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...