Melbourne Part 1 - Collective Consciousness vs Self Awareness

It's early morning in a Melbourne shopping mall, the bewildered tourist is shuffling through the mall lacking in self confidence and feeling paranoid. It's a natural reaction he has, in the mid morning adjustment to more aggressive crowds of pushy go getters, far from the Tasmanian shopping experience where you only get shoved out of the way by the odd pushy shaggy haired bogan rather than a maelstrom of Japanese tourists barging their way to Krispy Kreme. We don't have Krispy Kreme in Hobart, and given my aversion to franchises that might be a good thing. I'm sitting on a seat with my old man knees creaking horribly as I do so. I can't believe that my knees are so sore, the latest in a long line of horrible signs of old age that are tapping at my head like a cheeky woodpecker. There's some university students filming a piece in the mall, 2wo of them dressed like cavemen. I hate wacky student humour, it's a Scottish thing to oppose it, and I can just see my mother roll her eyes in disgust at the students as they pretend that they don't know what a telephone is for a skit. I'm sitting doing nothing more offensive than listening to my IPOD, but since the students are circling my life long terror of audience participation has me on edge as they get even closer. For just 1ne horrible moment I think I'm going to be dragged into their little world of theatrics and try and look as casual as I can, as a phalanx of Japanese and Korean tourists, enthralled by Australian home grown hilarity that ranks alongside the very best episodes of The Bob Morrison Show. As they all stand there enjoying the hilarity, a bedraggled, down trodden Big Issue seller shoves himself into the centre of the flashing Kodaks, heavy black eyes lit up by the flash of the cameras as he thrusts his magazine into dis-interested faces, and the tourists shift uncomfortably away with their heads down. They came for theatre, not reality. If only the Big Issue seller was dressed as a caveman. He meanders meaninglessly towards the front of Myer having scattered the sightseers. There's a vacancy in his eyes as well, as if he hasn't even noticed anyone was there to begin with. The students meanwhile began by noticing if anyone was there to see them, and when they notice that no-one is they begin talking in disappointed posh clipped tones about how badly everything is going, thus shattering the caveman illusion for anyone who believed in the boarded up theatre of the mind they are producing. I'd give them a cheery thumbs up for encouragement, but it'd be insincere, and I'm told uni students these days appreciate honest feedback, so I take my Evel Knievel book and walk off as slow as my knees will carry me...

I was in some bar with an ornate door with a fancy logo painted on it last night. The bouncers were a lot better than the ones at Irish, they said nothing about my clothes, nor threatened me with physical violence at random intervals, but I was still uncomfortable in the claustrophobic small bar with trendier better dressed young things crowding around the stools on the edge of the bar chanting like a mantra all the positive things about the surroundings. You can buy the bar staff drinks. They'll set fire to pieces of fruit if you ask. At 3hree in the morning a DJ dressed in silver starts a bitching set. These are all allegedly positive things, although I can't see the Tasmanian clientele responding well to queues forming in at the har while a girl who looks like the blonde 1ne from the B52s sets fire to a tangello. I wish I could explain my state of mind to my enthusiastic tour guide who found the oak panelled fruit firing DJ slamming bar for me, but I can't, because he loves it here, I can tell. He's as excited as the giggliest party girl to be here, and I wish I could be enthusiastic as well, but I just feel old, old and worn out. I think for a moment he's taking me to a strip club anyway, given the bar is in a dodgy alley and that door...I'm hard on myself of course, I always feel as though as though my lack of enthusiasm is a problem in my life, and I have too much cynicism to relax and enjoy things...my tour guide is more successful than me, proud of his world, I have no problem with that, but he enjoys his confidence, his own pats on the back. As another poor piece of mandarin suffers in the name of drink creation he's talking softly about someone we know who's always drunk, always flailing around in Saturday night gutters, and how we aren't like that. On cue, a girl in shiny silver hot pants focuses too much on the barman, and topples over like a fallen shimmering oak tree with slender legs and perfect teeth. She stares at the ceiling and laughs at the pretty colours, while her friends rave around her about what a fantastic place we're all in, the PA system once again plays Coldplay, albeit a dance remix of said band...it's too many emotions for me to handle, young vs old, the drunk vs the sober, the sufferance of the poor fruit, the faux Cocktail atmosphere of the bar staff...and yet all I can think of is, while I don't want to get drunk, the girl on the floor looks pretty damn happy...until she nearly vomits of course, but that's when the judgement kicks in...

I can't be too judgemental though, because when I leave the club I nearly break my ankle stumblebumbling over a kerb, my orange shoes failing to grip the kerb. Perhaps there's another blog somewhere where a girl in shiny hotpants is Twittering about some old idiot stumbling around the kerbs of Melbourne. Maybe she ZOMGed in her tweet. Maybe. I wouldn't blame her. It's late, and there's a prostitute in the lobby of my hotel, as I walk past munching a kebab. The kebab was a saga in itself, since I was approached by a Jesus freak trying to dole out sachets of ketchup. He didn't speak, which was almost refreshing given I've heard nothing all day but noise, but he was gruffly trying to shove the little sachets of ketchup into the hands of the queue as a window of opportunity to push his beliefs on starving tipsy drunk girls - I can tell the angle because he's got the cheekiest hint of a bible poking out of his coat, and a Catholic can always tell when a cheeky bible is poking out - and guys who haven't picked up and need a feed to settle the disappointed hormones. And then there's me, with sore knees and a sense of isolation that no windcheater can possibly buttress me against. I'm usually able to dislocated myself from passing pressers, but he's persistent with the queue, and I'm in a race between the gum chewing kebab chef and the ketchup clutching kibitzer that the kebab chef narrowly wins just as it's my turn to be sauced. The prostitute sitting in the lobby of the hotel has her own worries though, no more or less glamorous than those in the car park at Coles from my youth, just slightly less Linda Evans than those ones. She yawns just as I yawn, and under the faux lobby chandelier she looks like the saddest, loneliest woman in the world, exhausted and caked in make up waiting for whoever it is to come down in the lift and if there's a mutual connection that we're both weary, exhausted and in a glamorous setting feeling distinctly seedy and lost, it's only fleeting, because the Jesus Freak appears to have chased me up the street, and I have to head off into the lift, leaving a potential wonderful meeting of minds and ketchup in the hotel lobby in my wake as I fumble for my card and head for the allegedly glamourous spa...

It's midday, and I'm eating well, eggs served with self reflection. To be honest, if this blog has achieved anything, it's steered me away from fast food outlets. Like a pash in a nightclub, a burger at Hungry Jacks is probably not the best thing for me anymore, and I walk past awkwardly with youthful regret at all the time I've spent engaged with Indian employees in Melbourne in the early hours of the morning trying to explain that I don't want egg on my muffin. Such a complicated order, and who am I to deprive someone of the sheer joy of putting an egg on something? Selfish, that's what. So I'm eating a proper lunch, and I'm patiently waiting for it, hoping the upper class name they've given the lunch on the menu isn't just code for slop + GST. There's a girl at the table across from me with alarmingly painted toenails. They are a hypnotically ugly shade of pinky purple, like the third day of a bruise, and while I can't stare for too long as the margin for error in the stare too long you pervert stakes just gets shorter and shorter in this age of political correctness. There's a couple next to me who are thoroughly enjoying their expensively ground mince meat, and are in the first throes of love, giggling in that way only people having sneaky affairs or on their early first dates do, which is annoying when you have a headache. Oh yes, I'm just a pile of medical ailments on this particular moments, which would probably make me too normal for someone with bizarre nail polish. At a critical juncture in the heady mid morning mix of hangovers, horrible hues and honeybun laced hot air, the male in the conversation spills something on his lap - he was too busy I think trying to think of variants on the word snookums - a special sauce that's special because of the artistic way it's spread itself on his trousers I suppose. I might be wrong, but his paramour, drunk a few seconds before on Strepsils and sweet talk, visibly winces. I suspect it's the first flaw in the relationship, the first imperfection, the first moment in the relationship when you wonder if you are dating someone who isn't the 1ne but instead a slightly unco-ordinated loser...either that or she just bought the pants from a nice store and now can't get a refund. Either way, there's nothing for me to stare at that's remotely acceptable, since my choices are swingingly strange feet, a crotch with sauce to go and a slightly distressed and upset new girlfriend taking deep breaths and trying not to look too upset. And to top it all off, Coldplay are chiming in from the PA system...next time, I think I'll just go to Burger King...

And that was before I had a panic attack about my writing and my queues, but that's another story...

The Oliviertrilogy Part 1ne (TAFE killing time writing exercise, Jazzy Jims Hip-Hop Remix)

I was having an e-mail conversation today as the clock ticked towards my nightly parole from work about my pet hate for comedians who don't finish their jokes with a punchline but rely on intrinsic familiar whimsy to make a point - for instance the stand up comedian who holds up a copy of a toy magazine from the 80tys, point to say an ad for Wuzzles and can't come up with a more coherent joke than some sort of cor weren't they great Josie Long style fizzler. It's a strange hatred of mine because essentially I'm a bit lazy like that myself, I'm not always through with my thoughts bar I'm crowbarring a story about VHS tracking tapes in the middle of it. I don't always sum up with a pearler, sometimes it's just easier to throw in a reference to Orko and be done with it. I have basically followed the stringent comedy parabola of my time on earth though - where as now whimsy is the new comedy style, when I first moved back to Penguin I was able to thrive through a series of ripped off sub Hicksian routines which basically involved me finding fault in everything and walking around cloaked in misery. Not that I was living the part quite like Bill Hicks, as my main item of clothing was a rather rockingly bright Swedish soccer top with mad orange panels that made everyone go cool top. Yeah, but how many people died making it casual friendly passer by I would think. I was it. It was the searingly cold winter of 1992, and I wasn't really sure of my place in this strange Tasmanian town with it's obsession with overloading you with chips - 50c was enough to feed a family of 28ight - and I certainly wasn't going to try. In keeping with all of my inconsistent approaches over the year to personal presentation, the less I tried to be cool the cooler people found me and then I would think I was cool and then I'd not be cool because I was trying to hard and I'd tell everyone to F off and they'd like me again. And the more that I was unhappy the more things fell into place and became a lot easier for me, because I had a girlfriend, I had places to go, I had a social life and I was free of the weekly humiliation of trying to climb bars and ropes in an Ayrshire gym time and time again while the blue sky outside was engulfed in a horrible grey camoflauge. I was happy but unhappy, lonely but content. I would walk along a street miserable, grunt at passers by wishing me well, and they would like me more. Sadly I couldn't use my position to enlighten people to think themselves, as I really couldn't even manage basic thinking for myself, I just didn't let anyone in on the joke. One day, I was trying to distance myself from popular culture through a dismissive speech while dressed like the drummer from EMF and eating a Push Pop - I mean, who was I thinking I was? Clever? Adulthood only exists to reflect on the folly of youth I think, and if nothing else I've done a lot of reflecting, and most of it just involves me yelling what was I thinking at bemused passing seagulls until they too feel my pain...or want a chip, 1ne of the 2wo...

