The One Way Suburban Conversation

Jack Riewoldt, The Monster and The Bird

2011-05-15T02:22:00.000-07:00

Its 3hree AM in some middling Melbourne wine bar near Southbank. Friends of friends have dispersed long ago, in couples both new and old, in taxis and cars and off into the night. One of them looked incredibly like Nikki Webster, it distracted me for hours. Circumstance has ensured I'm here in Melbourne unaccompanied and my hotel room will only contain a left over slice of pizza, but it's all good for now. I'm left with the stragglers and my deeply unsympathetic friend Louise. Louise is a cold hearted pragmatist locked in a deep competitive race with no-one in particular to acquire more trinkets than anyone else. Across from us, an Italian waitress cleans a glass several times over, hoping we will leave soon so she can close up. The security guard hops awkwardly from foot to foot in desperate boredom, and 2wo of our other friends are awkwardly trying to pash, paired together by default and middle age ennui. I'm struck by how tired Louise looks - I wonder what happens to party girls as they age, when it's awkwardly painful to get in a cab at 8am and keep up with the younger girls. The last time I saw Louise before tonight she was throwing shapes in the middle of a dance floor with 16teen year olds. I do admire her self confidence in many ways. She plainly can't dance, but she doesn't care, while every step or shape I throw is laborious and pained. I inherited my lack of dancing ability from my Dad. I've turned down two or three dances already tonight, due to a lack of confidence. I'm neither drunk nor sober, and simply babbling to kill the silence. The Italian waitress walks past, and over laughs at 1ne of my jokes, perhaps for a tip, perhaps to indicate that she's watching us impatiently. Time is moving slowly - words aren't having any impact...neither are badly spelled text messages it seems...

There's a man in a black shirt with ashen grey lips drunkenly jabbing at an ATM in the corner. His hair is matted into a comb over, and he can't stand up straight, one leg going to the shops while the other comes back with the change. He misses the buttons as he swipes wildly with his fingers and he turns to the security guard and demands something is done to fix "his" ATM. His eyes are utterly void of logic and flash with malice as he tries to attract attention to his financial plight. The security is dis-interested, amusing himself watching our friends try and pash as the female of the pairing stumbles and falls to the floor giggling like a school girl. The man walks over to the security guard and spits in his direction, maybe accidentally, but in a flash of mindless violence so vivid and bright to me it was like a sparkler arcing through the sky, he is on the ground holding his face, struck violently hard and left to contemplate his failings in attitude and hairstyle. The security guard is indifferent save for a self satisfied flex of his left pec, and drags the man outside. Everyone seems to freeze awkwardly in time - even the pashing stumbling couple seem to lose interest each other and begin to hypnotically stare at the small drop of blood polluting their dance floor. The waitress gestures to someone in the back and some distractingly loud dance music sounds off through crackly PA speakers to try and distract us from the mayhem. It doesn't work and soon everyone is desperate to leave, mentally stampeding to more pleasant pastures as soon as they can...

So Louise and I make small talk as she surreptitiously pours her drink into mine, hoping I don't notice so it looks like she's drinking fast, trying to maintain a hard partying image even when she can't be bothered. Her first response to the BJ issue was crudely phrased - as you can imagine, when you are trying to explain complicated feelings to someone under the influence of Heineken and simplistic values, the last thing you want to hear is your entire relationship may come down to a question of carnal knowledge. You do want to believe it's special, you really do, and not driven by baser instincts. Louise is bored; I can see it in her eyes. She can probably tell I'm bored because I realise I've been looking at her crooked lipstick for hours on end without thinking properly about a word I've said. I could argue for hours with her about the nature of feelings, but it's easier to have a conversation about how to steal the audio off a YouTube clip and put it on your IPOD or some other ephemeral conversational topic. Our wounded comb overed victim bangs on the window in feeble middle class impotent rage, before turning and leaving. The pashing couple depart in separate cabs having had an argument about football, and the Italian waitress begins flicking the lights. Part of me wants to stay just to see how desperate they get to make us leave. Maybe someone will come out of the back with a broom and start sweeping or maybe they'll begin trying to make us all uncomfortable by talking loudly about us. Used to work at certain Grade 12 parties...

We leave once the conversation dies and fades. Louise hugs me as she gets into her taxi, a chunky 80s style bangle shimmering in the street light. I take a bite of a kebab I don't really remember buying. I wish I felt more special, and wasn't weighed down by self conscious values - my Dad told me when my Grade Two girlfriend dumped me for liking a different colour of crayon I was naive to think I was someone special. A heavy burden to weigh upon the burgeoning consciousness of a kid, one who was still working out just why he preferred Grimlock to Optimus Prime. Louise said she saw the footballer Jack Riewoldt sitting miserable in a bar at Crown Casino, almost in tears because he had been stood up. I think her point was that everyone was the same and love was no big deal and we can all have a broken heart. Louise can tie anything into celebrities. When I hurt my leg I think it was the same bone as Katy Perry's from memory. Last time I saw Jack Riewoldt he was cracking onto a barmaid at a Newtown pub with some don't you know who I am style patter. I think he'll do better than me throughout this New Year somehow. I haven't seen Louise since although several of her recent Facebook posts have been angst ridden and abusive towards her ex boyfriend, suggesting her world weary people hating everything is shit and blunt patter is rehearsed and untrue. The kebab remained stoically silent throughout our interaction, and I thought the night was over....

And then you flip your phone, push it up, hear a bland corporate clang indicating you've received a text message, read it, and that's it...life changed...even the kebab and cold slice of pizza seems delicious...and you really think everything’s changed. And that moment, you wouldn't trade your life for Jack Riewoldts for all the goals in the world...

Enjoy calm beauty with a unique sense of soul

2011-05-12T03:53:00.000-07:00

Its Xmas day in a suburban Tasmanian town. In the middle distance 2wo surfers sit on the beach in awe of the beautiful scenery and of course their own fancy haircuts. As for me and my family, after we piled into the family Kia Rio and listened to one of my more "Weary Willie" CDs (c Mum who thinks I only listen to whingy whiny indie females) and after a drive that consists of no fewer than 2wo arguments about cheese, we're guests in other people’s lives for the day. We have gathered around an increasingly cramped gently decorated wooden table to eat turkey and to exchange whimsical variations of an answer to life’s eternal question - "how's work going?".

Should I go with "It's still going!" or "Yeah OK? How about you?" - decisions decisions...bad jokes, hats, small talk from the pits of hell, it's all the staples of course. Yet something is missing, and I can feel the chill. This is the first Xmas with these people I can remember where it's been as much of an obligation for them to put on the spread as it is for me to faux enjoy it. Strange. I don't tell BJ, for I have built myself up to her at this point as a nihilist hell bent on hating on society, but later with genuine interest I do ask someone how work is going, just to get the party started. Perish the thought...

There's an aching poignancy in 1ne of the symbolically empty chairs on the deck above me later in the day which is making this protagonist decidedly uneasy.

"You can't sit in that chair!" they will say to anyone who doesn't know, only half jokingly. "Grandad wouldn't have wanted you to sit in that chair!" - I never knew either of my Granddads. One was a taciturn old religiously hypocritically religious bore who fell out with my Dad over a christening shawl, and never spoke to him again. He wrote me out of his wives obit in the local paper and claimed just 1ne Grandchild spawned the earth. My other Grandad was a product of his times alcoholic whose own funeral failed to inspire the most base of human sadness. It's thus hard for me to conjure up the feelings 1ne must feel towards a kindly old Grandfather figure. I did know their Grandad though, and upon realising that what their Grandad mostly wanted wasn't to be symbolically and posthumously represented by a worn old out folding chair, but to be left the fuck alone, I begin to think about my life and it's accelerating decline into mediocrity in a way alien to most of my other Xmas's. Certainly more than the 1ne I pulled a Santa hat over my head and fell asleep for 4our hours...

I would muse more on this decline if people would stop asking me how work was going...

Death frightens me. The reduction of a series of complexities in an individual’s life - in particular what really fascinates me, the individual steps in someone’s life that gets them to be, well, them - to basically a series of 4our or 5ive anecdotes that mostly end with the phrase "that was our (name inserted)" terrifies me. I wonder in this back garden how I will be remembered, if at all, as a furry yellow tennis ball slips past my feet and into the dear departed’s once mighty patch of vegetables. It's certainly a little D&M for a backyard game of cricket these thoughts - it's no surprise the kids are able to sneak through for a cheeky 2nd run. Inevitably, some1ne says can you imagine Granddads reaction if some1ne - me - stepped on his carrots. They share a mutual laugh I can appreciate but never fully understand. While they are musing, I run out one of the kids with a desperate throw from the pumpkin patch, which seems slightly inappropriate, but properly Australian...

Even the present opening is rapid-fire and awkward and forced. My Mum insists on buying the "kids" 1ne of those little stockings full of chocolate. Those kids are now 16, and as likely to buy Ice as enjoy the delicious chocolately treat of a Crunchie. Mind you, my own chocolate treats go the other way now - fancy, sure, and it's the thought that counts, but they seem, well, really old man chocolates. I'm only a hop and a step away from a bag of Werther Originals. Some1ne starts telling me a story about their car that seems so inordinately boring time seems to stop. I suck on 1ne of my old man chocolates and nod in all the right places but really I'm thinking if I could hit my Dad on the head with 1ne of the chocolates and if it would hurt. I mean these are big chocolates. The crux of the story about the car from what I gather seems to be that this guy’s favourite car magazine has said his car is a potential death trap. Some1ne takes our photo on a mobile phone. I'm not sure that it will be a keeper. My eyes when I look at the photo are blank while his are animated. What amuses me is my Mum in the background is stuck in a similar conversation. Later I find out hers is about Avenue Q. At least I could contribute to that discussion...what is a manifold anyway?

My own legacy is troubling me. I feel in a fog that won't stop swirling around me, like I've woke up Quantum Leap style in some1ne else’s life, at 32 years of age, without a clue how I got here. Kids I see 1nce a year are on mobile phones and talking about getting drugs at a gay club. When did Hobart get a gay club? Am I still hip? I know who Katy B is, does that count for anything? I say VHS instead of DVD, an instant giveaway. My expression seems permanently troubled, dour, tired even. At the same time, I'm lucky - I'm safe, and whenever I want, I can up and go to any part of the world I feel like. It's truly troubling to have a mid life crisis in the middle of Xmas dinner. In fact, it's only in the mid of this troubling series of questions that I realise that a small child has sat at the Xmas dinner table for about 2wo minutes with a fixed intensity stare that has bored into my skull, while they hold out a cracker. Every1ne at the table seems to be competing for my attention and is willing me to, bluntly, pull the bloody thing just to get on with the day. That's part of the problem as well. I'm not thinking about pulling a cracker, I'm only thinking of her. Whether this is going to work out, whether it's going to change my life. How to explain to a child with no teeth and a pout that could stop a truck that this moment where you hold out a cracker and nothing else matters is as good as life is ever going to get...

I won though, got a party hat and a little monocle out of a cracker. It's still on my kitchen table. Small victories to build on...

The beginning of the one way conversation Part One

2011-05-10T02:16:00.000-07:00

It's 12 pm in a suburban Tasmanian shopping centre. I have left behind the woes of office life and a flashing orange Instant message that may or may not be important to step into the bewilderness. 1ne of the local businesses has an angry sign about centre management affixed to his window, and all I notice about it is the shoddy way it's taped to the window, as if his impotently angry hands couldn't wait to put the message up, shabby or otherwise. I peer in the window and he's handing over a pen to a customer to sign his petition. Something about air conditioning. His cheeks are puce and crimson in alternate angry streaks. The customer drops the magic word to describe just what he thinks of centre management. All together now, it's the most wonderful time of the year...

Its 3hree days before Xmas and the centre is frothing with activity. I've acquired a neck injury, a sign of rapid aging. It went off like a shotgun my neck, right in the middle of the day. On a green bench sit 2wo middle class university students in matching school leaver’s tops. One of them is talking rapidly and preciously about whether the protagonist in a particular novel is "fascinating or trite". The girl in the conversation is staring ahead blankly, as if she's heard the conversation a million times before or maybe as if she can turn the next table into ashes simply by staring a hole through it. I'm walking with a purpose I notice. I'm very self conscious today. Every gesture is for some reason bothering me, as if I've become an awkwardly strung puppet in a giant play I didn't sign up for. What is with my walk? When did I start walking like this...

Xmas is not my favourite time of year. I've already regaled most of our casual workers with what has almost become a Seinfeldesque rehearsed piece of conversational fluff about how tedious Xmas dinner has become when people ask me every year how work is. To be honest, it's so rehearsed, it's almost ready for the stage, and I even pause for laughter round the photocopier. Truthfully, if that's not a sign of middle class ennui...

Xmas, so says a gaudy neon pink sign stuck with Blu Tac to 1ne of the store windows, is for the children. Sadly for me, my Dad has taped over 1ne of my Xmas mornings as a child with an old repeated episode of the Vicar Of Dibley. Tragically for me, the last vestiges of any evidence I may have been a free spirited innocent cherub have been erased and replaced by the formulaic scripted comedy of Richard Curtis and someone liners from the bloke who played Trigger on Only Fools and Horses. Those years now only exist in anecdote and whimsy, exaggeration and memories that coated in sentiment. My Dad has chosen to mostly remember the anecdotes that end with me looking foolish. That is his right as a parent. I have to peer through the veneer of Scottish cynicism to find true sentiment and affection. My own Xmas card in my hands will soon possess, in my own handwriting, a heartfelt and jocular plea to tell me who my real parents are, part of a long running family joke about me being a long last member of the Packer clan. My Mum usually ripostes with some remark about how they'd have sent my back by now. Yes, I was born this way, so any VHS based evidence of a sickly sweet family gathered around the Xmas tree learning would clearly have been staged nonsense for Grandma, and best taped over by a Trigger joke, since it would bear no relation at all to my memories, and how they have come to form the person standing drinking Red Bull before this storebound Santa at this particular hour...

"Do you believe in magic!" yells an emaciated sickly looking woman in skin tight green elf pants. She pumps her fist in the air like a bewildered out of place rock star as a single faint trace of mascara rolls down her cheek, and holds out her megaphone to her audience of bored looking children and . The rain on a tin roof emulating small round of applause that reverberates around the shopping centre suggests our shoppers not only don't believe in magic, they don't even believe in it enough to drown out the faint hum of a corporate CD chain store's Mariah Carey CD. She doesn't care - her enthusiasm for Xmas isn't shared by the sleepy looking store Santa who woozily huffs and forces his red jowls into a forced smile as a small child with cherubic features affixes himself to Santa's knee to aim for the only things important in a child’s life. I envy his simplistic view that life can any only get better if he acquires a particular item or possession. And yet, not only 5ive minutes later is the cherubic angelic child fizzing in strange anger about not getting a Samboys chip, but I'm forced to ponder just how emotionally mature I am when there's only one thing in my life that makes any sense, even when my thoughts are being Careyed at a suddenly noxious level...

