The four ages of man - punch in the arm, prank to impress girls, all pubs are shit, what are you looking at

The Sundays - Wild Horses
Uploaded by djoik

It's early morning - I wonder what I'm doing up to be honest, and I share my space with several other muddled and confused workers of various businesses who are struggling with the problems of sliding doors, holding a coffee while they open a sliding door, or just drinking enough coffee to make sure that they have enough motivation to get through another day of dealing with the public and that damned sliding door. I can see on their faces years of disgruntlement, minor annoyances now cascading onto them like torrents, the every day death by a thousand cuts not soothed by javas. I'm on the down escalator, which I'm sure is a metaphor for something. One of my quirks is more all my intellect or perceived one, I always get escalators and elevators mixed up when I say the word and like the day I kept calling Jamie Shanahan Jamie Shanashanan and couldn't stop no matter how much I concentrated such a mental blind spot has ceased to be cute. On the up escalator, two schoolboys sit on the ground and go up seated and unmoving, their hair a shaggy mess, their grins broad. I realise at some point that they seem a bit upset there's no one around to impress with their zaniness - the only female anywhere near us is a lady who would have made a great bad girl wrestler in the 80s, sturdy of thigh with a good effort in the clean and shopping bag jerk. Too young to contemplate any port in a storm, they begin shifting uneasily as they wonder where the little blonde girl from Zamels is that they all fancy. Disappointed at the lack of audience for their alleged hilarious as usual cheek - I mean, who sits on an escalator, those mad kooks - they begin grinning at me. I'm expected to acknowledge their superior comedy skills by way of a mutual grin, although I expect it will follow with some sort of mocking coda, and to be honest, there's no one else around, so if they believe they can embarrass me with mockery, only the lady wrestler would hear it and she's got her own problems, a bulging bag causing her tracksuit trousers to be less than Rocky like in their defiance of the laws of gravity. So I move on, sipping my water, listening to my IPOD and knowing what they don't, that no one is as cool as their showing off no matter who much it is backed up by a third lingering friend guffawing at the outrageousness. As they get to the top of the escalator and have to get up, Panda Eyed girl walks by - whatever her faults, she walks with an outrageous sense of cool, a disdainful hundred yard stare backed up with a strut that comes entirely from the hips. As she walks past, the boys are suddenly stricken with nervous hormonal lust that no amount of hair gel or puffed up surf jumpers can mask. They shuffle off awkwardly into the distance, and I feel like telling them it wouldn't matter. Panda Eyed Girl wouldn't notice. She's punching numbers into her phone, probably Twittering, her self absorbtion so absolute, she barely notices she nearly collides with an only slightly opened shutter, limboing under it, not a blonde hair nor newly plaited pigtail out of place...

My car, just before this exchange, had puttered through Kingston at less than warp speed. Once in my car, a guy in a blue ute with Revving Bastard on the back of his car pulled up next to me in Sandy Bay, revved his revving bastard engine to try and drag me, and then stalled as I drove off with solid efficiency. Today, I am a driving model of solid efficiency, negotiating road works and the arrogant lollipop lady I fight with every day, in her silly oversized coat and Kato like ability to jump out in front of me and hold me up whenever a student might, just might, be somewhere in the region. There's two kids at the bus stop - one is a small, slightly geeky ginger kid with cokebottle glasses and a sinister smile, the other a smaller blonde boy who looks a bit like Michael Christian, and who is always wearing some kind of hat. Whenever I drive past, with a brief glimpse into their self created sitting around at the bus stop world, they are always fighting. At first, it seemed playful, but today at the morning moment when I passed the smaller child was fully, forgive the lapse into Penguinese here, cutting sick with his punches to the ginger kids arm. Maybe he was pushed too far, the hat to the back jokes just mounted up. Mum would probably have got out and stopped them - she's like that, although even she's been dissuaded from that action by too many Mercury horror stories. I drive on. A long time ago, in a draughty scout hall, as the KLF pulsated and a DJ pondered whether flirtacious conversation with a 13 year old girl would get him fired, there was a fight broke out in the corner although since the music was pulsating at an alarming rate of wicked beats over phat choruses not many people saw it - two friends fighting over a girl and where once their fighting had been playful, nay, phat, this was different. The girl in question I had always found quite vulgar - interestingly, she had a quite a posh elongated name but short snappy wee ned vocals that didn't seem to fit, like some strange composite character rebelling against her hyphen. She didn't seem especially phased by the fight, and copped off with the DJ at the back of the stage by the time the teachers had suspended both the brawlers. Obviously the ginger kid is too young to be fighting over girls - unless there's some memo I missed girls are suddenly into cokebottle glasses. I round the corner just in time to nearly hit some ambling kid who is taking his time crossing the road. He's in full on slouching pose, too cool for school but I suspect from my judgemntally clouded windscreen - no wait, it's just dirt - that he will be one day, sadly, not be too cool to be flipping burgers at a popular chain restaurant with a litigious bent. That's the restaurant that has a litigious bent, not his burger flipping style. He's so lazy and apathetic as he holds up my usually frantic mid morning drive, I want to go round the corner and get the hat kid to beat him in the arm just to wake him up. Whatever you could say about the kid in the hat, but he's certainly got spirit...

