Jack Frost nipping at your Internet Kiosk

Xmas, or as I call it hell on earth with Bing Crosby songs, is upon us. I'd like to say it's on the faces of people walking by, but all it's meant lately is more people wandering around slowly clutching bags and turning left when all indications are they should be turning right. The boxes in the book store are still all over the floor, although in a nice festive touch there was a 1/2lf eaten Xmas cookie on top of 1ne of them. I think parking is a major problem at Xmas. No wait, I know it is because a woman told me today even though our only established relationship had been to sit back to back with each other on 1ne of those mall couches so beloved of the infirm and elderly and the lazy and bewildered who need somewhere to sit down and read the latest antics of Brynne Gordon in a newspaper. I don't know what this woman expects me to say. She's got a veiny, ruddy face, which is scrunched up in festive anger - her cheeks are the colour of the fire engine that used to roll down the street in Penguin and spray the kids with water, which is ironic because she spits when she talks. Is that ironic? I hate mis-using the word, and my linguistic mental muddle is enough to keep me from fully engaging in the problems she faces making her car fit into a space. She trails off in the middle and turns her attention to a passing elderly gentleman, and he understands instinctively. He has a passionate response which seems to involve blaming David Bartlett for everything not nailed down. I leave them to it, having their mutual bitch fest outside of Big W. A young girl with a horrifically botched pony tail - and 1ne eye going to the shops while the other 1ne is coming home with the change - just stares at them. I think that's what she's staring at. It's so fantastically Deliverance to watch a skelly eyed youngster opening up Big W while 2wo old people have duelling bitches over the issue of car parking, I completely forget I'm supposed to be at brunch...and that's even before Rudolph the Red Nosed Reindeer soundtracks their moment in my eyesight, and I feel as though my human observation day is going to pan out so richly, I might just sit here, miss brunch, and maybe even miss flupper...

There's no getting away from the Xmas music wherever I go. The only break is a mild Lily Allen interlude, although since it's selling her needlessly repackaged album, I think even that's in the Xmas spirit - the spirit of tat flogging. Sorry Lils. Even the appointed venue for brunch has got into the Xmas spirit, if you call giving a bartender younger than the scotch a red nose the Xmas spirit. Poor girl has to keep pushing it back on every 5ive minutes when she isn't overburdened with steaks and chips. She's so young, I feel compelled to ask her for ID. I don't really, I suspect on this particular day she wouldn't laugh, and in fairness, she's not having the best of days, since a very large, very sweaty man has taken it upon himself to flirt with her in front of his friends. He's decided the best way to go is to stick out the gut Russ Hinze style and start a dialogue about his summer home in Queensland. His eyebrows are raised to the ceiling in perpetual animation, moving and twitching in time with his anecdote. He speaks in a thick pompous accent, letting his steak cool and congeal as he elaborates on the fabulous porch and the anecdotal evidence that he's a tosser gather for everyone to hear. She's frozen in a mix of pity and distraction, and to be honest, a need by the terms and conditions of her employment to wait for his drinks order. After a nervous tap of her pencil, she walks back to the kitchen while the man with the beergut chuckles uproariously at his wheeling and dealing, his fantastic ability to woo a lady. Sitting entirely in tight pants and self indulgent laughter, I wonder if he notices that a large and ugly slab of tomato sauce - so thick it would take your eye out - has slowly and utterly landed on his shirt. It's dribbling down, but he hasn't noticed, and is busy telling an ever bigger lie about some girl he picked up at Syrup...but she's noticed, and stands behind the bar with a big smile on her face as she stares entirely at the sauce stain, and points it out to a fellow waitress. And all is well with her world. A little too well of course, because no 1ne seems to want to bring me my toasted whatever the hell it was I ordered. Instead, I sat back, stuck in my own conversation about cloud computers or some such nonsense, emperilled to watch a clock spin around, maybe until the end of time...or the end of toasting, whatever comes sooner...

They've plonked an internet pay kiosk in the middle of the mall. Pasty faced youths were clamouring all over it today like prisoners would attack their last meal, lost unyielding souls in need of something to do between cursing out poor Sharon. I don't know who Sharon is, but the people at the bus stop really don't seem to like her. I wish that there was a stylish way to spend some of your lunch break sitting in the middle of a shopping mall with a gold coin Internet session entirely yours to enjoy, but needs be as the e-mail must. The kid next to me was entirely engaged in his session, failing to turn around when his Mum wanted him to take some perilously balanced yoghurt off his hands. He was an interesting fellow, long sleeved, stubbly and stubby, sort of Movemberish in a whispy sort of way, laughing in between long sessions of typing, clutching an entire six pack of Honey Banana Up and Go in his paw. Mans reduction from hunter and gatherer to Up and Go drinker has possibly been a disappointment to any would be but as yet unproven God and creator, but what have I hunted and gathered in my life - M&MS? DMCs? Bubble O Bills? His laugh is airless, and a woman in a pink overcoat tuts as she walks past, click clacking her heels on the ground in a show of disappointment that anyone would dare to make noises. She is so busy looking disapproving she almost bowls over a tinsel clad child pretending to be an airplane. Eventually the kid got up and left, kissing his fingers and pressing them to the screen. I presume he has an Internet girlfriend, such was his ardour towards to the screen when he wasn't engaged in reading the ingredients of his nutritious breakfast drink. When I walk past his screen though after he hasn't logged off, and left the little clock on the screen frowning as the time runs down, I can't help notice the picture in his little Internet chat window isn't a picture of him, but of a much better looking person with a much less patchy beard. I wonder if they'll ever meet, and why there's such over-use of the word schnookums. The person after him doesn't notice though, logging off and then engaging in a violent set to with the coin slot that ends with so many curse words, the kid who was pretending to be a airplane stops, asks his mother what a certain word means, and probably ruins any chance he has of getting of that Monopoly game in his Mums bag any time soon...