I return to work. I'm humming a public domain carol. There's a crazy man standing on the steps of the centre. He's hitting himself in the head and talking about knocking his haircut into shape. His carer - not as I sometimes say, his "handler" - is patiently waiting for this fixation to stop. I feel no connection to my fellow man at all these days. Everywhere I look, I feel tired. I've stopped making sense in my conversation, and no one is making sense in return to me. Truly, I feel as though everything around me is a crazed one way conversation. If I speak to someone, I feel as though my words are meaningless, bouncing off and falling to the floor in a slow agonizing motion that I can see. In return, people talking to me are mere disturbances, interruptions into a private obsession that can never be truly explained. The crazy man is quiet now, but smiling the demented smile of those about to stab. My simplistic life begins again when I re-enter my work place, spin another one of my tedious anecdotes, receive in return a mild response of fake laughter, smooth my suit down and receive on Instant Messenger a comment from the only person in my life that makes any sense to me, truly the ship through the fog, if that ship was Tasmanian and the fog was a series of small children running into my shins and making me feel every bit of my world weary age...

Her name was BJ, and she was going to save me from all this...

Camgymeriad Gwych

2010-10-30T03:28:00.000-07:00

It's Friday afternoon. My boss has just made an error which has resulted in much flapping of arms and plenty of panic around the office. Cooler heads should prevail, but they don't. They never do. The girl with the mod haircut has solved the problem, pretty efficiently it must be said, but no 1ne is listening - the perils of temporary employment include the trouble of being dismissed as an after-thought when you've solved the problem. My boss has the conversational tick of adding a Y onto every word in an attempt to be jocular and matey. Now don't get me wrong, I'm not Bertrand Russell in my conversational voice, since too much exposure to football crowds and girls who play netball means I lapse into far too much casual swearing, but I do have a professional work voice when required. This particular conversation tick is wearing on me - sometimes we search for leadership in this office and are confronted with a repetitive comedy jocularity and faux sense of fun that can be jarring. Hold up an unfinished report and get a comedy pig and a wacky nickname in response and see how your mental state holds up...

I could be 1ne of those cooler heads if I could be bothered. I'm more worried about why my phone won't show me my e-mail quicker. Not that I get e-mail - comments from here and flashing e-mails from the NBA selling me shoes just about covers most of it - but it's nice to check. My phone isn't playing along though...yes, I will accept the CA certificate. For the 9nth time...I'm essentially checking out of habit really. I do a lot of things out of habit. I change my Fantasy NBA players obsessively, I do exactly 2kms on the treadmill, and I have toast regularly at set intervals. My parents are proud of being dull - they are truly the enemies of wacky and zany. My love of puppets disappoints them a little bit. I just find them hilarious. I never got into any of those "candid camera" style shows either...what has been interesting writing lately (nothing I hear you say) has been how often I've had realisations at my desk. Perhaps it's best to shut out the comedy pigs, stop eating the chocolate biscuits, and do some work, but sometimes it's good to listen to the little voice in my head as a way of killing some time...that little voice might be a little obsessed with popular culture and sport, but sometimes, it can be insightful...and it's either that or hear my name with a Y added on for 26th time today...

It was mid Friday and mid conversation I realised I'd never been genuinely heartbroken. The new girl at work apparently hates an ex boyfriend even more than the guy who let her down from the factory down the road. I think his jocular use of the phrase "daft cow" was taken the wrong way. As for the other boyfriend, he was dating her and then left her mid stream for another girl but didn't tell her for ages, just stopped calling. She saw them together at the Victoria Tavern, hopefully during their short lived "Coyote Ugly" theme nights. She was most upset - they had even got to the "luvved up" nickname phase of their relationship. I know this because his nickname was scrawled on a pen left lying around as both workplace and office detritus and she threw it in the bin. She was explaining the exact circumstances through which he transformed from lovable old "Chips" to having a swearword attached to every aspect of his character. I realised break ups have never have bothered me as much as that. Not even my current 1ne. Mind you, I never got a cute nickname either - Sarah used to call me "Snowy" on account of my white albino style early Beatles cut hair, but it never caught on. I called her Sarah. At least she had made the effort...

Relationships have never left me that upset - most of mine just ran their course. Sarah in Grade 2wo, she just didn't ring 1ne weekend. We last met outside a milk bar where I was too immature and too busy trying to find a Bryan Taylor footy card to reciprocate her excellent listening skills. I'm Catholic, we're hard on ourselves. Debbie? We simply had too many arguments about chocolate bars and everything fizzled out. My netball playing girlfriend? That 1ne was my fault since I played far too much ATARI instead of doing proper boyfriend things like, I don't know, arguing about stuff with a bit more vigour. Most times I've simply got on with life - when I broke up with Debbie, my Mum tried to cheer me up by making up a sort of weird jingle about how I was better off without her. I went upstairs and watched Beadles About and didn't even worry too much about it. Mind you, this was a period in my life where a failure to get a video camera meant I said to my Mum - a woman who lived in a single room with 10en siblings - something like has your life ever been as tough as mine? Aside from the hairdresser who asked her if people came into her room and touched her stuff, no misappropriation of her Glaswegian childhood has made her laugh more...

There's an uneaten pile of lollies on the table at work. No 1ne has eaten them...I might have to, or the girl who bought them might get a complex. I come from a tough family - when I took all the skin off my neck in a running into a tennis net accident, my Dad told me not to be so selfish when I asked for another Tic-Toc from the school nurse. I also come from a tough country. I think I'm emotionally tough, although I know drunk I can stay stupid things just to see what happens sometimes and then complain about it. I've been going to ask this girl out for 5ive years and every time I'm drunk I promise I'll do it, I really will...lucky I don't have her number. Some1ne wants to bring plants into the office. I make a "Between Two Ferns" joke since they want to put them either side of my desk, but no 1ne gets it. They just look at me strangely. They have largely abandoned the problem and chalked it up to experience and are already talking about plants and who's going to eat the lollies and whatever happened to Alison Brahe - no wait, I wondered that. They have left it for me to fix I think. It's sitting on my desk in that way people leave things when they are pretending they are going to come back later and fix it but they never do. Ultimately I'll pick up the pieces, even though I don't want to. I think some1ne will give me, I don't know, a lolly snake as a reward for fixing the problem. The other alternative would be to slip it onto the desk of the girl with the mod haircut, but she leaves on Monday - I hope she buys a cake, these lollies are terrible...

This current break up, oddly, was a lot like my break up with Sarah. Although with less crayon debate, less kissing for charity and more awkward silent pauses at about 4our in the morning that on a comedy show they would call a cricket riding a tumbleweed. Our relationship was nothing more than a beautiful mistake - I thought I could fix the world, and I couldn't. I thought if I said enough wonderful things and made enough playful gestures it could work out. It didn't. She still went back to the man with the scrunchy face, and now they've broken up. She's off work with depression now. No 1ne in the office has rung to offer support. They have left it for me to fix I think. It's sitting in my e-mail tray the "someone should call her" e-mail - in that way people e-mail when they are pretending they are going to e-mail later with a resolution and sort out who is going to ring but they never do. Ultimately I'll pick up the pieces and be a supportive friend, even though I don't want to. I think some1ne will give me, I don't know, a lolly snake as a reward for making the call. I haven't done it yet though. Instead I'm more worried about why my phone won't show me my e-mail quicker. Not that I get e-mail - comments from here and flashing e-mails from the NBA selling me shoes just about covers most of it - but it's nice to check. My phone isn't playing along though...yes, I will accept the CA certificate. I change my Fantasy NBA players obsessively, I do exactly 2kms on the treadmill, and I have toast regularly at set intervals...

An entire weekend bypassed by the time I emotionally wake up. I could have done so much more with my life if it wasn't so damned hard...

Thanks for the laughs and being true (cheers for all the Nandos!)

2010-10-28T03:22:00.000-07:00

It's midday in a suburban Tasmanian shopping centre. Emboldened by their pension, old people are slothfully walking through at zombie tempo, revelling in no longer caring they are in the way. A woman has McDonald’s ice cream dripping down her chin - her friends simply don't tell her. There's water cascading down the floor in a slow moving torrent. No 1ne seems to be in a hurry to fix it. I've spent a lot of the last few days in the strangest funk. I don't know why - it's not all Milo Bar related. I've been feeling physically spry but I can't get into any kind of gear. To try and work it out, I made a brief mental list of all the things annoying me in a single day. None seemed to be any more important in the scheme of things than slow moving cars, computers that didn't work or bewildered Grandpa Simpson style pensioners shuffling in carpet slippers into my path. It's hardly buzzbombs, rickets and rising damp. I'm sure someone from Wartime Britain would slap me in the face for my middle class concerns and angst and then hustle me away for a talk on stiff upper lips. Doesn't mean I'm any more alert though. They bought me a present today at work - a cute toy to try and cheer me up. I don't know how the complex emotional swirl of human life can be fixed by the purchase of a pig with a cheeky face but I guess that's where we are as a society. Plus, his face really was cheeky. I didn't even notice I was being grumpy. They then tried to name it around me. My e-mail box flooded with stupid cheer him up jokes...it didn't work, needless to say. The new girl got a Facebook message from the guy she was stalking which she took as a suggestion she was dumb. She was grumpy all day, chewing on chocolates in a depression. Needless to say my ironic ex girlfriend continues to not talk to me all day long unless it's necessary. She swishes past my desk and then walks past and swishes past it again to really emphasise that she isn't talking to me. She sometimes gets absolutely no work done with all the swishing. So here I am - one of my co-workers is eating chocolate in emotional desolation, another that I have had relations with is swishing past my desk endlessly in a sort of post break up swirl of hairspray and bitterness - and here I thought I was being mature, with my Chunky Kit Kats and chin up tiger pep talks - and here I sit with a pig with a cheeky smirk on his face for company. Welcome to Thursday...you don't have to be crazy to work here...

Away from all the swishing and consumption of chocolate products - I believe Sartre was mis-quoted; hell is being trapped for all eternity with the scent of hairspray - I'm able to escape into the middle of the shopping centre with coins jangling in my pocket and the merest hint of my first jaunty step for the day. The girl at Banjo's promises to toast my toasted toasty and then spends the next 5ive minutes talking to her friends and completely ignoring me while I stand hopping bored from foot to foot. I say talking - there's a loud gothic girl with overly dyed black hair in a hooded top that screams black from the top of its black lungs who continually says the girl behind the counters name, while her little gothy acolytes say things like oooh and wow. Well ooh, wow and the repetition of her name aren't toasting my toasty so to speak. What to do...make eye contact with the fat lumbering girl with the floury fingers to get some action? Sit down on 1ne of Banjos increasingly stained seats and hope not to catch anything? Bribery? Drink my Pepsi Max and hope to be noticed? If you picked I just stood there while the fascinating conversation went on around me...well, for some reason, I had had enough today. Maybe the torpor briefly lifted, but I was off, not quite on gossamer wings, but certainly on gossamer Clarks shoes. The funny thing was, after I put my Pepsi Can onto the counter and walked, the fat lumbering girl told the girl who was having her name called out off in a really angry voice for not having toasted my toasty in an acceptably toasted time frame and losing a customer. Having scored a victory for the invisible overlooked masses against the forces of franchise based corporate indifference, I then ruin it by ploughing shin first into a lousy punk kid...when I walk past later, my Coke Zero can still stands there, a silent monument to some1ne who couldn't take their indifference anymore, who stuck it to the man...until tomorrow at least. Yeah, cop that franchised bakeries...

Back to Hairspray heaven for the afternoon, and yet more swishing. I'm too tired for swishing. I'm officially an anti swishing zone. Maybe I should start swishing. No I'm not cut out for swishing. Not that I'm doing anything productive with my day beyond looking at Fantasy NBA scores and trying to look busy. There's a girl in the office that used to work here. She was a horrible person. Ugly on the outside and inside, she used to take the chocolate biscuits at the office she managed and lock them away on days she wasn't in the office. She'd write little notes on the pens saying things like "my pen" without even the slightest implication of an inter office joke, she bitched about everyone endlessly, and was generally a horrible person. Don't say hello...don't say hello...damn it, I said hello. Of course I did. The girl with the mod haircut is trying to get her boyfriend to take her to the movies. We're having an endlessly boring conversation about movies. The strange thing is I've repeatedly said to everyone I don't like movies and yet people keep asking me if I've seen any good movies lately...is anyone listening to anything I'm saying? The crazy lady who brings us in chocolate from god knows where has brought in some Xmas chocolates. The girls in the office are now huddled around the chocolates bitching about men. I might get a run in this conversation soon, judging by the intensification of the swishing offensive. The only other sound I can hear is the gentle rhythmic swaying of the Zumba Class up the road. They've started early, and their trainer is yelling out enthusiastic sayings in a loud military voice over the loud thumping beats of The Black Eyed Peas. He sounds frightening rather than motivational. The tape then skips violently. It sounds like anarchy, a Zumba uprising. I look at my screen. Where I'm supposed to have finalised a report, I've typed the phrase Zumba anarchy. I consider leaving it there to see if anyone reads these reports all the way through, but I don't want to know that. Every1ne needs to feel important. Maybe that's where I went wrong - thinking my care was implied, but maybe I needed to say it more. All I know is thank goodness I don't smoke. With the amount of accumulated hairspray around my desk, a mere spark from anyone could set the whole branch aflame. Thank goodness that spark, as they say in the classics, is long extinguished...

It's hometime before I know it. The girls in the office are having a conversation about the boss’s wife. I suspect I won't be able to join in. I don't have an opinion on the woman. So I go home. My ironic ex girlfriend is smoking outside a shoe store. There's a temptation to swish past her with my nose in the air, but it's too far to walk. The girl who used to work with us is looking tired and exhausted as she lugs some heavy shopping bags down the road. She stops for a moment, seemingly about to topple over. We 1nce went for a training course and in the rush for the bus home she almost collapsed in an unfit heap into the gutter just from some running. I can't imagine that plus shopping bags. A kid with a Dale Thomas haircut and a jaunty baseball cap is over vigorously pashing his bogan girlfriend to try and show his friends how much he totally digs her. Personally I think he's looking at his best mate a bit too much when he's doing it, but there you go. I leave all of them in the distance as I walk to my car. I guess it's not so bad - in the other office, they don't even get out for lunch. Their lunch is bought for them so they don't leave the office and continue to write reports no 1ne will ever read. They don't see the cheerful face of a ceramic pig at any stage of their life - you don't have to be deskbound to work here, but it helps. Tomorrow night, I'll be safely inside a pub recounting all of these issues with my friends in a chatty conversational low pressure environment, only competing against the soothing sounds of low frequency acoustic rock for sound rights. Maybe the girl with the mod haircut will finally get to the movies, maybe my ironic ex girlfriend will get back together with the man with the scrunchy face, maybe the new girl will put aside her feelings of stupidity and re-concile with the man she's stalking, and maybe I'll get a sandwich in a snappy moment of service delivered with crisp alacrity and the minimum of fuss...that's the thing about tomorrow, there's always the chance to shake off the slumber. Or maybe tomorrow will be more of the same. I'm already 6ix seconds into my drive, and a slow witted, slow moving Torana is blocking my path, unsure of whether to indicate or just be an idiot slowly moving in concentric circles until time expires and we all die in a football oval car park...yes, it could just be more of the same...

