt, then buries her head in her work, and I feel a bit guilty, and when it's my turn to be served, I feel the need to be a little over friendly to make up for it. Flustered, she fumbles my change, and I feel even worse, for making a bad day dis-integrate, however unintentionally, but she perks herself up, and just as I leave, she rises up in her swivel chair, stoically determined to see off the challenge of the grumpy old woman with subtle panache. The last thing I hear her say is an accusatory just the mints...the emphasis on the just, for what it's worth, can only be appreciated by anyone who's worked facing the public...

I've taken too much time in these queues, and I haven't eaten yet. I'm idling, I'm wasting time, I'm looking at things I can no longer really afford. At some point in my life, I became a curio whenever I went into a surf shop, being treated like an old man by impossibly young surfers named Brad and Dave who call me Dude and think I don't know who DJ Tiesto is. The surf shop is littered with Transfomers T-shirts and slogans, crude sexual drawings T-shirts, and the thumping sound of a place trying way too hard to make a simple retail outlet seem like a hangout. As the thumping repetitive strains of the loud music try to convince the likes of me that I could never afford some cotton with an iron on, I see just a glimpse of a frazzled hippy looking boy with beads around his neck sitting at a desk either doing stock or inventory or accounts...dude...it hardly fits the image. A dark haired girl with a name tag the size of Belgium is just about to try and elbow me out of the way for not fitting in with the demographic, or just apply sales pressure, but I see her coming and leave her groping blindly for something else to do, so she fiddles about with T-shirts and I move on, past a desperately grabbing man in hat trying to give out free samples of cordial or an AUSTAR pack or whatever the freebie of the day is. There's a giant poster of Glen McGrath bearing down on me, telling me he's going to be doing a book signing for the unemployed and the bewildered - a Dad in a red T-shirt with no logo discernible is trying to tell his soon who Glen McGrath is, but his son isn't listening, he's desperately eyeing a muffin from the store where the girl with the funny eyebrows works, and she's eyeing the same muffin, which is surely against company policy, the covet your own stores goods. Dad hasn't noticed the mutual muffin admiration society, and seems plainly determined to recount everyone of Glen McGraths 812 wickets, ball by ball...however, by now, I've joined in the mutual muffin adoration society, and think that nothing in this world would be better than a muffin. However, as we all stare, western consumers to a fault, at the surprisingly paucity riddled little tray where the muffins used to go, an old woman snatches in from off camera and buys the muffin. The girl in the store looks at us with an apologetic air, as if to say we still have hedgehog slices, but the moment is passed, the kid has found something up his nose, the girl has cursory politeness to impart and eyebrows to mash into weird shapes, I've got to go and see if blue eye shadow girl is working, and the Dad is up to wicket 200...something tells me that kid is going to wish soon he was back at school...

Blue eye shadow girl isn't working, but my grey haired trolley pushing nemesis is, so I steer well clear. She looks like Joyce, the singer you always see on those three times a year worst album cover e-mails, but I decide immediately that reference is too obscure and that time is running out for me to get a sandwich. I had wasted far too much time in the morning fussing over the exact creation of a lime spider to be late back to work, so I have to rush. At the front of the sandwich queue is a hunched over man with an unkempt beard and the kind of blue anorak only trainspotters and serial killers would wear - it even has a tartan inner hood, dangling to the left, which makes me think he has a shack somewhere in the woods - and his voice is high pitched and makes him sound like a special school kids. He's been put in my way by some deliberately pre ordained destiny, and he seems determined to talk about the quality of individual sandwich fillings with the girl in the silly paper hat, who's self consciousness about having to wear a silly paper hat she will one day outgrow when she becomes confident in herself. Her over applied lipstick speaks a lot for her nervous posture, but she's patiently explaining to guy that yes, that's a tomato and yes, that's bread, and no, that's your finger, don't eat that, and I'm looking at my watch figuring at this rate I might have to bite the bullet and eat some suitably budget conscious plain biscuits, as his lollingly retarded tone continues to eat away at my brain (at least someone was eating) - just as my stomach is about to burst though, a strange thing happens, his mate comes up to him, Argyle sweater, grey hair, stance of a doctor, pushes right in front of everyone to talk to him, and asks the special one if he's going to play golf on Sunday, and suddenly the man who had sounded like he needed help to draw a triangle is Charlton Heston, ennunciating in a loud clear voice about the wonderful time he had shooting a 65 at Royal Penguin. Me and stupid hat girl (sorry, that will hurt her feelings) stare in amazement, and without missing a beat, he turns around and says lettuce, pointing back in his hunched over stance, a reverse Lazarus as rare in the bakery as a warm sausage roll or a smile from the girl in the nose ring...

Time chewed up, I go back to work, shut the door, and re-engage with the hellish world within...we may not have hope, we may not have leadership, but by god I had neatly trimmed crusts...