At dinner my friend tells me they closed Sirocco's, the big nightclub in Burnie, a relative term I suppose, but I wonder what people do up there now. I spent a Xmas there once, back against the wall in an empty warehouse while people I went to school with pashed each other to festive tunes. To say the night lacked opulance and decadance would be to undersell it. Some girl was sick on the DJ. Maybe it wasn't Xmas, maybe mobile disco style all he had brought was Xmas music in a crate filled with vinyl. A crate he later turned upside down and sat on in utter misery while a fight broke out around him, a fight between ho and ho and ho, somewhat fittingly. Such a fragmented moment in my life. I pick at my chips with fitful restlessness, aware that nightclub anecdote is wasted on my friend, a Sunday napping, DVD watching girl who never goes out and is well on her way to being crazy dog lady at some point in her future. I don't think I could sell her on a story about nightclub fights, it's clumsy of me to even try. Across from us a family sit in utter sullen silence. The dad stares at his pate as if he can turn it to ash through baleful staring, the mother is craning her neck to stare over her own shoulder out the window, a piece of chicken on her fork utterly unconsumed, a solitary piece of jewellery on her finger glinting in the fading sunlight, a terribly hair dye job rounding out her misery. The kid is gingery and freckly, trying to smile, but aware something is terribly wrong - he wants to talk about whatever piece of paper he has in his hand, thinks about it, then shoves it back in his pocked lest he melts the familial frost with some good news. They sit like that for an age, not eating, not really doing anything, just stabbing their food then refusing to eat it. My friend doesn't really notice - she's spied a state cricketer in the corner of the restaurant and is trying to flirt entirely through the flirty eating of a carrot and a raised eyebrow or 2wo. I at least get to enjoy some peace and quiet as I nibble at my chips, and let Paul McCartney sing me into a sort of late afternoon nap, while the family at the table across compete in a never ending staring contest with their meals that somehow seems to me to so authentically Xmas, I can only wish them the compliments of the season...

My own house hasn't got anything Xmassy up at all...a terrible Xmas album, but at least I can sleep peacefully without the rustle of tinsel...

Writing Exercise #2 - TAFE 2001 - Illuminations in Cherry

Neneh Cherry - Manchild
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I know where I was. I didn't know where I was going, but I know where I was. Passenger seat of that damned red car, several days, maybe even weeks, before it was smashed by a bread van that zigged when it should have zagged. I know what I would have been doing. The seatbelt would have been tight, it was always tight. Right up around my chin, it clicked into itself with a satisfying clunk, then proceeded to strangle me. Strangle me like my own increasing sense of failure. I would have been drinking Fruitopia, that weird mid 90tys iced tea drink with the inspirational hippy wording on the side - we drank that because no one told us to drink bottled water yet I think. Innovate. Challenge. Dream. That's what it would have said. In swirling letters. Bollocks to it. Not in Burnie we don't mate. Innovation? I've been kicked up the arse by the Toyworld Bear, you tell me who's dreaming hippy. It would have been hot - I can't say if it was hot enough that we got TV from Melbourne via fuzzy satellite imaging, just faint enough you could see Anke Huber in all her glory. Womens tennis players in the mid 90s, we took who we could get. I would have inevitably have some concocted scheme that would blow up in my face, some spun lie about Maths homework designed as if I was some kind of Del Boy of the Algebraic Market. I sold exam answers 1nce, don't tell anyone. I would be staring out the window as we drove into town, down the big hill, past West Park, past kids looking shifty or sometimes sticking their finger up at the car. A teacher did it 1nce, right in my face, standing at the lights, just flipped me the bird. He went missing later, it was on the 7:30 Report. We would only ever go to 2wo places on these trips - Coles or Indoor cricket. Ah, Indoor Cricket, what a failed and miserable chapter ye were. Played with horrible people - awful people, middle managers drunk on the last days of jobs for life, talking about their cars and their sex lives and their sex lives in cars...drunk before they played chinless wonders, how dare they fail to acknowledge my scratchy but valuable 12elve run contribution, all the while attractive Burnie middle climbing women hung around smoking and disparaging the lesbians on pitch 6ix. Maybe that's where I was going - I had a burst of enthusiasm for playing, but that was only because I had discovered that lazy conversational irony was easier to forge than anything meaningful. After all, 1ne simple mention of Neneh Cherry had allowed me to chat 1ne of the wives up for ages, without resorting to my usual nervy mid 90tys stock standard rubbish about the weather or what I would be when I grew up. Challenge. Innovate. Dream. Stuff that. Drop in something from the past, and let the good times roll I say. Shame what eventually happened to her - nasty business that failed perm. Still, all that was before me as I would have let the window roll down, and my mind wander over the football ground and out to sea, far, far away...

No wait, actually, I was going to the pool. Why was I going to the pool? Burnie Pool? Was the grafitti that said "Bad Dues" on there at that time, the 2nd D left off the same way chlorine was usually left off the pool attendants to do list? Why was I going to the pool? It'll come to me. Dad would have been driving. He wasn't to be fobbed off with Neneh Cherry references. He didn't even like Manchild. He was a poker and prodder, determined to know what I wanted to do with my life. Get out of this car and scratch out a quick few laps of the pool. Why was I going to the damned pool? I can't remember, it'll come to me. It was after work, he picked me up outside Maggies Bizarr. Or Bizarre. Or Bizar. Depends on how much paint Maggie had during a refurb. Initially Maggie was represented by an old gypsy lady on TV advertising, but they dropped her 1ne day to focus entirely on selling snowcones, and the shop lost a lot of lustre. He wouldn't have said much when he picked me up. He'd have asked how my day was, I'd have said good, and that would have that. It was an interesting time in our relationship. They felt - perhaps justifiably - that a lazy son lying on the floor doing nothing all day was perhaps a concern. Not much of a concern to me I must admit. I think on this particular day he was in a good mood, engaging in converation about Manchester United or something like that. Probably Mum had made a delicious meal of mince and tatties, and he was feeling good about life. He was a simple and honest man my Dad, a straight shooter, but I could deflect his probing simply by proclaiming Robbie Fowler a genius and watching him sort. Oh I was quite the evasive talker. Picking and choosing, that's all it took. I mostly remember Dad wouldn't mind if you cranked up the radio where as Mum would forbid it, saying it distracted her from driving. I still swear Mum hit a dog 1nce, right round the corner from her friends house. She denies it. I say sometimes she must have had the radio on. I know since Dad was driving the radio would have been turned up to 11even, but I wouldn't have understood that reference. Mum drove slower than Dad, and I had enough time to change into my Pakistani cricket jumper after work. Why Pakistan? Don't know, thought it was rebellious. Dad was swearing at a stray Volvo, he was always doing that swearing at Volvos and cars that were holding him up. 1ne day a guy chased him all the way home because Dad had tapped the horn and made an idiot gesture towards a Prius driver. Dad said he had raced home to get Mum, since Mum would have solved the problem and sorted the angry driver out. I could write a lot of words about Mum and Dads relationship, but somehow, that's all I ever need to say...my relationship with Dad, especially at the time, I sadly can't accurately sum up in such a simple short anecdote...best to talk about Robbie Fowler...