I don't know why, but for the first time all day, I'm excited to find out...

No video, just the song

2010-10-27T00:03:00.000-07:00

Its 10en am in a windowless, self contained office at the end of the world. We're packed onto a candy cane stripe couch created in the era before ergonomic support listening to a gay man talk about his life’s passion for sales. I presume he's gay; he has a silver band on his finger that screams commitment ceremony, has a camp Frankie Howardesque lilt to his voice, and compares everything to buying shoes. I spend most of his power point presentation thinking about what to put on my new mix CD and wondering about why he knows so much about buying shoes. The only time I buy shoes is when 1ne of the limited collection of people who care about such things point out that my shoes are falling apart. I generally wait until I can see sock. To be honest, his camp frippery isn't what's distracting me. Nor is it my couched in closeness to my ironic ex girlfriend on the candy cane striped couch - it's his spelling. I realise when I get into my typing groove I'm not Bertrand Russell, but this is his life’s work. He loves what he does. He couldn't be more passionate about anything in his life. An evacuation alarm disrupted him mid flow and he looked crushed. Genuinely upset. And yet, right on the middle of the projection screen, is the word "destiniations" - it's really bugging me. I don't know whether to mention it, but not saying anything is driving me mad. My ex ironic girlfriend is drinking Diet Coke - this is worrying me because she's drinking Diet Coke because I was drinking it. She said what are you drinking as she walked past. I said Diet Coke, and now she's drinking Diet Coke. I know from the brief messy relationship we had that she was inclined to try things I liked in the name of "getting to know each other" - she even stole my copy of "Formica Blues" on vinyl. Did I get it back? Great, he's asked me a question now. See, thanks a lot overactive easily distracted brain. My response in all of these situations is basically to say something clever and abstract - not today though. I hadn't even heard the question but I know what to say...just like buying a pair of shoes...he might have asked me what the capital of Nigeria was, but he seems to accept my answer. Now, back to apathetic drifting...

I used to work with a girl who was Scottish like me. Hell of a nice girl. 1ne day her partner moved all the furniture out of her house and left her, and she had a bit of a fit. Nice girl though - partner was a knob. He spoke to me for ages about bottle caps at a Xmas party. Anyway, 1ne day I was telling a story about, I don't know, let's keep the theme going and say vinyl records. Tasmanians are for the most part very polite and will let you finish your story. However, I could see on this girls face even as she stood there she was incredibly bored. I asked her about it and she confessed - it was the most boring story she'd ever heard. I shrugged it off, and not just because as some1ne married to a guy who knew lots about bottle caps she was in a great position to judge boring stories, but the thing was, it was a moment of cultural recognition. If I wasn't Scottish, I probably would have missed the telltale but subtle signs of when a Scottish person has lost interest in listening. My office where I work has become full of office cultural recognition. To give an example, the new girl will expect praise from the girl in the end office. The girl in the end office will not give praise out because she thinks everyone should just do their job. So I can now essentially walking around giving the first girl a thumbs up and a big smile while telling the 2nd girl that hard work is its own reward or playing down achievements. It's become so predictable my ability to pre-empt their conversations, I don't even have to think about it. I didn't even notice I was doing it until today. I didn't realise I was on everyone’s side until 3hree separate people said how sad it was they had dis-continued the Milo Bar. The only way to be more popular round here is to speak in a camp voice about shoes. They love that guy around here. You should have seen them listening to him...I even tried to point out the spelling error...no dice...

Into this conversational ease about discontinued chocolate bars and the eternal struggle between relentless toil and a justified reward comes a spanner deep into the works. My ex ironic girlfriends was soon to be ex now officially ex - an abbreviation is required at this rate - moved out of her house at 3hree am this morning after they had a huge row. I only know this because I was in the middle of my own tutorial to some1ne in the office about how to steal the audio off of YouTube clips - I'm sure I spelled YouTube right, and yes, I said it was like stealing a pair of shows, an in joke they missed - when I heard her tell some1ne. She hasn't slept all night. In our relationship, we never got to the comfortable conversation stage. We got close, but I'm possessive about the things I like. I don't give up musical secrets easily. My favourite song changes 9ine times a day. I'm not some1ne who can easily solve your problems, since I attack everything with a Scottish fatalism. So our conversations never became easy. Today, I can't offer any real words of sympathy, lest I get back into the old routine by which I'm offering therapy in lieu of a relationship. Instead of saying something soothing, I'm pretty much mute and focused on trying to drive a straw deep into my purepak Orange Juice. This proves to be almost impossible and I'm soon incredibly angry at this inaminate object that has no recourse to argue with me. The girl with the mod haircut will later show me pictures of her cousins. She says they are always smiling. Indeed, on 1photos evidence, that is true, but then they've just been given toys, so I can't judge. I say for some reason I hope they never lose their smile. I don't mean this to become the piece of wisdom it becomes when later retold. I just meant it as something to say, but now it's being quoted round the office with everyone adding layers of depth to it. My ironic ex girlfriend stormed out of the office without saying goodbye to anyone. Some1ne said she'd lost her smile. They all looked at me. Great, now I'm quotable and out of Milo Bars, what else can happy today...they stop making the Burnt Sienna crayon?...

It's late in the day now. I've sat down at an Internet kiosk to find out a basketball score. There's a guy at the computer next to me licking an ice cream really loudly, in fact, suggestively to be honest. He keeps looking at me in a funny way. I really have no desire to be picked up a man in a Buffy T-shirt licking an ice cream like a rabid animal and glancing at me like I'm afters, so I quickly pack up and leave. This sadly leaves 1:43 of my Internet time scattered to the winds of time, but it's for the best. There's a girl in ridiculously painted shoes on a green bench as I walk past. Her shoes are painted in gold spray paint, to the point they hurt my eyes. She's on the phone trying to explain to some1ne abroad or some1ne foreign what Tasmania is like. She says it's like the Southside but the Southside of what and where remains unspoken. She laughs. It's an easy conversational in joke. Either that or the glare from her spray painted Wizard of Oz homaging shoes have driven her loopy. It's getting late, and a string of cars are stopping me from crossing the road, 1ne final barrier to my car and the road home. The camp guy from the training session is getting into a cab. He's explaining in detail exactly how to get to his hotel. The taxi driver has a blank expression on his hateful face. His beard even seems to be twitching angrily. They have a long argument by the side of the road about cabcharge vouchers before eventually settling on a price, and disappearing into the crazy world of Tasmanian traffic. I'm sure that getting a taxi is somehow like buying a pair of shoes, but I'm too tired to make the connection. The CD in my car is for some reason cued up to Chase That Feeling...when I saw the Hilltop Hoods at Big Day Out, it seemed as though everyone in the whole crowd knew every word to every song before it was sung...somedays at work I feel as though I know every word that'll be spoken before anyone even thinks of it...most days anyway...the car starts, and off I go, another day conquered...

It's not quite living, it's not quite dying slowly, but it's positively definitely maybe somewhere in between...

Part dystopian urban cartography, part spatial-poetic intervention

2010-10-25T22:41:00.000-07:00

It's a perfectly still suburban Monday at the place where I work. The bottom row of my computer screen is flashing with unread orange messages. She did this; she said that...I've chosen to ignore them. My ironic ex girlfriend is back to her usual self and is being incredibly nice to me. She may be single again by the end of the week. I'm not listening. She says she's never been on a picnic. Hey that's great, I would have thought had my brain been working, should have told me last week. The new girl is continuing her stalker based assault on the guy who works elsewhere. She's found him on Facebook. He may have a child. I'm not listening. Some1ne is bitching about their days off. I'm indifferent. My ex girlfriends current soon to be ex boyfriend - it's like Melrose Place around here, but with less hot pool action and more pens - is glaring at me or practicing his glaring in general through the window. I'd glare back, but I can't be bothered. Tuesday truly is the Lords most apathetic creation. I realise as I begin all this indifference around me that I'm tapping my pen on the edge of the desk to the tune of popular hit song. There's a sticker on my desk that just reeks of irony. They've started to hand out awards here at work, motivational stickers and e-mails are just flying around the office like the Wright Brothers. They keep sending me e-mails with smiley faces in the middle of them telling me what a great job I'm doing. Today they sent me home from work early as a reward for all my wonderful efforts. I'm staring at my great work sticker while realising I've done nothing all day but sit with fuzzy thoughts and mentally curse the new taste of the Milo Bar. Maybe I am doing a great job and I haven't realised it yet - or maybe they've just lowered the bar, like when they started giving out soccer trophies in school just for showing up. I bite into a Chunky Kit Kat. My ironic ex girlfriend has sent me a message. She'd love to go to the football with me next year. I didn't offer. Our clock continues to tick loudly. I don't think anyone here is going to join in my debate on whether my crush on Samantha Bee is idiotic - they will gather soon in an all men are bastards focus group. I could put my head down on the desk and have a nap today. All underneath the ticking clock - metaphorical and real - and right in front of a smiling great work sticker...

My ironic ex girlfriends soon to be ex boyfriend - I'd go for MIEGSTBEB if I didn't dig my word count - waits for her outside work every day. He's a pretty grumpy looking guy, with a scrunchy face and a wispy beard he hasn't quite grown into. He's started calling her at work to talk about feelings. When I say feelings, he works as far as I can remember at Blunstones, so feelings generally involve swearing and taking innocent crockery and throwing it at walls. Ah, the sweet pang of stereotyping. Keeps me warm at night. Anyway, he's started turning up to work, and he looks extra scrunchy. I'd glare back, but that would involve moving my face. And it's a Tuesday, I can barely sip Red Bull from a can such is my torpor, let alone compose a facial expression based on anger caused by a random accumulation of events over time towards a man who I vaguely thinks knows I exist through a glass window with a McDonalds thick shake stain dripping down it. The new girl has threatened to find me a date for Xmas drinks. I have tried to gently point out that I'm not quite in the mood to go out and stalk some1ne for the purposes of dating. Then again, the new girl, I still suspect, goes home every night to cry while she eats Frosties out of the packet and listens to 101 sad songs, so I hope she doesn't set me up with a similarly emotionally tuned friend - I hate Frosties. I'm Scottish, I'm suspicious of happy people, what can I tell you? As far as she is concerned, the man in the shop she is stalking by pretending to be interested in what he is selling is the 1ne. I want to cause a scene and see how he handles pressure. He may be coming to drinks - I think of dates with drinks now like that old Bill Cosby joke about cocaine - it might intensify your personality, but what if you're an asshole...everyone in this office I can say hand on heart is either dating an asshole, or possibly stalking 1ne. At this rate, we'll all be eating ice cream together in a huddle. Luckily, my indifference is breaking the cycle of whinging about stuff. No 1ne has whinged to me about anything all day. I like to think I'm making a difference...maybe that's why I got the sticker...

The only person I've felt I've stalked is Pippa in primary school. Pippa was my friend, although but for the presence of a reputable Burnie photographic company taking our Grade 2wo photo, I'd swear she was an apparition. I'm sure I've got most of my primary school experience wrong - given I swore for 10en years John Farnham’s appearance on Home and Away involved his head floating around on screen, don't quote me on this - but I was sure I never saw or spoke to Pippa in class. To my mind, she just stood next to our school monkey bars and said things that were incredibly wise and poignant and in a breeze her hair would blow about a bit. I was totally in love with her in school, as much as any 6ix year old could love anyone. Our love was flawed though - I had a girlfriend called Sarah, an identical twin who had yet to discover the evil joys of being an identical. We were boyfriend and girlfriend because we were assigned to be by a catch and kiss game the day it snowed in Burnie. Chase her, some guy I only knew as aren't you the kid with the giant head said. And so I did. And I ended up with a girlfriend. But it didn't mean I didn't hang out and stalk Pippa a lot. Some1ne pulled her hair 1nce. I was mortified. I didn't have that kind of suave sophisticated repartee with women. My relationship with Sarah was pretty easy to manage - she liked silver crayons, I liked silver crayons, great, let's get married. Easy as. Pippa, to my eternal detriment, found He-Man and the Masters of the Universe "boring" - I could not be with some1ne who failed to find my theory on why Ju-Jitsu was a much better action figure than Stratos fascinating. It was only in the depressing break of Grade 3hree that I found out, sadly, that Sarah did not find it fascinating either. She was just faking it. Luckily, I actually hated silver crayons. Oh my vengeful flourish when I drew my first castle that year with a burnt Sienna crayon. I feel as though everything I've ever learned about relationships I knew by the first 2wo weeks of Grade 3hree...the girls change, the likes and dislikes change, but the Sturm und Drang continues...I think Pippa taught me that word, during a breezy day in 1987 when I had forgotten my cheese sandwiches for lunch, and had to borrow 2 bucks for lunch...thanks, kid with the big head...

So I leave early. The computers at work have all broken. When you try and turn the 1ne out the back on it sounds worse than the 2nd Terence Trent D'arby album. The air conditioner is now spewing wrathful hot air out of its mouth, like a punishment for when we thought it was too cold. I'm going to keep the sticker up, as a sort of ironic motivational tool. I'll worry about all of these things tomorrow. I can't remember if I've ever been on a picnic...damn it, now that's going to bug me all day. There's a kid with a giant monster balloon determined not to get out of the way of the doorway, and his dad has weird purple bloated legs, like cankles but through his whole legs. It's all I can do not to stare. Why wear shorts in that case? Self confidence I guess? All least 3hree different people today have told me I'm keeping them sane or they are the reason I come to work. I come for the chocolate biscuits and the comfortable sense that I don't have to try very hard to do well. Not admirable but honest. I'm able to dodge the traffic because I'm leaving early - I'd have a nanna nap if I didn't have to pick up the groceries. I thought, rather proudly, I could fang it through the traffic, not realising that yes, there would be less traffic on the road, but more trucks, road works and slow moving objects with oversized on them. I thought I could fang it through the grocery buying but instead am stuck behind slow moving pensioners and bored women, some of whom have oversized on their pants label. When I get home, my mailbox is stuffed with junk mail. One of the letters promises to give me utter inner peace - as long as I send 19.99 to the appropriate address and ring a hotline. I throw it away - I doubt they could help some1ne who hasn't slept properly since 1984 because he can't get his brain to stop thinking for even a moment. I throw my meagre single man food scraps onto the table along with my keys, and sit quietly in my chair, while my DVD player turns itself on without a single action from me, and begins playing an episode of Entourage I don't even remember owning, the gentle hum of bad acting soothing me to sleep...

Tomorrow, as they say, will be another day...

