Discomforting Greenock Bus Stops bleeding into Discomforting KMart arguments

Family trails lead to strange places - like Greenock at 2 in the afternoon, a blistering sunshine shining on a world that is asking itself serious moral questions, a blinking world crawling into a new weekend immediately after 9/11, everyone making sure they read the newspaper at the right bits. In the new 2001 seriousness, no one wants to be reading the Striker comic strip in the super soaraway Sun, or debating celebrity flippancy. I'm doing my bit, reading with the correct moral imperatives and proper tones of judgement infused into every movement of my eyebrows. A girl in a short skirt peers at my eyebrow movement and correctly guesses that I'm all about the issues, and says isn't it terrible. Her in depth assumption that a significant attack that claimed many lives is, indeed, terrible seems to lack a certain emphasis, but I let it go. Over her shoulder appears a drunk in a Rangers top - he has no moral questions to ask himself, as his football team are playing, damn the world and all. With hissing affirmations of his own self assurance, and drunken breath that could stop a poker game in Claremont, he leers at both of us to ask us essentially if we're for his team or against his team. Sure, he extends some of the syllables to really make sure we taste the McEwans from the back of his throat, and I'm able to fend off his more offensive religious comparisons with a nod and a slightly patronising smile. The girl meanwhile has a look on her face like she's been confronted by Matthew Newtons New Zealand accent. I hope I'm looking cool, or at least masking the terror that I'm about to battered and need medical help in the less than salubrious surrounds of Greenock General Hospital by reading my paper even more intently. Eventually, satisifed that he has made his point that he is indeed in a position of moral superiority based on selecting one cotton based football shirt over another, he slopes off into the sunset apparently oblivious to any impending threat to the Western world, and the girl for some reason follows him, apparently charmed at the extra ks he tacked onto the end of his swear words. By the time I realise she's a prostitute - damn it all if that last little curl at the end of the fringe isn't always a giveaway in Scotland - my attention is taken by a mutant wean, sitting on a park bench across from me just staring beneath a mountain of ignorance and a furrowed brow that betrays the public education system as something that doesn't satiate the curiousity of the terminally bewildered. As the rugged off road bus picks me up and I shuffle through the aisle past old women clutching overstretched Co-Op bags, he never takes his eyes off me, and since I suspect he's picked up on the vaguest hint of a foreign accent and gone into full we don't take kindly to mode, I'm compelled by law to watch him all the way for research purposes, and he refuses to blink as I make my way out of Greenock, the whites of his eyes seeming to be all that remains as my focus eventually drifts from the town towards battered fish and conversation in a Glasgow pub that will, somewhat inevitably, drift towards proving anything anyone holds dear is in fact shite...

This is my standard mid morning, post cheesecake thoughts, dispatches of life leaping around my brain before I have to focus. Funny thing is, strange as it was being verbally berated at a bus stop miles from home and stared out by the idiot offspring of three generations of cousins, I was still more comfortable there than I am right now, trying to seperate friendship groups so I don't have to deal with both sides of the emotional coin at once. I have a friend who's pushing into another group, and like when I dealt with the drunk I'm nodding and smiling - well, in an e-mail sense, although I have the dignity to at least avoid putting together a combination of shift colon and shift 0 - and trying to change the subject, maybe directing the conversation towards that cheeky monkey that went on the rampage. I've never been socially exclusionist, except in extreme circumstances. In fact, there was a party in Burnie where a would be gate crasher was turned away at the door - such innocent times in the mid 90s, one gate crasher not 50ty people who found out about the party on Myspace - and had to sit in the car for four hours on his own listening to 7BU until the person who brought him was ready to go home. When I brought him cake in a mission so sneaky I should have had a codename, his gratitude was so touching, it was pretty scary. So I do have a heart - but really, it's not the time and place for one friend to join another group in Melbourne matrimony. I try and let the situation down gently, but there's a pressing to the responses. I think this friend thinks they've missed out on something. Last time I went to Melbourne I got impossibly drunk and ended up by the side of the Nepean Highway on my own totally lost, ready to vomit and completely unaware of how to tell my host family exactly which netball centre I was outside. I told this to my friend who reacted with the same rapt awe the boy who got the cake did. Which makes my non committal oh you know maybe you can come look a shiny penny response even harder to maintain. I think it's why I like sports - sports and music are easy to talk about, at any juncture in time if anyone brings up a personal problem we can steer the ship back onto safe ground through knowing what coaches should be doing at any one time. As the e-mails continue to fly, I eventually just stop replying. I push the problem aside, dislocate it from my conscience in the rush to cut the first slice of cheesecake from the herd. Maybe a bit Golden Girls, sure, but I suspect clinging to my e-mail box is a demand for dates, times and places when I'm going to Melbourne, and in the face of such demands, casual flippancy about what happened to Gnarls Barkley might not cut it...