My Mum, she knew that my poses where no truthful representation of teenage disaffection, has a catchphrase of do you believe that? She uses it all the time, to the point it sticks in my head anytime someone tells me a story, and my natural reaction is to think it's untrue lest I be lead into a folly of belief and be as silly as someone trying to prove their intelligence by hitting their head to dislodge a coin. 1ne day she came to collect me from school because I was ill, and as I stumblebummed my way across the courtyard to her welcoming motherly arms she nudged the person she was standing next to and said in her typical Glaswegian way oh look out here comes fucking Laurence Olivier. Which requires only a brief dissection - she clearly thought I was acting up, like the great thespian of yore, pretending to be ill to get out of school because school was for corporate losers or something. If I had been living the Hicksian doctrine of life she didn't even believe I was Denis Leary. Those cynical Glaswegians, always with their finger on the pulse. And boy when my heart nearly stopped and I collapsed on the pavement was her face red. Ah there's nothing like a near death experience to sharpen the mind. Yes, her wolf crying radar was astray, and I was taken to hospital to confront an early question of mortality. I didn't have a lot of mental strength or indeed physical strength to cope with this sudden shift of events, and to be honest the nurses were a little bit too concerned with filling in charts to listen to flimsily consttructed routines about the corporate society I was forced into by society. I mean they had bedpans to deconstruct. And that was literal deconstruction not....you don't know what true reflection is until you are attached to some machine you were too zonked out on morphine to fully take in the inner workings of. It was only 1ne night, 1ne long night in a ward with a disorientated old grandpa who kept asking for Margaret. Due to my lack of sleep, and my hatred of beeping machines, not to mention brightly painted Burnie hospitals, I had a lot of time to reflect...meandering musings for Margaret had motivated a migraine in any event, so what chance did I have...

4teen, 4teen years of age I was, stuck on a couch at home, sipping soup from a straw watching midday television with celebrities dancing on the screen, somehow less famous than I remembered them when I had moved out of Penguin to the Ayrshire wilderness in the 1st place. No one in the house, hell, no one in the town really, since Mum had decided to make up for her lack of motherly faith by buying me something nice from Burnie. I don't know what could have made up for it really - a walkman would have been a good start. I was under strict bed rest for my illness, although the cheeky nurse who was cheeky in that Benny Hill kind of way before no doubt all the cheeky nurses were rounded up and given a lesson on political correctness seemed to imply my illness was all in my head. I believe her phrase was I was medically perfect. Saucy minx. Lazy eyed bitch more like. 14teen though...I had almost passed on, with nothing to show for my life. I had no more possessions after being stripped of my room in the move than a troll doll and a slightly and oddly homo-erotic photo in 2wo frames my best mate in Scotland had given me of him and me side by side as a farewell present. The morphine had just added to my medicated sense of panic, and I didn't think I could make it off the couch, and this could be my life, a series of lost days and nights on the couch distinguishable only by the variation of the blankets and shawls my Mum would cover me with. To say I was scared was an understatement, and I did't even a cool scar to show for it, just a band aid that may or may not have had a dinosaur on it, the soothing effect of his cheeky grin somehow re-assuring. I was not a resillient boy, I was pampered, an only child, my traumas were things like doing the dishes and not getting kissed at parties. Not this, not the Shawlshank depression. Not a faint humming in my ears, not a virus so strong it had rendered my arms as useless as an Ab King Pro. I spent an entire day watching a bug crawl up a wall, then back down, then back up again...I was tremendously depressed when that bug took a break from it's crawl up the wall to avoid a hard fall onto the shawl...well it was funny on morphine...

It took me a while to get better - oh sure, I got off the couch after a week, but people would tell me things and they'd go straight out of my head, and I couldn't really come to grips with basic requirements of my day to day tasks, like comebacks to insults and things like that. I was definitely shorn of my attitude, my sass, vim, and indeed my vigour. I missed my vigour most of all, that was my trusty sidekick. I was too new at school to get real sympathy about my collapse, though a girl at the window said I fell like an f'n something or other, and I think she did a good impression of me doing so. Besides which I think someone showed their underpants on the monkey bars or someone liked someone so my story didn't gain neither grip nor traction within the circles of influence. I was just some benny who fell over really. It was a little different in Penguin though, where I had acolytes, followers of my story. After all, when the leader topples, the followers can get restless. Which is a massive overstated way of saying some people who thought I was cool were worried about me, but I had not shown these people vulnerability yet. Least of all supercool cynical Vicki my pash buddy, or my stalker who used to watch me get off the bus all the time with rapt awe. Luckily most people were too kind to bring it up, so either they really didn't give a toss or my first theory was right and good old fashioned Penguin reserve kicked it, as we gathered at our 2wo am meeting point in Hiscutt Park to heckle the Milkman, and it was only as we dispersed after 2wo hours of psuedo-intellectual bollocks that Vicki asked if I was scared. Scared? I was terrified woman, I couldn't move, and the nurses...and I'm miles from home, and I have accomplished nothing yet, and...if you guessed that I shrugged and pretended with a curled lip that everything was fine, you'd be absolutely right. She smiled brightly, squeezed my hand, and said she was glad I was better. She then rolled her eyes and shook her head and said she didn't believe me for a minute that I wasn't scared...we parted as the sun came up over Penguin, and a new day began with me sneaking back in through the window trying to pretend I'd had a relapse and getting my arse booted onto the school bus quick smart...

Laurence Olivier? I couldn't manage it...I was fooling no-one...

I'd be my biggest fan if I could just make me love me

I had a dream last night - actually a hallucination brought on by the bitter cold while I waited for a tow truck to emerge from the darkening gloom and take my car away. It wasn't inspired by the acts of human kindness surprisingly brought on by people who stopped to help me, which rather made my cynicism about other people go away for just a brief moment. It was inspired by a mental desire to escape the humdrum of tedious radio testifying, a DJ wittering on about the essential comedy we hadn't yet found in tragic events while I sat in my non moving car, and I think wry sideways glance was used by said DJ, surely popular cultures 2nd most terrifying phrase after hamming it up. My brain wandered to a bus trip through Pontville many years ago. I had completely forgotten about it, the uni trip we went on in Grade 12elve, a trip where we were meant to go to Hobart and have a look around uni and prepare for our future life, bright eyed opportunistic bored bus bound Burnie prospects too young and excitable to be spat out and chewed up by a tidal wave of broken hearts, casual drug use and irresponsibility given a brief taste of future anxiety - by being shown a computer lab full of over caffeinated nerds - or in my case, too little anxiety until I failed. I had a collection of Tazos for god’s sake, little discs with cartoon characters on them, how could I possibly prepare for adult life and dragging myself out of bed to make sure I got to uni on time, when the lure of blanket bay was so strong and no one was there to thump the door repeatedly? Let alone deal with unrequited love based on Beth Orton CDs and a washing up roster that seemed neither fair nor reasonable? Would I be able to pass uni through Tazo bribery, tell a girl I loved her through coded messages about the quality of the 1st season of Hanging with Mr Cooper? I was woefully unprepared. Still, that was all ahead of me as our silver Kergers Coach style bus shimmied down the highway in high spirits. I like the idea of a time in my life I was so excited I thought a bus was shimmying, rather than progressing slothfully with me in it loathing every other passenger like I would now. In the hallucination, I was happy, I was excitable and loud and talking to people I didn't know, with a buoyant self confidence that betrayed no doubt an opposite series of emotions, after all take the unrequited Kylie love out of 1996 and it was pretty much a perfect year, although like re-watching The Breakfast Club, I have no doubt completely forgotten the slow boring bits. When I piece together my nostalgic late teen yearnings I do snip and edit out double Maths on a Friday with Trotsky style precision. That bus trip seems to me to be some sort of metaphorical journey rather than an actual one, although I do have the diary entries to support that it actually happened. While I'm sure that there was some gigantic lesson to be learned about the transition from youth to adulthood the bus journey represented, I tend to think that my hallucinations are far less emphatic and meaningful. After all, all I really remember about the journey, other than a desperate attempt to make it back to Burnie for the series finale of Friends, was how funny it seemed that someone on the bus was pointing all the way through Pointville, only to find out it was slightly less funny when the real name of the town was revealed to be Pontville...