Astute observers are saying there may be no more

2010-10-23T00:42:00.000-07:00

It's a chaotic post modern kind of Friday in the shackled to my life suburban shopping centre - the shoppers have rejected the conventions of queuing and polite behaviour in a child like rush to the shopping counter. An old Italian woman simply brushes past me to the Banjos queue in Post Panini haste, and is served first, leaving me to exist in impotent middle class fury. She has so much hairspray on her head that I hope the left over smoky breath of the fat lumbering girl serving her doesn't cause some kind of combustible reaction. Children free from going to school run freely into everyone’s shins and shopping trolleys, under no supervision at all from dis-interested smoking parents who are equally dis-interested in the sign that tells them not to smoke. Someone cue up Simba. There are larger ladies swinging their flesh freely in the breeze, in hotpants and tube tops, putting a Carolee Schneemann piece of performance art to shame with their muffin tops and other analogies between flabby skin over fabric and bakery items still yet to be defined. Anarchy has descended somewhere around the Sushi bar, as two old men in suspiciously matching pullovers begin pushing and shoving each other - the impassive implacable Japanese girl behind the counter simply stares at them, her face not even flickering for a moment. I eventually get served in the eye of this bubbling suburban storm of domestic impatience by the blonde indifferent member of staff. It's a strange detail I notice that she never blinks - I don't know why I notice these things. The arguing feisty pensioners have to be separated by their wives, the cause of their argument unknown. They are simply swinging wrinkly fists at each other without words. The Japanese girl simply ignores them and wipes down her counter. The unblinking blonde disappears into the kitchen seconds after selling me my baguette, and the Italian lady returns to the counter to complain about her coffee, pushing past a harried single mother on her mobile phone. She raises the bar for middle class impotent fury by letting out a harmless tut, and then doing absolutely nothing about it...I myself take a bite of my baguette, and count to three, in anticipation of a small child crashing into my shins...I don't even get to two...

There's a tension inside my workplace when I get back from lunch. We've put the Xmas drinks list on the fridge. They are all tiptoeing around who they want to invite and are trying to keep it quiet from certain people - the girl with the mod haircut for instance. My ex ironic girlfriend isn't talking to me. I have this feeling in my guts we'll end up scrapping in the pub car park during Xmas drinks. I might have to drink Diet Coke. My workplace is also anarchic - 1ne of our workmates has gone home early and left us short. I have on my desk a card she sent me at the height of our relationship. It sits next to a bumper sticker I'll never affix to the back of my car. I still haven't figured out which of us has ended up the Regine Olsen of the relationship, but I'll get to the bottom of it 1ne day. There's a man twice the size of Everest standing blocking out the doorway. He's got 2wo giant vats of water for our drinking machine, and a stack of forms to sign. His beard looks like it could house small animals and his face heaves with the anger and stress that will 1ne day kill him. You could connect his veins and form a pattern if you so decided to. He eventually says can someone sign these forms please, emphasising the word please in a way that in this particular recap should cause me to use Caps Lock. The weird thing is his voice is uncharacteristically squeaky and camp. Maybe it was stress, maybe that's how he normally talks, but it makes me giggle out loud that this giant bearded distance cousin of Giant Haystacks talks like he's sucked the living breath out of a helium balloon. I turn to tell my ex ironic girlfriend what's happened, but then I remember...oh that's right. Can't do that. Instead I eat a Milky Way, let the little moment of poignancy pass me by, and type it into an Instant Message to someone who never replies. The silence at work is killing me right now. Still, mustn't ask how she is...can't go back now. Gotta be big...

It's Saturday now. I've mostly been putting posters up on the wall celebrating Collingwood’s Premiership and putting songs on my IPOD today. Free of emotional baggage, I've essentially reverted to the life of a teenager again. I'm even wearing a hooded top with an unidentified stain and eating Weetbix from a bowl, just like the old days. This does also mean I have to go shopping for 1nce on my own - I don't think collectible jars of Isnack 2.0 and 2wo cans of Red Bull are going to get me through the weekend. My local shopping centre has taken down the advert wall, which I hadn't notice before. Essentially next to the wonderfully named Cyber Hair - that's my local hairdresser, surprisingly free given the name of robots, but full of vapid blonde frustrated "hair technicians who couldn't care less what you are doing on the weekend but ask anyway - there was an abandoned shop. For the life of me I can't remember what shop it was. Maybe Trax, the last Tasmanian dying ember of the record shop spark. Anyway, the wall was soon covered in a strange collage of fliers, advertorials, those little rental ads or tutorial offers with the little bit at the bottom you pull of, or 1nce I saw a note that just said "Susan call me". It was on a post it note between a missing dog ad and some1ne offering adult services, as they used to quaintly call it in the Advocate back on the North West Coast. Sadly, they cleared it the other week. Sure, the new wall is sleek and shiny and futuristic - I'm sure the people at Cyber Hair approve - but like Phillip Johnsons Glass House, a tidier look doesn't make it functional. The loss of the tattered wall of scattered moments in people’s lives doesn't sit well with me, but I suspect I mourn alone as I push my shopping trolley mournfully around smoking hairdressers and bewildered pensioners eating Milky Bars. I should approve far more, having made my own life less cluttered, but somehow, I can't bring myself to applaud anything that promotes the sleek over the shambolic...

Inside my local Target, two red-shirted store workers are loading wrestling figures onto the shelf. I'm reading a book about some footballer whose life I'm sure was really interesting, but not interesting enough to read about after the exchange of money for his interesting story. One of the workers is middle aged, blonde, with hair painted and dipped in blonde, lipstick attached surgically to her mouth, and a smile of genuine sweetness. The other one is young, with soaking wet hair, a frantic pace to his work, and a hatred of the in store music. The plastic wrestling figures have no opinion on any of this, lifelessly and silently placed on shelves without complaint. The footballer’s life story continues to kill a few minutes in my lunch break. He has some strong opinions on The Hangover apparently. The blonde woman isn't particularly interested in stacking wrestling figures on a shelf; she's more of a supervisory figure, putting her head around the corner any time a customer appears to ask them if they need help. None of them ever do, and she walks back to her post slightly defeated. The wet haired boy continues to stack and complain about the music, throwing the wrestling figures onto the shelf with reckless abandon. He complains so much about the music I try and identify it myself. It's some generic R&B, the type made by a singer whose name you won't remember in a year’s time. Just as I turn towards them again, to express some sort of visual glance of solidarity to his point of view, the two workers are holding hands, surreptitiously, like first daters struggling to work out how such a thing had happened. It's only for a brief moment, a little mutual smile and then it's gone. I wonder if it's a sudden realisation for them - it deserved better than to be sound tracked by Taio...Bruno...whatever one it is - but it's there. I wish them well as I walk off directly into a pram pushed by an unhappy looking Muslim woman. She offers the most insincere of apologies, and we keep walking in opposite directions - the CD playing skips erratically at that moment, violently, hissing from the PA like an angry stuttering snake. It's to my interest only, as no one else even seems to notice, let alone seem to care...

I go home to a free uncluttered life, and the obvious detriment to it - nothing to do but have a Nanna nap. I think most of you know me well enough by to know if this is a positive or a negative...

By 1978 the phrase was in use in print...

2010-10-21T00:02:00.001-07:00

It's Show Day today in Hobart. I don't like the Hobart Show, it lacks the muddy omnipresence of the Burnie show in the local community, but I enjoy the day off. It means I've avoided a day in traffic and not had to solve the problems of my ex ironic girlfriend and her will I won't I stand off with life. I'm being harsh - the traffic isn't that bad. It means that essentially I can do what I want, although this has generally meant sleeping a lot, eating cereal from a bowl and talking to my Dad on the phone. Since I don't have to worry about emotional dramas, my mind has become a lot clearer. I sat on my front deck today almost like an old man on the porch, sans banjo and moonshine, but swinging back and forth on my hammock nonetheless in simplistic stillness. My Dad is alone in his house at the moment because Mum is in Melbourne. He's pottering around the house cursing the AUSTAR people for not putting on more worthwhile than old episodes of Open All Hours. Since my football team won the Premiership and My Dads teams have all been, to use an un erudite word, shite, he's been claiming the most minor of victories in things like fantasy sports or betting competitions and bringing round certificates to show he's beating me. He's currently down at the shops - I bet he's got on his blue tracksuit trousers, wondering why our local supermarket makes you take a number to buy a salmon cutlet when there's no 1ne else in the line. I know it makes him mad. Being devoid of emotional responsibility, I'm able to slip into the most comfortable of sleeps. My hammock is 1ne of my prized possessions in life - a personal reward to myself. In true single man style, I can spread out and enjoy myself on days like this - when Mum is in Melbourne, Dad is able to do the same, sit up with his pint of Guinness yelling at various A League soccer players for being horrendously rubbish and not have to switch off 1/2lf way through to watch something on the Crime Investigation channel. Even though we are in different homes, we are both contented today. No work, no traffic, no problems...although Dad craves physical space though, I crave emotional space, and in a very true sense our wishes today are being utterly fulfilled...

Although my Mum and Dad and I have an exceptionally close relationship, it hasn't always been easy. My Dad is quite an idiosyncratic individual. To make a point he will go to extraordinary lengths. For instance, during a large part of my teenage years he thought I was appallingly lazy. He was right of course - the fact I couldn't even rouse enough anger to argue the point probably proved him right. To prove this point, he would wake exceptionally early in the morning - sometimes around 7even in the morning - to get up and mow the lawn. When we lived in 1ne particular house in Burnie, mowing the lawn was like hiking casually around the North Face of the Eiger. Throw in that our lawn mower was essentially a petrol powered Fisher Price prototype, just a modification away from blowing bubbles instead of cutting any grass, and it was no easy task. It would have relatively easy even in our perpetually arguing are you sure you don't have any homework fraught relationship to assign me, as a pent up but home bound teenager, to get me to mow the lawn. However, to prove his point, he would get out and mow the lawn out of nothing but sheer old man spite. He would push his pasty white creaky Scottish old man body around the cliff faces and avoid the feral neighbourhood dogs and children who would terrorise him with barks and spittle flecked abuse. Having cut the grass to within an inch of its life - my Dads scorched earth approach to lawn mowing left it as barren and bereft as a marine drafted in for a 1/2lf cut - he would be close to exhaustion. Weeds would be piled into the corner like the end of Platoon. All that was left was barren desert and, since we were Scottish, absolutely no beauty was acceptable. At which point he would emerge into the kitchen and revive himself with self satisfaction and orange juice. I would then have the temerity to wake at, say, 8ight O'clock, and he would say this proved I was lazy since he had spent an entire morning pushing the Fisher Price lawnmower even without the aid of Sherpa’s or an oxygen mask. Had I been a sleepwalker I dare say he would have been out there at 3hree in the morning. He did whatever it took to win my Dad...

The most infuriating thing about my parents growing up was their approach to arguing. My Dad would often simply stop an argument to declare "he had won" and would argue illogical conversational avenues simply to get to victory. My Mum came from a family of 13teen, so she had to be sharp. Her tack would be to remember ideological points from an argument 5ive months previously and re-hash them like a skilled debater. She was 1nce told by 1ne of my aunties that 30ty was, like, ancient, and so, like, she waited a whopping 14teen years to send that aunty a card that was covered from brim to rim in the word ancient in a variety of fonts. Arguing with them on a unified front was an impossible task. Especially with my non confrontational teenage rebellion of not telling them anything that was going on in my life. They found me a frustrating curiosity - almost like a scruffy flatmate or lodger - at times rather than a son. I know that 1nce we had a huge argument about maths homework which threatened to become a UFC style knockout battle, simply because I wouldn't explain my marks to them. I can still see my Dads angry face as he put my copy of Sensible Soccer in another room where I couldn't get it. We got through it though - just. There was a clear and unambiguous apathy to me in my teenage years that they couldn't penetrate. I would collect TAZOs endlessly to a full set but not sit down and study for an exam. I can't even explain some things myself to be honest. Compared to the rest of Dads family, we've been perfectly normal, but there's a factual distance in my family. There are still so many things they don't know about me. I just never found talking to them easy - if it was about sport or music, easy. I'm just reticent to talk to them about anything important, perhaps lest I lose an argument or hear something I don't want to. They say they just want me to be happy - that's all they've ever said. Be happy. Today, I am happy though. I can at least trust my parents to be there - they've never, oh I don't know, pulled a gun on me - and I think that's as good as can be expected. Dads on the phone from the supermarket. He doesn't know where the pasta aisle is. Weird thing with my parents - terrible at directions, wonderful at remembering slights...my Dad still hasn't got over the electronic soccer debacle of 91...

Dad leaves the phone call midway salmon cutlet purchase. He hates the girl behind the counter at Woolworths - he thinks she's a snob. He might write a letter to management. He wrote a letter 1nce to a Scottish soccer journalist and got in return a 5ive page hand written reply. He thought it was patronising. I leave him to get home for an episode of Ironside. Would a normal son say Dad I've got this girl at work and...maybe, but it's too late, we're not a revelatory family. He goes home to make sausages bang on time and then have his customary nap. I haven't moved beyond the hammock all day except to read a book about how faux over optimistic attitudes have destroyed a generation of Americans. The kids next door are arguing about something. I think they were trying to see if a bike could do a stunt and jump over a glued together pile of fruit boxes or something. The ginger kid with the scrunchy face is the optimist who thinks he can turn into Kingston’s equivalent of Evil Knievel while his friend, a little ratfink kid with a little ratfink tail coming out of his head seems entirely to consist of a 1ne word vocab - that 1ne word being dunno. Every time the ginger kid tries to coax some sort of enthusiasm for their stunt based project - projecting future dreams of YouTube glory or, I don't know, a lolly snake from Mum - the ratfink kid simply says dunno. Eventually the ginger kid storms inside, turns on a retro Air Jordan sneaker and says to the ratfink kid you don't believe in anything, why don't you try harder - it's an insult that is lost on the ratfink kid who simply shrugs, lost for words. I guess sometimes it's easier to be the sceptic than the fighter. The ratfink kid picks up his bag and walks over the pool, looking at his own reflection in the mirror with a confused look on his little ratfink face. With an empathic loudness I never associate with him he says a different word to dunno. Dickhead. He just says it out loud, the object of the word unclear - his former friend, himself? Sometimes it's impossible to tell who you should really berate. Too young for emotional complexities he then cannonballs into the pool and proceeds to beat himself over the head with a pool noodle. Too old for emotional complexities, I let my mobile phone ring off the hook, as I fall deeply into blissful public holiday afternoon slumber...

I wake up craving a salmon cutlet of course, but the hassle to get 1ne, frankly, is far too difficult...

Ennui (Directed by Chuck Leal)

2010-10-20T03:41:00.000-07:00

Its 9ine am in a suburban Tasmanian shopping centre. I feel even more het up than usual from a snaking conga line of traffic gridlocked all the way back into the city, which left me alone with my thoughts and a CD of songs I don't even like anymore. It's hard to know which of those things frustrated me more. A woman is sitting at the Internet kiosk watching a clip of her grandson winning a sack race at a randomly assembled school sports carnival. It's hard to know if either the subject or watcher will ever be that happy again. The bogan girl with the tattoos in Banjos has been preparing my breakfast this week because I've struck down with a serious bout of ennui - tea leaves may thwart those who court catastrophe, but I can't even be bothered buying the tea leaves in the first place. I wish I didn't feel so flat. I don't work at the East German Labor camp version of our workplace with targets, meetings and inspirational videos, but I still need something to aim for. I'm a product of my nation - things are going OK, so claim the predictability is bringing you down. The bogan girl asks me if I want my usual - succour for my torpor from a bogan. How fitting. Every day feels exactly the same at the moment. I can even predict the Banjos staff movements, even though this is a new workplace. If the blonde 1ne with the ponytail is there she'll pretend to slice bread and ask some1ne else to serve. If the fat girl with flour on her fingers is there, she'll lumber up to serve slowly so some1ne beats her to it. The bogan girl will mention the weather...yes, it is a lovely day...yes, it is cold outside...yes, the hurricane did destroy my house...the bogan girl is smiling the demented smile of those with nothing but time in her life. I like her happiness, but her tattoo is a mess. You can only see it if she stacks something on the bottom shelf. It looks like a child’s finger painting effort - it's pretty much translates from Chinese for can I get a refund on this. And yes, I will have my usual. Damn it's delicious allegedly freshly made by fat girls with floury fingers but really mass produced taste...

