He needed to create a specific blog post at this time to seize the moment. And he has done that! Steve

It's Saturday morning, the weary traveller sits idly in a speciality restaurant eating with vigour, wipes sleep from his eyes, stares blankly at the unbending corpse like figure in his way, on guard as airport security, no wrinkle on her face remotely betraying emotion, and goes back to his book. It's a jarring juxtaposition of thought and non thought, as he reads a book about The Baader Meinhof Complex while dressed in football colours, a strange mix of Andreas Baader and Jaxson Barham if you will. He never claimed to be predictable. As the syrup dribbles down his chin in a somewhat precarious man dangling off a cliff kind of way, he's aware of a worker pushing a succession of boxes into position out the back of the Airport McDonalds. There's no one else in the airport but the odd child with absolute surety that their Dad has lead them in the right direction to support the right football team. As the sounds of sweet chart based music fill the ears, it becomes increasingly apparent that the pushing of the boxes is a mundane, Sisyphus like task. Of course, should you not know the legend, Sisyphus was compelled by the Gods to roll a huge rock up a steep hill, but before he could reach the top of the hill, the rock would always roll back down again, forcing him to begin again. Oddly, this worker, with a pony tail that seems to be painful and a T-shirt with a jaunty corporate logo on it seems condemned to live her life pushing crate like boxes from one end of the airport to the other, then pushing them back again, then stacking them, then unstacking them...maybe she's hiding from more difficult responsibilities, but her repetition is engaging to watch, and when later, our traveller finds himself stuck behind an old woman, rugged up from the cold with just the right amount of ginger hair dye in her scalp to hide the grey if you don't try and pick it out, who can't work the automated ticket machine for love, nor money - well certainly not money, it's not taking the money, and she sounds short on life. The traveller hops from foot to foot in eternal frustration as the queue of people who have chosen wisely to be served by a person purchase tickets with no problems at all. He may be the only person in this queue thinking of Sisyphus, or indeed any kind of legend, as in the mid morning air, a football song breaks out, with swear words and everything, causing the old lady to hold everyone up even more as she glares down the line, heart on the line for morality, as she blindly swipes her Visa card everywhere but the slot, and the traveller puts his hood over his head, turns his thoughts to Ladyhawke on the IPOD, and waits eternally for the bus, praying that day will provide him with proof that his sporting heroes care about his team as much as he does, and as much as the boy with the autographed shirt cares...

It's the next day, the football team has been vanquished, but the traveller is not concerned. He has had a night of rock and roll excess, a smashed glass at the ESPY, an 18teen verse version of Gloria, a pash from a cute girl in glasses, vomit on the floor...an interesting evening, he reflects, and a true test of sporting loyalty, as he saw one of his so called heroes out on the dancefloor dancing not caring that they lost and almost went and told him what he thought of him. Tis only a game Greavsie. Blind 3am panic as to where he was fades, and simpering hotel staff are making him feel uncomfortable in 5ive star luxury, as they call him Sir and pamper him with free bottles of wine, betraying his working class roots, and he looks too shabby for such treatment anyway. To balance the universe out, he decides to shuffle through the night air, to leave behind a silly woman on TV who is entrancing the nation with her refusal to show her haircut, and wanders down to McDonalds for a late night snack. The air is cold, the IPOD is loud, the pace quick through small big city gaps in the pavement, gaps between large crowds of people that appear slowly. He disappoints some Americans with his lack of geographical knowledge about Melbourne, but he knows where McDonalds is. He stands in a fast moving queue, the poorly paid staff working overtime and desperately to provide the late night lost and hungry crowd with salted chips. As he fiddles with his IPOD, time stands still as he wanders, and he notices the animated chatter of a well dressed couple behind me. Trendy clothes, trendy haircuts, clear eyes, hands held tight. They stand out next to me, rocking shabby chic but feeling good about myself. In an oddly poetic moment of quiet as mein hosts go off to get chips, or at least have a break in the midst of a stressful situation, she looks at him and says softly so how do we do tell our friends about us? There then follows silence, and no one in the couple seems to know what to say. He's not really in a position to help them out. The small Japanese lady behind the counter has located the specific type of burger he requires to help him cope with my working class guilt, and he puts on his IPOD as the male in the trendy clothes puffs out his cheeks in moral imperative disquiet, and the traveller has to turn up Ladyhawke really loud just to shut out the awkwardness and the taste of the late night chips...

It's the morning, and it's cold. The traveller is distressed, it's a hot and sweaty Internet lab, and the pace is just too much for his tired soul to cope with. He's happy, he's having a good holiday, but there's something about the way the Indian owners of the store keep trampling over his seat to fix the computer in the corner that makes him uncomfortable. So he leaves, and against all his judgement is back in the same fast food emporium, just because it's quiet and no one needs a reason to be here, no one is trampling over his shoes to poke and prod at a wire. There's a plumpish girl behind the counter, with a skirt with a split up it and bad Susan Boyle skin, and she's in charge, it says so on her badge. He's reading his book idly in the queue, flicking through it idly, as a Korean manchild, with a bumfluff moustache and a bad corporate uniform fiddles with the register like a drunk trying to catch a balloon. Lest anyone forgets thigh split skirt girl is in charge, she begins a process of complicated hand signals and motions, as if hoping by the pure power of manifesting that the drawer will open. It's then that she slips her hands underneath the arms of bumfluff boy, and they exchange the most bizarre but potent look of sexual tension I've seen since...well, the ESPY probably. It's so jarring, the traveller looks around to see if anyone else noticed it. When life continues on apace and a poorly displayed sausage muffin is presented, the universe is back in order. His book won't keep him fully from retreating from the world however, as a troupe of mentally ill patients out on a treat of a day to the Telstra Dome come in for something to eat, and one of them throws a pickle at the wall, nearly pickling a grey haired old man who is doing Sudoku in the corner. As he beats a retreat lest he become the victim of a pickling, the traveller takes one last look around, just to try and see if he can see another look of sexual tension he can store in the memory bank next time he wants to describe lust in a piece of writing, but alas all he sees is the thigh split skirt girl mopping what I hope is mushed burger up with a mop, chunky thigh hard to the floor. It probably wasn't the image he was hoping for, so he turns back to his book and his IPOD, ducks under a low flying bun, accepts an apology from the carer, and shuffles off into the crowd, un-noticed by the masses, in peaceful solitude...

In the end his bag is heavy with the whims of reckless purchasing and the excesses of what happens when a luxury hotel stuffs up a room in a recession and is keen to over service every single customer, it's weighed down with massive consumption, books and wine and cheeses. His head hurts so much, he doesn't know whats right and whats left, but he's moving straight ahead through the dark and the cold, lights illuminating Hobart not yet in sight, he slumps in his chair as a stewardess goes through the repetitive routine of explaining what happens if the plane crashes. Such is his seat, he is expected to be a hero, but he doesn't even know how he feels, since he is exhausted and motionless and simply wants to resume reading his book. It's hard to read to relate to the struggle of a radical anti capitalist group while being lectured by a Virgin Blue stewardess and thinking about a bag stuffed with free wine and cheese. His brain shuts off - he shouldn't have dropped the glass, true, he should have spoken to the girls outside the bar, but they were right, he did think they were prostitutes, and he's glad he didn't speak out of turn to his so called sporting hero. Everyone, he reflects, copes with disappointment differently, and angry and frustrated, had he himself not taken himself off to get drunk and enjoy himself in a foreign city? Time has passed so quickly, he hasn't even got time to think of those lame JB Hifi Cards attached to staff recommendations - Lily Allen is Da Bomb? Silly JB Hifi people...a small boy disrupts his thoughts, shoved into the aisle to get out of the way of the drinks cart, the boy, in the football jumper of a far more potent team smiles as he tramples on my orange shoes, and I respond with blank tiredness. His Dad, with a Wilford Brimley moustache and sincere smile, nods in my direction as the drinks cart vanishes in a flash before anyone can grab an overpriced Pepsi...I'm aware at this point that I've stopped being the traveller, and I'm back to being me, and I'm going home. The Dad asks me gently what I got up to on the weekend, and I smile, say a fair bit, and throw my head back into the seat, soaking up the last pleasant few minutes before the real world crashes into view with a horrific bumpy landing...

It was, as they would say, quite a fun weekend...

The only thing that can save a wounded cat is a vat full of paraffin

Someone must have got a hold of the Worksafe people today - they were bounding around like an energetic Aerobics display, they had multi coloured and obviously compliant drinking flasks and the man with the bald spot had been replaced by two perky tweens, who were standing alert on their heels - surely not worksafe - handing out leaflets. If they had The Presets blaring in the background everything would have made a lot more sense. Their energy was exhausting, and I found myself gravitating to the cute girl selling roller doors from a table with a flipbook on it. She wasn't energetic - she was flipping thoroughly through a copy of the Womans Day and was lost entirely in a story about Cathy Freemans wedding. It felt impolite to disturb. Everyone was weary today apart from the festival of safety dances, lead by the tweens without hats, and the lady in the foilament shop looked ready to throw in her lot, rocking back with a cup of tea and looking out blankly at the latest as, somewhat ironically, my IPOD kicked in with the Buffy the Vampire Slayer theme. Nothing says rocking danger and scary times like walking past a washbasin cat with no one within 200 metres. It's probably my age, but I hate people who mis-use the word irony. Linguistics are very important to me. I can't explain to people how tired I felt today, there's no one awake enough to listen to me. There's a fitful stampede outside Big W though - the lucky few who got their free cash from the government, those who lord it over us all, sometimes stampede in a sensational stimulus spending spree, crowding around the top of the escalators in a gravitational pull towards the cheaply priced packets of Samboys, and if you get caught up in the maelstrom, you can end up in Big W without even realising it, since you can't change direction. Today though, there was no stimulation, no real no motivation to move it, or indeed move it move it, and as Melissa Mars filled in the time on my IPOD, I realised it was just Friday under the flickering flourescent lights, and none of us could really be bothered putting on our weekend best just yet. Shutter girl was still there an hour later, and since I have a rudimentary knowledge of Womens Day, I noticed she had moved forward one page, the foilament lady appeared to have just put down the cup of tea, and I felt like I hadn't moved a muscle. There was an old man with his pants pulled up to his nipples and crazy hair like Doc from Back to the Future milling around the fringes of Boost Juice. He looked completely bewildered as to why his juice wasn't being boosted, and I felt bad for him because his faculties were a bit scrambled and he looked panicked and desperately sad. I had just turned up If You Seek Amy on the IPOD a bit, and I'd have latched onto for some Samitarining, but to my discredit I guess, I didn't have the time to help the old boy. If you seek service though old boy, don't go to Boost Juice, the promotions models will stare right through you, no matter how often you pull your pants up and have a cheeky scratch of your arse...poor guy...lucky he wasn't standing outside Big W, he'd have no hope...