Why was I going to the pool? I really can't remember. Was it a date? Not with the pre bad perm wife? That's implausible even for me to believe. I know I didn't have friends - well I did, but I wasn't interested in talking to them. They were all high achievers, grade getters, sporting champions, nightclub hangers out. Apprehension was my enemy, I couldn't feel comfortable around people with plans. I wonder if I had told them about the Toyw...oh right, I had. I wish I knew then they were just louder than me, their lies more believable. Most of them were off their heads on drugs anyway, living in basements, studying with as much anxiety as any regular Joe. Who was good at conversational spinning after all? Maybe we were doing something for him, maybe we were picking something up. He was a teacher, what were we picking up from the pool? Why was he dropping me off then? Now I remember - I was getting fit for indoor cricket. It was a short lived phase, the sheer ick of public pools eventually got to me, and that's why Dad was in a good mood, he was happy I was doing something. It was our 6ix weeks of Blisstopia. Innovate. Challenge. Dream. Swim 6ix laps in a crappy pool and hope the girls don't laugh at how white you are and by the way mind that suspiciously coloured patch. I was eating an ice cream I think - a big chunky mint Cornetto - in the car so I suspect my commitment to getting fit was already waning. Coles in Burnie - it had such a culture of theft. You were supposed to get this little label put on what you bought so they knew you had purchased it legally, but no one cared. I never stole anything, I suspect they used it to fire you if they didn't like you, and I wasn't really the most popular member of staff. I had just had a blazing row with our Kathryn Harby a like night supervisor, something about tangellos or oranges - oh my woes with orange based fruit, will you ever end - in front of a customer. Had I been a better son, not only would I have offered him a bit of my honestly bought Cornetto, I probably would have articulated some of my fears and concerns to him in our car based travails, but it was too late for all that. We had, I've come to realise, the kind of relationship a cab driver has or had with a passenger. All he needed was a hefty flagfall rate and more right wing views, and that's all our relationship would have amounted to. At least he was proud of my newfound interest in swimming...

We never found out his name. We never found out if he lived or died. He was just sort of lying there, blocking the entrance to the pool. He didn't look well, I know that much. He looked a horrific colour, lying on the ground in a nylon tracksuit, just staring up at the sky while a crowd of ambulance chasers gathered around his wispy bearded face and gawped. There was an old woman in a cardigan, 1ne of those garish Jenny Kee numbers that died off in about 1986ix, she was doing some sort of oh the humanity over the top hand gestures, smacking her head over and over again like the Ayatollah had died. Our car was thus impounded by faux grievers, who had taken it on themselves to surround the collapser, although none of them seemed to be doing CPR or anything useful. Someone rather un-neccesarily tapped on our car and told us to give him some air. I failed to see how we were depriving him of air, while we minded our own business in some sort of hastily convened pool driveway, and certainly if someone has a bad toupee that keeps sliding off their head at every single point of their rant about giving someone some air, you better listen. I'm not sure anyone deserves to die, or certainly collapse, in the midst of a crowd of Burnie pool goers, some of them shrieking like wounded bears, others waving their arms around and trying to keep their syrup from falling in the pool and alarming children. All under a blue painted fence that said Bad Dues on it. We drove home, n swimming was done on that day, the rain fell on the ground, and if it was a date, she's still sitting there on the hill waiting for me. I'm sure I made some sort of attempted glib remark on the way home about kickboards just to try and lighten the mood - I'm absolutely obsessed with kickboards, they formed such a big part of my childhood - while Dad tried to be earnest about making sure each day was precious and to make the most of every opportunity. He would, I'm sure, have hung the keys up on our key rack, a piece of wood shaped like Tasmania his soccer team gave him, and tried to relate the death of a man to me not doing my maths homework. I'm sure I wouldn't have listened. The 2nd those keys hit the map of Tassie - matron - I would have been straight into my room, with nary a reflection on the fickle and temporal nature of life, but instead Anke Huber was probably playing Amanda Coetzer, and popular culture is and definitely was always a more interesting thing for me than big questions and big decisions...

There may have been innovation going on somewhere in Burnie that year, but it definitely wasn't going on in my house...

It's Xmas time in the city...in November

It's Xmas time already where I work. My desk is now officially covered in a designated amount of Xmas tree gingerbread biscuits, biscuits that sit idling in a green bowl until such time as the dieting worker will succumb to temptation. We haven't got to carols on the CD player yet, but we will, doubtless. There's an invitation on my computer to my works Xmas dinner, but no nightmare shall ever come close to being squeezed into an Indian restaurant - nothing says festivity like a curry I guess - in a party hat with people I see all day long. I've already got my excuse lined up, something about having to go to the airport, something like that, something no-one can really check. Feign illness and you can be caught pushing groceries around a supermarket. There's a horrifically Xmas themed advert on TV right now for an online dating service, cloyingly attempting to poke and prod at the lonely. I certainly won't be lonely, that's for sure - my house will be full over Xmas, full of transient visitors and aunties from home, only some of whom will require me to lock up my valuables. Curse having a house with space. Xmas has got to the girl at the hand lotion table. They've stuck her with antlers, and every day we share a mutual look of woe, although she might just want my Smoosh T-shirt. She has to work every day with a man happy and toothy - a man with curly frizzy hair and a core of values from a self help book. He tries to flirt with every woman that passes, while she sits idling at the cash register, flicking through a magazine, surviving another dreary day. When they first pressed themselves into the mall, he was trying desperately to get her motivated, but he's long since given up and now they only talk in short 1ne word sentences. He's started adding Xmas themed words to his greetings, or at least he did until a woman in a heavy blue coat struggling with her groceries responded with 2wo well chosen swear words. He's been much less bouyant since, chastened and less likely to stand with hands on hip eyeing middle aged women to swoop and lotion, but she's been smiling and glowing, even with the antlers on. She's barely turned the page on her story about Nicole Kidman all week, and sits at her desk in a perpetual glow, smiling and nodding in his direction every time I pass. I smile back, but not too vigorously. She might be setting me up for a hand lotion demonstration. You can never be too careful...