The new girl at work is planning to ask some1ne in another office out. Apparently he makes her weak at the knees. I don't think I've ever made anyone weak at the knees. My old netball playing girlfriend said I made her feel safe. I said I don't know if it was a compliment, to be compared to a fire extinguisher or a smoke detector. Thus begun our long standing argument about how she could never say anything nice to me. Good times, precious memories. The new girl has the demeanour of some1ne who smiles all day then goes home to eat crackers and cry. I'm obsessed with her fake laugh. Not obsessed enough to ask her out of course. Sometimes in the office they talk about girly things and there's not much I can do to join in. I don't have anything to contribute to discussions about inter relationship mutual waxing or medieval sounding medical check up procedures. The worst thing about this office - perhaps the main reason for the ennui right now - is they all hate their boyfriends and none of them will leave them. 1ne stands outside the office at night in an essential kidnapping to make sure they go home together, 1ne bought Internet porn with her credit card, another 1ne has just got another girl pregnant. I just smile now - I can't save the world. I can only recommend songs for a heartbreaking mix tape. The other girl at work - the single 1ne - has given herself a mod haircut and spends all day long on the Internet looking at pictures of Lady Gaga. Essentially, I'm out of conversational options today. That is beyond the staples of office life - can't believe how quick today has gone, can't believe how slow today has gone, the invention of amusing office nicknames, that kind of thing. A redheaded woman with painfully thin watery eyes is waiting for her appointment. She's sitting almost rocking with rage, her eyes flicker and dart back and forth angrily as if she's trapped in some horrible never ending hell based tennis match. Not at us, but at her husband. It's not possible for me to feel basic human empathy some days. I wish I could, but I'm just too flat. I wonder if it would help if I walked past eating my Kit-Kat and said something about how quick the day has gone...

The air conditioning - defying all logical thought processes - has decided to now pump out nothing but hot air into our workplace. This after we had been excessively cold in the depths of winter and a man with a blotchy face told us it was essentially our fault for, I don't know, being near it. I press my face into my hands and pull 1ne of those faces people pull when they want other people to notice that they are tired. As hard as I've worked all day was editing a letter from my ironic girlfriend to the Tax Office. She hadn't spelled office correctly. I gently changed it. Eventually my quest to have every1ne notice I'm tired spills into outright saying gee I'm tired. A drunken man in a baseball cap is sitting cross legged in 1ne of our ergonomically structurally sound chairs awaiting his appointment. He doesn't appear soothed by the soothing music soothingly piped into the office. He also has a stack of papers so thick and bulging that it looks like he's about to attend the Treaty Of Rome. He drops them in an inevitable drunken manner, scattering them to the forewinds in a blur of paper and panic. He starts swearing really loudly. I study him to try and work out the exact problem, but give up quickly when he catches my inspecting gaze. The new girl goes out to help him, which is nice of her. It's only then I realise that, last week, a similar man had dropped all his papers all over the place and the new girl helped him pick them up - great, now even the interesting programs are repeats. I quickly go back to eating my Kit-Kat. No 1ne else in the office is moving. It's a sea of weary faces and indifferent expressions. In my supervision role, I should say something inspirational, but what's the point...too damn hot. The drunken man disappears into a frosted glass office for his date with destiny. The woman with watery eyes comes out of the other office, kicks 1ne of our ergonomically structurally sound chairs in frustration, and then disappears. No 1ne moves a muscle. Just that kind of day really...

I've spent the week at least doing something different. I've pushed back from my ironic girlfriend. It's just not going to work out - I found out today in casual conversation that her Dad 1nce chased her with a gun for an unspecified reason. When I go to my memory bank of parental neglect stories it's the time I had just taken the skin off my neck - long story - and my Dad told me off for asking the school nurse for another Tik-Tok biscuit. I like to chide him that maybe since I took the skin off my neck a pink Tik-Tok biscuit wasn't out of the question. There were no guns in our household - my Dad chased me round the house rubbing Manchester United victories in my house, that was about it. We're just far too different - our relationship had essentially become a series of shock and awe revelations on her behalf of problems I couldn't fix. Hell, my main concern today was trying to work out my favourite track off the 1st Britney album, I'm not sure that qualifies me to comment on the dying embers of some1nes marriage. I've run out of re-assuring words, I can't fix the world as I said and thus I've run out of things to say. Today I didn't send her any kind of instant message of support - there, there's your modern parting of the ways. I don't think I'm cut out for modern relationships anyway if the stories of inter relationship mutual waxing are anything to go by. She later tells some1ne in the office she's leaving her husband, who is of course standing outside waiting to kidnap her. This is now not my problem - she says tell me I'm doing the right thing. I shrug and say I don't know. My main priority, now I've made this decision, is pretty much to head off into the sunshine and try and work out why my Internet connection is so horrendously awful. She disappears into the metaphorical and literal distance as I climb into my car. The new girl heads in the direction of the office where the heartbreaker works to work her charms, and the cleaner pushes a mop mournfully around the tiled floor of our office with a back aching expression, all alone. Frankly, I know that look. It's the look you pull when you want people to know you are tired...I invented that look...I'd ask her how quick and or slow she thought the day had gone, but ya know, I've done enough listening for 1ne day...

Incidentally - Born To Make You Happy. Now that is a tune...

4our Scenes from a Rainy Hobart Friday

2010-10-16T00:58:00.000-07:00

It's Friday afternoon in a Tasmanian suburb. The rain gently coats the pensioners outside with something to complain about, and my lunch break is fading from me all too quickly. The problem with lunch breaks, to purloin the old vaudeville joke about something else entirely, is that you never remember the great 1nes. I'm inside the claustrophobic narrow catacombs of a suburban newsagency. A man with glasses and a receding hairline is blocking my path. He has the beady eyes of a gargoyle and the critical faculties of the pickiest type of restaurant critic. His wife is a small, stooped man, with a ginger mullet and the air of some1ne who's listening skills were killed by depression sometime about the Fraser years. She has a stripy bag that contains nothing but oranges, and is idly flicking through a knitting magazine in the 1/2lf hearted way some1ne idea rich but time poor will always do - she'll start knitting tomorrow she says to herself, she promises herself mentally. I empathise - I'd do lots more writing if only the quality of programs on AUSTAR wasn't so consistently high. The man is cleaning his glasses of rainwater and blocking the path of several other middle aged men killing time on their lunch break. He then flicks through a book rack of autobiographies, holding them up and pointing out loudly how little the various authors had done in their lives to deserve an autobiography. He thrusts 1ne such tome from a reality TV star or football right in his wives face and says that he has lead a more interesting life than said author. His wife doesn't even react. She just stares sadly and quietly at the stained and matted carpet until he finishes speaking. Meanwhile, over at the Tattslotto counter, a man in poncho - remember, you can't be unhappy in a poncho - is pontificating to a young girl in purple eye shadow about his system for winning the lottery. Apparently it's all in the kid’s birthdays and in the stars. She says in a soft bogan voice how many times have you won the lottery? He looks awkwardly at her, picks up his tickets, and walks away without saying a word. Outside, the rain continues to bounce off the ground, bounce and then dissipate in a torrent down a gutter, like the faded dreams of so many suburban bustling shoppers. My dream for the moment is to avoid getting soaked, and for a moment I wonder if the tattslotto ticket buyer has a system to avoid being mugged for his poncho...my surroundings, as it where, are leading me to more and more grim thoughts...

It's 5ive pm at my work place. My computer screen is off, and I'm standing around a white table covered in magazines. A man with a patchy beard, akin to, say, a bass player from Dr Hook, brings in about 5ive posters a week to work, all of which are advertising upcoming events. I'm staring at the rusty, creaky old visage of Col Elliott, 1ne of those comedians critics sometimes say are "holding up a mirror to challenge political correctness" - he does Chinaman impressions in other words. I'm engaged in this 1ne sided staring contest with Col because I work in a very girly workplace and a very girly conversation finishing is my last conversational hurdle to negotiate before I go home - already this week, I've discovered that all naked men are essentially laughable and funny looking, so I know my expect every day of my workplace life to contain some sort of Cosmo revelations. The bonding glue between the women in my workplace is they all have kids and all wish they didn't. I've become some sort of conversational totem pole to them because I quite openly don't want kids, so they keep asking my opinion but I'm not really listening, since I'm trying to remember the line in a song...battleship of baggage and...how does it go? And I'm also trying to send txt msgs to 1ne of my friends to try and cheer him up. He sits at a desk in a different office, 1ne that has meetings all the time, high pressure targets, inspirational videos to watch and a manager who runs the office with an iron fist and not much encouragement. In contrast our office is eating lollies, and our only morning meetings are held around the radio trying to win a garden voucher from a local DJ. I'm trying to keep his spirits up but it isn't easy. My Mum is somewhat bewildered by my reputation as a good listener. She thinks whenever some1ne is unburdening to me my mind is at the MCG imagining I'm playing for Collingwood or wondering what the 3hrd track on Withershins is. In most cases, that's true, but in this instance, I'm genuinely trying to help. When I say I'm going home, he trots off to another soul-less meeting in an oak panelled office to be berated...again. There's nothing I can do - I leave the txt unanswered, and go outside, for no other reason than to avoid our over chatty cleaner, lest I ask for hours on end when the hell she's going to some dusting...

It's later that night in a quiet Hobart pub. In the corner a black haired female singer is in cover version hell - her only audience are 2wo men inappropriately aged to wear baseball caps requesting Holy Grail endlessly with squeaky hoarse voices. She tries to engage our table in some banter just for something else to do, but we're a little distracted. We've got a list in front of us to organise Xmas drinks - who's in, who's out, as if we're organising an Oscar’s party, such is the exclusivity and passion of the debate. At 1ne of the poker machines a man with frizzy ginger hair sits down with a bucket full of coins, to try and win his fortune. He stares longingly at the machine as if it's the answer to all his problems, and then begins the process of falling victim to the slavish rhythm of the poker machines noises. Outside the window taxi drivers lean against their unused cabs, standing in the rain setting the world to social rights. Soon they will disappear into the night, taking with them passengers who will become part of the original social networking chain, and have opinions on all matters pressed deep into their conscious whether they like it or not. The singer takes a break to get her free drink for the night, and slowly walks up to the bar shrugging gently almost in apology that no 1ne is into her singing. The gambler truly doesn't know when to hold them, and returns to change a 2nd bucket of coins from the indifferent bar stuff. It's only later I realise that when we went into The Central that we sat at our "usual table" - we had our usual conversations, and although the singer and the gambler have changed faces, not much else has in the intervening years. Should I crave more from my existence or cherish my fortune in consistency, in friends and situations I could count on? Such questions probably drove ancient philosophers nuts, although none of them were distracted by the clunking and clicking of a never winning poker machine, the acoustic sounds of a slowed down cover version of Come Together, the whirling thrill of free passed around the bar snacks, wondering which Taxi driver in the queue has the most right wing opinions and debates about the 3hrd member of Bananarama. Everyone looks at me - Keren I say. They now I'll know. I know they know I'll now. It's come from familiarity....we've been here before, and we'll be here again...that's just how it always will be...

It's late at night now. The cold and black of Hobart night-time are overwhelming, a star poking its head out of the darkness providing the only illumination. A suited and booted stranger who tried to make our acquaintance has already been discarded, lost in transition when his conversation threatened to become obnoxious. He stumbled off to go and annoy some1ne else with his opinions on finances a long time ago, now no more than a footnote in an anecdote. I'm picking bits of fish out of my teeth and waiting for a taxi as the rain stumbles down from the heavens in awkward, ragged patterns, chilling my bones and making it difficult to check my txt msgs. Some bridesmaids are fleeing Irish Murphy’s in a blur of angel wings and wedding dress fabric, taking another fleet of taxis far away, and complaining about the cold. My jumper is by necessity thin and boring to make sure I was allowed into pubs, but the payback to this is freezing cold. Cold and dark, like those claustrophobic Ayrshire mornings trying not to get a punch in the head from older bullies. I think if I hang round long enough in the dark some1ne might attack me sometimes, the consequence of having a mother who hasn't wised up to the methods of modern media to create fear in the populace. She always thinks if I walk for even a moment, something is out there, and it's seeped into my brain through osmosis. Everything has a consequence I guess. I drop my phone in a puddle and a passing drunk tuts so loudly it disturbs the Gods. I don't know why my Samsung abuse has so irked him, but perhaps it's just his excuse to have a go at me. As it turns out, he's tutting at some1ne else entirely, an obnoxious brunette girl calling everyone and sundry the C word. My phone has survived the bruising encounter with the pavement, and I jump into a taxi, leaving behind their forthcoming fracas to another anecdote chronicler. As my phone recovers, a txt msg comes up on my screen - some1nes leaving their husband at Xmas. Everything has consequences. The rain lashes down hard on the ground, as my taxi driver turns, looks at me and says "rough night huh?"...

Articulacy leaves me as I grunt, fall asleep, and let the gentle hum of Katy Perry’s ongoing battle with poor radio reception send me home to bed...

Subject to the same forces of compression

2010-10-14T01:25:00.000-07:00

It's Midday in a suburban Tasmanian shopping centre. There's a malfunctioning alarm system ringing throughout the shopping centre, as annoying as a well flicked ear, pounding its rhythmical warning beat to all and sundry. No 1ne seems to notice at all, pensioners amble to and fro, Chinese cooks fry and torture assorted dim sims, and a newsagent stares blankly out her window, dreaming of home time. A procession of old women and harried single mothers sit on the padded seats in front of the Internet kiosks, ignoring the signs that say they can't sit there. Challenged, they may claim war service or an ache that predicts a storm is coming. They certainly aren't moving for any social media checking teenagers with hats and pants in different directions with girlfriends who's name they won't remember in 2wo weeks time. Outside Banjos, an old lonely man is holding up the queue talking to a tattooed cheerful bogan girl behind the counter. The rest of the new Banjos staff I've encountered balance out her cheerful nature with a series of huffs, puffs and unhappy faces. They make sure that even the gift of a free house cake is given with the gift of grump. Somewhere outside this shopping centre, a protagonist in the maelstrom of indifference and non evacuation activity in the middle of an evacuation drill looks downward at his shiny shoes and see his own battle weary face in the reflection. He's been evacuated and stands divorced from his IPOD and his increasingly promising sandwich. He has in his pocket PK chewing gum acquired from the exchange of money for goods and services. He has to be light on his feet lest some1ne crash a shopping trolley into his legs. For reasons already forgotten he isn't speaking to 1ne of his work compatriots. Or she isn't speaking to him. She's under the pump, harried, harassed, stalked and lacking sleep. He's annoyed because that's what he gets like, especially when he's 1/2lf way eating a sandwich when an alarm tells him to stop. In time, they will patch up their differences for the sake of office harmony and exchange Quality Street chocolates brought in by a crazy lady who used to work for Cadburys - so she says. We're thinking lately we're eating stolen goods. For the moment though, our fussin and feudin co-workers are standing outside listening to a cacophonous symphony of repetitive wailing, staring at the ground, and trying to engage in the lifelong never ending competition of who can pull the angriest face after a fight for spurious pointless reasons...it's what makes us human...