Time passes slowly, my IPOD begins to repeat itself like a complaining neighbour, struggling to make itself heard in the fading light, while a girl gives me a thumbs up for proper use of hazard lights, which I hope in many ways is simply one of the best chat up lines ever. I never did really accumulate what a guidance counsellor might call the point of my experiences in Grade 12, drowning as I did in a sea of glib gossip and grown up grief that I medicated with flippant references. Something like that anyway - when I worked at the ABC, I came out the other side with a story about a broken tap and a Hungarian marathon runner swearing at me, rather than the massed contact book of a go-getter looking to work in media and when I worked at Triple J, all I accumulated was some free Cds from the prize cupboard. My bus trip to uni ended up with a few in jokes and a story about the way a bakery in one of those terrible Midland country towns was right beside an animal hospital. If Grade 12elve ended up having a point, it was way over my head. The uni trip just became another pointless missed opportunity the Tazo collecting cynic in me missed - did I learn anything? Not really, but I had an enjoyable time. In fact as an earnest man in an earnest suit with a Windsor knot and a terrible penchant for puns - if you can imagine such a penchant could ever be a bad thing - made a speech at the start of the day which made Joe Cockers performance at Woodstock sound like a model of clarity and vision, I did something I never did before or again, and sneak out for a cigarette. No one noticed, at least I don't think so, such was the proximity of my little wooden chair to the escape hatch, although the illusion of my rebellion against conformity was shattered a little bit by being joined in the circle of lights by at least 2wo teachers and a nerd. So any notion that I was raging against the machine was already down some raging by the end of the 1st event, and I sort of slunk back to my seat as Captain Windsor made a pun about law school while smoke breezed in from outside. Appropriate that I was inhaling 2nd hand smoke since I'd very much exhaled 2nd hand rebellion. As I sat kicking and swinging my legs like an impatiently trapped child, to my left one of my friends, the one with the Beth Orton CD the year later I had a crush on you you didn't know about girl was paying rapt attention, mesmerised by the hypnotic combination of middle aged try hardiness, Windsor knots, puns and over exaggerated self confidence emanating from the stage like a tsunami of awkwardness. I should have realised then, as I do now, that the reason we aren't friends is because she was climbing skywards, or at least attempting to, while I was trying to remember all the names of the Banana Splits or some other time wasting not paying attention exercise. As much as we would mutually discover and then reject Ms Orton, our paths were too divisive to be a fantastical couple. She went out with someone who spoke a much bigger game, was well on the way to inventing a perpetual motion machine, and perpetual motion, as established, was not my thing. Perpetual Tazos maybe...

Rebellion, god, it's been a while since I've done that even feebly. Nothing really to rebel against. My car isn't working, and it's a family standard car, just minus the family. A safety car. The intermittent moments of self awareness I have during my daydream seem to indicate I never became the rock star I could have been. Not that any of this worried me at the time, and to be honest, I was king of the trip in my own mind. I made everyone laugh, I sat up the back of the bus, I lead all the jokes, and for want of a better term, was the kind of person everyone could buzz around in perpetual motion. When we attended a feebly weak battle of the bands, I had the best heckle; the show stopping one not even Hellyer College kids could match. Sure it was just a play on the bands name with a swear word inserted in it, but I was bus lagged. I'm sure it was funny at the time. There was a lull in the day’s proceedings to get sandwiches or buff the name badges we didn't wear, and my future crush took it upon herself to go and make connections and talk herself up to guardians and uni people with even more impressive ties. At the exact moment she was availing herself of the really good staff sandwiches and posing like a starlet in the high beams of a red carpet, I was engaged in a conversation with the drummer in one of the feeble bands, a girl named Amber with piercings and a tattoo of Che Guevara shooting at America. I looked at her, she looked at me, Amber looked at her tattoo and explained in tedious detail about the detail in her tattoo was while I muttered huh how about that you think you know somebody, and me and my friend smiled at each other in mutual feigned reproach, because we both knew we were happy in our respective worlds and conversations. I wonder if she remembers that you know, the plate of sandwiches, the mutual smile, if she places me in any of her anecdotes from around that time or if I'm as lost to time to her as I no doubt am to Amber. Last I saw her she was frantically and angrily drumming in the direction of one of our party who asked her why she had Allan Border tattooed on her arm. If the day has a deeper meaning, it's only obvious now, in the hindsight of a horrible future day, as the tow truck pulls down the road, and disperses my daydream as it's headlights light up the street in the gaudy shades of a drug fuelled cereal ad from the 70tys...orange, yellow, red and frightening...

There's no deeper meaning to my car breaking down of course. Stupid thing just won't go forwards. It reverses fine, but in a plume of smoke and sparks it won't go forward. I'm sure a finer writer than me would come up with some sort of metaphorical meaning about my life never going forward, but the crackly line down which I speak to the RACT man isn't doing much for deep and meaningful thoughts, unless they are about buying a new phone for both of us. At least I can now confidently find my hazard lights button. As long as a girl gives me a cheery thumbs up. Whatever I've learned in my life hasn't prepared me for a broken down car, nor the slow progression through the fog that transmits me forward in the cab of a tow truck trying to read a newspaper in a poorly illuminated environment. The tow truck driver is amiable and professional as he puts my car onto his truck, leaving me freezing in the cold as he both checks and balances. I admire him for his courtesy, and for not talking into my ear like a drunken taxi driver. By the time we hit the sweeping bends of the Southern Outlet and the road absolutely refuses to yield any kind of romantic fairytale or character of any kind and simply becomes the symbolic embodiment of a particular kind of domestic drudgery for us both, he decides to try some conversation. He considers for a moment commenting on the Black Eyed Peas who are clogging up the radio, but he doesn't know which way that will go, so he asks me if I had a good day. Well the Black Eyed Peas song is Good Night, so I guess it was a hint for his conversational avenue, and I can't really answer. Not just because he's missed the point that it really can't be a good day when your car is loaded on a tow truck, when you are freezing and immobile and still kms from home on the world’s least inspiring road. So I mutter something about so-so and turn back to the paper. I know it was rude, but I couldn't really help him...

...I’m still working on whether day’s 13teen years ago were good or not, it's going to take some processing to get back to him...

Corporate Coffee still sucks

It's Saturday morning in Hobart and I feel old. The effervescent youthful hyperkinetic balls of youthful energy with perfect hair and teeth are loud and proud and listening to IPODs and fitfully recounting energetic nights out in a coffee shop queue while I stand like their shambling old Dad, or so I feel, and while I can engage them in conversation about Ladyhawke and Lily Allen I'm far too much a laconic laborer through life, a product of a laconic care little generation, to feel as excitable as they do at this time of the morning. To be honest, they wouldn't talk to me because I know from accumulated wisdom their tales of sex and drugs are simply over-exaggerated re-heats, like the ones I used to tell whenever I came back from the United Kingdom. They display a disturbing attraction to tracksuit trousers though, I will say that from my unscientific anthropological study over a re-heated and distinctly reheated cup of java that they, and I'm now old enough to say the young folk, lack a certain surety. I'm pretty sure when I told my over exaggerated stories about wild nights out at Regines, I believed what I was saying, I rehearsed my own hype. These young uns don't even seem to have a definitive ending flourish beyond I got in a taxi with someone and nudge nudge. The alpha female of this maruading pack of style and affordly priced cotton is called Chrissi, which I know because her acolytes seem to spend the entire time chanting a refrain that Chrissi is so bad, emphasising the final d with a Warrane hiss, as she preens and gathers macchiatos in her morning tracksuit, a devil may care attitude to hair care present as her bed hair piles lushly on top of itself. I search for some clue as to why anyone would follow her so slavishly - fashion, hair, the pace of her stories, a suspiciously dodgy Fonzie style attitude towards hooking up. Some sort of tiny glimpse as to why her mere presence inspires such chatter, and why a much prettier girl up the back is so quiet and rapt just to be there. I think I narrowed it down to 2wo things by the time I left. Either her tattoo, the one on her hand that was obviously too hip for me to work out was some sort of homing beacon, or the fact that she was quite prepared to open up a thick wallet full of green 100dred dollar notes and spread her largesse as well as her stories. I might be mistaken with my old man eyes, but I'm sure when she was relating her tale of thumping techno pashes, the prettiest girl up the back wasn't paying the slightest bit of attention to anything but nudging the girl next to her and rolling her eyes, although I'm sure she was incredibly greatful for the coffee, doled out with genuine store bought friendship and love...

The coffee shop is called Zuba - which I think is Greek for lukewarm - and the pace of the day is yet to really hit me. The lukewarm corporate brewed served with a grimace coffee washes down my throat with a brisk burning sensation anticipated, but it never arrives, as instead a sugary mess that isn't quite sugary enough doesn't so much slide down the throat as slowly trudge apologetically. Maybe I shouldn't blame the coffee, so much as a mindset that anything before 11even AM is intrinsically evil and wrong. Still when you decide to make it your mission to get out of the house, away from the hammock to see what Hobart has to offer, and people make you follow up on it, there's not much you can do about it. The girl behind the counter seems a horrible corporate hybrid of store trained service and toothy smiles, before turning around to give one of her underlings what we used to call a right bollocking in less enlightened times. Out of the corner of my wandering lazy eye I see someone I know - I wish I was better in situations where small talk is required but I'm just not, I always feel like I'm drowning in inarticulate 1/2lf thought out sentences and boring sentiment. I've actually got a friend who's lack of grammatical excellence drags me down to their level, until I'm speaking in tongues and saying words I don't even know with an extra Tasmanian syllable tagged on at the end. Although this friend has far more self confidence, our conversation is horrible, mostly because I'm trying to get away, uneasy and unsure of myself and apprehensive of any pauses in the conversation, trying to desperately fill them in the same way I've tried to fill in the lack of taste in my coffee with an overabundance of sugar. To my chagrin, just to fill in time I offer myself up for some conversational self deprecation, which I instantly regret. I make a mental note to talk myself up not down in future interactions, given the relative secrets I know about this friend, which when known rather falsify his self confidence. We part with a real commitment to keep in touch more just as the chastened girl who received the bollocking is forced by the horrible constraints of retail to get back on the horse, and under supervision remember that above all else when you sell the horrible coffee, sell the horrible biscuits at the same time...no matter what you do, sell the horrible biscuits...