Fitfully making it through the Xmas rush has become my annual event. That and weeding and guttering on the weekend before I get invaded. In Big W they've narrowed the aisles for Xmas, packing much more junk in, with the side effect that you can't walk anywhere bar some horrific pile of bogans stampede you to get near the new release of Nobleism. They've cranked up the Xmas music as well, to ear splitting levels, levels at which you can only form some sort of Reiseresque routine about Xmas music because all other thoughts are drowned out by Crosbyism. Panda Eyed girl has responded to the changes by wandering around saying everything is shit, although conversely she hasn't stopped smiling for weeks on end, an evil smile with thin lips and silver lip gloss to the fore. I try and think for a moment about, oh I don't know, the last Xmas I enjoyed, try and work out exactly what I'm such a miserable bastard every December, and how maybe it's just because of that Xmas in Scotland where I had to care for the elderly and sat in a pile of snow while my friends had all moved on. Maybe that's it, or I'm just a miserable bastard. Panda Eyed Girl is poking and prodding the packaging of a wrestling figure and calling it flimsy. I feel as though she was doing this last year, and the deja vu is striking. Time keeps on passing I guess. There's a kid in a South African cricket top doing zig zags in front of me, until I have to stop because the temptation to boot him up the arse is driving me insane. I used to be like when I lived in Penguin, I used to sprint and zig zag everywhere. 1ne day I was just sprinting in the middle of the road, and a kid was running in the other direction. It was Penguin, so it's not like there was any cars. As I ran past the kid, he said Penguin was just like Workington. I can neither confirm or deny that. I don't think this kid was likely to come up with anything profound. He was just running directly in blind zigs unsupervised. Eventually he plows directly into a pile of unsold Ray Martin books, and falls down on the ground hurt with some tinsel on his head, and a Ray Martin book on his leg. He lies on the ground for so long, staff rush from everywhere to help him, but his parents are completely unseen and unsighted. Panda Eyed Girl looks interested for the briefest moments, then returns to her rant about the wrestling figure, before swishing off to find something else to complain about. The kids parents meanwhile emerge and pick him up without even looking, propping him up under both arms while casually keeping up a conversation about crazy paving. Somehow, it really does feel Xmas...

We never make it to end of 1ne year from the previous year without at least 1ne farewell dinner. They all pile up to an inconsequential series of nights out, the same speeches, the same ill thought out gift and same card thrown in the bottom of a drawer. This card was baffling - that's all I took out of the whole evening. No one could figure it out, all it had was a woman in a bath on the front. I think it was supposed to signify relaxation in retirement, but it looked strange and ill thought it. I became concerned for this person that they had worked here for so long without making a single impression, until on their final day they got something that made no sense because no one could remember what they liked, but if I expressed that thought, it was only in a desire for them to hurry up with the mint ice cream. In an adjoining room, a much more upbeat party was in full swing - people in suits singing Xmas songs on karaoke under flickering lights while some1ne walked past our gathering with a stuffed reindeer under his arm. I was uncommunicative and sullen I must admit, the most peripheral figure in what was a solemn ocassion. No-one wants to go to work functions anymore, they don't have the time, and the ice-cream has a prohibitive cost. At the end of our table, 1ne of our younger, perkier and drunker members of staff is pontificating between nights out at Syrup about how her friend would be perfect for me. Such things bounce off me now, as my friend would be perfect for you seems to be code these days for my friend has a lawn she needs mowing or hasn't been out to dinner for a while because she's poor. It's only when she says her friends has a collection of Care Bears and cheerfully describes them as "vintage toys" that I even flicker. Vintage toys? It makes them sound like antique cup and ball games or something carved out of wood by a blacksmith. Time is passing. Too quickly. And I'm sitting around eating mint ice-cream. She doesn't realise she's just made me feel old, and continues blythely onwards without even stopping. The reindeer ends up sitting propped up outside the bar, unloved and unlamented, and the karaoke party ends up in a swinging and violent fistfight, apparently because someone wanted to Parton and got Rogers. They are thrown out past some wealthy dowagers sitting picking fitfully at a rotating shelf of chocolates and saying things like I never. I leave early, pretty much as soon as I've devoured the last piece of my mint ice cream. 1ne day this will be me, making the platitude speech, getting the platitude card, glibly annotated onto the end of some new employees welcome to work speech. When I step outside to get my taxi home, something brushes up against my foot, and it's only after trying to shake it off I realise it's the card the departee was given, thrown away as soon as they had left the building. To think, I came for the pistachio, and ended up with poignancy...and feeling about 100ed years old...

The card disappears down the gutter and vanishes, and since there's no cabs around, and it's probably the right time to get a talkative cab driver bemoaning the state of the nation anyway, I wander into a bar, somewhere that used to be my local, just to kill time, just I don't have to watch my terrible football team embarrass themselves again in living colour. There's no-one around in the entire bar, the barstaff discussing ethics in sport with the passion of those who can never change anything but think they can, except for a girl with a badly tattooed arm - the kind that looks unfinished and drawn by a hypnotised and dizzy 3rd grader - draping herself drunkenly over a man in a Nirvana flannel shirt. The man barely looks up from Guinness, his face cracked and craggy, like a road map of a thousand nights out. The band try and crank up some enthusiasm, running through their standard routine of Powderfinger covers in terrible warm up fashion. The beer is flat, but it kills time, time until something else happens, no better way to describe these nights. The girl, I realise about 1/2lf way through my 3hrd sip, used to work at Coles. She looked a lot more lively at Coles - she was our Xmas funshine girl, the kind who brought antlers in a box and planned outings I never went to because I couldn't be bothered. Or wasn't invited. I can't remember which. She used to always sell raffle tickets and hum happy tunes. Now she just looks exhausted. Her man is practically asleep, practically resting his head on a phalanx of Keno pencils and beer mats. I'd suggest she add antlers to her outfit, but it wouldn't go with the ennui. Everything just takes like mint ice-cream, even the beer, so my stay is short and pointless. I get up to leave, at which point a voice in the corner says didn't you used to sell oranges? Given anything else is likely to confuse and befuddle her sleepy little head, I shrug, say maybe, and leave the band still lost and running. When I turn around, both the girl and the man are fast asleep on the table, about 6ix seconds away from being thrown out by a grumpy Samoan bouncer. I've been there, I've seen that, I've been barred for wearing the T-shirt. There's a weekend to fill in yet, before the circus of my worklife continues to roll on for another week...

Time, as they say, continues to pass...