My mind goes further back, an uncomfortable end of year hay bale - was it the night Dad got chased by the school fat girl trying to get him to dance, oblivious to law suits and the possibility she might cripple his poorly knees? Or was it the party where the wounded girls all sang Alanis at 3 in the morning and I just loathed everyone? One of them anyway, the dying lights of youth twinkling in the night sky - so much alcohol, so many misdirected conversations trailing off in the discomfort of our fracturing friendships, so much ambition yet to be thwarted by lack of application and lack of motivation. The Kylie saga - she being the girl I loved in Grade 12 who didn't even make the effort to say no - failed to resolve itself, mostly because whenever I talked to her it was just nonsense about nothing that meant anything. In fact, such was the flimsiness of our friendship at the end and the lack of substance to anything we said, I suspect that the jug band in the corner was discussing more serious issues about the human condition than we were, and they mostly rhymed things with jug. Or beer. But mostly jug. At all of those parties someone broke up in a flood of tears and thrown drinks. It was for the best, after all post Grade 12 life takes you in scattered directions, and no one had invented Facebook to maintain the we'll keep in touch eventually thing going on. A kid called Nick sat on the hay bale next to me, looked out onto the courtyard/flaming drums of oil, and said how uncomfortable he was with everything, proving it by being hunched up in an aggressively coiled spring. He was somewhat sceptical of the whole jug band/country interface, and since he was the kid that scientifcally disproved personal jinx as a game, we all listened to him. He was a child borne of wisdom. I think he wanted to have a goodbye conversation with me - he was a good friend of mine - but since I was fixated on woe is me overacting, and I was watching Kylie dance, I think I blew two chats with one moan. Luckily, I had a back up plan, which was different to my normal back up plan of awkward self deprecation. The back up plan was simply to convince myself that jug band music was brilliant, and that I would dance up a storm to every single musical syllable. 212 songs about jugs? Fantastic! Such was my funk on the dance floor, I know Kylie was jealous of the rug I was cutting. Oh yes, it was definitely Persian...at least that's how I remember it. There's every chance that I just got drunk and did the Tassie Two Step, but the most important thing was liberating myself off that hay bale. I wish I could do it more often, but I suspect Boags was just more potent in 1996. Those parties were like strange one night stands, where you can remember the details and you felt good but they were ultimately inconsequential. When you sat on that hay bale, you felt like you were the dead centre of the universe, and no one could tell you one town down a kid just like you was sitting on a hay bale thinking the same things. Still, no one could do the Tassie Two Step quite like me...take that kid just like me in Devonport...

My Dad is on the phone - he's upset with Underbelly, and Mums gots a whole bunch of baby pictures she wants to bring round. I'd love to be more positive, I really would. Discomfort hugs me too easily though. I'd quite like to be the kid who would sit for hours on the school fort when friends needed him too, but I'm just not like that anymore. That said, I am still capable of surprising myself. For when the pictures come, I look and appreciate every single photo, even asking questions about them. Strange, I think as Mum leaves with her mainland tan. I actually did quite well there. I reward myself with a chocolate royal and some pointless music video watching. I try and teach myself every day that ultimately stresses in the world melt away, a discomforting evening is only a temporary setback, but maybe I'm still letting it sink in. The book store continues to fade into oblivion, that's affecting my mood anyway - now they've got huge signs all over the place announcing they are closing, just rubbing it in. In Kmart, theres a fight broken out - two women have gone to grab the same DVD, and one of them has gone ballistic. Absolutely radge. She's spitting and cursing and hissing and blaming everything from the decline of the Tiger economies to Matthew Newtons accent on Underbelly for the accursed wretched fortune she's been destined to suffer. I can't see what the DVD is, but the other woman has her mouth in the classic cartoon agape position, taking the tirade not with fear or apprehension but with complete surprise such a minor inconvenience could be such a horrific nightmare to anyone. Uncomfortable, I move on, just as the swearing reaches Greenock proportions, and a poor short blonde staff member has to step in the adjudicating maelstrom. The last thing I hear as I sweep past the staff member on door bitch duty is some kind of accusation about the innocent womans parentage which makes door bitch visibly wince. The only problem is, she still has a huge grin on her smiley face, thus making the wince a sort of cor blimey people what are they like gesture. It's obviously me - my brain is working on assumptions that the world is concerned about the threat of terrorism while people are looking at sports, I've got a whole thing in my head about how people are ruder and door bitch is acting like her kid has said doo doo head. No wonder I spend my days uncomfortable, I just have too many mental paradoxes competing in my head for air. It's also probably why an empty K-Mart can feel like Greenock eight years ago, everything ultimately feels like a repetitive circle, and why just for the sake of respite I dumb everything down into easily digestible points about actors and their accents...

Just wait until I get to the letter M though, then you'll see some thought patterns...