When I was young, there was a coffee shop in the Plaza Arcade in Burnie, and while I couldn't tell you the name which is lost to time sadly, I could tell you it was where I would go like Norm in Cheers for a sympathetic ear whenever I was stuck working at Coles, and didn't feel like getting a relatively sympathetic nod from the car park prostitutes I saw when I was shoving trolleys around and trying to scav up my lunch money. Whenever I would get my own bollocking from one of the bitter desk bound middle agers behind the cigarette counter, or when life was getting me down, I could guarantee there would at least be coffee. When I emerged from the middle 90tys with a sudden and quite unexpected group of friends, I went through quite a strange change in my life, as suddenly I was forced to make decisions about myself. Not obviously whether I wanted to be good at school or getting myself fit, oh god no, but what I had to represent when someone asked me what music I liked or whenever I had to go outside dressed in fashionable clothes. I decided it would be a good idea to drink coffee, not just for the sympathetic ear but because it seemed all the trendy people of the era were doing it, although it was somewhat ironic if you remember 1996 that when I drank coffee, it was entirely a solitary experience given the popular TV show of the era. I also smoked cigars, listened religiously to trendy music and became a person that I really will never recognise, just because it felt like that was what I was supposed to be like to fit in. My coffee drinking era though came to a crashing halt just before I moved out of Burnie when the shop had a change of owner, and became less of a haven for enlightened thinking and personal space and more of a terrible nightmare with mood music, overly bright lighting, fudge brownies replaced with tofu laced creations that seemed to glow with evil under the lights, and worse of all communal sofas. It was completely Starbuckked up, before anyone used the phrase. 1ne night at rockclimbing though, I was able to entrance an entire audience simply through a line of university approved anti corporate sentiment. I was fully aware I was talking out of my hat - or beanie at the time, it was rock climbing - but I figured whatever I said, it was enthralling. Interestingly, it was part of a much wider malaise, where I really couldn't figure out whether I actually liked things or trained myself to like things, but I never went into that coffee shop again, and my fortress of solitude became the Coles pay office, which you could sneak into with the right preperation, and there I would sit without mood lighting, but with a horrible carpet with little staticy suckers on it if you dragged your Clarks shoes across the floor and touched something metallic. I definitely learned that sticking it to the man generally involved sitting on the floor alone and miserable while everyone else got on with corporate approved life. Oh well, I guess I showed them and their tofulicious ways...

Chrissi clicks her fingers and her cabal of tracksuited troops leave without finishing off their frothy lattes and departing with Adidas trainers and store bought bling clangling in an inelegant rush to a fleet of taxis. I myself am overly late for an appointment, but obviously the coffee is so delicious that I can't imagine anyone rushing away from it, while across the road a hippy guy is emerging from a bookshop weighed down by his own dreadlocks and the biggest bag of books I've ever seen anyone carry. I would grab him and discuss the effects of corporatisation on our culture, but he is rocking some very fine NIKE shoes, so I don't think he'd listen. A fat hipped Fijian table cleaner asks if I enjoyed my coffee and I say I do, taking a gulp of the foul liquid as I do and doing an unconvincing Macca thumbs aloft to confirm it. Guess I never did learn to stop liking things for the approval of others. I leave, with my only tip being don't give up your day job to the girl behind the counter, smiling like a benny as I go so everyone knows I really enjoyed the coffee, and wander down to the mall dressed in a less than fashionable waterproof jacket in anticipation of rain that never comes. There's a desolate and desconsolate girl Friday on the bench next to me, no older than 15teen, with mascara stained cheeks sobbing hard with her head in her hands. Her IPOD and mobile phone are set beside her, available even the most inept thief to lift. She picks up her mobile phone and studies it for a moment then begins crying again while her friend comes back with a bottle of Red Eye and looks as uncomfortable as someone listening to my anti corporate speech. She looks at me, I look at her and shrug, although I think she wanted the voice of experience to come over and say some words to fix the tears. Sadly my experience in trying to cheer up a crying girl mostly involves offering her a Butter Menthol, so I turn away and shift uneasily listening to Shakira as I do so. I have a strange, long ago flash back to all those tears years ago, all that angst, all that wasted angst, although it wasn't messaged by txt msg, it was face to face, but the result was the same. I hope she gets through it, and I know she will, but it doesn't make having to listen to her any easier or less poignant. So I head in the direction of another coffee shop, since my lift is running late, and sit down to enjoy a coffee from a nicer shop with prettier waitresses, a nicely drawn chalk board, and absolutely no music, none whatsover, absolutely no Presets...which I always am very relived about...

That the coffee is even worse, of course, is just between you, me and Naomi Klein...

1ne year anniversary post - Our worst misfortunes never happen, and most miseries lie in anticipation

There's a new book store opening up in the shopping mall where I work, although it's hidden away behind white screens and doors at the moment - an impersonal sign is affixed on the door, stuck down with flimsy tape and promising books in fancy piles and staff that will positively burst to serve you and cater to all your reading needs. It's in a positive font the sign, so I'm sure they wouldn't lie to you. I don't remember the first time I saw a shop close down - I think it was the one in Scotland, the sports store that one day suddenly vanished in a blizzard of unpaid bills parked under the door. I'm always depressed when a shop closes, but one opening is sure to cheer my spirits as a new wave of bogan customers slowly deflating eager beaver middle managers with their insane ramblings and strange twisted queries while I hover around in a tracksuit trying to purchase a book I don't really need. I'll miss the man with the IPOD who worked in the old book store, he had style - sitting behind the desk listening to his classical music on his IPOD while rocking one of the worlds most perfectly manicured beards. I guess his demise as a storekeep is some kind of progress, but it still requires a moment of contemplation. I was in quiet thought about exactly what the anticipated new bookstore might provide when an old man flapping his arms walked past, in a pair of old man high pants and creepy crawly eyebrows muttering something about the government being to blame for everything. I'm not entirely sure what has brought about this particular dismissal of everything that Kevin Rudd stands for, it certainly can't be the people at Boost Juice, they are entirely to blame for their own shortcomings. He's looking squarely at a man in a cleaners outfit who's blamelessly eating a sandwich as he chews, but I don't think he's done anything to inspire party political comment. Unless he's chewing his sandwich with a left wing bias. Which isn't easy to do. He storms off continuing to flap his arms, before turning around to curse in the direction of the book store, muttering something about it being the corporate arm of the facist something or other. His vitriol is passionate but mis-directed and hollow, as the book store hasn't even opened yet. Maybe the staff there will hate the government too, and throw off the shackles of corporate oppression. Maybe not - he wouldn't be happy anyway I suspect, because when last I see him he's turned his attention to the perennial problem of poor bus services...bloody Rudd, what did we ever see in him...

There's a very large man who sits in the library where I work, always on the computer in the corner playing some sort of role playing game - I'd take the moral high ground of course, but my own 1999 was spent entirely competing with single mothers and a threatening Aboriginal kiddie for a glimpse of the Internet, the use of one of the 3hree computers Kingston library had at the time and now I wonder what the fuss was all about, all the shouting and all the times the single mothers pushed aside bewildered children to make a further point about how they put their name on the list first. Good times. I walk past him and he always shoots me a look like I'm about to invade his personal space or worse, take his computer away and make him stop being an elf at a critical moment of elf stress. It might be a breach of elf and safety for his mental stress. As he shifts in his seat one leg at a time, clutching the keyboard like it's his personal property, I sit down across from him and try not to make eye contact unless he gets upset. Next to me is a doe eyed hippy girl with brunette hair and sparkly shiny braces in a tie dyed skirt that's a melange of not quite matching dis-orientating colours, who doesn't appear to be looking at anything in particular. Her blackberry is about to fall on the floor, and she's 1/2 way through an e-mail or something and the cursor blinks relentlessly, which is re-assuring, because she doesn't blink once as her fringe falls casually across her face. It's sort of hypnotic watching her expressionless frozen coupon. Perhaps she's pondering the pain a whole lot of money will bring like the chatterbox kids reading the Advocate far away. It's then I notice the entranced expression of the fat guy, who seems to have taken a real shine to the blank expressionless hippy. I'm in no position to be the mutually introductory conduit to their potential happiness, distracted as I am by the perpetual question of what exactly the old woman in the glass booth in the library does. I mean she allegedly works for senior citizen awareness but as far as I can tell she sits and does Sudoku all day in an air conditioned office. I'd ponder it for a bit more, but I'm feeling a bit like a third wheel between the worlds largest elf and the hypnohippy, and to be honest, it's put me right off my Youtube clip, so I shuffle out awkwardly, having a flashback to pretty much every party I went to 1995 as I go - it only needed Alanis on the CD player and to wake up on the back of a flatbed truck...

Much later I'm in a queue in the supermarket, it's mid afternoon. I'm scouring the supermarket for the right assembly of chips, something I pride myself on. Anyone can buy Samboys, and I don't roll like that. I've got a million mundane thoughts on my mind, and none of them involve the school age child talking about how large her boyfriends appendage is. I have to turn up the IPOD pretty loudly to drown her out. I hadn't noticed just quite how many skill testers there are around the front of the supermarket. It seems to make the purchase of little mini Picnics completely redundant when you can waste your life picking them up with a claw. An emaciated guy with a turban pushes trolleys around past them as I watch - when I did it, I at least got to watch the routine of the prostitutes, see a surly Peter Brock and pocket enough 20c pieces to try and woo Kylie during a showing of Space Jam at the Burnie Village Cinema. He just isn't putting his heart into it though, so his blog must be rubbish. A taxi driver meanwhile is explaining the demise of the taxi industry to an old woman who tomorrow will be gone far away by the look of her frailty - Brighton if I'm not mistaken. A woman in a black polo neck decides to alleviate her 1ne woman queue by shuffling us all rather rudely to register 1ne, and as I look back I see she's pretty much just reading her magazine, staring and idly pointing to celebrities and chatting to the girl behind the cigarette counter about what a skank Lindsay Lohan is. After a while she really isn't even looking at who comes up to her, she's just sort of pointing to the poor junior with the tie his Mum did who's stuck doing all the work. I feel a kinship with him down to the overly big glasses he's stuck with. I want to tell him the ladies in the supermarket with the big jumpers and the bossy attitudes really have tenure, they never really get out from the lure of the tangellos, they end up marrying failed lawyers and bitching about them in the cool room, and are continually depressed about younger prettier trainees bypassing them to cushy office jobs while they are stuck on the register. Maybe that was just Burnie. He doesn't know any of this, he's patiently waiting for me to get my butt into gear and get my change right, he doesn't have time for the arm around the shoulder talk from some old man, some old man who's desperate to have a crack at the skill testers...I could murder a Picnic...