1nce, 2wce, 3hree, 4our, 5ive, 6ix, 7even times A September...

It's a hot afternoon in Melbourne. I've drank all the water the liberal bag checkers on Virgin blue have allowed me to carry on, I've worn the battery out of my IPOD and read my football clubs sanctioned account of their latest miserable failure - I've wandered and ambled around an airport terminal until a suitable time for me to leave has passed, and been faintly embarrassed as a minor celebrity has passed her own time in the airport by throwing a ridiculous hissy fit about Subway sandwiches. I briefly think about taking a picture, but there's no value on it, much like eating the sandwich. I'm now in a taxi with a portly Indian cab driver. I've shown him a grubby piece of paper with an address on it, and I've got nothing more to say other than short grunts and nods of direction. To compensate, he puts the acoustic version of Cry For You by September on 7even times in a row on CD repeat, and taps the steering wheel in tune each time with pudgy fingers it comes on as if it's a surprise to him. For all I know that's all he does all day, drive around, not finding where he's supposed to go, letting the sweat stains accumulate on his work shirt while he plays Cry For You for tourists in the hope of creating a convivial atmosphere. He certainly seems happy enough, but I'm relieved I never have to hear the song again by the time he dumps me seemingly miles away from my destination. I'm outside a hospital, forced to ask a scrunchy faced freckly intern for directions. She's helpful, then returns to her Sudoku, her face even more scrunched as she clicks her pen in a frantic motion. Later, I see her out and about free from such cubicle puzzle based restrictions, throwing such strangely odd shapes on the dancefloor her face unscrunches and she almost tears a hamstring. I try and tell my dancing companion about my interest in co-incidence, the strange way in a city of millions I've seen the same person 2wice in a matter of hours but she's not listening. She's not an intellectual, she's not bothered by the notions that I am, the random nature of the universe, just things that are shiny, things that are basic and simple - beats, rings, how some drinks are like so expensive. That's fine, it's not the night for universal discourse. I can't help feeling though she should meet the taxi driver, I could see them together some how, just never letting a thought enter their heads, just eternally listening to September over and over again until the end of time. She asks me what I'm thinking about, eyes gleaming between songs, but I can't articulate fully, and unless I could display it in interpretative dance, she'd get bored with it anyway. So, I simply queue up to get some more drinks, because truthfully, this is my thinking out loud outlet - the rest of the time, I'm as confused as the DJ was when The Vengaboys came on 3hree songs too early, and his entire night seems ruined by a moment of disappointment, his face never 1nce recovering it's early poise, bounce and hope...

I'm weighed down by the eternal notion I can tell when people I'm staying with have had enough of me I should say. I blame my mother. She used to load me up with so many things to worry about any time I stay with someone - from the time I was a kid -I can never really relax. I'm staying with my cousin, 1ne of those people who's link to me through routes of adoption, through quirks of fate and the fickle way someone in Asia picked a particular baby out of a particular cot because Mums sister was their on a particular day are not as thought about as often as they could. I think by day 3hree of my visit, she's had enough of me. I can't be certain about that, but I think so anyway. I at least get a toasted sandwich out of my visit, and am able to pass on several impressive nuggets of popular culture I've gleamed during my time on earth. I can't help but feel as though somehow I'm cramping her style. Maybe I'm being unfair. It's still best to move on though so she can do something more glamourous with her day. There's a bewildering tram junction outside her house, and a mysteriously glamorous but sad looking woman in the pool at her block of flats just swimming up and down all day as if she stops she'll cease to exist. I would ask my cousin, but I've probably exhausted my conversational stock. My cousins flat mate I never see due to poorly matched schedules. He seems to love photos of himself, they adorn the assigned spaces on the wall he owns, the kind of accumulated memories males like to assign themselves. Pubs, cricket, arms around minor celebrities with startled uncomfortable expressions. My cousin has no wall, no photos up, just a Gossip Girl DVD on the table in a sea of cricket books, and a mug on the balcony. Other than that, there's no real evidence she lives here. Maybe she is never here, and I've stuck her inside for a while, and if I had anything to say, I should say it now, should perhaps be a bit deeper in conversation, but I'm too tired. I came, I saw the thing I wanted to see, we had a drink, and it's as far as it can ever go. The lady in the swimming pool shakes all the water from herself and looks utterly morose as she ploughs back into the pool. I have so many questions, and somehow no inclination to ask them. I've mentally checked out, and I don't even realise it. Maybe somehow in 2010 I'll connect with all these dotted around cousins, ask them about their skating trophies, their sexy but depressed looking neighbours, their lack of personal effects inside their own house...maybe...or maybe it's just too late, and I should stick to Lady GaGa talk...it's too much for 1ne backpack lugging tired male in a BK Hacken top to work out on 1ne tram ride...

I'm in some pub by now anyway, by the time my brain works again, some strangely lit pub that uses it's big screens to advertise chicken parmas that look about 8eight foot tall and a strange mix of weird colours on a TV that should be showing rock bands or what the other TV screen in showing, a sporting star on the other side of the world looking disconsolate on the sidelines, having long ago given up on his own team. I'm between friends, 1ne having had to go back to work, the other held up by inefficient hotel standards. The sports star never recovers, looking on the sidelines like he's just been seduced by the giant chicken parma ad and been sorely disappointed. Time is moving very slowly between sparsely sipped drinks, the price prohibitive, the heat discouraging further exploration of other spaces. Most of the conversation is, like my first friends, faux ambitious, dreams, unclosed business deals, secretaries hot for their bosses, men in suits who turn playing on the same course as Tiger Woods 6ix weeks apart into some kind of personal meeting and endorsement from the apparently great man. Women, I suspect, are tolerated in this place, perhaps a table accoutrement stuck up the end, rarely prodded into conversational action while the men break bread. At the next table over from me sits 1ne such girl - she's got a stripey green top on and says nothing for almost an hour while the 2wo guys she is with talk endlessly about their work and their colleagues, and even when she leaves her farewell acknowledgement is clipped and cold, an irritant to the conversational flow. It only dawns on me later that the first guy, a sort of Robson Green a like with a flimsy November moustache, seems to be downplaying all of the office staff and over emphasising their personal flaws if the 2nd guy, a metrosexual in jarringly bright denim, talks them up as a potential girlfriend, and begins telling the 2nd guy without fail how he can do a lot better. It begins to dawn on me after a while the 1st guy is really into the 2nd guy, and is keen to just sit and talk and gaze into his eyes. I wonder if the 2nd guy will ever realise, maybe he likes the attention. Their world is only on show for a moment though - they leave discussing Glee, and their replacement family are as bland and boring as the 10en dollar pizza deal, and never for a second speak, but chew silently and quietly as a parade of Finn brothers replace the Chicken Parma on the big screen, while the sports star sits with his unchanged expression, only moving when the aggressively blonde barmaid decides it's time for the suits to see golf...