My kindergarten teacher went on strike when I was 4our. When I passed the gates on a daily basis I would say to my Mum "what's going to happen to all us kids!" - given 1/2lf a chance I'd have lead the kids in a counter protest based entirely around what this was doing to our educational prospects. Back then I was tipped for glittering intelligentsia based success by the Penguin glitterati, also known as the milk bar owners, although they would also say my inability to tie my shoelaces would hold me back in the real world. They gaveth and tooketh away in the Penguin glitterati. It would have been wasted on my class - 1ne girl smelled entirely of tissues and dribbled on the Lego, and couldn't tilt her head properly, and she was the thinker of the class. She said profound things like sandwiches were better than giraffes and we would ponder if that was true. Mostly it was a theatre of cruelty kind of kindergarten however, the scrambles for the burnt sienna crayon in the morning particularly bothersome. I learned a trick that if you didn't replace the crayon at the end of the day you could just take it home and use it again the next morning. I've often wondered if my stash of stolen Crayola crayons and the cost of replacing them somehow contributed to the budget crisis that meant the teachers couldn't afford to be paid more, in a sort of butterfly flapping its wings causes the world to end way. I think the girl smelling of tissues eating the chalk didn't help either. So I was walking past the school with my Mum 1ne Sunday, and in a rare fit of parental indifference - my Mum was hardcore on the parental protection, not only calling our local bully in Scotland "Moggy" an "ugly wee bastard", but making my hold my legs on the Puffing Billy when I was 10en, so any time I was off the leash I remember it - she left me to press my face against the bars and stare aimlessly into a classroom that could be occupied by kids the following day if there was no strike...by me. I used to love school...and as I pressed my little 4our year old face to the bars, a girl called Saskia Vandermast walked past in the opposite direction, screwed up her face and said "you're SOOOOOOOOOOOO ugly..."

Ah, Saskia Vandermast. She had the jaw of a female boxer and was the first person I ever saw with corn-rows. She had a tooth that looked like Albania. She was the first person I ever remember that said I was ugly. I looked at her as she walked off into the distance towards the general store owned by the Scottish guy who we later found had "connections" and could get us supplies. Ugly? Me? Who was I to be told I was ugly by a girl swinging a Batman bag and rocking the Yuliya Dovhal look years before it became fashionable. My response to this grievous insult seemed very adult and grown up at the time - I would completely freeze her out of any group activity and every single moment of my life. Yes, that'll do it I thought. And so I did. For the rest of the school year, Saskia Vandermast would ask me for a crayon and she wouldn't get it. Saskia Vandermast would try and join in the games in the sandpit and I would simply leave her to it. She would always scrunch her face up in sad bewilderment, tug at her cornrows and walk off. I think she genuinely had no idea what she did, until 1ne day she just said "I'm sorry for..." and trailed off with a poignancy which didn't really belong in a Kindergarten classroom full of kids pondering whether a teddy bear was better than a badger. I felt really bad about it for a long time. I felt my response to my first conflict situation had been irresponsible and hurtful, especially since other kids - kids whose sole feeling in life was schadenfraude - had taken up the bullying baton. Some1ne once told me the closest they ever came to suicide was when their art gallery exhibition was attended by drunken upper class idiots who had become their fandom. Their work was entirely out of their hands. I empathised. I empathised entirely through the point of view of a 4our year old child trying to put a genie back in a bottle. I vowed on that night - after 4our joints it must be said - that I would learn not to be huffy, to deal with my problems in a more rational way...with that said...

The alarm eventually goes off, apparently due to malfunction, and not due to the usual standard reason the alarm goes round here - interaction with naughty kids with mischievous intent. My IPOD luckily hasn't been stolen by looting mobs of pensioners, my sandwich ends up being full of surprises, none of them pleasant, the chocolates lay uneaten while the staff sum up whether the crazy lady from the Cadbury factory is trying to kill us and normality returns to the office. Although my reaction to the minor infraction that caused the dispute has been pleasingly kindergarten, it doesn't befit the modern workplace. Especially since we got the instant messenger, and every single moment of life is reduced to OMG and LOLs. I put Smoosh on the IPOD to try and drown out the drama. Instead of fighting over burnt sienna crayons, we're pretty much fighting and railing against our own irrelevance most of the day. We're not doing anything important, we're not saving lives, so we have to do something to pass the time. If there was a sandpit in the office it would have a demarcation line in it, a clear line between the popular staff and the unpopular staff. Actually such a thing exists - it's called Xmas Drinks. In the case of Saskia Vandermast, there was never true re-conciliation since I left at the end of the year and she kept her distance from me. In this small office space, we re-conciled our differences, me and the new girl, through the exchange of messages and sweets. There are times it's best to let things go - maturity brings clarity of thought. Smile, shake hands, exchange insincere messages and at the end of the day shake hands and move on. Just like in the manual. On a flickering television screen inside the shopping centre Chilean miners are being pulled to the surface - while slack jawed Tasmanian shoppers gawp and clap - to hug ginger mulleted mistresses. My escape from my work place is far less dramatic - there's no book deal, not ginger mulleted mistress to hug, just a simple escape through the exit door into the afternoon air, past some slack jawed gawkers, leaving behind only another lesson learned in life, and a sad unanswered message from some1ne stuck in a different office, trapped in meeting hell, who envies our ability to leave earlier than him...

Many are prepared to suffer for their art, but never learn to draw. I'm prepared to suffer for my mistakes, but never learn not to repeat them...but now, I can manage them...

The Story Of Carpentry Part 2

2010-10-11T01:13:00.000-07:00

I am the creation of an extraordinary series of inter-generational co-incidences. My personality has been the series of a lot of events, some kind, some cruel, some moving, some scarring, some joyous, some bewildering. My sense of humour is affected and created by the theft of a series of jokes from UK comedy shows no Australian has ever seen. I read a series of books that explain extraordinary co-incidences to me or seem to tell me to fix my outlook on life in a particular way to get what I want. I could fill a whole room with these books. No one has ever fully explained to me in simple English that they share the sheer joy of wondering all the co-incidences that made...you. Without some1ne thousands of years ago making goo-goo eyes at someone across an Irish swamp while washing their clothes or trying to steal a potato just to get through the day I wouldn't be here. I find the series of events that brought me to this point of my life so mind altering it keeps me awake some nights trying to remember them.

I don't need drugs, a brief moment of reflection on time and space will generally do it for me.

So, with such a respect for life, you may ask yourself why some of this precious short time on earth that will 1ne day be replaced by infinite peace in the cold embrace of the grave or, should you be other minded, eternal life with all your childhood dogs, is taken up with fixing the lock on a door at work. Of course minutiae won't form the basis of that amusing anecdote the priest or celebrant gets to recall on your funeral day, but a million frustrations may drive you closer to that point. Light is fading outside as I stand watching a bug eyed man in blue overalls trying to twist and contort an immovable lock into a shape that will allow us all to go home. He looks like either the inept chubby gangster who gets shot first in a crime movie or a weightlifter who's about to drop the bar onto his foot. His overalls don't quite fit him, and his hair is receding and retreating from his forehead 1ne curl at a time. He certainly loves locks. He sighs and deeply examines every inch of his work, in super slow motion. I'm bored. I don't share his passion for locks. He's already snapped at the new girl at work, he said something like "Didn't I tell you not to snap the lock back!" - she's new, she shrugs. Maybe he told me. He huffs back to the lock, in a blur of bad skin and little chubby fingers. He's lost the tip of his index finger. I try not to stare, since to ask would be to make polite conversation. The last thing I want to do is delay the crucial work being done on the lock. The really funny thing is when you live at home alone there's really no impetus to get home quickly, but it always feels like there is. The chubby locksmith asks me if I remembered not to slap the lock back. I shrug as well. He sighs from the deepest point of his overalls in disappointment and turns away from me as so many imparters of seemingly obvious wisdom have done over the generations to impudent fools such as myself. There's no point in any further bonding. He works for the rest of the time with us in complete silence. He must feel like Jesus, but with less miracle performing ability, unless the miracle you seek involves you getting home at a reasonable hour...

I've had to fix this lock because the same cabal of people, the same descent of complaints that saw me fix the air conditioner; they made me get this lock fixed. The air conditioner the other day was too warm, instead of too cold. I locked myself away in an office for a while just to listen to some Charlotte Gainsbourg to get away for a while. They still found me. My ironic girlfriend took her jacket off and worked for ages in a short singlet. I don't know if this was a come on - maybe it was. Maybe it was just warm. I can create a linear pattern to how the lock broke - someone twisted it and it didn't work. So some1ne told me and I rang a number that diverted briefly to India, saw me sit on a stool and listen to a series of frustratingly banal muzakical tunes until I was connected back to the country I live in and after the exchange of facts I had booked a man to come and fix the lock and lo and behold here he was. It's pretty easy to draw a flow chart that explains the process of lock being broken to lock being fixed. Any kind of emotive feeling within me I shy away from - ironic girlfriend? Don't mention it. Focus on the lock. Much easier to deal with. The light outside has completely faded by now. A bully is throwing shadow punches at a much smaller kid in the laneway across the road. The only sound is a staticky hiss coming from our increasingly dangerous and violently trembling radio. It makes all songs sound like they've been coming out of an East German cartoon from the 60tys - clanging, clanking, hissing and ultimately sounding nothing like they are meant to. How did I get here, I wonder, as I turn off the Paper clip on Microsoft Word and begin to type. Only 3hree sounds are heard in this quiet office with 2wo Males in it - industry from the worker, hissing from the radio, and me touch typing into an out of date copy of Microsoft Word while time ebbs slowly away from me...but not slowly enough...

I saw my netball playing girlfriend from many years ago outside a lift in 1ne of Hobart’s finest shopping centres the other day. I was my usual indifferent walking through life, and I didn't hear her say my name. I think I was thinking about sandwiches - how rude to interrupt. She has kids now. I don't remember that happening specifically. It just happened. She smiled broadly and hugged me after saying my name for the first time in many years without a swear word prefix. I didn't have much to say - it's lucky that I didn't tut when she accidentally ran her pram over my foot. I think it was accidentally, it might have been for all those times I played ATARI in her attic instead of talking to her about feelings. She disappeared into a crowd of milkshake buyers with her kids pulling at the hem of jeans, making a vague promise to talk on Facebook. We'll never talk on Facebook. She looks old and wise while I'm wearing some sort of retro soccer top paying tribute to the Bravo Juice company as a sponsor. We parted making the kind of awkward stilted small talk couples make on a first date. We went on a date 1nce where she wasn't happy with me for trying too hard. I was bewildered as to why effort was a bad thing. She never had an answer for me. She later looks impossibly miserable as her kid’s career into the shins of the local bookstore matron. The local bookstore matron is large enough that if she stood in the classical wide stance she would block out the autobiography section in an eclipse of nylon stocking. No 1ne would be able to ever get to the hilarious recollections of Ken Sutcliffe if she did so. The kids probably think it's a challenge to career into her legs and live to tell the tale. My old girlfriend looks at me as I walk past later sipping a milkshake. She looks a tiny bit regretful, or just hotted up and frustrated trying to control her rowdy infants. It was inter-generational co-incidences and a mutual love of Beth Orton that brought us together and now here we stood entirely different people with entirely different lives, perhaps with a chance of re-connecting as civilized adults. The moment is brief, and passes quickly. I see an opening in a lift and take it, she has to restrain her rowdier child from throwing Ken Sutcliffe’s memoir into another kids head, and we part without a farewell glance. Maybe I'll send her a message on Facebook after all...if I remember her surname...

The locksmith man leaves. He doesn't say he's left. I only know he's left because there's a stack of forms on a desk that no 1ne will ever read. There's scrawled psychopathic handwriting all over the forms, so maybe that's where he gives us his dire lock based warnings. He just leaves the forms to sign and disappears, leaving behind his silver wrench in a fit of forgetfulness. It hopefully isn't some Cinderellaesque sign that he's my true love. The workman’s code - leave behind a work item for the 1ne you love. Maybe it was for the new girl. She has a stalker who smells musky and wears a baseball cap to the side and Metallica T-shirt ensemble in a signifier that his youth is over but by god he'll go down kicking and screaming. She left a while ago. She's suspiciously happy all the time the new girl in the manner of some1ne who goes home and cries and then steels themselves to a big effort the next day. Her kid ran into my legs and said sorry Uncle Miles the other day. I said that was OK. It took a lot of restraint, since I hate kids, especially out of control running ones aimed at my shins. I click off my work place Instant Messenger - it deletes an entire day of whinging conversation from all and sundry. I turn out the lights with a deft flick of my wrist, and step outside into the night air. For a horrible moment I think the lock is about to devour my key like a hurt man devours the microphone when he sings sad songs at karaoke - but it clicks shut, and in a short walk I'll be in my car, driving through the dark part assorted equally bored car imprisoned strangers, until finally my driveway comes into view, and time comes to relax, far from locks, ironic girlfriends, and any stressful messages flashing on the screen...

Linear, so clear and linear how I got home. So easy to describe. Everything else, of course, I'm just not verbose enough to sum up easily...

A short history of carpentry Part 1

2010-09-29T03:51:00.000-07:00

I'm just talking to ya...sigh...I'm just talking through ya...

It's Monday morning where I work. There's a Chinese lady at the end of the road with a colander on her head. She's gurgling like she's doing it to entertain a child, but I don't see any child. I briefly wonder if she really is Chinese - she may be Japanese, Korean, Nepalese...I don't like it when people call me English. I would apologize for my impertinence, but she has a colander on her head, so it's best not to get involved. A milling crowd has gathered around a girl in a school uniform who has just been assaulted. She lies in the middle of the street with the bewildered, stunned look of the ferociously attacked. It's hard to muster up much dignity when you are lying in the road, skirt hitched up, being tended to by a doctor who, having stepped through the crowd with the campest of "I'm a doctor!" flourishes, doesn't seem to be much help at all. He seems short in more than one way; short in height, short of medical supplies, short in wit...his medical technique seems to involve telling people to stand back a lot. The woman with the colander on her head isn't part of the milling crowd. She has wandered into the local hairdressers. With a colander on her head. Maybe they can cut around it...