I have to stagger through one last task in the bewilderness, a boring go-no-where meeting with lots of paper and a bowl of Jaffas infinitely more exciting than anything being written on a notepad. Time goes utterly slowly as I feign the enthusiasm required to convince the meeting I'm actually paying attention while surreptitiously drawing little marks all over the face of Judy Moran. I hope she doesn't find out. I had been dreading this horrific corporate nonsense all day long, but I get out of it eventually, without need to blame the government nor take substances that make me stare blankly into outer space. It takes an age to meander and wind my way through the traffic and get the taste of Jaffa out of my system and by the time I get home, I fall asleep pretty much straight away. I have an incredibly strange dream in which my uncle yelled at me for no apparent reason, and wake up in the dark all on my own in my house, freezing to death while a petulant soccer player whinges at me from my TV screen. I still find it strange living alone - I still find the calm, the stillness, the personal responsibility quite terrifying at times, all the little jobs and tasks that go into making sure the house doesn't burn down or that the oven if off or that I remember to take the Chip and Dale VHS tape out of the video recorder...well, that last one was from the first time I ever stayed at home alone. Before I really knew about bad governments, the difficulties of talking to girls no matter how transcendantly still, about what really goes on with supermarket politics, or how horrible it is to be in an airless windowless room picking idly at Jaffas and nodding at the right moments. I would ponder endlessly about the way my life has turned out, the good and the bad, but there's some contrived improvisational comedy on the television, and the fuzzy headed emptiness of the premise is enough to take my mind off the trials and tribulations of the day, and finally, I am as still, calm and non moving as even the most bewildered of the Rosnyites...

I don't have any ice-cream in the fridge though...bloody government...

The 1ne year anniversary post - Progress Part 1ne

When I was about 7even, Penguin, the town where I lived and grew up and learned how to make a lime spider in got a Soapbox, a shop in which all kinds of fancy powdered washing detergent was available in little buckets for you to scoop up with little plastic scoops provided Mrs Benson from Upper Hale St wasn't hogging the scoop. Around about the same time, we got an even more impressive new arrival - the ice cream machine that was allegedly only 1ne of 2wo in the whole world that at the time could take little bits of your favourite chocolate treat or type of nut and mash it up into the ice cream. The possibilities were limitless, I mean who didn't want to imagine what it was like to take a Mars Bar and grind it up into a lump of Vanilla ice cream? I think the mythology that we were only 1ne of 2wo places in the whole world to have this technology might have grown from some kind of weird Chinese purple monkey dishwasher story the denizens of the Dial Arcade were trying to peddle us in the early days of Penguins new shopping mall, but I certainly believed it. I told everyone in the playground of this wonderful technology as if I myself had invented the Death Star or found the mythical Bernard Toohey card for my footy card set. It's fair to say that because I lived in Penguin and went in school in Burnie, which was a tiny bit Palestinia vs Israel but with less actual fighting and more references to what mothers did at night, I was proud of our little town growing and thriving, especially when my auntie opened her tea shop, with the best free fudge sundaes in the world. Yes, it was a heady optimistic mix of soap, crushed nuts and fudge that couldn't be washed off my face with the strongest of facecloths the old Penguin in the mid 80tys. If there was flaws in the place, I certainly didn't see them, buoyed with enthusiasm and patriotic spirit. It's no surprise that 1ne day I stood at the bottom of Mission Hill Road and said that Penguin sure was a beautiful town. Even my cynical Glaswegian mother would surely have to agree that we lived in a wonderland, and if she needed any proof, she could simply hold some of her whiter clothing up to the light and inspect it for stains. One dose of washing powder from the Soapbox would surely be enough to impress even the most dislocated homesick Scot who couldn't let a single comment go without a snappy comeback...

If I was hyped up on the boom time that was progressive Penguin, it was nothing compared to Mr Phillips the friendly newsagent. To the best of my knowledge he was what you might call dating one of Penguins less morally observant Queens Quest contestants, and he was full of local hype and excitement - front of the float when the Fire Engine would sail through the town at Xmas dishing sweets to the kids, down the beach jogging and saying hello to tourists in the morning, a big gregarious fellow with a happy smile. I think he was possibly a little bit loopy on the fumes from his incredibly dangerous heater he kept at the back of his little newspaper selling desk, but anyway, whenever something would be opened or something new would come to town he'd be out the front of the celebration with a big grin and a big stupid jumper. To be honest, I think if I met him now, I'd hate the guy - I'd find his smile insincere and wonder if he was looking over my shoulder to see if someone more important than me was available to talk to and I'd wonder if everyone secretly hated him, but back then I found his fascinating. He was bold, he was loud, he had the run of the entire town, and he was sleeping with a vacuous blonde woman who didn't clog up the relationship with conversation or anything like that - every mid 80tys male dream surely? I figured this would just be my natural progression - I'd grow up in Penguin, marry a local girl, watch the town progress and grow into a mecca, and everything would be fantastic surely? Hell, I was young, what did I know about progress? To me, progress and change was always positive, and who couldn't be excited about staggering technological breakthroughs like the BBC Micro - as for Mr Phillips, the last time I saw him was about a week before we moved into our little flat in Burnie that began the downfall of the worlds own optimist, ie.me, before we moved to Ayrshire. He had some Korean tourists bailed up on the beach and was telling them the colourful history of the Big Penguin while they looked terrified and concerned. I remember thinking how lucky he was that he would see Penguin grow and thrive while I was stuck in a horrible Ayrshire rut, and in doing so completely blocked out that as he turned to say hello to someone else, the Korean couple fled as fast as their legs would carry them, in a completely different direction, maybe heading towards Ulverstone...

Things were different when I moved back though. The teashop was gone, the Soapbox was gone, I presume without being able to accurately recall that other countries and towns had discovered the secret of putting nuts in ice cream by turning a handle. Mr Phillips appeared to have gone AWOL as well, or perhaps the demise of the Soapbox finally sent him over the edge. I don't think I would have been impressed anyway by any of my old pleasures after 4our years of Scotland taught me that everything was pretty much rubbish and enthusiasms were for people asking for a slap. I found that the more bleak and world weary and fatalistic I was when I first moved back to Penguin, the cooler I was and the more popular I became, but I stood for nothing much, and found fault in anything until the act became tiresome. Sometimes I would try and reflect on what had changed in my outlook and why everyone annoyed me so much, but I was just homesick and lonely, and I was hardly unique in being grumpy. I hadn't expected the bubble gum chewing vacancy in the eyes of the girl in the milk bar with the big hair and the pink streak through the middle of the thatch. I hadn't expected anyone in Penguin to feel sad or down because it just didn't compute to my memories of the place. She was down though, she would chew her chewing gum with perfect unmoving arrogance while you waited for a dollar worth of chips. She annoyed me, and I was also annoyed she stole my pose that I thought I'd invented, and every time I went in there we exchanged ever more terse grunts as I tried to show her that I thought life was more horrendous than she did and vice versa. One day in town I saw her getting out of an incredibly fancy car and she was smiling, and I figured when she saw me after a brief period of recognition that she would realise that she had lost, after all she was in a fancy car and giggling and without pose, but when she looked at me I realised then that I was holding a teddy bear in my hand for my pash buddy Vicki, with a Care Bear style love heart on it, and she eyed me evenly and victoriously. It's hard to hold a grunge era disdain for life while holding a big teddy bear and stupid I've just been pashed grin, and she looked triumphant as she smiled at me. I tried to mouth something akin to we'll call it a draw, but it was too late...damn bears...you can never out-run them...

There was a particular shop in the Dial Arcade that wasn't filled for ages - I think it had been a pet shop then a pizzeria then nothing then a shoe shop then nothing again. There were receipts on the floor and it was easy to get into, if you knew how, since it was abandoned and the early 90tys weren't a high point for the security forces in Penguin. The whole town was more or less wide open for slack jawed teenagers to wander around in, finding places to sit and pash and drink, and even the library was easy to get into if you knew how. I only took advantage of this freedom once - we set up for the night, Vicki and I, inside the abandoned shop, on a sort of date while drifters and wanderers shuffled through the place. I had snuck out the window early in the morning just to get there, almost breaking my ankle on the train tracks in haste. I was excited to be honest, there was a thrill involved in lock picking and such like activities to be honest. As it happened, in many ways I had made progress - I had the run of Penguin, I was dating the local, but the surrounds weren't the romantic wonderland I had thought of when I was younger. Unless you count finding 20ty bucks on the floor romantic. We pashed, obviously, because that's what we did, we drank cheap rum and talked a bit, but the excitement of teenage deliquency wore off pretty quickly for me, and I wasn't the big supercool nihilist that I had made out to be - in fact, I was cold and depressed, shivering in an abandoned shop and feeling like I was the only person on earth with this collection of feelings and fears. There was a girl hunched up in the corner when I walked past, and she frankly didn't look well. Vicki was unkind to her and to my concerns, but relented and checked she was OK. She was, I think. I did wonder what Mr Phillips would think about the scene I had wandered into and then out of a little later with a hangover, a scene that I knew I didn't want to wander into again...

It was progress, for sure, but I really did want to just eat an ice cream with nuts...

La Vie C'est Chouette, Quand on a une amourette

hobart paving


There are definitely parts of Tasmania that scare me - sloping roads leading to lost little towns where the intelligence quotient or lack there of can be strangely intimidating, which is a polite way of scaring they are terrifying and if you wander into a town you expect the piano player to stop like in the old westerns. The road out can be harded to find than the road in and you end up stuck there all night drunk and bewildered, sitting on the knee of some local you don't even know. The purchase of a can of Bundaberg rum from the wrong pub can become bothersome, and the locals seem mutually suspicious of anyone wandering through in a fancy white coat from London, although the words to describe said jacket are short and obviously sharp. To be honest, I wasn't enjoying myself in a little town yesterday. Not just for the rain, not just the impending dark and slushy mud, not just for the early morning isolation - standing in Mures car park, me and a few bewildered hungry seagulls, me listening to Goldfrapp, them foraging for chips that hadn't been cooked yet, a bogan couple pashing hungrily on one of the park benches - and fatigue that set in as soon as I gathered my thoughts in the morning. It's simply that I don't want to go to this town, but am forced to by a friendship which is becoming more tenuous by the day. I would share this concern with the more interested of the seagulls, but they only love me for my Lime chips which I'm scoffing down. In this particular town, they drink hard and long, they scrap and fight, they have rougher nights out than this genteel Kingston living boy can handle, but most of all as a blue sports car pulls up to my park bench - scattering the seagulls but scarcely bothering the voracious pashing duo who continue to over do it if you ask me, like the nightclub couple who are all hands while the girl stares at other guys, til you don't buy it anymore - it feels like the kind of engagement where the friendship is so tenuous, it feels like a work function. I wish I could be open about this, I wish I could run away, pull all the covers over my head and forget all about it, or just have a talk that involved the words stop and whinging in the direction of this particular friend, but alas, since the car is here, I get in and zoom of the direction of the function, head down, trapped by the Presets on the radio who chirp and sing away with carefree glee...