A day passes, a night passes, an entire Xmas parade passes before my eyes. I lock eyes with a man in a historical recreation outfit who looks like he's about to die in the heat, a man clearly uncomfortable his passion to dress like a gold miner has been hijacked by corporate stores who employ large men with big megaphones. He disappears from view when a Tweenie leaps in front of him to steal the spotlight and wave frantically to the crowd, while a Japanese man behind me tramples over small children to take a picture. He has a T-shirt which just says AWESOME DAD on it in large black letters, in an eye wateringly large fault. He doesn't seem to have kids with him though, if he did it would probably be bitterly ironic anyway because I think he'd stand of their heads just to get up close and personal with a Tweenie. I immediately become like him though, since I'm in big city mode, pushing grandmas out of the way because if I don't, I'll be trampled, I'll be swallowed up and that book that I've ordered will sit in some1nes pigeon hole forever. I don't feel especially fit, and I'm feeling sorry for myself, damned hay fever, and why did no-1ne appreciate my new Sierra Leone top? I mean I bought it specially. Philistines. There's people all around me, bumping into me, or I'm bumping into them, I can't quite tell. A Myer spruiker heads directly for me with a microphone, I think to ask me for the crowds amusement what I think of the parade, but I sidestep him with a deft swerve, and he's left fumbling in dead air. I think he had to ask the Japanese guy a series of stilted and awkward questions instead, I didn't really have time to work it all out. Meanwhile, outside an abandoned looking cafe, a homeless woman with grey straggly hair in a filthy blue and black tracksuit can't get up in the heat - she just lies in the doorway while a series of corporate messages and floats walk or drift straight past her. I know I feel completely uncomfortable when 1ne of the Tweenies casually waves in her direction, but I don't really have time to register how I feel. It's been that kind of weekend. Things happen, then apace it all changes, and thoughts only register much later, it's too hot, it's not my city, she wasn't that interested, she was too interested, the story was too long, too short, not punchy enough. And now it's all over, and I've ended up nose to jaw with a Tweenie, hand extended for a hi-5. What the hell, come here tiger. There's kids watching, and I'm part of some kind of experience, but I don't know what. I can't make sense of it all. The homeless woman slumps back in her alleyway, the Japanese man has moved on, and Melbourne won't mind if I quietly and subtly move on, back to Hobart, where what I do counts for something, if only because there's people registering my movements. Carefree time is over. Back to work. Maybe 1ne odd regret, but nothing to write home about...txt msgs can always be deleted, can't they?

You'll never see me again...and now who's gonna cry for you...over and over and over again...until the end of time...

My Mama always says to keep your head up, even at casinos

I wish I could get this song out of my head, it hums and rotates in my brain, and I don't know what it is. It's making me scowl in an oasis of cheerful faces, and I'm standing out, not just for my swanky haircut. Good intentions are floating around the pub like the chunky waitress with the tray of ordives, that's for sure, and even she's in a good mood, mostly because she's stealing an olive or 2wo off the plate when she thinks no-one is looking. I'm sitting waiting for a taxi on another 1ne of those horrendously wasted nights that pile up, 1ne of those horribly promising days off where the heat shimmers and everything seems promising. There's a small blonde girl all but standing on the table in excitement, loudly proclaiming in a screechy voice that this night will be the greatest night ever. Her companion rolls her eyes as if she says this all the time and begins colouring in the teeth of Zara Phillips with a handily placed pencil. Outside, there's a sound that sounds like someone vomiting on the pavement, but no-one wants to look, in case such a horrible event takes away the bad vibes. No one wants to be the old guy in the pub, but I think I would be anyway, by default, even if I was wearing braces and wasn't allowed to watch the original Batman movie. The good vibes in the pub extend to casual enforcement of the ID rule when it comes to buying shots. The girl leading the party cheerleading has her hair entirely in line with the Lady GaGa template, stiff and blonde and wig like, and she slams her glass down with her tiny fist, in a 2ndry plea for support to her thesis that this is going to be a good night. Her glass almost smashes on the table, her eyes and mouth certainly don't seem to be cased in good vibes, and for an awkward moment the clunk of glass on table has made everyone stare at her to see what she does next. Sensing everyone staring at her, Lady Tantrum takes a tiny slice of brie from the plate, and sits back down like a naughty child, while her colouring in friend calls her a nasty name without ever looking up from her from her descration of royalty. Although there's another 1/2lf an hour I sit in that pub, nothing quite gets back to the heady heights of when I first got there, the joy and good feeling is all gone, even newcomers can feel it, and to top it all off, a bouncer looms into view, causing people to scatter like poppy seeds in the wind or winos hearing a police siren...

There's a trendy left wing slightly opinionated comedian sitting on the pavement outside 1ne of our hotels when I walk around Hobart looking for a cab. He looks at me hopefully and earnestly, perhaps in expectation that I'll ask for an autograph or want to hear the 1ne about Kevin Rudd, but I preferred his old comedy partner, and I'm reading something about basketball anyway. He looks down a little sadly at his own reading material, a bright thick orange novel of the kind rapacious students carry around in their 3hrd year at uni to impress nervy young out of towners. It's thick, sure, but there's only about 2wo pages actually flicked. For a moment, we're the only people around, and for whatever reason I feel almost obliged to make conversation, but am saved by his driver appearing like an apparition, a man who glides in a positively camp way, keeps his suit entirely pressed even in strong heat and opens car doors without even glancing away from his own shoes. The earnest comedian tries to strike up some basic conversation, but is dismissed relatively early on, and returns to his novel a forlorn figure. The car pulls away at a fantastic speed, just as 2wo girls in low cut tops come up clutching autograph books and asking if they were too late and missed him. He just couldn't catch a break the poor guy. Hope his novel was good. Not that the girls are too concerned, within seconds they've launched into a conversational diatribe about what happened to the cardboard standee of the Bundaberg Rum bear in the window of the old Gas Centre building. Their conversation is somehow coded, as if they are feeling nostalgic, but I don't think they deserve the right to be nostalgic. I'm sitting wearing a retro soccer top, but I bought it when it wasn't retro, it was BNIB as they say in the trade. I want to curse them for feeling nostalgic when they don't look old enough to even get into Syrup, but it's just too damn hot. A man meanwhile in spite of the heat walks past in a full business suit and sweaty shirt, a man the size of a small bungalow dragging along his small Asian girlfriend by the hand, while the poor girl lags along behind carrying umpteen cans of V. We all watch them go past, hope we haven't witnessed some sort of kidnapping, and then go back to our own private thoughts, theirs about cardboard, mine about how long it will take to get the Liverpool manager not just sacked, but publically flogged...