Laziness has crept into my Saturday - not old enough to give up, not old enough to be tired without it being commented on, but not young enough to be truly hip apparently, but then again not old enough to need a truly new hip - but so has a hangover, something I didn't used to get. On David Boon Day all those years ago - I've got to get to that - I sat on a couch drinking entire cartons of beer with no more than a casual shrug and still retained my ability to suggest that Regurgitator would be a musical force for years to come, just like The Sundays. There's a lack of pulsating music in this pub tonight - no atmosphere, a detached restraunteur in the far corner talking about his business being in decline, a television with Rihanna and the sound off on in the background. I go to come up with some sort of witty Observatory/observing that it's shit in Hobart line, but it'd be wasted on my friends. Besides, I'm drunk, curse it all, and I'm probably babbling on my default topics of sport and music. I know I at least brought up music - if I bring up sport, such is my surety my team will beat Dads team at AFL on Friday night he has taken to calling me smug and it's made me feel I'm jinxing the Pies in the Sky - because I mention the reformation of an allegedly trendy band. A cool girl in short shorts with blonde hair and overly orange make up - I'd say Tangello as a shade but such was my lack of knowledge about fruit at Coles was so poor it's almost certainly not - hears our conversation and asks excitedly if it is true. When I affirm that it is true, she asks if I am a fan of said allegedly trendy band. Now, had I been younger, and been in a desirous position to be amorous with said girl and wake up to a face that made me think of an amber traffic light once it had faded in slightly, and lets face it, we've all been there, I would have said yes, great band, their Led Zeppelin tribute act is truly a marvel of modern invention, I have tickets...alas, I cannot lie, and she skulks off once I say that I am not. I'm accutely aware that I am now too old for such one night stands and lies about music or what I do for a living - no one buys I'm a gad about Scottish playboy anymore, I've lived here too long and probably everyone has seen me at one point or another out and about doing the Tassie two step and word has got around. Besides which, I'm old enough to believe that these nights are fundamentally depressing. In my own hypocritical way, I still go and get drunk and such like things, but less than I used to. On my e-mail, the reasons why no one can go out tonight are getting more and more desperate. Who moves house at 8 at night? Truthfully, we're just at the age where the noisy thump of techno has given way to the quiet strains of Channel 7s football coverage, and instead of sleeping in someone elses bed and trying to sneak out the window, we're sleeping in our own in the afternoon cos we need a nap - or at least, some of us are, my friend of similar age was more than happy to declare himself a fan of said band, which is patently untrue, and if he was confronted in the morning with a face that neither indicates stop or go, I'm happy to leave it between him and his god, which last time I checked wasn't the least singer of that trendy band, and I'm happy to have a long boring talk with my taxi driver about the declining nature of Friday night entertainment...

I have an ambition when I'm old - it's not a noble one - to find a local pub and essentially retire there, flirting with the barmaids, calling them darl, rolling out of bed in my slippers and going straight to the pub to have opinionated chats about sport and glare angrily at locals in my chair. My chair of course will arbitraliry change depending on who's sitting where and I will be truly annoying within the confines of my own narrow world, floating emphatic opinions with absolute certainty and then changing my mind when people agree. Mind you, there is a recession on, so there might be no pubs, we might all live like the Reagan era trolls Michael Stipe used to be obsessed about before he discovered Buddhism and Sesame Street. There's an old man who's taken my desires and acted them out for me as some sort of street theatre involving the returning of biscuits. Such is his unhappiness with some aspect of the exchanging of money for goods and services and a big chocolate cookie, he threatens to bring the alleged biscuit infraction up in parliament. The girl behind the counter looks weary, even older than him, as she grapples with page 82 of the customer service manual provided on induction day - what to do when you really want to say fuck off old man and take your bushy eyebrows with you. She smiles politely but her lips still somehow drip with acid, aware that the ravages of time and the eternal pull of the grave will take care of her grey haired foe. Eventually, she just gives him another cookie and he smiles directly at me with some undeserved triumph, I shuffle uneasily from foot to foot. I think for one moment he's going to demand an up top. There's really nothing to up top about. I know Tasmanian parliament doesn't much to discuss other than how not to give Hamish and Andy a key to the city or problems with chickens, but I can't see them sparing too much time to a biscuit crisis. The girl watches him go, never taking her eyes off him as he walks off to a shop called What's New (not the decor! Am I right folks? Am I...is this thing on?) to complain about something else. I know from her overly pursed lips that she's thinking she'll never be like that, doddering and old and completely pedantic as to worry and complain and harangue about a biscuit because she's young and cool and carefree and won't let things get her down - but of course she will be, and besides, the anxious look on her face when she can't find her tongs and the over exasperated concern on her visage when she forgets where the hedgehog slice is in the stall seems to indicate the process has already started. It happens to the best of us, I feel like saying, maybe putting an arm around her in consolation and pointing out that she's using the tongs to pick up an almond slice...it happened to me the day I began really finding myself hating people mis-using the word ironic...

So very much....