As I walked today, there were a group of kids behind me - the girl in the middle was about 4our foot 2wo, built nuggety like Tony Shaw with a swirl of pink through her hair like a motor racing circuit blueprint, all chicanes and impossible loops. At first glance I thought she was perhaps the accompanying friend of 2wo gay guys because they were ignoring her and were engaged in a very personal whispered conversation, and they also appeared to be sharing frosted tips tips, but not to be ignored, Nugget began to boom a very personal anecdote about Mr Frosty #1s girlfriend, and what she had said about their first kiss. She wouldn't be deterred by the fact that the Frost boys were oblivious to everything she was saying and were poking and prodding at each others, er, Iphones. She began to weave a story about girlfriends last boyfriend, a hapless innocent called Brad, and how he was a terrible kisser who used to drown the poor lass in saliva. I did consider being a bit down with the kids and making a reference to the band Saliva, but to be honest it would have been like being one of those crusty old men that get thrown in the sea in a Frankie Avalon film. Poor Brad wasn't around to defend himself against such slobbery charges, and the revelation past without incident, although a woman in a lemon coloured Millers jumper was so disgusted she looked at me for some sort of joint moral young people are going to hell exchange of glances, but I wasn't game to exchange glances and scuttled off leaving her to write a letter to the Mercury in disgusted green pen. Although for a second, Frosty #1 looked up from his Iphone to at least acknowledge to Nugget that he was a good kisser - well, comparitively, although following Brad in that department was like acting in the same film as Natalie Imbruglia - but it was just a fleeting moment of recognition and Nugget went back into her conversational cave, taking a gigantic sandwich from her backpack and chomping on it with resignation. I suspect that she fancied one of the Frost boys, as the way she said the girlfriends name was, and maybe only I noticed, laced with a rather elongated second syllable, spat out into the cold air in annoyance. However, she couldn't compete with the power of the kiss, nor the homoerotic power of 2wo boys and their toys - and their hair care products. With rueful resignation and rye bread from a rucksack, she trudges forward, dreaming of her day in the sun, white horses, and probably a better quality of bread...that sandwich looked manky...

Outside of Lily Allen, my favourite ever line in any song is in Kisses by Tracey Bonham, the one about she kisses harder than me, I guess I'm not that hungry. Maybe you just had to have a girlfriend who kissed as hard as Vicki, my early 90s pash buddy in Penguin, did, she was positively voracious, and I thought for a while everyone was like that. Maybe that's where our relationship really floundered, not because I moved to Burnie to begin summer camp for awkward adolescents, which lasted all year round for 9ine years, but because she kissed harder than me. Still, even with such pash based violence, those early 90s days were a sort of cultural high point for me, as cool as I was ever going to get without a talent, say, playing a guitar or kicking a ball around. You can only get so far making a lime spider and knowing that Lemmings don't really throw themselves off cliffs. Try using that one in Syrup. The hapless tale of Brad was a reminder of course that girls talk about these things, ability to pash and further consequences of the pash. The girl selling the shutter doors for whatever reason seems to have a sparkle in her eyes even when she sits still while the Tweens working safely don't seem to have a single glint anywhere even as they beam outwardly and clasp their flasks like they are prop bearing extras in a massive dance number. Vicki was probably the last happy person I got on with, and I mean American happy, that beaming smile and belief in a better world. For the sake of my own sanity I walk around today trying to see if anyone looks genuinely happy, anyone who doesn't think nothing is ever as good as it was. The newsagent isn't going to be a source of enthusiasm in that regard - he's got his eye entirely on 2wo magazine flipper but not buyer boys with such an uncompromising glare I think he's going to jump the counter and chin them. Such is the ridiculous nature of her glare, from behind one of christendoms worst flimsy piratery bearded faces, that it makes me laugh all the way home, and the flippers are quite happy to sit and flip through the magazine rack to their hearts content. It's that kind of day you know - movement is so limited, as limited as my own thoughts. Outside of a vague hazy few days remembering 1992, I can't get myself into gear at all. There's a star in my dreams, a personal sunbeam, but the memory is far too perfect, too idealised, and it fades in a haze of pointlessness, just as the old man with the high pants stumbles past me, heading to god knows where, not a hair in place...

The old man, I hope, got served eventually, or someone cared enough to make sure he was OK and got him on the road to somewhere. Such was his dismayed and confused air, I'm not sure he knew what he was doing. I know the feeling, although in my case the confusion is metaphorical, not literal. I at least know tomorrow I'm literally going to Melbourne, on a plane that hopefully will take off. I hope Nugget one day finds her prince, on a pony with frosted tips, I hope no one ever disturbs the girl selling the shutter doors and makes her talk about the thing she's supposed to be selling. If she spent an hour reading about a wedding, she's probably getting married herself and looking for an idea - from Cathy Freeman though? I hope the foilament lady sells some of her washbasin cats, and I hope for myself a turn in fortune. Not even that things are bad, but I still question where I'm going, and what I'm doing. I'm far too hard on myself I decide after a day where I've had about 3hree thoughts by the end of it and one was about Bill Werbeniuk and the other 2wo were about events from 1992, and everything just added up to nothing. I even found myself queueing in McDonalds being served by a blank eyed gimlet, and I don't really know what I was doing there, I mean with all the options in life you pick McDonalds, but there was a man in there protesting when I came to somewhere around the healthy options line that I had cut in front of him in the queue. He was angry, and I said in a voice that wasn't my own for him to fuck off. It really didn't sound like me, but he backed down immediately. Luckily it wasn't a London supermarket. I've been so grumpy lately, so fidgety and confused and tired, maybe it all spilled out into one phrase, one acid laced phrase taken out on some dickhead in a Pantera T-shirt. It's the onset of a personal winter, the struggle when it gets dark, and after the outburst, all I can do is laugh, laugh pointlessly at how frustrated Friday has made me, collect my tepidly cooked meal from the blank eyed gimlet, and bounce back tomorrow, hopefully with a bigger and better attitude...Vicki, I'll do my best for you, I promise...

For today at least, it'll do...it'll have to...

People who have no proof their superstitions work

The foilament shop, I don't know why, but when I was walking past it today with a mouthful of muffin - I'm not sure why I feel so unkempt and mockit and chunky at the moment but it's annoying me and takes away the joy of chomping on a muffin - but it looked so dingy and poetic, I began to doubt my ability to convey it to anyone else. It looked positively Dickensian because the back walls of the shop they currently squat in are unpainted and have strange stains creeping up the brickwork. I had to move on in the end, because I spent so long looking at how awful it all seemed - white walls screaming for a touch up, middle aged women gossiping about you can get such ornaments in any part of the world which must be re-assuring to the Afghans, piles of boxes loaded up against the wall ripped 1/2 open with packing foam all over the floor, the painted sign in the window with the date they have to move out by changed in felt tip pen - that I think the woman in there thought I was going to buy the washbasin cat and I had move on before I was sales pressured. It looked so amazing to me though, so old school squalor, I really doubted that I could explain my thoughts to anyone. I would have taken a picture if I could, but I'm not good at taking pictures. Well, that's not true, I'm not good at being in pictures, I could probably take them OK. In fact, when I was very younger, I took great pictures. My technique was that I would take the picture on the first syllable of cheese, not the post cheese seconds, because I thought it was more realistic. Once people fixed their grins to their faces with apparenty conviction I didn't think it seemed anywhere near as good. It seems such an odd thing to remember as a 5ive year old handed a camera - surely the simple ability to point and click should have been enough to inspire wonder - but it seemed to me as though I was quite a nihilistic child sometimes. My memories are of how great Penguin is, but then something like that pops into my head, like I was wandering around when everyone else was spraying people with hoses and making up songs about boogers trying to find out what everything meant, and questions of reality and unreality. No wonder I didn't have any friends, I must have been loping around the playground trying to work out the mathematical possibility of Santa Claus existing. That's not true, I did have some friends, a cabal of like minded Prep aged dreamers who would talk of the world outside and what would happen when we left the playground confines of the big yellow caterpillar structure we would huddle under. I'm not sure I thought I'd be shoulder to shoulder with a toothless old man pondering aloud to his wife just how dirty the walls in a shop would be, but then again, I think most of us thought we'd be teachers, as it was our most adult frame of reference, and when Dad has to slog through a weekend of marking, I'm glad I didn't go down that path...