It's mid afternoon in Hobart. On the pavement, several wounded bogans limp along in the heat, their black Motley Crue T-shirts attracting heat the same way they attract a dole cheque. It is hot though, everyone feels it. My taxi driver hasn't added it to his list of gripes, but I'm sure he still will. He's got a long list of them that he can unspool with only a tenuous link to the subject. He's already seen off women, immigrants, female immigrants, other taxi drivers and women again, not realising like an aging slightly grizzled and forgetful insult comic he's doubled back on his own material. I'm dying to ask if anyone is in from out of town, but he wouldn't get it. Mostly, he hates driving taxis. I find this curious, this unburdening to me as I sit idly fiddling with my IPOD, a sort of reverse confessional that his passion for the work has faded over time, in line with the increase in his waste band and his growing likeness to someone who could have stood side stage for The Allman Brothers and punched anyone who dared to get too close to Jeff. I wish I was more dis-interested, but I find the aging process strangely curious at the moment, a sort of pallid fascination as I try and pinpoint the exact moment too much driving around listening to Lady Gaga on the radio, too much drunken exposure. Even more curiously, the driver has a fading gold star for customer service on his licence, 1ne that doesn't seemed gimmicked like my trophy slash crystal decanter style thing they would have given away on Sale as a consolation prize that I won many years ago for something or other at work. He loses his rumination though in a flood of egg sandwich, traffic light problems and some kind of rant about immigration far too long winded and xenophobic to even begin deciphering, and I lose interest in finding out anymore about him. I eventually dis-embark from his taxi at the casino with 1ne last bitch in my ear, something about pensioners gambling at all hours of the day and night. As he says it, someone I know has no money lurches and limps down the doorway of the casion in a charity shop piece of casual knitwear, clutching enough coins to do a years worth of laundry at an 80tys style launderette with enough change left over to fit in a cheeky game of Pacman. It's too late for agreement with the taxi driver by then anyway, for I realise I've sat in this taxi wearing a Glasgow Celtic soccer top, and at some point, he surely took against me as a foreigner, and was simply padding out the fare before he could pit his wrath against me to the next customer, an old woman who just craves the chance to go boat people I'd say...

By the time I head home, it's midnight. The last rum has been drunk, the last pointless post modern sub ironic comments on Super Grover passed, the girl on the floor of the casino has deflected the chat up lines of drunken idiots - not me this time - and I'm in a taxi rank behind 2wo old dears. Both have on large swanky coats, and are both smiling amiably. They both gently smell of gin, and good cheer. They are mildly complaining about something, but not in a nasty or vicious way. After a while waiting for a taxi that seems to never be coming, no matter how many times the man with the wig who works for the casino blows his whistle or officiously talks into a walkie talkie - which just brings back memories of being horribly ripped off on walkie talkies at a young age - the 1st woman, a sort of Rue McClanahan a like with a more wrinkly face, begins a tale about her son who lives in her basement. I've never lived in a basement, apart from a week I was supposed to be hanging out staying with 1ne of my friends and never made it out of his basement because I played C64 soccer against his sister all week. I'd like to rent a loft...Rue thinks that her son is some kind of desperate eternal batchelor, the kind who'll sit on the Internet typing all weekend and never go out and find a girlfriend like that nice Brad Pitt. She hates Facebook, she clucks her teeth when she says the word, as if it's a dirty swearing thing. The 2nd woman, smaller, older, more covered in make up, smaller, but more lady like and dignifed, head high in the air, listens to every word of this little rant. She pauses, looks up at a star, and says to the 1st woman she should be glad her son is around to be a batchelor. The 1st woman stops, puts a consoling arm around her friend, and they both get in a taxi while the man with the walkie talkie self importantly berates the taxi driver with swishes of his non verbal communication for keeping the ladies waiting. I'd tell him a late taxi seems to tbe the least of their problems, but he's got me a cab at the same time, and another night on the road to the end of the decade is over, and I've got Girls Can't Catch on the IPOD, and another pointless journey to make just to get to bed...

Which I do, after a lot of fumbling with the stupid key....

The Budgie and The Bitter

It's Midday in a windowless office. There sits on a desk an idling winning Melbourne Cup ticket with unclaimed cash the prize for correctly being able to deal with the local TOTE grump, a fat man with glasses and folded arms cursing having to do any kind of work. He was the kind of man who pines for the weekends, joyless, friendless, a man bound in a corner forever smelling stale beer on the breath of punters and perhaps upset by the desperate nature of betting. Perhaps I'm being too poetic, he might just have been a prick. Vanessa Amorosi is belting out some affirmitive but ultimately bland and forgettable pop on the radio, and I'm reading a story on an online newspaper about some hapless duo that stole luggage off a carousel time and time again. I'm also humming the theme song to Shirls Neighbourhood like some sort of unseemly mantra as a viral video someone sent me embeds itself into my head. I work with an uncaged budgie, a tweeting flapping unseemly overly nervous parrot who has to fill every single space in the day with conversation, inanity and upbeat observations without the clarity or wit to become a fully fledged sentence. Escape seems to be quite impossible, so I'm writing what no doubt most people who aren't peering over my shoulder is some kind of office based memorandum, but is in fact this very piece of writing. Is that post modern? Or just lazy? I haven't decided. I'm nursing a headache anyway - the parrot by the way got herself into such a tizz yesterday that her horse was running in the Melbourne cup she gave herself a stomach ache and almost passed out - because I'm angry at someone, someone who should know better than to send e-mails proclaiming themselves to be more mature than they are. I mean, what's the point of sending speculative I'm far too mature to be drinking with you e-mails to people when in your past you dressed like a reject from the Matrix and passed out topless in a Burnie rock climbing club drunk at about 6ix in the evening 1ne night? The parrot files her nails and begins a story about her weekend trip to Deloraine. She thinks I'm listening, but I'm not. I've picked up her conversational cadence. In fact I don't even need to listen. Simply through patterns, I can pick up by now when to say yes, when to say no, and when to say that must have been nice. I can do it with my eyes closed. Instead I'm watching an incredibly evil parking meter attendant chalk everyones tyres. I like to think his eyes meet mine as I watch him and he shoots me an apologetic glance as he walks, a sort of I've got to make an honest living guvnor shrug of the shoulders, but it might be a trick of the light, and I lose track of following him mid bite of a Subway sandwich, and mid saying that must have been nice for the 8th time in a minute...