My local hairdressers having proclaimed "Pink is back!" and try our free pink GHBs are now saying "appointments may not be necessary!" - this excites a woman with a black funereal coat and long stringy blonde hair that sticks out at weird angles. She says to her boyfriend "maybe I can get my hair done!" and he says "yeah maybe" and she beams as if he's proposed on an exotic foreign beach. They then walk off with hair resolutely undone as a car almost runs me over. That'll teach me to pay attention to other people. There's a gaggle of middle aged women smoking outside 1ne of the supermarkets. The most rambunctious of the women has a mullet that nestles gently on her neck, and a hooped ring around her wrist that could disable even the most determined of muggers. She also has a child on a leash that is inhaling a fearsome amount of 2nd hand smoke through its nostrils. The point of her story is lost on me since it contains several personal in jokes and references to the time Gavin cried, all of which seem to cast aspersions on the manliness or lack of inherent in poor Gavin. She then says as she slaps her own denim encased knees "Yer don't have to be crazy to be ma friend, but it helps!" and much hilarity ensues. The kid doesn't appreciate the hilarity or the craziness. It's about 1ne stretch of its legs away from picking up an empty packet of cigarettes and stuffing it in its mouth. You don't have to be crazy to be a parent...

"Where does it hurt!" says Doctor Quickfix, and then sort of winks at the crowd. She points to a cut. He looks at it. "Does it hurt!" he says. "YES!" I say, louder than I intended. He glares at me 1ne cack handed medical professional to another. Well, I have a First Aid Certificate...

He's re-assuring I guess if you are concussed. The girl’s eyes are black, but she still has the presence of mind to start txting people she knows. Some1ne with a colander on their head might make her laugh for a moment. Time constrains me from finding out her fate. I have to awkwardly step over her and go into work. I swipe my card to get in. If I don't have my card, I have to stand outside in impotent fury until some1ne else comes to assist me. This will not be an amusing camp doctor, but some1ne smug; swiping their card saying "lost your card!" - my work did a productivity study many years ago. I could have saved them a lot of man hours if we could just reduce the amount of time people tell each other obvious truths simply to pass the time of day. "You eating a biscuit?" "Nearly home time!" "It's cold today!"...

Actually, it is cold today, hence why Steve is here. "Hi Steve!" I should say. Instead I grunt "Nuh" at Steve. Steve doesn't even respond to my grunt. He simply turns and faces me name badge first. Then he turns around again, and resumes the pointless dance of the wrench and the little nut that never turns. Steve is here to fix the air conditioner so it will be warm where I work. A man with a splotchy face came last week when it broke down the first time and poked at it with splotchy fingers and said things like "There's your problem!" without actually fixing the problem or saying what the problem was. We had a security guard at the same time; because some1ne robbed something...no one tells us anything in detail. It's all vague short semi sentences. The concussed girl is taken away in ambulance to become a statistic of our frustrating legal system and our frustrating hospital system all the while watched from through a glass fish tank window by a victim of our frustrating air conditioning repair system...

And as I spit my dying wish, you're listening to something else...

Steve is in the roof. Steve won't fix anything. I know Steve won't fix anything. Oh he'll climb in the roof, he'll hit things with a hammer, but eventually, he'll descend from his ladder, shake his head, and say he can't do anything. I know this because Steve has confided in me already that air conditioning repair is, quote, "all political"..."Mate this game, it's all political!" he said, before he'd even pushed a button.

I guess our air conditioner voted for the wrong party and now must pay. He says this with a conspiratorial wink. Sure enough, Steve descends from his Ivory tower not with a dead raccoon or good news. He leaps off the bottom rung of his ladder with simply the sweat stains of a man who killed a few moments idling in the dark with his own thoughts before descending to eat a biscuit and say "it's all political"...he does have a clipboard full of forms for me to sign. Pink forms, blue forms, cerise forms...he calls me chief a lot Steve. Chief and champion. "Sign here champion!" he says pointing the point of the form where the champion - I guess that's me - has to sign. I sign. I sign with an angry seagull like signature. Yes, take that Mr. repair man. You and your fancy forms shall feel the wrath of my signature. I hate that I'm petty enough to think if I puff my cheeks out and sign in an angry way it somehow expresses a shared frustration between me and repair man that he has done a poor job. To be honest, he couldn't care less. He's got a van and 2wo of our Anzac biscuits. He's not even looking at me, and he's certainly looking at my signature. But in my mind I do for a moment think, yeah, I got you. You know I'm annoyed with you and your forms...I am king of the puffed cheeks...you will fear my rolled eyes...

In this white wave, I am sinking, in this silence

Steve leaves. It's still cold. He takes his clipboard and walks off whistling "Buffalo Soldier". He gets into his van and drives away. Some1ne says "it's cold". I say "it's political"...they don't get it. So I sit at my desk as a parade of people with beseeching eyes and shivering hands and over exaggerated mimes to indicate how cold things are pass me by. I look around desk. I don't own it - I have a temporary residence of it. My ironic girlfriend has done her best to personalise my desk whenever she walks past. She's put things around there to try and cheer me up, little posters, little nots but on days when everyone is talking in whinging riddles and saying how cold things are, even the most loving note or amusing photograph can't make the day go any quicker. The rusted hands of the clock never seem to move, except backwards. It is as if the fabric from the chair I sit in, the Suzette gray fabric with the dotted pattern, has entered into my very soul by osmosis and destroyed my spirit some days. There's a cabal of cubicle bound workers down the far end who gather together to bitch and complain about everything. I ignore them as much as I can - best to just focus on the endless supply of pens my company supplies. I wonder if their manufacture has been all political.

"Col Elliott!"

A man has come in brandishing posters to put up in the kitchen. He comes in every so often. He smells of salmon and poverty. I'm not sure why he does that. 1ne of them was signed by Kasey Chambers. Personally signed. I don't know why we ended up with it. I drew a moustache on it and threw it in the bin. Bit disrespectful perhaps. He's brought in a Col Elliott poster. Col Elliott. I haven't heard that name for ages, not since his "you can't help laughing with Col!" phase - somehow I managed to avoid laughing quite easily, even at his impression of a nun. Interestingly, the characters for this new tour seem to be exactly the same. "He's a funny man!" says salmon poor poster man. Oh god, he thinks I'm interested. I shrug feebly. "Lots of great characters!" - what is this fish paste scented man doing, selling tickets? I don't know why I don't run. New girl at work has a stalker. She gets flowers. I get Col Elliott posters and scaly smelling waves sent in my direction. Hell even my ironic girlfriend only gives me posters out of the paper. I smile a wan, thin smile. The poster man rubs his hands together and says what I know he's been dying to say, longing to say. "Bit cold isn't it!" - he says this like it's an interesting new way of thinking of things. I hate conversation....

"Yeah it is cold, it's all political" I say, not even looking up from my doodle of Yuliya Dovhal that I've done on a pad, right down to the cornrows...

He backs away as if in the presence of a nutter...slow, backward steps, leaving Col Elliott behind in his haste to leave. And that was just Monday...it's been all downhill from there...

Memoirs of an Unproven Placeholder

2010-09-28T02:52:00.000-07:00

My Mum 1nce asked me what my first memory was. This was during 1ne of this interminable Foxtel ad-breaks, as I sipped tea and tried to pretend I wasn't disturbing her with my visit. My Mum watches a lot of crime shows, primarily to see the ending when, in her words, the bastards get caught. Slightly vindictive, but there you are. My Mum and Dad’s counter to any criticism of their TV watching is to say (for instance when I slagged them off for watching a 33 year old episode of Open All Hours) is to say "Yeah but you watch the Simpsons all day!", which isn't true.

Well, it is, but only on weekends....

I don’t watch much of the Crime Investigation Channel. I don’t watch much of anything anymore. I took a long break from the Internet simply to find thinking space again. Living alone is, by definition, supposed to be lonely, but I really enjoy it. I’ve never truly felt lonely. Even in, say, Dubai airport at 3hree in the morning with just me and 2wo cleaners and a mile of overlaid carpet within miles of each other, I felt more at peace than I do in a crowd. Actually I have felt lonely 1nce in my life. It was on Montello soccer pitches at roughly 11:47am sometime in 1988. It was the last game I played for my school team before I moved back to Scotland. My friends had said their goodbyes, and for some reason I had to go down to the far corner to go and get something – a cone (a witches hat, we didn’t do drugs that early in those days) or a sandwich or something. When I turned around, my friends, they were all at the other end of the pitch preparing for next week’s game. A game of course I would never see because I would be in another country. I swear to this day something ran up my spine. It lasted all the way back to Penguin, it stayed with me as I bit into my Monaco bar on the way home, and maybe it’s still with me. It suddenly hit me that they had already moved on and there I was, holding a witches hat and preparing to drive off. I never told anyone this of course because who can you tell? I wish that I had a more open relationship with my Mum and Dad. Hell, I had a girlfriend for a whole year they never knew about. They think I never got a job because of poor interview technique. Truthfully, after that day, I never trusted them because they had taken me away from my life. And I was, oh, 9ine at the time. I told my Dad 1ne day I was going to invent “suitcase syndrome” as a disease, and all the people who had to move around the world or from town to town would gather and complain about how messed up their lives were. Dad wasn’t listening I don’t think. He was eating a Monaco Bar at the time...if that’s not a sign from above...

"So, first memory, whit was it!" she said again, impatiently. Sadly I am no Cameron Adams when it comes to television criticism, and with her interest in my opinions about the Crime Investigation Network waning. I was forced to answer. I was 4our. I was in my room alone with my toys, and I had a holographic Indian toy. On his chest, you could sort of make an Eagle appear if the sun was aligned with the 6th Quadrant of Venus. Picking up at the Miss Universe backstage party was easier than making this thing appear. But, it was all worth the effort in the end. I know I got it from K-Mart, because the receipt sat solemnly on my cupboard for years as a warning that life wasn't always going to be fair. For reasons lost to time, I put this toy deep inside 1ne of my giant orange beanbags. I presume I was playing some sort of Cowboys and Indians game. I don't think this is right; we didn't have any Indians in Penguin. In fact, we, the Scottish family, were about as ethnically diverse as early 80tys Penguin ever got, so I doubt I had the complexities of divisive land warfare down pat, even in playtime. Maybe I was playing Penguinites vs Ulverstonians. Whatever the case, the Indian was placed deep inside in the orange beanbag to hide, and I never found the toy again. I put my hand inside the beanbag many times over the following year, and it never came out. Sure I could have tipped all the beans all over the floor, but given the beanbag was a hearty, pre health and safety era bean filled monstrosity the size of a small steam train, I'd have been picking beans out of the carpet until at least 2012...

Hairdressers. It's always hairdressers with me. I have another crush on a hairdresser. When I say crush, I'm 32wo, I'm too old for crushes. Its just some1ne I think is pretty. Blue eye shadow girl I had a definite crush on, but work has parted us now. In the window of their business it says "Hair is a religion!" with the ! underlined on a homemade sign. This is also the hairdresser’s mind you that screamed at me last week Pink is BACK! IN GHD FORM! - I think it was GHD, but I thought that was an illegal drug. I might have got it wrong - pink might have come back in some other form. Who would know. I didn't even know pink went away to be honest. Sadly if hair is a religion you could count my sadly inept barnet as an atheist. Long ago it developed an apathy to organisation and dammit that’s how it likes it. It's freezing today. If I was a kid in Penguin I'd extend my jacket out and let the breeze drive me dangerously close to cars as I flew down Mission Hill. There's a girl with a fringe that would make it impossible to drive walking past me in a school tracksuit. Her gaze is on a pamphlet handed out by an Indian man with a bored expression on his face. He never gave me a pamphlet because I had my don't give me a pamphlet face on.

I was eating a Subway sandwich because my work place was evacuated and I got stroll around pointlessly for a while dealing with the bewildered sandwich making fraternity of Subway

"Cheddar Cheese!" she said.
"Yes! For the love of God yes!" I said, for I had been asked if I wanted Cheddar Cheese several times already.
Tick. Tick. Tick. Give it a minute. Let the oxygen marinate in your tiny brain...
"Cheddar Cheese?"
I notice that her hair has a pink stripe in it. Got the memo on hair, but not on the cheese....

They were supposed to ring me to tell me to come back, but I don't think they did. I don't know that I'm strictly necessary at my workplace. I provide Vita wheats and sympathetic understanding, but not a lot else. I can't even get a pamphlet. I saw a prostitute give out pamphlets to sailors in the more liberal time of 1997even. She wasn't working hard for the money, just sort of leaning on a bench and handing out leaflets. I don't think I got 1ne of them either...I think it was the fault of my hair. It was the wrong religion. Someo1ne I know is in the local paper - their Dad died on the weekend. They then still went to the football because it's what Dad would have wanted. I don't ever make the joke anymore that what Dad really wanted was not to die - funeral experience will do that to you. I'm terrified to death. It's scarier to me than anything, a date with Yuliya Dovhal anything...I hate the idea of an accumulated lifetime of personal wisdom and anecdotes reduced quite simply to "what I would have wanted" and "remember that time with the pen" - the complexities of people, I don't think, are ever truly reflected in elegiac flowery poetry. It's what I do every day though - it shouldn't take death to make me reflect on the reality I see every day. The hairdresser is cute, the girl with the fringe is fringey, the guy giving out the pamphlets looks bored out of his mind, and the Subway girl is an idiot. Such short interactions every moment of every day, people reduced to frippery, to exaggerated qualities that take away every decision that lead to them standing there, in that job, in that moment, with those kids....I shut the paper. It nearly blows out of my hand. It turns to a story about a cat and a chicken that are friends...the girl with the fringe laughs in a high pitched way at a txt msg...maybe some1ne sent her the article...

"You don't see it do you Mum!" I say. My Mums house for what's it worth is warm, they installed a fire place a few months ago. They know have heat at the flick of a switch. That's why I go round there. Not for the conversational bon mots...

"It was the first thing in my life I ever lost!"

It's a weak point. It was just a toy. And she is Glaswegian. They are flint hard. Get on with it is in their DNA. The life lesson about the toy and the beanbag and how soon you can lose something, well, it wasn't really falling on the right ears...let alone getting out of conversational first gear to talk about...well...other things...

She sits in her chair and rocks forward.

"Do ye know remember whin ye were dressed up as the King Of Hearts in the Irvine Herald! That whis a cute photie...!"

I leave shortly after, warm house be damned. Some conversational barriers are just too hard to break down...

While You Were Thinking, I was Leaving You Behind

2010-09-27T01:40:00.000-07:00

"I guess Mary Poppins had an accident"...