Someone tried to blow up my local ATM the other day. I haven't been down to have a look at it, but apparently it took some of Kingstons finest minds to put it all back together. They huddled around it, discussed it, painted it and then decided that yes, it was damaged. My Gran would no doubt have admired them for their efforts, she was always appreciative of the workers. When my Auntie wanted me to audition for the role of the Milky Bar Kid, such was my Grans vehement disdain for anyone keen to pursue a career in any kind of artistic profession I'm surprised she didn't sign me up for a Glenbuck coal mining job on the spot. It's a shame, not that I didn't become the Milky Bar Kid, as I had the haircut for it, an albino bowl cut of some repute, but that I didn't pursue acting as a career. Not that I had the looks for it, but after my star turn as Joseph and several Grade 9ine improvisational skits that made Katie giggle, I never kept it up. I couldn't imagine walking up the London Road in Glasgow with my uncle as an actor, a thespian or any other profession that wouldn't be described without a swear word in front of it - as with his son, a used car salesman with a suspicious reputation based on the fixing of raffles. He's got nothing on Vanessa, a minxy minx eating a Twirl in the library today. I know her name is Vanessa because when me and the fat bloke were on different computers looking at the Internet same as any other day, except I don't have the melancholy air of man with nowhere to go except the bakery like he does, someone came screaming into the library screaming in a bogan scrag fight kind of way looking for Vanessa, and Vanessa cared not a jot, flicking through her periodical without a single raise of her pierced eyebrow and without any of her spotty white face moving one inch. Eventually, harassed library security, a little old lady and a passing visitor move the screamer on, pushing her our sternly by the stretchmarks as she swears vengenance for Vanessas crime, which apparently is conning the screamer and disappearing up her own arse. Quite the trick. Vanessa obviously in addition to taking up dying her hair poorly must have been quite the actress, and was more than happy to live in a world of untruths and betrayals. When I look, she's flipping quite undisturbed through a copy of Inside Sport, with all the time in the world. I think she might have blown up my ATM such is calm criminal mind that seems to be at work, but her evil genius is disturbed by her mobile phone ringing and scaring her. Like a sitcom, it invokes a stern shushing from the busiest bodiest librarian, and a filthy glare from the perennial fat computer user - oddly, I relate to him, I remember those melancholy weekdays in the library aimlessly surfing the Internet. As far as I can tell, he doesn't have a single mother to flirt with, nor an Aboriginal trying to kick him off every 5ive minutes to read his e-mails. Some people would say having more computers and less interaction in the library, it's progress, but not me people, not me...

I sweep past a little display case in Eastlands today, a mystifying maanequin in a glass case with balloons at the base of it, good quality ones like you get at posh kids birthday parties. I was never able to tell if I was at a posh kids birthday party when I was a kid though, it seemed to me as though everyone really pushed the boat out. Even when I had to hide in the cupboard when Ex Daddy wanted to chop up Mummy with an axe at my friends house, they still had nice cake. The mannequin, minding it's own business and refusing to judge anyone, is part of a strange new display in the middle of the sock district, a salute - and who doesn't love a salute - to workplace safety, although I don't know what anyone is supposed to ask the men behind the desk. How to be safer at work I suppose, but the sock district does a much better trade. They look utterly bored and utterly fed up, to the point that the man with the George Graham slicked back bald spot and over abundance of pens is positively reclining in his seat, staring vaguely out into the world with a thousand yard stare. It is by some gentle notion of irony that he is leaning in his chair in such a way that, frankly, he looks incredibly unsafe at work as his chair dangles in the point between tipping over and a giggle for everyone else. He might impale himself on his chunkiest pen, one of those multi coloured ones stand up comedians used to always take about that would run out of black and blue in term 1ne so you had to write in purple or puce, but such is the expression on his face I suspect it would liven up his day. This is not the time or place to pass to explain irony to passers by, who hustle and bustle by in a blur of poorly chosen outfits and lost bouncy balls their kids have thrown away that they have to chase. In the jewellers shop, a gossipy woman is explaining economic reality to her co-worker, about how she had to sack someone, and she explains it in flowery indirect language, explaining how it wasn't me and it wasn't her - must have been snooker professional Bill Werbeniuk I guess - it was just, and she said it with a hair swish, it was just reality. It's only when I look closer that I notice her face is frozen desperately with the power of Botox, her shiny forehead glinting in the spotlight. Confronted with another reality, aging, she didn't confront it with a hair swish and a defiant speech, but with a big injection. In the shine of her forehead, I can see the man in the chair edge ever closer to tipping over, it's only a matter of time, as he stares at the ceiling with lip curled and eyes entirely on the ceiling, blowing bubbles into the air and forgetting entirely the point of the mannequin, which as always sits in an entirely non judgemental fashion...

Everywhere I go at the moment that stupid Taylor Swift song is playing - it chases me out of KMart and out of Big W like a haunting murderous refrain, a Pavlovian response to flee stirring within every time I hear about that bloody Prince and Princess...things are depressing in the taxi rank - unemployment row is one thing, but the taxi rank and smoking section where I work is endlessly depressing, a fight is usually breaking up and the whole thing has an embittered grudge filled tone as people bicker over who's taxi got there first. When I walk past Humble Pie, a man eating soup is saying grace, rather than saying the usual word around here, and blessing the soup. It seems out of character for where he is, and I hope my slight staring didn't offend. Knowing the soup they serve at Humble Pie, you probably need to pray a fair bit in the hope you don't get poisoned. I feel like joining him in a silent prayer - I have a work meeting in the afternoon where they want me to write on a piece of paper what I love about working where I work, and I don't want to go back. If someone took a picture of me now before I had time to pose, I'd look sullen, like an outcast hanging around the fringes of society with my head down and my collar up, wandering around bored from shop to shop without anywhere to really go. Maybe I could join a queue at the post office and kill time talking to old people about the perils of society. I could hang around outside the travel agent shuffling nervously in a will I won't I kind of way, looking at brochures and then forgetting to book. I could badger passers by with tales about my weekend trip to Melbourne and the aceness of my tickets to the football but my Dad will tell me I'm being boring. That's his parental style - lots of eedjit name calling. Or I could do what the laws of commerce tell me to do. Grab a marker pen and a smile and come up with enough ideas to fill a piece of butchers paper until they let me get out of there. Once the bell, or in this case, the alarm on my watch sounds, lunch is over, time is up, and behind the closed door I go...

Sometimes I don't think I've left school at all...we just need a caterpillar...

The intermittent nightmares of the man with a sketchbook and no pencil

Even though it hasn't happened for a while, I used to have a recurring dream about orange seagulls, which was sort of deep and complicated but essentially involved a seagull that couldn't fly. I don't talk about it that much because it sounds so much like a dream people invent should a person who analyses dreams come into their life. I'm probably a surrealist dreamer anyway, and when I dream about Lily Allen it's not conventional pervy dreams, but she's there doing things in the background. I mention this because I spent yesterday in the company of someone who had decided that all dreams were futile, pointless, that life was a series of victim inflicted tragedies coated in emotional struggle, and I was powerless to contribute anything to the conversation. I had to sip quietly on my water while the torrent of gripes fell to the floor, and I had left my house in a jaunty mood like some kind of cockney milkman from a sitcom, a whistle on my lips and a strut in my stride. In contrast their face is taut and tense, old and stern, the milk left undelivered. Over the day, I sort of turned things around to the point I had quite a nice day, but in the course of the conversation I felt a distance between myself and the talker that I hadn't felt before. My emotions and empathy feels lazy at the moment, sluggish and discontented as I walk listening to the discontent. I can't imagine this person has any dreams anymore, they seem to have flown away a long time ago. When they shut their eyes, they must only see black, or maybe a vague hint of sepia for a time when life was a lot simpler. As the person in question talks, I'm taken entirely by an old house with a fantastic porch that would be perfect to sit on with a shotgun, which was fantastic piles of wood neatly stacked up along the fence. By the time I've rejoined the tree of woe conversation, I feel as though at some point I stayed a teenager with strange imagination and hopes, while this person headed directly to 60ty without passing go. Since I'm too tired to put up a fight, I simply nod and smile at appropriate moments, although most of it is coming up with songs about porches and the thought of my Dads new haircut...so much hacking, so much skull, so little hair...

Someone in Penguin once sat me down on one of those lazy Sundays when Dad was sipping beer at the bar and told me the natural order of life - hairdressers marry footballers and that's how it is. Of course that same person said the problems with society could all be fixed if the young people went ferreting, so you know, he was only batting at 50%. As I walk around Bellerive Oval watching local football, I see a whole stand of hairdressers, chatting idly in a local level WAG clique, knitting and fitfully offering encouragement. It's the same scene I grew up with in Penguin, except with more modern clothes and greater use of peroxide. Some of them glow with the achievement of dating the local footballer - if he does well, all the better - and some of them feed hyperactive children lollies as they fidget and pull on modestly designer skirts and ask questions impossible to answer. On the fence are those who haven't graduated to the stand, girls with swept up hair and hopeful grins who hope to date a footballer, leaning over the fence to show their assets. Even at a local level, it's a subsection of societal dating that I'll never be involved in - it was established pretty early I wouldn't be able to play sports that didn't involve the rolling of dice. A man in a battered football club jacket, all spittle flecked invective and wasted finger pointing, directs his venom towards a particular person, repeating a specific insult time and time again. He's the only sound in the whole stand, the only person who cares, as the hairdressers barely look up from their Vogue magazine as they lick their fingers and bounce their progeny and turn the pages in uniform unison. They've fulfilled their ambition, they've got their man, and they don't need to put in the effort the fence girls do, the cheeky grins and the coy glances. It's fair to say spittleman is in the wrong area, his ambitions are entirely for the person his rage to suffer great pain but entirely out of sync with the sense of complacency and ennui all around him. I swear sometimes as we walk past the fence, a slight murmur of anticipation sweeps around, just in case we might be someone important, or better yet, know someone important. It's either that or a murmur from someone poisoned by the eternal football triangle of hope, optimism and an undercooked saveloy...

