Sunday, June 14, 2009

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...

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