Downhill Hairpins on the Sewerage Road

Oh unevocative twisty road, where will you take me today? Not very far is the answer it seems, as I'm encased in traffic, glued into it as the Southern Outlet grinds to a halt with all the tedious inevitability you would expect from a Monday. In my car, there is no real glamour, just the faint breeze of the air conditioner, and the odd muted mumble from the radio. The local radio DJs are chattering about Tasmania not getting a new sports channel, and they are about to launch a comedy sketch on the subject which fills me with dread. Everything else in the car is still, and leaves plenty of time to think. There's no distracting view after all on the Outlet, no majestic city scape unless you like trees. Lots and lots of dead trees that all blend into one big supertree. And gravel, gotta love some gravel. We're high on a hill, but no bird hears our song, not today, not since we're all waking up to another week. A curmudgeon in a Camry tries to scoot down the emergency lane in a frantic dash for freedom, the kind drug users make mid high when they freak out and have to run out of the room, but he's forced into a humiliating climb down when no one lets him back in, and he sits impotent and stuck in the lane flicking his indicator. A man making such a dash for freedom truly learns how trapped he is. Mind, all I'm doing with my free thought time is remembering old episodes of Cheers, and remembering the volume of e-mails that I have to reply to. There are no intellectual thoughts floating through my head, no debates of philosophy, and no landscape on this road that encourages it. The impotent Camry driver after 5ive minutes pulls out of the lane, a feeble wave after sneaking back onto the road as a truck more or less lets him in. The radio DJs wrap up their sketch with a laugh so hollow and so grim and so forced, I want to open the window to perfectly animate the grey landscape, since I think it will make birds scatter frightened in formation from the tops of the dead trees. And in the car in front of me, a girl licking a big lollipop is grinning an illuminating smile as she looks at me, waving with the friendliness of an innocent child who is yet to uncover what a little bastard she can be. I suspect that perhaps I will be on this road forever at this point - trapped, somewhere between curmugeonly cutting off chaps, and little girls who's eyes are flickering from left to right in animation that can only suggest an overabundance of red cordial is swimming through her bloodstream. Her stash, as it were, would be great to share, but in these times, asking a little girl for a drink of her cordial might be considered a little distasteful, so I put my eyes back to the front, and resume the difficult process of no longer caring about anything...

Time, I've wasted a lot of it in my life. My Dad and I - and I apologize if I've said this before - once sat for 5ive hours in Melbourne Airport together between 1 am and 6am, just us, no one else in the whole airport, waiting for a connecting flight to Hobart. Well, it was just us, and this big big girl who looked Slavic in a tight orange top who for a while looked like the saddest girl you'd ever find, since no one came to pick her up, and then her family as one sprinted down the stairs and took her away almost on their shoulders like they were about to throw her in a volcano. Joyfully of course. I thought perhaps this would be incredibly boring, and was dreading it, but I liked the solitude, and it would have been more solitudianal (?) if Dad hadn't decided to declare his Fruit and Nut to Customs and not wasted hours on end answering Cadbury questions. I loved watching all the businesses shut up really late, I loved that slow meaningful moment between the girl with the ringlets shutting up Gloria Jeans and the cleaners staggering into view, hell, I loved our skeezy pilot strutting through the airport on his own out into the night sky with the unjustified air of superiority, a sort of Russell Brand with the ability to fly a plane and wear his pants a bit too high. My Dad and I don't talk - not in the conventional his Dad and him way where they literally don't talk you know because of that whole his Dads a complete git thing - I mean we talk, but not about anything that matters. We talk about Liverpool and Manchester United, not life and meaning. Perhaps it would have been a good time to do so - no one was around, there was cavernous empty space, the drone of the vacuum was still an hour away, and I don't think he was probed by a rubber glove trying to find a Bounty Bar...but of course, we didn't, I ran off to go on the Internet, and he sat and had a boring evening, time passing ever so slowly as he sat with his arms folded nodding off to sleep. I distinctly remember the time between 2:21 and 2:28 seemed to take an absolute year to pass for some reason, and had some enterprising Serbian family tired of hoisting their mighty assed child and been prepared to carry someone less taxing, I'd have volunteered, just to get out of there. In fact, I was trying to calculate whether I could get a taxi into Melbourne and get Maccas and ended up not doing it because drawing on the desk to work it all out passed much more time. Dad took it in stride though, passing the time working out the sheer pointlessness of a cryptic crossword. Eventually a coffee shop had the good grace to open at 4 in the morning, and we shuffled in to talk entirely about sport, and not how bored and cold we were watching the world wake up from tedium...