The girl who sold the saveloy was nervous when we queued - she had a thin layer of blue eye shadow and eager to please freckles. When she spilled the money she was holding or couldn't distinguish between chips and chips - represent sister, it took me 5ive years after immigration to work that quagmire out. She says sir and madam and she's the only food service person around. The vast concrete edifice underneath the stand doesn't have any of it's service shutters open, everythings closed up tight. Walking through, the only people around are an old shuffling man who can't get to the toilet quick enough and a couple with somewhat myopic views on immigration and even more myopic views on the importance of fashion. I don't expect such conversations at football games as the cavernous space around us all sweeps a chill down our backs, in fact I expect what I get the rest of the day, people shouting out swear words and throwing chips at each other. As nothing is open, we have to sweep our way through the far from milling crowd for our slice of friendly service and undercooked meat products. The kids are having the most fun as the players act as a vague creche with pretty sketchy footskills. The kids with the most energy stand out - one chases a magpie with dogged and ruthless determination, one with a bit of a mashed up face climbs all over his Dad, entirely sure of parental purety and wisdom, and another is held up as cute by his Dad to his friends because he can dance like a Wiggle, but he looks to us just like he's sinking into boggy grass. I can't shake the feeling that just as in each case these kids are entirely single minded and focused on one thing, so I can't cope with interruptions to my thought process, someone trying to get me to fix a printer when I was watching football so childlike in response it makes me squirm as if I'd just bitten said undercooked meat product. In fact, it's locked in even more by the fact that just next to our dancing, sinking Wiggle child, another kid is getting a rap around the legs from her Mum, as her face contorts and twists and turns in a series of anguished and bewildered grimaces, I think if only she had some teeth, that really is the face that I pull in moments of genuine confusion and disruption. I may even have pulled it when helpful freckles told me they were all out of Picnic bars...if it was, I sincerely apologize...

By the time the conversational despair has settled, and the saveloy still hasn't, I'm home before I know it, it being mutually decided that everyone is bored and it's time to put aside the football for another day, so we walk past the kids, past the freckled girl, past the shotgun shack and off home, in my case to eat store bought rolls and retire to my own thoughts. Despair heads off in the other direction to retire to entirely different thoughts, kitchen based alienation and hopelessness coming in through the window every time there's no hot chocolate in the cupboard. I'm trying hard to relate, I really am, but problems in my life are, dare I say it, childlike. Distract me with shiny things, or take the conversation in another direction, and they fly away like seagulls in the midst of a hazy dream. I don't sit with the complacency of the achiever nor find fault in my current circumstances so every problem mounts into a mountain, and nor do I help with the patience and friendliness of the freckly saveloy seller. I roll differently, and I can't explain it to anyone easily. By the time my night is over, I'll have been dragged from my house kicking and screaming to go and repair a printer, sulking and pouting like a child, but when I fix it, I'm beaming like a child. Little things set me off in annoyance, and little things can set me off in delight, but I still have hope, I still believe that in the future anything is possible. Somewhere down the road someone else has given up, but it won't deter me. It's not surprising that later when my eyes tightly close, I dream entirely of positive things, of things that still matter to me, and it's only much later that I'm woken up by the still rumbling of that undercooked saveloy. There's a hissing static from my radio that's turned itself off, the only sound in the whole house. It's such a negative, unchanging, violent hiss, it sounds like the noise I imagine you hear when your life has involved you giving up entirely, so I turn it off, smile, and do my best to find something at least a little positive about being awake at 3hree am in the coldest house in the world...

A repeat of Snagglepuss usually does it...

Post 250 - Ice Cream is nice, Monsters are not

I'm trapped in a conversation and I can't get out, the animated talker trying to break the record for most words per minute, and the words tumbling in a cascading crescendo of self importance. My mind wanders through a series of thoughts until the words fade into nothing. I was trying to remember in the maelstrom of this conversation whether or not I have a first memory, and it's funny but I really don't. I'm suspicious of absolute purity of vision from someone remembering exact details as a four year old. Sure, you thought there was a monster in the closet but you can remember the archetictural curvature of your house can you? Mind, my own memories maybe be fatally flawed - there was after all a particular episode of Home and Away which was proven to be ridiculously out of sync with how I perceived it that I got really worried I was on the fast track to senility. And this is from someone who after 6ix is able to tell you how our groundskeeper mowed the football oval on specific days. Mostly flymoed and a little longer around the boundary. I do know that my cousin, the one I don't like, broke his arm when he was 5ive and I was 4our - he would always win the fight, bang bang etc - trying to swing like Tarzan on a curtain cord. I remember sort of shrugging my shoulders and resuming my play, with crayons or whatever, and when he got back from the hospital we had an ice cream shaped like a hamburger, so I had a fantastic day. I don't know if any of this is true though, or in the theatre of childhood cruelty I've conjured up that my life was much better because he was in pain. Well he did turn off my imaginary TV. The conversation I'm in meanders to an inconclusive punchline, and I do a sort of Diane Sawyer fake laugh and get out of the situation - in the void where you shuffle onto the next person sitting at your pub table and talk to them like speed dating but with more Guinness, in the little gap before your brain has to re-engage in conversation, I notice a 15teen year old in alarmingly high heels and piled on blonde hair baffled by the conversation going on around her. She looks at me, I look at her, and we have a moment of mutual recognition, the mutually bored exchanging looks across age, cultural and hairstyle barriers. She rolls her eyes as her beau begins a conversation about work, I roll mine back as I'm swept up in a conversation about what football coaches should do, and we leave it at that, for the age difference would just be a nightmare. I mean, by the time you have to explain what an ATARI it was an why you played it all year when you should have been looking for a job, those hairdresser eyes have glazed over. Besides, pub chats aren't so bad - when you are giving glib nods and affirmations, there's plenty of space for personal reflection...

They've taken away some of the more gaudy foilaments, replacing them with clay animals and an ornamental cat where they've taken ye olde wash basin and made a cats body out of out. There's now a staff member in the shop guarding the creations, although her job is to talk mostly about the necklaces slung around the disembodied mannequin necks that fill up the middle part of the shop. There's an old man who looks like the 2nd Uncle Albert from Fools and Horses leaning near the Muffin shop, with a big circular beard that curls around his face and encases it like a whiskery plague. I internally wonder about a reference from the early 90s as some kids wander past - age is creeping into me as much as I try and deny it, and I notice it in every moment that goes on even when I'm not think ATARIs are great. Old man Albert is showing his wife one of the tables in the store and stroking his beard with old man wisdom as he goes through the process of explaining exactly how you take a lump of clay and turn it into a cat for sale at a reasonable price. His wife has thick horn rimmed glasses and a face set in cold cream concrete. Without a facial expression changing, she begins a vicious monologue directed entirely as some young people who are sitting giggling about something in a Dolly magazine, broken up as much as if someone had just said the word regina. She begins to immediately assume that the young people are plotting to strip the store entirely of all it's foilamental finery, and shoots them a disgusted look. Much like my home town in Scotland, she's succumbed to the monsters in her head, the fear and threats so real and clear to her she can't see people eating a muffin bar she's conjuring up a spellbinding mix of loathing and self protection. Having heard it all before, Uncle Albert isn't even listening, and even though he has a good 6xty years on the blonde in the pub, the eyes and expression are exactly the same, as he turns all his focus entirely on one of the washbasin cats. As I walk past, he even shoots me an apologetic glance as she gets increasingly loud and right wing. I think for a moment she's about to judge me, as if I pose a threat to the shopkeeper in mid spruik, but she bottles it when she sees I'm listening, and clams up, putting the monsters back into her purse until I've hit Sanity, saving her judgement of me for the sewing circle, or down a phoneline to another person bored out of their mind in a house somewhere, trying to stay awake and remember their name as they doodle spirals onto a pad and try and fast forward the talker to the point...

The pub crowd never increases in size, I mean who would have thought the introduction of the worlds thickest bouncers would displease a clientele, and the hairdresser blonde leaves with her hot pink heels click clacking across the floor, her place taken by a rotund man in one those weird T-shirts that meant to look like motorcycle clothes, every piece of fabric straining and working overtime, and luckily for my sanity we don't exchange any glances that are meaningful. We're talking about a game we're all playing, a real game not the game of life which somewhat circuitously is actually a real game, and we're talking about how someone playing the game failed to take a risk, and again circuitously we end up talking about how someone playing a game failing to take risks is now code for the relatively safe life they lead. Who would have thought Irish Murphys, home of thuggish bouncers and cheap T-shirt tie in promotions would be such a hotbed of philosophical thought and interchangable coded meanings? I start to worry though that if we can sum an entire life up in one failure to act in a game, how am I judged with each aspect of my own personality? I like Calippos, and Lily Allen, are they prejudgding all my faults and foibles through the prism of philosophical pop records and frozen ice blocks? I can't tell them beer makes me sick in the stomach, but so does nerves, and just because I can get a laugh remembering the push pop doesn't mean I don't have my own monsters to face - I risk, but I fail, and I feel awkward looking at 3hree in the morning when jamming joints are allegedly at their foxiest dancing peak. A bouncer in a black puffa jacket meanwhile is shoving a guy out of the door, like Millhouses Mum pushing Bart Simpson out for smoking. There's some Americans in the corner who down their drinks with undue haste and make their way out once the ambience of the evening is spoiled by the confrontation. I think at the moment of possibly SMSing - well she wouldn't have SMS, it would have to be mailed - the old lady with the horn rimmed glasses and saying in theory she was right. I go as far as to pick up my phone, since for a brief mildly drunken moment I get my phone out and get confused that she's someone I know, and when I do, theres a txt msg that my football team won against all the odds, and somehow, I feel so much better, it's impossible to stay in this environment of faux Irish glee, after all, all joy must be punished, and all men who show expressions of enjoyment must be evicted, turfed to a taxi rank like unruly schoolkids late for an outdoor assembly...if I set the angle of my mind just right, I can still feel sometimes post Irish Murphys as if my school tie is just a fraction too tight you know...

