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...