I've run away 1nce in my life - well 2wce if you count the time I said I hated my house and Mum put a coat on me and said I was free to live on my own, when I was, oh, 6ix - and didn't get very far. I ended up sitting alone on a hill just round the corner from my house in Scotland until my concerned father found me without really having to look too far. I've taken a lot of stick for it, Dad even calls me the fool on the hill, and I take it in good nature. Sadly I couldn't articulate at that age what was really bothering me about the bewildering Ayrshire town we had settled on, so the joke has kind of stuck, stupid idiot ran away and stopped around the corner. What I've never told him was the reason I had stopped was to see where the ice cream truck had stopped and then I just forgot to keep running, sitting down on the grass having completely lost all the fury I had built up in my desire for a raspberry ripple in a cup. I didn't ever fit in in Scotland, well I didn't think so, even though I developed a suitably bleak nihilistic attitude to life which suited my surroundings beautifully. My town was medium sized but a bit on the crumble even back then - I learned to fit in simply by saying everything was rubbish, and the fault of them bastard English, even if it was just the lack of raspberry ripples in cups. Truthfully, I never felt as though I could express an enthusiasm there, it wasn't the place for it. If you liked a girl, you kept it quiet or hoped that your exchange of grunts would be encoded as I really like you, please go out with me. Such were the confusing communication rules it took me 3hree weeks 1nce to work out I had a girlfriend once, something I certainly hadn't counted on when I turned up to school one day with a carefully painted egg for show and tell. I knew I had a girlfriend when she said my egg was crap with a little less mustard and venom than usual. No wonder I never quite managed to fit in - everything was confusing and un Penguinlike. Aside from the enigmatic goddess of the monkey bars, the lovely Pippa, everything was clear and straightforward and easy, but in Scotland, everything was bleak and harsh and jagged...and that's what I should have explained but I didn't know how to, so I shuffled off home without saying a word, while he laughed at my inability to formulate a plan for running away that didn't involve me sitting on the hill. When I got inside, I shut the door, confused, and didn't really feel much better, but I couldn't say why clearly and decisively - so I guess I did fit in after all. No wonder the raspberry ripple tasted good that night...

At the function, someone has brought their kid, since it's a visitation weekend. The kid is shy and picks fitfully at a bowl of Twisties on the table. I was meant to burn some CDs but my laptop is so useless it's like the Zac Efron of laptops, and the disc drive failed. With world weary resignation mein host sighs and rolls her eyes as if fatalism has come calling. It's only a CD I mutter, angry with myself that I even feel bad. Luckily the kid is having fun, doing a series of drawings with noticable flaws, like a pig with 9ine tails, or a house with a tiny door, but to criticise simply feels like carping. It's still much better than I can draw. The only A I ever got in art when from turning a rocket ship into a hippo...my mind is drawn to the television or anything that makes the day more convivial. The kid hasn't learned disappointment yet, and is so positively perky it's shaming. So I lighten up a bit, shut out the grumbling host, and eat toast and make bonhomie with relish. I'm still looking for the exit though, the easiest way out with no damage done. I get trapped and isolated and punished for my perkiness by being trapped in a go nowhere polite conversation about the relative merits of wearing a white jacket. Apparently it's good. I'm only saved when the croissants arrive and my conversational assailant is distracted just enough by the bready goodness for me to escape and bury my head in a newspaper. The kid I feel bad for - those visitation weekends must be rougher than the dip is on my throat. My dad lives round the corner from me and he has visitation rights to me - by which I mean him and Mum come to visit every so often with coconut roughs in a box, and they sit in the cupboard until the next day they visit. I'm pretty lucky in many ways, give or take a few changes of country and such like things. I think Pippa told me that once, I was a lucky kind of person, which was weird because I was eating a cheesy sandwich at the time and had a limp from where I'd strained my quad trying to get into the Burnie is becoming a city Olympics, but that's what she said, I was very lucky, and just the memory of it is enough to keep me sane as another bout of whinging eminates from the direction of the television while the kid continues to draw strange shapes with oblivious carefree disdain, which I can only hope to emulate...

As it turned out, no ones escape plan was particularly sophisticated - we just all left at the same time, sober as judges with disdain for our lack of drinking hardness and scattering to various parts of Hobart, in my case a small out of the way bar with horrible gaudy neon lighting and a cabaret stage with no one minding it, while I'm bombarded with txt msgs from mein host calling me soft for leaving early, although later I find out she was in a bar-room punch up and I feel quite relieved I got a lift home before the roads closed and things got a little out of hand. There's a flurry of activity on the stage, a fat roadie flittering around a keyboard the size of Jupiter, hitting the keys with his fat fingers while the gaudy neon signs pulsate and the clientele get edgy and plan their escape before Copacabana can possibly start up. There's some Maoris seated suspiciously around the males toilet who certainly aren't in the mood for any kind of cabaret based shenanigans. I'd spent the entire day in a sort of trance, a sort of polite daze of friendship fulfilment where no one says anything meaningful or honest, but hey, if they want truthful comment, I'll certainly join in if they start up some cheesy cabaret tunes at this time of night. I've never been good at plain speaking - unless I'm drunk and someone is tinkling on the piano. My phone hums with idle txt msgs sent across the wire with critical reviews of my ability as a friend and one from a girl I met a few weeks ago, which seems a lot more important. If ever there was a time for plain speaking, albeit in the form of an abbreviated string of pixels mashed into a phone, it'd be now, but I get distracted by the Maoris starting a fight, and it's only the next morning when I pull myself into the house that I finally am able to say what I want to say, and do it over the phone instead of via the medium of Samsung, that I finally get it right after a day, maybe a life, of trying, and then can finally go to bed and have a nonsensical dream about nothing in particular and trains off the tracks that even David Lynch would reject on the grounds of absurdity...

There was something about that Pippa you know...I don't know want to know what she's doing now...I prefer to remember her as always right...

Thinking of nothing all the time, when sometimes it's nothing but you

There's not much time in my life for genuine self reflection. 6ix days off provided plenty of vividly coloured dreams and pretty repetitive patterns that swirled around my head like cheap one night stands - they were incoherent, they meant nothing, they lacked any kind of depth, and if they threatened to, the noise outside my window of my next door neighbour Barry Tosser and his wolfy wolfhound would scramble the message, or some kind of perfect realisation would be lost because I had to jump out of bed in bare feet and call the carpet cleaner. There's at least a glimmer of a chance of self reflection this particular morning, standing outside a broken down ATM with money in my hand, waiting for a lift. Commuters are stabbing their mobile phones with boney icy fingers, but mines seemed superflous this morning and I left it on the shelf. 1ne of 2wo things would happen, either my lift would be on time or late, there was no need for a txt spk line of chat to confirm that. Mall rats of all kinds are swooping around of course, but they are doing it at the other end of the mall to me, down town rats with an ersatz air of sophistication you don't find in Kingston - the chords on their tracky daks are tied, and when they argue with their girlfriends, the fs to cs ratio is a little lower. A trained eye can tell. There's enough space and time for me to wonder exactly how I got here, standing at this exact spot blasting Ayria into my ears - and I know she doesn't feel the same about me as I do about her - at incredible decibels and threatening to lure the World of Warcraft geeks out of their Internet cafe through sheer noise power alone. My paper is of no value to me at all - sold to me by a man in a newsagents with a big woolly out of control beard letting the last of his morning coffee soak through his bloodstream before he even acknowledges the presence of customers, and coated in sleaze and trash from cover to cover regardless. And there I sit, feet up, nowhere to go, nothing to do, music blaring, arguments blaring - I think, although they look like the kind of couple who would f and c and curse each other affectionately because that's how they talk - and just me with a rare moment of perfect self awareness and peace. The cold wind blows the hat off a confused old man, and a girl in a black tracksuit turns away from the entrance of Subway, having seen something she doesn't like even beyond the horrendous glazed coating of the sandwich fillings. Never has a sandwich looked so plastic as it does in the hands of a passer by. A busker meanwhile, as a crucial moment of thought in my brain, a crucial decision just threatening to sprout and bloom, decides to launch into the 1st few bars of In The Air Tonight, a warm up tune. I shoot him my dirtiest possible look, but it's not especially threatening, and our war of attrition ends with me shuffling off uncomfortably, head down, as the old mans hat blows past me at an alarming speed, looping and swirling in the wind, coming to rest up against the window of a store, just waiting for the old man to realise the thing has even blown off his combover...