My football team setting my mood for an evening is so childlike, I might as well sit with crayons and eat hamburger shaped ice cream. Had they lost, perhaps I'd have slumped off home, but they didn't win by enough for me to go to Syrup, luckily. The conversation had tailed off by the time I left anyway - one of those nights where everyone takes so long to decide where to go, everyone sobers up enough to realise we're still in Hobart and there aren't enough options to have a 20ty minute discussion about it. I can't help but feel childlike tonight, such is the simplicity of everything that happens around me, the way the night illuminates people and seperates them - ugly and non ugly, brutish and pleasant, risk takers and dullards, Calippo eaters and...it's not too dis-similar from schoolyard sureties, the surety that ice cream was nice and teachers were bad and girls were gross. As a committed dullard with a stomach unpredictability reactive to beer, it was time to go home, as if the bell for the end of lunch had rung. They've moved the taxi rank, so one old fashioned surety is gone, but outside another pub, some girls are arguing violently over who was first in the taxi rank, whether it started from the left or the right or the north or the south until another taxi drives past them both, their argument on who's a bigger scrag so out of control some guy in a Hawaiian shirt just shrugs and steps into the taxi without a care in the world. They look exactly like me and my cousin did, they look entirely like two kids fighting over an imaginary TV being switched off, and the worlds seem impossibly small and repetitive. My taxi driver, since I also get a taxi in the scrag fight vortex which is now horribly offensive to single mothers and women of ill repute, sits in perfect silence as we drive home, until a song comes on the radio he doesn't like and he says it sucks in an emphasised block capital kind of childlike way. To him, ice cream is nice, but Grinspoon are not, and such is his 4our year old surety and squeaky tone of voice, I giggle all the way home, trying not to ask him if he's got his cootie shield up and if he wants to see a broken arm, because it's pretty gross, but also pretty funny...

And if we'd lost, I'd have gone straight to bed without any supper, until Mum woke me up for a Country Practice...

Post 249 - The faces of the silent men below showed total bewilderment as they pondered be thine foily thing a duck or a goose

Winter in Tasmania - perhaps like other parts of the world, although in Scotland it brings on bunion ache if the legends are true - brings out the old folk who like to ponder to total strangers just how cold it is. I haven't seen their close cousins lately, the cheer up it might never happen family, but I'm sure they are about somewhere. Summer, they'll be in the same place, flipping and subverting the question to ask if it's hot enough for you, as though they are in charge of temperature and are keen to make sure you are comfortable. Eastlands even kindly got them a meeting place, a shop temporarily where the book shop used to be. When I say shop, it's three tables with tat on it, absolute tat like little ornaments you buy for people you don't like and Xmas trees made out of foil. There's nothing else in the store, no desk and no staff, just those three tables and so much space up the back in this once packed out store that you could sit there and have a picnic or just loiter for a while pretending to look at little foilnaments, but really just badgering strangers with comments about how cold . There's a printed out piece of A4 paper stuck to the window in a desperately apologetic font that seems to suggest this store will only be around for 2wo weeks, like a squatter they can't shift until the paperwork is finalised, or a relationship with a 2nd date scheduled before the first one that you go through for no apparent reason. There's something quite nostalgic to me about the apologetic font, a sort of throwback to my primary school days when inappropriate acts were made up for by someone printing out an apology on the BBC micro, and some of those apologies from under 9ines who took your pencil would still tear your heart out with their sincerity. There's an Elvis Costello a like up the back of the shop, picking idly at one of the foilaments, holding it up to the light as if assessing it on Antiques Roadshow. He's casually munching a sandwich when he sees me, and I suspect from the adjusted angle of his trilby that he's in need of someone to compare temperatures with. It's always a man in a trilby with me who bails me up in conversation, and I have no particular place to go, but no particular desire to get involved in the fading lights of suburban temperature assessment, so I shuffle on, not least of all because all the thoughts of temperature are just reminding me of flash cards with how to spell, and by the looks of the ornaments, some poor kids are spending their mornings learning to spell by flash cards, and their afternoons in a sweat shop with a box of foil and all the air out of the room...no one will ask them how cold is it...

While clumsy fingers and good old fashioned Scottish ineptitude - we used to invent in the days before Buckfast - meant that my foilaments ended up far away from any market stall, I did find in my cupboard a little bracelet my cousin made for me. That would be my cousin who we adopted from Korea who said Melbourne has too many Asians, that one. She went through a period in her life where she would spend her weekends making little trinkets and I must have been supportive and got myself one made with my idols name on it - Ralph Wiggum. Ah, casual cartoon irony, how you have kept me warm through the years. Why wasn't it Snagglepuss? He must have been out in 1995. She sold them on cold mornings at Penguin market, pre the gay guys buying it, and in howling gales next to endless tables stacked to the sky with buckets of honey and buskers who could only play Solid Rock by Goanna, she would offer up her items to the gods of Penguin commerce, little old ladies in the Lions Club who poked and picked at the market stalls on their way to lunch. Finding the bracelet made me a little sad because there must have been a morning where she got discouraged and stopped, like a million other ambitions throughout life that never got followed up on. My keyboard was switched off one day, my ice skates were thrown in the cupboard when Mum said I wasn't skating, I was marching around the ice like an infantry soldier. I could have blamed the skates, Magnum standard issue blue wellington boots with skates that acted as a bizarre ice repellent, but they bought me Gretzky hockey skates and I still sucked. Or so they told me, and on one final Sunday morning, I just lost the desire when I realised that my fun and adventure through the world of ice had become a learning process, and I hated education. Finding ice skating boring is sort of a defining moment for me, because I essentially realised that if I wanted to get good at something, I'd have to study, and as I stared into that grey Irvine sky, I for the first time couldn't be bothered. A little girl with a bowl cut and a fringe swept across her face excitedly held her ice skates up to the sky and smiled a toothy smile to everyone, and as she marched up the ramp enjoying herself, I yearned for her innocence. Mind you, I was 10en, and when I later recounted this story to Debbie over a shared Malteser, she told me I was too young to feel so old, and we sat in appreciative silence for a moment after she told a story about her sister, who was 12elve, who had got her first pimple, right on the edge of her nose. I might not have been able to skate, but my skin was soft as linen. Or something like that...

I had an afternoon nap on Sunday which terrified me anyway even before I found the Orbis Italia 90 sticker album and realised I was one South Korean Left back short of a full album - how can I fulfil that as an ambition? I had a nap because I had absolutely nothing else to do. I was on the computer writing a story, and lost interest in what I was writing. I had the ingredients to make a lime spider and I couldn't be bothered making one, and the 1/2 finished book on my table was so boring all the words curved into one, and that word was Bulgaria. So I went to bed, in the middle of the afternoon, and almost immediately jumped out of bed in fright, because while an afternoon nap can sometimes be a noble accomplishment, I couldn't imagine a time when my options were so limited all I could do was sleep until a new day came around. I know there were a lot of people at uni who would just go and have afternoon naps so when they woke up, enough time had passed in their day so they could recheck their e-mails and see the one extra e-mail they had got, and they didn't have to wait for it. I was genuinely scared that I had lapsed, and had nothing to do. Sure, I was hungover and been out all day the day before, but I had succumbed to the Sunday terrors, or some sort of horrible onset midlife crisis that I couldn't cope with. Did all the little unfulfilled ambitions in my life add up to one big waste of time, or had that just been something left offer thematically in my brain from that episode of Red Dwarf where they were all judged? And should I know more about art than Red Dwarf anyway? I freaked out a bit in my own kitchen in that oh my god my life amounts to 6ix Lily Allen VHS tapes and a lime spider shaker kind of way. This hypochondriacal mood passed quickly though, because out of nowhere I came up with a great idea for something to write, and typed it really quickly into my laptop. In the background, my football team failed miserably, and over the back fence an argument broke out over who really shot the sherrif, but my ambitions were clear, type, type fast, don't miss anything out, and there was no one around to disrupt me...it was such a wonderful moment of solitude I had to share it with someone...really and truly as ironic as a black fly in your chardonnay, or lime spider if you will...

The people who made the foilaments had a dream I suppose, a dream that their little foilducks and bears will one day spring out from the wasteland of Eastlands, off the tables and shelves, and take over the world and be feted by Oprah but if your ambition is fatally bad to begin with - making a Xmas tree out of foil in April for instance - failure is surely the only option. You could argue at least they are trying, while I toil chasing my Dad in football tipping, and perhaps the argument is valid. I watch as Elvis Costello ambles down the road. It's then I realise where I recognise him from. Many years ago, he had handed me a business card in the middle of the street. I think he was offering me a job. Or he wanted to nail me. One of the two. Girls with blue eye shadow don't offer me business cards. She was door bitch today, but anyway, back to the point. He made these little Tasmanian animals out of pewter or silver, and they were great. He had a stall of course and because he came into work he gave us all one one Xmas, I've still got, it's in the cupboard next to Choi Chang Uls non stickery presence and the bracelet with Wiggum spelt wrong - my fault. The ice skates went to another cousin of mine, personality so lost to time he's boring to write about. Of course, one day when I was walking past, whistling the tune of the day, possibly Soda Pop, I saw the animal maker go into the TAB. Nothing bad with that, we've all been there. It was after 25ive consecutive days of seeing him go into the TAB that I kind of thought something was wrong, and sure enough gambling debts got to him in the end, and those little animals ended up unsold and uncast in their moulds, another talent wasted, another dream unfulfilled. My empathy is up though, because later I'm standing in the sandwich shop, looking around, waiting eternally for miss I'm too old for a nose ring but no one will tell me to finally serve me. I smile idly at the passers by, and entirely to shake myself out of the comfort zone of unfilled dread, I ask the most beautiful girl in the shop if it's cold enough for her, and only step away when I realise she has a speaking voice that could shatter glass from a thousand feet...

Choi Chang ul, you don't know it, but I'm gonna find you...get ready...