Eventually I get out of the traffic, through some nifty driving, sleight of hand, and everyone turning off to head in far more interesting directions. The Mercury clock seems to be on autopilot, jumping from time to time, moment to moment, although possibly I'm just distracted and don't know how much time has passed between snatches of radio conversation and people meandering across my path on their way to their own workplaces. I know a guy who once played a flight simulator for 16teen hours, putting it on autopilot when he needed food, just so he could say to girls he flew from Australia to, I don't know, the UAE and it was sort of true. That's true dedication to wasting time. My own contribution to killing time comes in KMart, where I hop from foot to foot bored staring at piles of DVDs, not looking at them, not reading the back of them, just sort of looking through them in the middle of a deserted shop. Given I started this year desperate to not only read The Kreutzer Sonata but write my own version, and now I'm staring at the back of several poorly made Hollywood potboilers in garish fonts while a man in a baseball cap is screaming at his son something about how he never listens to anything he says and yes, it feels like I'm wasting time today. Tolstoy, from my limited reading of the subject, he pities humanity for its pleasures, so he'd be ecstatic seeing the miserable face of the yellee, head down and sad little face dragging along the ground as he gets further and further away from his intended Wrestlemania game. There's a chill in the air that has nothing to do with the over amplified air conditioning as he wanders off idly and quite alone. Eventually the Seiko watch wrapped around my wrist, the watch which is just far too big for me and looks ridiculous but makes a satisfying click every time a second passes, tells me time in this urban sprawl is up, and I shuffle off, desperately hoping the woman at the door doesn't bit me a cheerful thankyou. For some reason, she makes it sound like she thinks I've stolen something, but I'm sure she doesn't mean it. She stands there all day after all, back against the wall, middle aged turkey neck out, and I'm sure time passes so slowly, she thinks she's flying a flight simulator straight to Dubai...

The drive home is a lot easier, once I weave my way like Frogger round 2wo buses and a somewhat bewildered hot rod driver who is doing 20ks under the speed limit in vast contrast to the proclamations of his own bumper stickers. I think on the way home of Burnie, mid 80s, when school would just take the afternoon off and let the kids waste time however they felt like it. It was fantastic, we would bolt down the hill, and lie in the middle of the football oval, staring at the clouds, waving at Dave the guy who cut the grass, and then staring at the clouds again. Sometimes you would have a girlfriend, and your relationship would go to the next level and you would pick what shape the cloud was together, other times you'd sit and stare at the cloud and pretend that someone was talking to you and ruining the moment. Of course, it was fantastic, just the kind of thing I need to be doing more of now. There didn't seem to be any need to get up and muck around on the monkey bars - except it was the domain of Pippa of course - and entire seasons could change and still the most severe argument anyone could have was whether the cloud was a pig or a sheep. The monkey bars, that was where the pressure was, not just to impress Pippa, but it required skill, it was a form of showing off, as much pressure as slow dancing or trying to paint a dog. When you looked up, you would see endless queues of boys gathered around there, waiting for the chance to swing and show off. For some reason, this all came back to me in the car park of Channel Court today. As I stared up at the sky, clutching my little bag of groceries and my single man shopping persona, a boy on a skateboard tried desperately to impress his own Pippa, and fell on his arse, skidding around the ground and coming to an undignified halt against the tyre of a 4Wd. No matter how much time I waste, the patterns of life continue to revolve around me. I want to tell him to relax, lie down on the football oval, and wait for someone to pass him a note that says so and so really likes you, tick this box if you like them back, but his Pippa has already walked off to buy pegs at Chickenfeed, and he checks his pockets, making sure that he hasn't lost his wallet, along with his dignity...

And the good thing is, all of this saved a long blog post about defragmenting my hard drive...