There's a family outside the window who have dressed their barely old enough to walk child in an outfit that very Fonziesque. I can only imagine that they are tormenting the poor child, sticking him in a leather jacket and white T-shirt and making him walk around with his thumbs up. Outside Subway there's a very large girl I used to work with - with an unprintable reason for hating Santa Claus - devouring and munching on the biggest sandwich Subway can provide. She's probably on her mobile phone. She used to do that, get her mobile phone out in the middle of the day to ask her boyfriend if he loved her. I got the impression he mostly said no, and her day would spiral out of control until she was sobbing in the car park or throwing sushi on the ground. It was best not to pry though. Time is moving slowly anyway. The Fonzie Kid has found a lump of dirt on the ground and thinks it's a treat, but his parents are too busy arguing to even notice the completion of the mouth and dirt transaction. I can't hear what they are arguing about, but the gesticulations are not very lady like. She's got two major assets the mother, the ability to slide her bogan self into size 0ero costumes, and gesticulating hands that make it clear when she's annoyed. I can tell from experience he's not really listening, because our expressions match at the present time. Only I'm not being told off, just being told of part 2wo of the fascinating Deloraine story. The Fonz Family are so engaged in their argument that their child has wandered completely away from them to go and see if some weeds taste even more delicious than the dirt, and that the slightly awkward I'm just making an honest buck traffic inspector armed with enough chalk to make even the geekiest 80tys school teacher jealous is writing their car a ticket as they speak such bitter words to each other. This time, I know he sees me looking at him out the window, but I don't know whether he sees my disappointed shake of the head, because if he did, it wasn't for him, it was a rueful shake of the head that the parrot had managed to come up with part 3hree of the Deloraine story...who knew it had a parrot prologue...man I wish I was a kid that was eating dirt again...

I went on a school trip to Deloraine 1nce. It was just before the Melbourne Cup, and they took to a butter churning facility or a box factory or some nonsense they used to take the kids to when Australia still had a manufacturing industry. After a while all those Grade 2wo school trips blended into 1ne. We always seemed to be getting onto a shiny Kergers coach for some pointless reason then frying because Laurie the bus driver was too tight arse to turn on the air conditioning and getting off in a field because Laurie the bus driver was too tight arse to park at the meter near where we were supposed to be going. We had a fight on the way to the box factory - split the bus down the middle until even Laurie felt obliged to take a side. Can't remember what started it, but I think it involved who was responsible for the break up of our primary school power couple. I like to assign random adult themes to my early conflicts, but there's every chance it was just about whether a sea green crayon was somehow more boss than burnt sienna...an insane point of view. It ended up being 1ne of those things that got completely out of hand, and even with my reputation for level heading thinking and logical problem solving, I had clearly compromised my position entirely by taking a side on whatever the issue of the day was. The teachers threatened to throw us off the bus, Laurie, compromised as much as me, threatened to turn the bus around - not with your driving skills big L - and the whole box/butter/standing in a field of poppies in a more innocent age day out would have been ruined if Daniel Custis, our school benny, hadn't had the presence of mind to break wind in the middle of the argument, thus ensuring that we were able to make it to Deloraine for a simple, easy, relaxed day out. He was like the UN but effective our Daniel. As we dis-embarked the bus, 1ne of the main protagonists in the heated crayon debate handed me a note written suitably in the crayon of discussion, on pink paper, and that was the first time I knew Sarah, my first girlfriend, actually liked me. That's how I like to tell it anyway - there's every chance the note simply said I was an idiot for my support of the burnt sienna crayon, but the more illustrative side of my brain chooses to remember it in a particular way, the way i like, the way that makes me happy on days when budgies are squawking, twirling...god why is she twirling...I can't imagine what part of the story requires twirling...

It's 4our O'clock by now, the day has passed in a flurry of inane conversation, lunch time sandwiches, parking tickets and Vanessa Amorossi song - singular. My in tray, such as it is, is no smaller, but I feel aged and tired. There's more travel brochures for New York than any actual work surrounding me, and the phone is ringing off the hook but I can't be bothered to answer it. I leave on the absolute button of when I can, and drink water in a long and lengthy queue just so I can purchase a book full of things and opinions I can later impart as knowledge to try and impress some1ne. An entire Girls Can't Catch album goes by on my IPOD by the time an old woman at the front of the queue spins and unspools her life story to the cashier. The bogan couple from before have been put into a divvy van and taken away, Fonzie child in tow, for some unspecified reason. I know because I saw them being lifted and the ambulance chasers were out in force gawping as the van drove away, nearly crashing into a bus as it did so. Had they been a bit more vigilant, they could have made a double arrest and picked up the girl who's just stolen a Ray Martin autobiography from the table outside Big W. I feel a bit strange to be honest, it's a strange time to regret having never been in a gang, apart from the 1ne in primary school devoted to our love of sausage sandwiches. I wonder if I missed anything. There's a woman with a beaming broad smile and a touristy T-shirt just in front of me in the queue. She's buying a giant pair of pants that look about 20th sizes too big for her. She unfolds them with a care normally associated with the more dilligent members of a camping party until they take up the entire register and threaten to jam the belt. I'm trying to find the chocolates because it would take a hell of a binge for her to fit into them. She smiles her best smile and asks the cashier how her day was, at which point the cashier pulls her foulest Claude The Crow face, mutters something about how does she think it was, and throws her change back at the lady, having folded and crumpled the pants into a bag faster than the naked eye could see. I'm not sure why we all shuffled in such a morose fashion having been clearly told of the registers no chit chat policy, but we did, for we had homes to go to, pants to binge into, and facts to devour and impart to strangers to try and impress them...

I might try some out later, over dinner, or over a shared lime spider...actually, get your own lime spider, this 1nes taken...