Post 248 - The unfinished fragments of other peoples lives

Easter has a rhythm all of it's own, mostly the rhythms surrounding my life being people standing next to me gazing out at, say, a shop or a football crowd, commenting on the lack of people around us and with great depth perception saying that everyone must be away for Easter. Where do people go for Easter? They don't linger in Hobart nightclubs, they don't gather around the shops in the morning queuing for groceries and wondering what happened to the local newsagents, and they don't gather around big screen televisions wondering where the barmaid from Customs that boasts a lack of intellect as her most appealing quality is. That's my job, and I feel like a seat filler at the Oscars, filling in time and space in an empty part of the world. It gives me more time to think though, this blissful stillness. Time to put on the radio and hear vengeful people saying vengeful things about footballers who couldn't care less about them, time to pick at the fringes of an Easter egg or time to go on a pointless hunt for Newcastle Brown Ale for my Dad. I wish I had a greater sense of adventure on days like this, but adventure only leads to inquisition, and my brain isn't in the mood for it. I'm taken aback standing in the empty car park, struggling for anything to look at as the cold air sweeps through me, so much space around me, so many little shops in the Kingston Shopping Centre now shut down, leaving behind empty buildings, for sale signs limp in the window, other shops now coated head to toe on the outside by fliers, tattered pieces of paper flapping in the breeze, lost dogs and French lessons struggling to be heard in the middle of the early morning maelstrom. So often I have moments where I can walk by, hear a tiny snippet of a conversation or see something, just a moment, just a little fraction of time where I don't get everything that's happening, and the moment passes without the full story unfolding. It happens all the time, but it's not happening today, in the cold of mid morning, and as I clutch my little big of groceries and shove them into the boot, the entire scene is so ridiculously quiet, I think for a moment it isn't just the shopping centre that's ground to a halt, but my own brain. Luckily, my struggle to think is interrupted by a rogue trolley skidding guilelessly across my path, and normal order is more than restored...

It's Saturday night, although it's hardly live. A pub, a waitress struggling against the offensive comments about her weight mingles through the crowd with a swish, holding up a plate of meat while her own plates of meat ache against tight heels. A crowd gathers around a television set. A group from a table across become entangled with our group, joining our social circle and spilling their stories freely. There's an arrogant surfer boy amongst the group, who begins telling me about his whisky collection, with such surety and tedious detail I'm sure I drift off and when I come back, he's looped his conversation back to the start and seems to re-opened the whisky cabinet for another go. I drift off, watching the TV, watching the chunky waitress, watching girls having a handbag fight at the ATM on the wharf. He leaves, and his friends nudge and wink as they presume he's used his Mick Fanning hair cut to woo a lady, but when he comes back, he looks like he's about to burst into tears and seems woefully uncomfortable. I presume his charms, or his potency, have failed him, and he shuffles from foot to foot, suddenly a smaller man, diminished in stature but not in quality of whisky collection. What happened I will never know, as he drifts into the night, his last drink downed with undue haste as he spirits away into the night. We're left with his drunken mate, loud, offensive, making smirking comments with a racial sting at the end that hang in the air uncomfortably. He follows us out, and in the blink of an eye, he's gone from an annoyance to a threat, the smirk gone as he menaces a busker with threats and an aggressive piece of posturing out of a how to be a wanker manual. I'm left wondering what happens when I leave the scene at an awkward moment, shuffling off to the taxi rank as the argument breaks out. I'm left to wonder about the transformations people go through, the way confidence ebbs and flows and the way eyes can glaze over in an instant when alcohol sinks in, but only much later, as the taxi drives off into the night, a woman driver beginning her own life story and letting it sink into a mind, mine, that simply can't take it all in, as the argument flickers behind me in dim light and continues to unfold as the engine splutters, the radio hisses and crackles and my mind shuts down for the evening...

It's Sunday evening. I need some Red Eye, to shake off the lethargy of the night before. I didn't go to Syrup, which I was proud of, when the group I was with headed off that way to dance around with the bored DJ. I also didn't make fun of the waitress, for I understand the difficulty of not looking your best, as I think I do now, but my local store isn't the kind of place you want to be too dressed up. It's a flannel and ugh boots kind of store, basic products and the ever changing rotation of Greek owners who appear to be running some kind of immigration scam. I'll never know what's in all those damn boxes that pile up out the back and clog up the walkways, but I don't think it's Samboys somehow. The boy behind the counter has a Forrest Gump expression when I walk in, the doorbell that chimes perhaps should play duelling banjos such is his never changing monosyllabic tone and fiercely unblinking gaze from behind a mind as closed as Irish Murphys is to anyone who isn't blonde and 18teen. He goes quickly back to his Mercury, scanning the pages of the funnies and making strange grunting laughs. He's discomforting, which perhaps is the point, trying to hustle out the customers with blank stares and airless laughter, but I'm used to this store by now, and I take my time, sliding around the spinning rack of porn and heading straight for the fridge as his eyebrows follow me around. After a while trying to decide between Red Eye Gold and Red Eye, er, Red, a fight breaks out behind me - a man in a tracksuit so nylon it seems likely to combuse, who's doof doof mobile has pulled into the car park with ridiculous speed, is trying to get a Chiko Roll and wake up Forrest wasting his breath against a wall of indifference, turning to swearing as he verbally pokes the bear right in the middle of his grey hooded top. Suddenly thrust into the hurly burly of customer relations, Forrest doesn't really know how to respond, and the argument curls around into pointless loops of point and counter point and the chiko roll seems further and further away from being eaten as it sits unloved turning in the little metal grill it sits upon. The argument seems never ending, tracksuit sparks flying as a history of poor service tumbles from the aggressors lips, and I put the Red Eye down, go past the rack of porn, and leave the shop, as Forrests eyebrows follow me out, and with a weary flourish he turns back to the confrontation, and while I don't know how it will be resolved, I do know that that chiko roll seems absolutely unlikely to be eaten...by anybody...

It's Monday morning, the shuffle of single mans slippers slip across the supermarket floor as the early morning staff stack groceries and a 15teen year old boy eyes the shoppers with youthful disdain. My own basket is such a classic grab-bag of single male shopping it feels like I'm trying to be cliched, and I look less than appealing, so luckily it's not Thursday night and singles evening and I don't need to go and grab a melon. I'm still a bit hungover, and my manky green jumper is such a loud shade of flouro it's really not helping. As I turn the corner an even more shambolic looking woman in an even more disgusting jumper that seems to have a pattern designed to follow me around the shop, a mess of swirls and twirls so lurid I suspect if I stare long enough I'll see a Magic Eye dolphin. Round about the cake section there's a wide open door and a woman with loud and plain anxiety says loudly that Sarah must be dreading 4 o'clock. There's real concern in her voice, and it doesn't seem right to linger, no matter my curiousity. The 15teen year old doesn't look old enough to shave, and gives me cursory service, blank eyes and a tie that only a mother could tie. It doesn't seem right to linger once again, it doesn't seem right to criticise someone who is only doing this part time, as I once did, and I wasn't the warmest of checkout operators, but I packed a mean bag. I shuffle through the less than packed urban sprawl, past the closed down shops and past the bottle shop where a woman with straggly hair and puce coloured cheeks can feel like a queen once she is flirted with by the young lifter of the beer, with a swipe of his mighty fist lifting up her beer carton and she giggles and twirls her hair as if he's personally asked her out. I don't even mind that meanwhile I'm left struggling with a distinct lack of service and am hanging as I grow idly by the counter as they walk slowly, joined in a mutual moment that they'll never get back. I guess the guy just doesn't like the cut of my gib though - or doesn't know what a gib is - because I have to lug my own beer carton through the car park, past where the old pizza shop used to be, past a thousand memories of ugly nights out and hanging around on pointless unemployed weekdays, as my fingers grip the cardboard and cut against the easygrip handle, I think the carton of beer is about to snap in two and send beer cans cascading down the road, but if someone makes a twat of themselves in a carpark and no one is around to offer moral judgement...well you know the rest...

That's how I ended up alone in the car park, that's easy to explain, but how I ended up here in life, that's a far greater jumble...

The Leaving Of Brashs

There's this kid outside the library on Thursday, a big dopey looking kid with his hat on backwards. From a distance I can see he's trying to show up the library visitors to impress some girls, and when he gets to me, I see his schtick and raise it, subtly, for his joke is to shake hands with the visitors and say his name is Borat. Hilarious you'll agree. When I say back to him, yeah and I'm Bruno, he pauses a little awkwardly, and laughs in this hollow loud voice as if he's really got me good. I don't mind, if he gets a pash out of it, whatever. I used to get really sensitive about people trying to play pranks on me, especially the guy at Central who was trying to convince me that to get into the pub there was a cover charge and when I fumbled for my wallet laughed uproariously. I was so close to telling him to grow up like some camp sitcom character it was embarrassing. There was a huge lumbering fat guy behind me anyway that the big dopey kid was desperate to try and prank anyway, so we parted ways very quickly. Roadside Jesus is still around showing off his sign and making sure everyone knows the true meaning of Xmas isn't licking a Creme Egg or watching a Goodies Marathon on Foxtel, and everyone was in hustle and bustle mode as they finalised their Easter shopping. In the case of my Dad, this involved a last minute trip to Kingston shopping centre to buy my Mum some Rocky Road, his thanks generally involving some sort of quaint Glaswegian phrase like who did you steal that off or what happened to my egg? I just feel old though, not just because I've now got to an age where kids are playing pranks on me rather than the other way round, or because I can remember specific episodes of the Goodies and which TV dinner I was eating in Penguin when I watched them, but because I'm tired, I just feel mentally quite old at the moment. I know it's just because it's Good Friday, where nothing seems to move and inner reflections come in hammocks that sway even gentler than normal, but I feel like I'm spending far too much time lately talking to people pining for the 90tys. Perhaps I spend too much time thinking about Grant Dodwell and old TV shows, but I quite like now, I quite like my life now, and such meanderings on the phone seem to just age me more than I would like. Then again, I have a pet panda that's sitting on top of my TV, which is the other extreme - that makes me feel too young. There's nothing in my house that feels like balanced stuff to have for a 30ty year old. And on my phone, so proudly sold to me by a bogan chick in Big W Kingston as the phone Big Brother winners get, there's a long text pining for 1997, ah, such a good year, when I was sober enough to enjoy it...