I used to know a girl called Audrey - she was a largeish girl with no real sense of irony. She disrupted an 18th being caught in a certain position with a boy, and yet she said I was a troublemaker because my pursuant of my Grade 12elve crush Kylie had been bothersome and immature. If we were friends, it was for reasons lost to time, although there was something achingly poignant about a drawing she did for us all one day, when she was out of favour, a suspiciously desperate attempt to curry favour with the masses through the use of textas. One day in Hobart mall, I was sitting cross legged on one of those green circular benches after the amassed passing of time and the lost years in which I shuffled around various car parks talking to kids under the guise of finding a job, and there she was, and she came up to me with a cupcake and gave me a big bosomy hug. This was bewildering to me, as I was a bit sleepy and wasn't really in the mood to process a conversation about my own name never mind be set upon by Huggy Bear. The word on the street was that she was really pleased to see me, and she had all kinds of questions lined up for me about what I was doing - and all I could think was how bad I felt accepting the cupcake and making conversation. I wish I could just have got up and walked away, but I didn't, and when she left I still had a bloody cupcake in my hand and a vague sense of unease that I couldn't get rid of. I'm probably a product of my upbringing, since I can't relax around people being nice to me - the Scottish way, where people aren't looking at you for nothing. The cupcake incidentally I handed to a bum, a man with a big bushy beard and a trenchcoat who was either appreciative about it or too drunk to tell a cupcake from a Corolla. I don't think there's any bums around this morning though - certainly I couldn't give out any cupcakes, the only person hovering in my airspace is a slightly senile man from the Reform Church handing out green leaflets. I turn Ayria up a bit louder to shut him out, but he leaves a leaflet next to me. It has the word joy on it in black texta, underlined and triple circled, and given the cold and the way the old man rather feebly fishes for his hat without ever quite managing to grasp it, I can only presume the Reform Church is doing a fine line in irony based leaflets these days...

We had last spoken many years before - I still couldn't grow a woolly bushy beard but I was immature enough to find that collection of words very funny. She had just ruined the party of course, in a flurry of pantsless activity, rude words, and policemen being called to calm down the jilted paramour, who was going off his nut and being held down by partygoers and the makers of ice sculptures alike. Audrey was hiding around the corner, sitting a patch of dew and weeds and, I wouldn't say guilt, she wasn't the guilty kind, more disappointment she got caught and she couldn't get a drink. There was a flurry of activity behind us as the jilted party began plans to jump off the roof in an overdramatic display of jiltedness - I mean, I had been jilted hours before, there was no rum at the party, and I didn't decide to test my wings. When I found Audrey, there wasn't much I could say or do - I think we had a conversation about the texture of Butter Menthols, but with the unspoken subtext that we probably couldn't ever have normal conversations again, given her soon to be outcast status within the judgemental town of Burnie, or at least the tiny subsection of it that we lived in. Maybe when I spoke to her in the mall that day I should have given her a Butter Menthol. The reform church man is doing a far better job of making polite conversation - he's struck up a conversation with some Germans who are genuinely interested in green texta ruined leaflets, or so it seems from afar. My shoes involuntarily lead me forward to a hypnotically enticing but ultimately disappointing sale of music stored onto discs, and my lift appears as lost to time and space as exactly what all those overly dramatic hyped high school conversations added up to in the end, all those horrible parties when all the girls sang Alanis songs around the flaming oil drums. Wherever I stand I'm in the way of someone, although I can't get out of the way of my own self reflective nostalgic shadow most of all. The man from the Reform Church certainly seems keen to offer help in texta to any lost souls, but when I notice he's wearing a horrific silver wig and flicking through the Bryan Adams CDs, I'm not sure I want to sign up for his particular joy...

The last time I saw Audrey, she tapped me on the shoulder, and said hello, then tried to sell me a CD, or something like that - at least she didn't give me a cupcake on the proviso I bought a Lady GaGa album - inside some horrific corporate record store somewhere in Tasmania. I feel like I'm a better person than I was in Grade 12elve - but that's a subjective call. My lift eventually arrives - I had begun to look homeless and lost to be honest standing around, and a perfectly pleasant young girl had begun to start a conversation with me about the poor quality of Hobart ATMS - frankly, she looked too young to feel so old. The old man got his hat, thankfully, after plenty of angst and awkwardness, and the man from the Reform church has gone to pluck victims from the depths of JBHifi, saving their souls from affordably priced Lily Allen CDs and XBoxs marked to go. The girl luckily finds herself an ATM that works, her hoop earrings glistening in the glimpse of sunlight as she visibly beams and throws me a thumbs up just because she has mastered the card vs slot interface, and a new cast of characters gathers around me as I get up and throw my empty bottle of RedEye in the bin. To be honest, that's how I feel about my school days - I wish Audrey well, I really do, I just feel like we left and a whole new cast of characters with too many tunes going round in their head replaced us. I wish I could run with a more impressive gait, but somethings just can't be changed. I know I run with a slightly gimpy idiotic manner, but I've got to balance my IPOD, wallet and green leaflet in my hands. I might put the leaflet on the fridge, add it to my scrapbook, and as the dying words of Avril Lavigne fade on the IPOD, my lift asks me what I've done with my morning, thankfully and politely not mentioning my running style. How can I sum it all up? What I was thinking about, what I was doing, what I'm thinking now, old men and hats and leaflets and nostalgia and the letting go of...

Oh hell, I'll just talk about the footy, it'll be easier...

High on a hill, heard a bird sing her song, said you were true, then she got it all wrong...

It was AFL Grand Final night 2001 it happened - the stamp on my hand told me that much. A pieced together but mostly forgettable night out. The kind of night where you wake up with a roughly stamped hand, a neon green nightclub stamp pressed into your skin and a sleeping bag and a rough approximation of where you are around yourself. For me, it's always guilt, I always worry if I did something wrong - through a bleary mid morning gaze I quickly check I'm not in any kind of holding cell. I saw a mate get arrested for public disorder once and he's never been the same. London doesn't care though - I'm on holiday in the UK, for no real reason other than it's there, and cheap, and suited and booted Cockneys are marching up and down the pavement oblivious to the noise they are making in my head. I'm not sure about which of my cousins many flavours of raw cereal picked by ethnic minorities I should eat first, or even if cereal is picked to be honest, and she's gone to work anyway, a kindly drawn note on the television underlined in green pen to make sure I see it. The pen is less neon than the stamp on my hand, and I pour some muesli into a bowl and chew it as some perky, non hungover morning television presenter in bright pastels is tut tutting about something, trying to restore normality to a post 9/11 world. I turn over one of my postcards to send to my best friend - although to be honest, in 2001, she's my only friend, through a series of circumstances each more grim than the last - and try and tell her my Geri Halliwell story in the limited space the cheeky Beefeater postcard will allow, and slump on the couch. Eventually once the pastels, muesli and neon font form a psychedellic garish barrier to all rational thought and my head stops feeling like a pavement down which men shoed like the Dave Clark 5ive are pounding endlessly, I'll realise I'm alone in a giant city to do whatever I want. What opportunities there are - the chance of a sleazy visit to an illicit house of ill repute, by which I obviously mean Burger King, the chance to see fine art, by which I mean disreputable claimes about Sharon on a mens room door...an entire world of possibility opened up in one 24our hour window...no rules...no limits...no...ah to hell with it, Ricki Lake is on, I'm staying indoors...

Her name was Samantha, or Suzie, or something like that. We met in one of those horrible Australian themed pubs people feel determined to take you to, where the barmen say Crikey and there's a Vegemite hour where all drinks are 1/2lf price and no one knows who Glenn Ridge is, but they wear corks in their hat anyway. She was dating a rugby player called Mike, a nice fellow at the bar trying to learn the intricacies of AFL from people while holding 12elve beers in his mighty hands. She was, like me, from Burnie, the sort of co-incidences you only find on these nights, although I had to prove myself, since I had a Scottish accent and was caught unaware and didn't have time to change back to normal. Damn holiday accents. I proved myself through some unavoidable reference knowledge - yes, I did sit at West Park Oval in the cold and dark of winter - and we shared amusing tales of missing trains and planes and all kinds of nonsense. She had long curly black hair and a weird shade of lipstick and was interested in what you had to say, in that kind of politician way where she would say everything was interesting when it plainly wasn't. I was gawky and awkward and made far too many of those kind of conversational bits where you end up having no real point and end up sounding like a bad stand up comedian going so, the price of groceries, what's up with that. Mike would habitually come over in his rugby shirt - the logo on it seemed, how would you say, flamboyant, but he was a nice guy, and he put his hand in the pocket as they say in my country, making sure the table was well stocked with drinks. They were getting married the next year, and their conversation was easy, light, fluffy, essentially meaningless and pointless but laced with enough Hallmark approved nicknames to be acceptable. My hard edges were on show though or at least the put on of some because I was not in love, and I must have looked uncomfortable or winced or done something at about the 27eventh mention of snookums, and she filed it away, and I knew she's filed it away because I saw her file it away, but I thought nothing of it until the muesli eating analysis of the night before the morning after, because as she filed it away, a drunk in the corner vomited and Mike had to be part of his escort out the door committee, and the last I saw of him was a pair of weird faux Adidas trainers kicking and scraping along the tiled floor as a barman said crikey like a South African, and to be honest, I was a tad distracted...

Mike, after a while, drifted off into a smoke filled room to play poker machines with rowdy Brisbane Lions fans, and my cousin, peripheral to the evening and the story as she was tuning some guy called Brad all night who had a Zapata moustache and weird faux Adidas trainers he got from a market owned by Del Boy, was long gone in a cab I think, so we were left alone, me and some chick from Burnie, as Oasis played on a jukebox and images from back home flashed up in vibrant sunshine coated colours on the TV screen. She had, so she said, worked at a supermarket the same as I had - her in the slightly more rock and roll the way she made it sound Farmers, me in the frankly vanilla and polka world of Coles, where aside from casual you working here tonight glances at the prostitutes when I got trollies, not much of any note happened. She told me a story about a customer who she really liked called Geoff, who had played football for Cooee, and used to work at Rettke Firearms in the Plaza Arcade for a while hoping no one would rob him, and how he made her laugh and all these different qualities he head. Geoff was a nice guy, and they went on a date once to some burger joint with a big 50tys jukebox, but she didn't like his laugh or the way he laughed at his own pun laden jokes, and so they never dated again, and when next she saw him it was awkward and stilted and she couldn't scan his groceries fast enough. She was as wistful about her superficial rejection of Geoff as I was wistful about my own doomed Grade 12elve rejection by Kylie - after all, we had spent the entire night of my 18th sitting in a rowboat in a Burnie park talking and she must have known I liked her...it was such a passionate conversation about regret and ennui, and all those other things that are supposed to make you stronger, as far conversationally from our starting point of hey remember that woman who worked in KMart with the googly eye what's up that as it was possible to get in 28ight beers, it was no surprise to me that eventually she got up to leave, asked me to follow her, and I did, rather suavely leaving Mike behind and slightly less suavely stepping right into a puddle...