When I first moved to Hobart in 1997, I wasn't one for playing silly youthful pranks or games - well apart from one late night game of statues that got out of hand. I spent my first few weeks getting used to the variety of flavoursome treats that North Hobart had to offer, adjusting to the little things like trying to find a milk bar that was afraid of experimental milkshake flavours, and spending my meagre allowance from John Howards government on un-necessary items like The Incredible Sound of Jo Whiley CD and a rugby league jersey. You know, I could have studied or bought books, but the Gold Coast Chargers live on through my jumper. For the first 6ix weeks I lived in Hobart, I would stalk around the local record store, a store called Brashs. I don't think we had Brashs in Burnie, I think we had the 7BU Record Bar for a while, a massive scam, and that shop in the mall next to Coles where the girl smelled of milk and was a bit too much of a fan of Lisa Loeb. There was a girl who worked in Brashs who I liked because she was personable and wasn't screaming about Shania Twain liked those pushy 7 Habits of Highly Successful Sales readers at Sanity. She was about 2ty 3hree, and didn't smell of any dairy products that I could discern, and our relationship never got to the stage past casual conversation where I'd either make an arse of myself, or she'd have a boyfriend, which were my main 2wo dating responses in 1997. Our nascent conversational relationship about orange vinyl floundered though when Brashs closed in a flurry of financial trouble and bad business decisions, and the girl who had seemed so cool and interesting suddenly got quite sad and wistful as the closing down sale whirled around her head, and the last conversation we had was interrupted by a burly man who shoved straight past me to haggle about the price of a U2 album. It seemed apt I couldn't find anything interesting to say in our final conversations, because she had an adult problem, losing her job, and in the first flurry of freedom from home, all I was doing was wasting my time with immature decisions and time on swings and conversations about Snagglepuss. It was a shame that I couldn't empathise, but we'll always have our chat about vinyl. An interesting discussion it was, until I realised I probably should have been in class - oh well, plenty of time to catch up I guess...

I come from a house where we never really played any pranks or practical jokes. My Mum hates them, plus she has a vicious streak of revenge. Her favourite motto is you have to sleep sometimes, and some of my childhood games of tag were vicious affairs. It's probably not surprising that when I lived in Ayrshire, I never tormented the old woman who lived on the corner. Due to her busybody nature and bolshie Ayrshire attitude, she would often come out and claim to all the kids she was going to call the police no matter what was happening, even if it was just because she didn't like their face. The kids, in the middle of this eternal stand off of kids vs the man, only the man was an old woman in an apron, would respond by knocking her door at 3hree in the morning and getting their dog to perform sinful acts on her lawn. It came to a head on water balloon Sunday, when all the neighbourhood kids decided on an assigned time to throw water balloons at her door. Except for me. It wasn't that I wouldn't have done it, my exploits in knock door runaway were semi legendary, I just didn't see the need to harass an old woman who hadn't done anything to me as far as I knew. And anyway, I had confirmation class to attend, in a nice part of town called The Village, and as I got off the bus, I saw a parade of flying balloons hitting the door and a confrontation beginning. I lingered around the back out of sheer curiousity, and learned a lot of words I didn't know. In fact, I saw a lot of people who really wanted the nonsense to stop and looked really weary, but didn't quite know how to back down. It was then though the old woman looked at me and said something about how come all the kids couldn't be like me, mature and sensible. It's amazing to me that I wasn't instantly beaten up, on account of being a swot, and I had to shuffle off embarrassed past policeman who had lost all respect for me and my immaculately pressed shirt. I almost for the sake of my self respect got up at 3hree in the morning and lobbed a water balloon through her window, but of course, I couldn't be bothered. I probably even got up, put my jacket on, and then saw something on Eurosport and sat back down again. I couldn't bring myself to hassle someone just for the sake of it - I still couldn't do it. Mind you, I had to do something to redeem myself, and when she brought round some Easter Eggs the next year, I didn't enjoy them...much...yeah, that showed her...power to the kids....

I've been immature and mature in the same sentence sometimes, said just the right things but not shown the right actions. However, I'm more than happy with the peace that Good Friday brings me, and don't feel the need to beat myself up. There's a perfect stillness to the day, until the phone rings, the only sound I hear all day. The sound disrupts my mood, and I notice that I never got my paper delivered and get upset that I had to move out of the hammock. Good Friday most people say is the most boring day of the year, but I appreciate the respite, I appreciate the afternoon nap and the way nothing is opened. I hope Roadside Jesus was still out there though, plugging his Xmas message. I've made some mistakes in my life, but today is not the time for reflection. It's a time for peace and quiet, and as a result, I'm going to give you the best gift of all - a short paragraph...

It's not an egg, but it's not too shabby...

Snagglepuss, Jesus and the rise and fall of the Easter prophet

It says a lot for my mindset that a man dressed as Jesus holding a big cross by the side of the road doesn't draw my morning attention away from anxiety and pre Easter stress. Yes, Hobart has this week accquired Jesus, probably on loan from a 3hree week stint at the Sands in Las Vegas, who has been booked to stand by the side of the road, usually across from VIP Driving school, to hold up a big sign about Easter penitence. I suspect it's not really Jesus of course - I don't think he had disciples who wore thongs nor had such a patchy beard - and it's best that I don't pay him any mind. Besides, Lily Allen is on my IPOD, and in this celebrity obsessed culture, well, Jesus hasn't released a new album for a while. I think though that the roadside Jesus - which is a great name for an album - on 2nd view is purporting some sort of John 3:16 message (which I can recite on request incidentally), and when I was growing up around Mexico 86 you would see people in the crowd holding up John 3:16 signs as Scifo scythed through the Iraqi defence. I fear for our Jesus though because it's bitterly cold, even by Hobart standards, and his religious powers of persuasion might be dimmed by sipping soup from a flask. When Joan Osborne said what if God was One of Us, I don't think she meant literally - literally a bloke taking a week of his annual leave from Officeworks to stand by the side of the road with a sign, literally an ordinary bloke. My priest at school incidentally one told me the story of his conversion at Easter, and it was such a simple story, well told, that I completely believed it but Roadside Jesus seems to be in it for the glory, for the notice, and to be honest he might as well have a honk if you give it up for Jesus sign. VIP Driving school, we always laugh and joke about that place, because I failed my driving test so many times, we think they built a special wing devoted to me. It is cold though, as my car winds and wanders through a mass of traffic. They are trialling some system where the buses have all the rights on the road and the poor plebs in the cars are stuck lingering while they take over. The car next to me is the gaudiest thing I've ever seen, lime green sports car with big wheels and a horrifically tacky personalised number plate devoted to a football team. As I finally drive off just as 22 fades out on my IPOD, I see Roadside Jesus catching a glance it, and I know he's probably thinking some pure thoughts about the commercialism of modern society in these troubled times, but surely even he is thinking, seriously, what colour paint is that...

I've never been big on Easter - I don't know why, obviously Good Friday can feel like the most boring day of the year. It's usually cold, and in Penguin there was nothing on but religious programming instead of Transformers - badly drawn cartoons and that whole in the jungle one day ad on ad naseum. I can't really talk too much about Roadside Jesus having played the role myself one Easter. It was in primary school, and I was given the role of Jesus in an Easter Parade through the school. Luckily it was the good bit, where people waved palms - well, weeds if I'm honest - as I rode through the school with regal purity. Incidentally, it bugs me to this day how I rode through the school, since obviously we didn't have access to a donkey. Was it skateboard, bike, trolley, or piggyback on a fat kid? It troubles me that I don't know. And since I had previously played Joseph in a Penguin church production - you won't recall the Joseph goes to sleep bit of the bible, that was pure Penguin, but when I woke up a woman in the front row either mouthed this is awesome or awful and I don't know which - it all feels a bit Springeresque in hindsight. My cousin - the one I don't like - has the distinction of playing Jesus more famously than me though. During his roughly 6ix week stint at my secondary school, he was cast as Jesus in a Grade 10en play, and decided to play him as a sort of Frankie Howard character camply accepting his fate as a martyr for the Catholic religion with swishes, swirls, interpretive dance and an accent that was pure Snagglepuss. My exit stage left joke would have been hilarious if anyone got it. Or I had friends that year. I love Snagglepuss a lot, but there's a time and a place. I like to think my reading of the role was a lot more subtle, but all I can remember about it was I loved the attention, especially given that it got me a free Violet Crumble from the tuck shop because I did such a bang up job. Obviously, and luckily, after lunch I wasn't crucified, but I was bowled for 2wo during after school cricket by a ball bowled by a little smart arse who's foot was clearly 2wo feet over the crease, a clear no ball. It would have continued the motif of the day had I been resurrected by an umpires decision and given a 2nd chance, but I wasn't, and the smart arse kid proceeded to hook my bouncers over the fence time and time again...lousy Easter, probably got an Easter bilby that day, stupid....

Jesus is a difficult role to play, but so was an 80tys Easter Bunny at North West Coast schools. It was a tough gig, less glamorous and more difficult to pull off than a Fitzgeralds Santa Claus, requiring a greater leap of faith from a child than Santa as well, and a far worse costume. I mean, Santa was plausible, you could basically tell that one of your teachers had just put some bunny ears on even at 5ive. Pippa - ah, Pippa - was always ahead of her time when it came to telling us all such home truths around the monkey bars, and I lost my Bunnyfaith when the designated bunny failed to give me an egg one year in a mad scramble, and I saw him driving away in a 1974 Ford Mercury Cougar Coupe with his bunny ears still on, and a Winfield Red in hand. It was the talk of the fort for weeks to come. Easter is an awkward one at the best of times, I never know whether to buy everyone an egg or not, and unless I get a Cadburys Creme Egg, I'm never happy with my lot. Big W had eggs in February, and they've still got lots left. I'm pretty sure Panda Eyed Girl has been flicked, and they still haven't fixed the light near the DVDs that keeps flicking, which makes my head hurt every time I walk under it. No one today seemed in any kind of cheerful Easter spirit, let alone me because I was snowed under with work and couldn't really get my motivation up at all. Everyone is just hanging out for their free government cash, and until then all commerce seems to have ceased. Blue Eye Shadow Girl had a weird haircut today, I'm sure it was her Easter treat to herself, but I'm not sure about it. My Easter treat to myself is probably just going to be my usual packet of football cards, and maybe a Creme Egg. As I walk through the shopping mall, a stern faced security guard pouts from behind a mask of toughness and leathery craggy lines. Someone got stabbed here the other day, a good samaritan - sadly we haven't had a roadside version yet - tried to intervene in a shoplifting situation and got a knife in the ribs for their trouble. It doesn't put me in the spirit of the season, whatever that is, as I walk past as quickly as I can, away from the cragg, away from the weird hairstyles, and out back into the car park, where no religious figures, fictional or real, are waiting on me, and there's no prospect of a virgin birth around these parts, because, well, you know the punchline...

Ah, Easter, what a web it has weaved. From the horrible despair of the 3hree days at Eddie McGuires house in Melbourne looking at my bicentennial medal and wishing I could do anything to live in Burnie again to the cash splurge of 97 when I recklessly spent all my uni book money on a Gold Coast Chargers rugby league top and got depressed that Brashs was closing - a post in and of itself by the way - to all those wasted fitful Good Fridays sitting around the house staring out the window at grey skies. I'm sure there's memories of egg chasing - literal egg chasing , not playing rugby - in there somewhere, memories of painting up and egg and then throwing it down a hill and some other bugger finding it, supressed by the cold weather and the lack of ingredients to make a lime spider. I'm unlikely to use the holiday season to be born again as a new person, since I'm set in my ways, and there will be no twists in the next few days to make me bold and positive. In fact, I suspect I will wile away at least one of these precious days wasting my hard earned free government cash at Syrup in a I thought this would be a good idea moments at 3am. Such is the flesh on display whether you want to see it or not around that big stripper pole, Roadside Jesus could have a field day encouraging people to repent. I think though my Mum would quite like me to have a kid, I think she's beginning to try and nag me into it. There's just enough time obviously for a Syrup pick up and time to...no, I'm not going to have kids. Given the hissy fit I've had trying to get lime spider ingredients, I don't think I could handle a child. Instead, I decide to head out on a possibly fruitless search for Halls Lemonade, and just enjoy my day, my time off, my own moods and my own sense of independence. I'm sure Roadside Jesus would appreciate the individuality of thought I'm displaying, after all, if you are out in the cold of a Hobart morning holding a cross, what are you but an individual....maybe we'd get on...mind you, the religious people want to ban Lily Allen from the radio...so maybe not...

I'm not sure he'd like Snagglepuss either...too fruity...

Sleeping alone in a field

If Moonah through circumstance remains, poetically perhaps, the winter of my discontent, it's probably un-surprising that my happy memories are all pretty much tied to my years living in Penguin, shopping at Cut Price Sams for Bubble O Bills and having really long summers out the back trying not to hit a cricket ball into the pampas grass. I'm aware as I get older that it wasn't Penguin that was so wonderful so much as my youth, and my ability to run around and around in a circle until I fell down if I so wanted. It's probably one of the reasons I don't go back - the family Xmas of 2000 nearly broke the spell and allure and I don't want to do that. Everything I ever learned in life pretty much started in Penguin, fashion, how not to ask for a Golden Gaytime, that when the siren sounds at a football ground you really should come off. To explain that, at 1/4 time in Australian Rules Football you used to be able to walk onto the ground to hear the coaches address to the team. It's where I learned all of my swear words and where I saw the classic 80tys moment of women with paddle pop sticks scraping mud off the players boots. It's also where I heard the Penguin equivalent of I Have a Dream, a coaches speech about netballers and skirts which is still being recited in pubs to this day. We were playing Latrobe, and at 3/4 time, as the crowd dispersed, I probably saw something in the shape of the clouds that I had to study, and as I stood staring up at the sky, the game was held up for about 3hree minutes while I wandered around quite oblivious to the drama, until an announcement had to be made over the PA can that kid get the hell off the ground. That's why I was so happy in Penguin, I could just wander around thinking and playing, without a care in the world. It surprises me sometimes when my Mum sometimes says I was a whinger when I was younger, because I don't remember ever whinging about anything other than the time Joe Brown turned the hose on me or the time they took off Wide World Of Sports and put on some nonsense called Live Aid...I mean who's going to remember that, Peter Gilligan reading the sports, that's what the people will remember...no wonder I went to my room all day, huffing and puffing...

One thing I realise I've lost as I've got older is summer - summer in Penguin was always a fantastic treat. As soon as the last of the board games was packed away and the last school chair was on the last desk, summer began. Even though by modern standards, those summers weren't exactly technologically exciting, since the most exciting advance we had was when it was really warm we could tune in Melbourne TV, it was still fun. There was a little general store around the corner with a KISS make up set in the window - still there in 1992 - which seemed like Willy Wonka to a youngster, given the amount of chocolate that was available, even though in hindsight my description of the owner of the store simply sounded like wonka. By the time I moved back to Penguin after 4our years of living in Scotland, everything seemed incredibly small, including my mind, after a large dose of what you might call the real world - drug dealers at school, that sort of thing - and flint hard Ayrshire cynicism. To my discredit I was horribly snooty about the place even as everyone around me worked overtime to keep my face straight. I was a little bit like Mums friends sisters who picked up the local paper, the Mercury, and bemoaned the lack of news about Scotland when they were here on holiday, and I'm sure that the fact I couldn't find the right kind of bread to toast caused a few troubles, little pains masking life changing despair. The little kid who stood at the bottom of South Road and said Penguin was a beautiful county was long gone, and I think it took a while to rediscover my love of the place. It was the little things that made me rediscover why I liked the place - particular ice creams, friendliness in the newsagents, and probably the tranquility of Hiscutt Park. Once I found my spot - the spot in which I could compose my thoughts - I felt a great deal better about everything. That when I listened to my thoughts, they were poisonous and bitterly homesick, I find that natural, logical and it certainly wasn't Penguins fault...apart from the people who laughed every time you asked for a Golden Gaytime at Alannah Hills Dads Milk Bar...that was entirely Penguins fault...

I admit though that I love people who spend all their time thinking about the old days. Moods are so interchangable that thinking about a glorious past is to cut out all the negative feelings, and focus on how wonderful it was to live in the pre 87 economic bust. There's a pub in North Hobart called The Black Buffalo, where only the barmaids stay young. A man pulling up a bar stool at 40ty can very quickly find himself waking up at 60ty with David Byrne handing him a big white suit and posing some questions. Time stands eternally still, a parade of blonde uni students left to fend for themselves amidst a stream of innuendo and routine from the patrons. To them, to the patrons, it's a mecca, an old fashioned pub, but there's a dining bit attached to it, a big glass room full of wooden furniture and good new fashioned family fun as kids tuck into fish fingers in a basket. Even though only scampi should come in a basket. It's a strange meeting of old school thinking and new school thinking, as manly old men in flannel shirts bemoan a world that they don't understand before heading over to the football to do the whole thing in an entirely new setting. Never breaking from a long established pattern of nostalgic yearning and fast drinking, they must have had a day when the plans for the adjoining family restaurant were unveiled and grumbled about it as more modern thinking. The trouble with nostalgia is it clouds every moment of the present. I had to cut myself short, and still do, when I start muttering about how football was a lot better in my day. An old boy meanwhile is in the corner of the pub, hitting physically one of the computerised betting machines. Disgustedly, he curses in the general direction of the ceiling fan all kinds of curses at modernity as the blonde behind the bar contemplates just how long it will take to finish her degree and get out of there, and a bespectacled barkeep fills in his football tipping and pretends nothing has happened. Our eyes are all drawn towards the simple fact that the betting machine isn't plugged in, but we figure from the craggy drawn lines on his face and the Maurie Fields style way he keeps saying the phrase mongrel that the old boy deserves to let off some steam, and besides, I know tomorrow I'll be stuck in traffic muttering similar curses about how, in my day, we didn't have so many gas guzzling 4WDs, and when I curse, I'm sure I'll miss a gap by which I can accelerate through the traffic...Black Buffalo, warm me up a barstool, I don't get todays modern world, I need the horse and cart to make a comeback...

My Mum used to say when I asked her that the best day of her life hadn't happened yet, a typically Glaswegian response. My best day - concession being so far - was probably some time in the golden summer of 1986. It was the year my trampoline flew down the street in a hurricane and we had to chase it down the road. That trampoline, even with it's ability to electric shock me in a variety of ways, was my crowning achievement in my first 8ight years. A real realisation of a goal, in that I had spent most of my year nagging, cajouling and seeking a trampoline, and then when I got it, I felt like I needed a cigarette, such was the satisfaction I felt at my achievement. That would be a candy cigarette of course straight from that little packet with the drawn on cowboy before a tedious family group got them banned. I had planned an entire summer of doing nothing but bouncing, lying, and then bouncing some more. Before then, one of the nuns organised an end of day softball game, which to me just got in the way of lying on a desk with Sarah playing Operation. Such tedious nunnery was an early example of the nunny state, making people do things like play sport when there were perfectly good board games to play. As it happened, I hit the winning run, off the last pitch of the last action of the school year of the best year I had had to then off the school jock in fading sunlight to general approbation and appreciation before heading off to a blistering summer of excitement. Even though this scene plays out in my head like the dying scenes of Major League, some things don't add up. Was it really a big home run or did I just bunt it and someone else scored? Was it fading twilight or just lunch time? Was it the school jock or the school nerdy girl with hair in a bow and an inhaler who pitched the ball? Do I just remember it all wrong and have elevated it to some magic moment? The last time I was in Burnie, I began to doubt myself, lay down in the middle of my old school field, and decided that whatever the truth, the past didn't have this obsessive desire to video tape every single moment, which made me happy that I could tell my own story how I wanted, and let it stand as a perfect moment. As I said, it's why I don't go back to Burnie or Penguin all that often. As I lay in that field, a janitor began mowing the lawn around me, but I didn't care, I was happy, content, as I always was, and not even Groundskeeper Willie on a Victa was going to disturb a long stream of happy, fantastic memories...

Then I come back to Hobart, and create new memories that for the most part are equally good...I guess you could say things aren't too bad...