Nothing happened of course, even without the puddling it wouldn't have, we just continued the conversation in other parts of London, walking around, stepping over drunks, drinking coffee in a bus station, taking pictures of weird people wandering about the streets, avoiding a TV set someone threw out the window at about 4our in the morning with a deft sidestep. We parted company inside a greasy spoon at about 6ix in the morning, the kind of place that offers for breakfast beans on beans on more beans, in a really dodgy part of London where a man in a tracksuit was setting a market stall that sold tracksuits just like the one he had on. She texted Mike mid mouthful of beans and we exchanged numbers but we never spoke again. I told her my Geri Halliwell story and she laughed and then a cab came and that was pretty much it. She said as she left she was going to ring Geoff, and I said I would try and find Kylie, but I never did, although I got as far as writing a letter to her once, but I never posted it. I hadn't expected a discussion as deep about the temporal nature of love and the pangs of nostalgia for a past I could never replicate when I sat down to watch Jason Akermanis run around a football field, but as I shuffled past the tracksuit stall seller and watched her drift away into the overly populated backdrop of suburbia, I realised I had up all night and got some things clear in my head - and I still don't know how I got home, just that I woke up with a renewed sense of purpose, a new tracksuit in a bag, and all the muesli I could eat. I never got to say thanks though, which is a shame...just by the door, there was a badly marked pair of faux Adidas shoes but I never found out if my cousin had cause to view the night differently me to me, but I rolled with it anyway, and spent so long lost in dislocated thought and head trauma that an entire day of my precious holiday was lost huddled on a couch with a sleeping bag around my shoulders, and a bowl of muesli that I never finished in my hands, as man, woman and child oblivious to any of my lessons learned walked idly up and down the road, full of their own cares and woes, but none of them anywhere near as still and relaxed as I was just to be so far from home, and yet have spent all night talking about Fitzgeralds...

How I made the most of the next day though, well, that's for another time...

I needed a break - I'm back now, but the world never ceased

Days off stuff with my head. Rituals are lost - the aimless wander around Big W replaced with an aimless wander around JBHifi picking up gadgets with a tutting old man grimace and concern about un-necessary purchases. Stubble replace cleanliness, although to my eternal discredit, I can't grow a beard - especially disquieting because my friend can get the full Lawrence Leung going after a day. The suit stays in the cupboard, routines set aside, aimless wandering around the house and silence replacing mid morning chaos. The rain bounces off the pavement in beautiful, predictable Hobart patterns, slightly bewildered tourists drinking lunch beers, tans coated from other states of Australia fading in an instant once they leave the Woolstore. At one end of Salamanca, unbeknown to me, there's a blocked sewerage pipe spewing out all kinds of trash and filth all over the pavement outside the Ball and Chain, while directly a man in black acid wash jeans is spewing out his own kind of crap - muscles flexed directly in the direction of our idle bogan barmaid, a short girl in glasses restraining herself from a tirade of industrial language by wandering away to fill in a chart on the wall any time the man in the black acid wash starts asking in a posh put on accent for imported beers from Belgium. Without looking up from her chart she says in her drawling voice that they serve Boags and Boags, and crestfallen he orders a Boags, putting his muscles back into his shirt as the frothy home grown beverage fills up his glass. There's a pretty girl sitting outside in the drizzle who's keeping him company, although her jumper is so nylony it's giving off sparks, although she doesn't look like she's living in any kind of powderkeg, probably off one of Daddys trust funds. She stares vacantly in the estimated direction of the sewerage spill, bored expression of idle contempt the only sign of life as she bashes the keypad of her phone, drizzle and nylon colliding in the middle of an otherwise remarkable day. A bouncer not yet on duty hops from foot to foot, pondering whether to work his remarkable 2wo grunt charm on her, before disappearing inside when he hears an ethnic minority is arking up behind the scenes. The nylon girl sits idly texting for an age, and never looks up for even a single second as the man in acid wash sits at her table and begins a diatribe about the beers. She travelled all the way to Hobart, and she didn't even get a lousy T-shirt, just a lousy travelling companion...

Fancy restaurants, even ones landlocked in the middle of otherwise average bars, stuff with my head. Mind you, this is only fancy in comparison to my usual eateries, my daily badinage with sandwich white female in the corporate bakery replaced by a middling impersonal conversation with a flighty blonde waitress, the sports and lounge section of the bar hamstrung by a lack of lighting, and a lack of sports, as no one seems to be crowding around making a rowdy lunchtime scene around a big screen episode of the Golden Girls. Such a waste of expensive HD investment when it's used to only illuminate Betty Whites bewildered old lady facial expressions. A kid in a pink babygrow is asking her Mum endlessly where chips come from, until the question is asked not in a quest for meaning by the end but simply as a acknowledgement that the old before her time weary mother is even listening and paying attention as she picks at her salad with nostalgic longing for her single days at Syrup. The kid eventually gives up potato snack line of questioning and turns in the direction of Betty White for more sage advice. The waitress herself is hamstrung by her own impatience and flightiness, a whirl of blonde curls and 3hree second charm, the pen not quite as fast as her desire to move on, charm another table with her store trained friendly banter. When she offers a wine list and it's rebuffed though, she takes it almost to heart, as if a personal insult has been inflicted. I feel almost honour bound to drink wine such is her hurt expression, and even the kid in the pink baby grow looks slightly embarrassed for us all. From somewhere deep in the kitchen, a Black Eyed Peas song tinkles in the background, and after an age, she heads in that direction, breaking the awkward silence with the click clack of her shoes. When the steak arrives, drenched in sauce, she's so eager, just fleetingly, for me to endorse it's saucy goodness, that I bite into a sauce covered prawn quite without thinking simply from the hypnosis caused by her pleading eyes, and she seems happy as she heads in the direction of Betty White, and because the girl in the baby grow is equally happy that her Mum has held up a chip and has finally got around to explaining the chippy process, I'm suddenly the only one not happy, because the sauce/prawn/beer/Peas/White/chips/why is the mother doing a Paul McCartney thumbs aloft mix has caused me to feel light headed, and the conversation I'm in is so far off beam, I'm going to have to take at least a second to tune back in to what is actually a quite interesting and intellectual discussion, or it would be, if the waitress wasn't peeking out from the door waiting for the moment she could check if all was well, pen clasped in perpetual nervousness...

Bars in Hobart in mid winter do my head in - there's no one around, it's cold, the sport is usually dull and by now I've exhausted all my conversational avenues of sport and music and what gimlet headed soap stars should really have done on nights out when they don't want to be found. I'm tired, but drinks are flowing, I'm trapped in the corner of a couch with no stains, and I'm not making sense. I'm entirely distracted by the hapless fate of a very large girl on the fringes of a friendship group who looks so funereal and mournful it's at odds with the dancing singing chipper cheerleaders gyrating over her head on some TV station from somewhere else, and by the girl 2wo tables down from me, who I believe to be putting on a Scottish accent. It's all consuming, the cadence of her sentence structure so jarring and off putting I feel like a demanding patriot just waiting to ask her questions and verify she isn't who she is claiming to be. I let it go, but it's bugging me, and I'm drumming my fingers off the edge of a table in tribal based impatience. How dare she pretend I think as my outrage roughly equates to the level of someone watching the ABC - although in fairness, my netball playing girlfriend in a moment of respite from our daily badinage of uncomplimentary silences and I did bond entirely over some long forgotten song, which we later found out be both hated but we'd just agreed to like because we were so apprehensive about making an early in the relationship faux pas we weren't honest about our true opinion of the song - and the Gin Blossoms never really recovered from our slight as it happened. So I let it slide, let the girl talk in her obviously forced accent, since if it gets her some action, who am I to criticise? My leg is asleep, it's not really adding much to the conversation anyway, and the large girl has long since disappeared, off to hang around the fringes of another conversation in another bar, and the night is winding down. There is a moment of perfect silence in the bar, the cheerleaders have ceased gyrations and an advert fills up the screen, the barmaids are idle, the men professing life long support for football teams off to nightclubs large and small - the girl at the table along from me chooses this moment to spit out a particular Scottish phrase which is so wrong and forced, I involuntarily spit out a swear word to no one in particular in a strong Ayrshire accent. No one hears, life resumes, but when I listen again, she sounds slightly more New Zealand and I swear she looks chastened...

I'm on the fringes myself of another conversation, something about TV or something, some nonsense, something without consequence or meaning. I don't know what day or night it is, holidays will do that for me, but not as much as alcohol. In the corner of the bar is an important man doing important things, in an important suit with an important bodyguard of massive size and intimidating shape - a sort of larger, more ginger Oddjob just standing at the bar sipping every so often, but not really moving, just bodyguarding through perfect intimidatory stillness. A girl has trapped me in a spiderwebbed conversation, about where I got my glasses of all things. I'm responding as best I could, something about standing on my glasses and breaking them and scrabbling around, something you talk about when you haven't figured out an answer, never mind an anecdote. The important man in the important suit is drinking an important drink and telling an important man from the mainland - you might know him - important things about important things. Their hand gestures have got me, important sweeping gestures about important decisions, large in scope, urgent and dramatic and self absorbed. In contrast, my conversation seems unimportant, mundane, so meaningless at the end of the day, and I'm not giving it my full attention. The important man in the important suit picks up his important Blackberry, and pushes important buttons. I don't have a Blackberry, and I try and break the cycle of glasses talk by moving onto the fascinating subjects of Blackberrys what are they like, but she won't be deterred from her looking good and seeing clearer obsession, and since she's on the arms of my glasses and what style they are - she fails to see the joke when I say army style - and I look up slightly wistfully at more important conversations, I look up to see the important man with the important blackberry has gone to get something important from his briefcase. As he scrambles for his important papers, his mainland counterpart has, without him noticing, made the sign for wanker behind his back, causing a momentary, brief glimmer of life to crack across Oddjobs ginger freckly face, and suddenly the important conversation seems to have all the meaning of a chat about the legs on a pair of glasses, and all of Hobart seems to have ground to a conversational halt...

And I wish the taxi driver would have joined in...