I say this to my drinking companion at the Telegraph when we step over a smashed up blue umbrella. The umbrella looks a little too posh to be lying in the gutter in pieces. It looks like 1ne of those umbrellas unfurled by old Lords at the cricket on the 4th day of a windblown tactical battle between England and India, just as a south west drizzle sets in. Some1ne has really gone to town on it. The handle is blocking a gutter, making puddles splash over the open toed shoes of the impossibly young texters queuing to get inside. My drinking companion has decided to ignore the umbrella. Instead he's holding a red ticket up to the light, 1ne of the free cocktail tickets we've accumulated over the course of the night. It has an amusingly entendre based name this cocktail, but our tickets go unused. I'll say 1ne thing for the Telegraph, in an era of fascist bouncers and people actively seeking ways to refuse your custom, the Telegraph could care less what you do. It's not exactly chapter 26 of Satyricon when it comes to debauchery, but it's robust enough compared to the anodyne scenes elsewhere - it's toilets overflow with twitching, discomforted teenagers hunched around porcelain meeting places, their first hangover simply hours away...

I never know if these scenes - the girl without the shoe, the boy hunched over with his friends carrying him down the road in homage to Jesus, but with more bourbon - are true drunken capers or mere acts. My Dad 1nce pretended to stumble in the gutter to get attention from my Mum. He was 37even at the time. We pretend it never happened in our house. In return, no 1ne mentions the little cut off white T-shirt with the brown sleeves I used to wear - the 1ne that had a BMX biker on it saying GO! on it. We have an understanding...

Some1ne turns the lights off in the toilets for a prank and the bewildered noises of the ill can be heard down the bar. No 1ne moves. I feel ridiculously old of course. I feel as though any minute now some cheeky young scamp is going to come up to me and ask me to tell them what life was like when we had to ring people from payphones. In the corner on a pulsating video screen is 1ne of my favourite ever musicians. She looks so happy, or looked, back in 1999. I wonder what she's doing now. T-shirted males dance and cavort in the kind of display you see in nature documentaries, and some1ne threatens to be sick in the far pocket of the pool table. A girl no older than 14teen is rifling through her wallet to try and find ID to convince the bored bespectacled barmaid she really is old enough to enjoy a shandy. I went on a drinking trip with some1ne who photocopied their passport as ID, and changed the date in black pen. That was his ID - a photocopy with a big alteration in it. I say drinking trip - we went to a girls house, watched Friends on DVD and were asleep by 11even O'clock. I blame myself for that you know. I should have put my foot down and demanded that we went out, but I was too sleepy. Secretly, just between you and me, I'm quite happy to get home most nights. I secretly hate the idea of stumbling around Hobart at 5ive in the morning scrabbling for kebabs with thick necked guys called Bullet trying to push me out the way. My aversion to hangovers is not as well known. Most people think I'm a party animal. Truthfully, I'm a mere sleepy kitten...

The 14teen year old drops her wallet to the floor with a spirit crushing thud. Her eyes sink in disappointment. To her shame, the barmaid goes to produce 1ne of those humiliating yellow drink cards they are giving out in pubs now. You have to be going some for the Telegraph to draw the line. A man even older than me - laden down with personal baggage, gold chains and the last vestiges of a beer gut creating mid life crisis - briefly threatens to intervene as her sponsor and patron, but suspecting, rightly I suspect, he may lace any bought drinks with his own special sleep inducing "additions", she leaves, muttering something about trying to get into Irish Murphys. Yeah, good luck with that...

"But I'm sober!" she says, defiantly. I believe her. Or I would, if she wasn't saying it into her purse, believing it was her mobile phone. Her companions are all laughing at her with a ferocity usually reserved for a Rodney Dangerfield audience. In the confusion, she loses a shoe to gravity, and her night is slowly unfolding with a tedious sense of inevitability. I envy them. Their mistakes are still being made. Mine all have consequence and gravitas. Or at least I think they do - some of them simply serve as fodder to write about it. There's a piece of graffiti I saw at Motherwell train station 1nce that sums it all up

We aw think we're the centre o the fackin universe, but we're just a pack of arseholes!

It was the ! that really topped it off for me - you spray paint philosopher you...

As it happens, at that point some1ne sings a song on the video screen about a free for all, and it's time to leave...

There's a man outside the bakehouse with his hood pulled over his head trying to talk to people about Jesus between mouthfuls of an egg sandwich carefully plucked from a lunchbox sitting innocently and without opinion on a park bench. I think he's drunk, but I'm aware fervour can come from the sober so I'm not going to judge. He looks suspiciously like 1ne of those early 90tys CTA warriors that used to lurk outside my high school luring the perkier children to a life of chastity and repression. I watch him for a moment, but not too closely because I may be lured into a conversation. I'm just drunk enough to be amiable and I am a sucker for an egg sandwich. There are no taxis anywhere, so I stroll around Hobart for a bit. My ironic girlfriend has just sent me a txt. I don't know what I'm supposed to do in order to cheer her up. I'm not an especially helpful marriage counsellor, I mean I've just found out how to make old Rosita tracks I have on vinyl into ringtones, but that doesn't mean I can fix the conversational distance of 2wo people who's affectionate romantic messages to each other contain more swear words than Hallmark approved sentiment. Best to leave it alone I think. I turn my phone off, leaving their problems best solved by them. I've become a cynic; I don't believe in love anymore, I don't know if that's always been my view. I pulled myself back the other night from dribble, diatribe and discourse on the matter. After all, the last thing I wanted to do was become the kind of man who perches on the edge of a barstool, oblivious to the fact I was ramming my opinions down every1nes throat, boring them, saying things that patently no-1ne else agreed with...

"Jesus LOVES YOU!" says the egg sandwich eating man. Eventually, he's hustled away from exalting mid word, mid opinionated rant about homosexuals, by a security guard who looks oddly like Bryan Mannix. Security guards should look more like Yuliya Dovhal than Bryan Mannix. They should have far stronger centres of gravity. The Jesus freak loses his sandwich in the moment - parting is such scrambled sorrow. To see a short man with an 80tys bouffant hairstyle push a bewildered tall skinny Jesus freak away from scaring bakehouse customers - is that a quintessential Hobart moment? Or just the kind of random strangeness you can expect at 3hree in the morning? 3hree in the morning? When did that happen...how long have I been out for...where did the lost hours go? Where did my drinking companion go? My ironic girlfriend has sent me a txt saying she needs some1ne to talk to. There's also a sandwich in front of me I don't remember ordering. It's the kind of bold and fancy flavours I only order when I'm drunk, otherwise I'm strictly butter or jam in my sandwiches. And Rosita is purring away, indicating some1ne is trying to ring me at a frantic pace. The 14teen year old girl from before stumbles out of Syrup, so at least she had a good night. As for me, I'm too young to feel this old. And I'm also too old for the old familiar line...

"Hey! I was before you in the taxi line!"

I turn, smile, and raise a middle finger at the Jesus freak, who responds by uncharitably calling me a word that rhymes with punt. I smile...he's not the only 1ne who talked a good game and couldn't back it up. I just wonder which 1ne of us will learn first...

I can feel it coming in the Ayr tonight

2010-09-26T02:16:00.000-07:00

I was born in a country that doesn't believe in beauty or positivity. Not for us the broad beaming optimism of the American citizen. We support a national football team pathologically addicted to failure, the descendents of Highlanders and Lowlanders always 1ne inept battle away from disastrous defeat at the hands of the English. We don't accept nice things. We believe in guilt, we believe that if life hands you lemons, you've deserved them for being a terrible person. It's in our DNA. My Mum and Dad went on a honeymoon to Ayr, a Scottish town described in Wikipedia as very flat. I'd imagine that was a bit like the honeymoon. I've wandered around Ayr many times during my trips of Scotland, trying to imagine what having a honeymoon there was like. Often I've stared at bus stops and pram pushing lunatics through drizzle covered glasses and wondered how anyone could feel luvved up in such a place. It must have difficult creating a romantic atmosphere. My friend went to Ayr 1nce and was sitting quite happily on the bus when a local ned decided to chat her up between slurps of Special Brew and social commentary on the ethnic population.

"Whit colours yer hair darling!" he said, with all the suave sophistication of a young Gerald Butler.

"It's auburn!" said my friend - suspecting he was the nutter on the bus who claimed to have a nuclear bomb in a tin can of baked beans, it was best to just say something.

"Aye! Aw burnt tae fuck!" he said, before giggling maniacally all the way back to Irvine. If he wasn't Gerald Butler, he was certainly Butler from On the Buses...

My Mum and Dad met at a holiday camp in Scotland. They both worked there. Dad was a chef - well, chef in the same way you can call Ke$ha a singer. Gordon Ramsay didn't have much to worry about, but when it came to feeding the masses beans and little sausages made of pork and newspaper, he was your man. I don't know what my Mum did. Made the beds and played soccer in those hilarious "men vs women" matches in the mud where single entendres were pumped through the PA system to the hilarity of campers. They've made it work somehow, with a patience and resolve I can never imagine. I can't even wait for the toast to pop up without tapping my foot never mind getting married. And spending a honeymoon in Ayr? I've seen the hotel they stayed in, you can see a bus stop from the window. I know, because on their romantic honeymoon of a life time, Mum saw her sister. And my Dad can't even go to the shops bar his feet hurt and he's fretting about missing something on TV. Mostly though, Ayr has a tense, pre violence air of calm stillness. Maybe that's the key to its romance and charm - time, space, cold, nothing to do but walk and talk. Work things out. Plan. I can't go 5ive minutes these days bar something’s beeping, paging or ringing. 1970s Ayrshire there was nothing to do or see but talk and do other things Mummy’s and Daddy’s like to do. You could also go and see Sidney Devine perform some hilarious musical numbers at the local theatre, but it's no wonder we're a fatalistic people when Mr Devine is head of the musical society. My Mum being the practical person she is and was, such solitude would have been perfect for her. She isn't 1ne for plans and dreams my Mum. She grew up in a house of 13teen kids, always waiting for the moment when their Mum had to pack up and take them away from their alcoholic stereotypical drunken father, straight from the pages of an archaic Dickensian novel. Dads family wasn't much better, all Acker Bilk records and dudgeon coated layers of judgemental scorn. Maybe Ayr, for all its faults, really was perfect for them after all...

I think the most romantic thing I've done in Ayr was buy a pair of mittens for Debbie - my robot obsessed, hipster indie girlfriend of the time. The lady behind the counter looked at me like I was effeminate for buying such a pair of woolly mittens with jolly sheep or something stitched into the fabric. There was no way that a boy loaded with cash buying gloves was going to pass in the rough as guts part of Ayr as some sort of Hugh Hefner figure. That's the other thing about Scottish people - anyone who says it's cold, they are to be suspected of being a big Jessie Willox. She never looked up from behind her eye shadow splattered eyes - never took her eyes off the gloves as she put them into 1ne of those clanging old fashioned cash registers...

"They're fur my girlfriend" I said, nervously, unconvincingly. This was obviously a mistake. Any Scottish person would say "Ma burd" - girlfriend? What was I thinking?

"Aye, very guid" she said, in the manner of the distinctly unimpressed. I think she had correlated that the gloves fit my hands perfectly. I have titchy hands - built for typing, not for fighting.

"They are!" I said, before taking the gloves in the angry manner of the unimpressed. She took a slurp of her Diet Coke and said "Hope she likes them!" before tittering.

Stung by the assertion that I didn't have a girlfriend - when I so totally did - I went through quite the phase of wooing Debbie with dates and presents. I don't know why I did this, but I thought I probably should make an effort. We caught the bus to Ayr to go ice skating. I wanted to go to a rave at Ayr Pavilion, but was promptly told "they were shite", an assertion time and Youtube has proven correct in every possible way. Debbie was in a huff anyway. As far as I can remember her and 1ne of her friends Lindsay had had an argument about something, maybe Lindsays use of drugs. Talk about adult situations. All I wanted to do was take "ma burd" out and buy her a coke, and now I was in some scene from The Basketball Diaries. Heroin addict? Lindsay? She hadn't even progressed beyond mixing cough syrup and Irn Bru and calling it a cocktail! I pressed my face to the glass window of the no 52 A bus and watched the world pass by...

"Are ye listening tae me!" said Debbie, pouting, and adopting the position of a teapot.

Aye. I was listening. But I was also thinking - Paris. Rome. Sydney. Great romantic cities. And I was in Ayr. Bloody Ayr. Staring out the window at a psychopathic skinhead in a psychotically coloured bomber jacked giving me the finger. He maintained it all the way through, until our bus was out of sight. I don't know if you've ever ice skated in a bad mood. It's similar to ice skating in a good mood, but somehow even more pointless. I tried to make some sort of joke up in my head - Torvill and Moaner? Torvill and Whine? Torvill and...ah forget it - and as I marched around the ice in sullen icy silence, I wondered if this was what relationships were like. Grim marches around ice rinks while Adamski and Beats International played constantly on the PA system and a woman who looked like Yuliya Dovhal screamed at the skaters to keep skating and not mooch around the sidelines. Maybe Yuliya was the 1ne I was meant to be with. She certainly had a good pair of lungs. Nice hips. We got the bus home in equally sullen silence. I think it was Lao Tzu who said ambition has one heel nailed in well, though she stretch her fingers to touch the heavens. I had 1ne heel nailed in gum, and if I stretched I could touch some Artline pen graffiti that told me Brendan was a homo. The bus even threatened to break down at 1ne point as it swept an arc around a close and cul-de-sac so perilous it nearly threw an old woman off with it, her tenacity in clinging onto that silver pole truly extolling the spirit of the blitz. The bus driver threw every1ne off in Dreghorn, leaving us a long walk home in the rain. My orange FILA boots got coated in drizzle and her mittens looked inviting to wear in the cold - shopkeepers be damned, my hands were cold. I got to her door quicker than I expected, turned away to walk home and hopefully not got mugged, and she grabbed my arm by the fold in the elbow...

"Thanks for a great day!" she then said, out of the grey, in beaming sincerity. She kissed me on the cheek and skipped away happily. I never figured out Scotland. It was truly a strange place. I went home and put it all in a journal that has long been discarded, put on some Sinitta to fall asleep - and woke up with a phone number given to me at the ice skating rink that I never rang. What would be the point - I'm Scottish, it would never have worked out...

Carolines a victim, smash your social system

2010-09-22T01:04:00.000-07:00

It's midday in a Tasmanian town. I'm biting into a sandwich sold to me by a perky, tattooed adolescent who finds shiny things cute and I suspect has a twitter account dedicated to things her cat does that are equally cute. There's a long row of computer Internet kiosks in the middle of the shopping centre, un-used, although the seats are used by small giggling children to form human pyramids of playfulness. There's a small child outside Coles who wants to join in but his arm is being clamped in a parental anti fun vice by his harried, pink boob tube wearing mother, who never looks up from her phone, simply adjusting her required grip whenever the child squirms. I guess it's a form of parenting. I wouldn't know - I don't have any kids. I have an African sponsor child who has just betrayed me by sending me a picture of herself grinning and holding a Manchester United bag. I think this as close as I'll get to 1ne of those horrendous moments in a sitcom from the 70tys when the bigoted dad finds out his daughter is dating an ethnic. I certainly fumed for quite some time but I forgave her because her mud hut is in Radio Tanzania Road. I wonder if they do crazy calls and the secret sound. The children on the leather stool across from the computer have stopped forming a pyramid and are now playing tickle fights. Their parents are idly discussing mobile phone plans with white trousered clipboard girl in the Telstra shop - a pudgy girl with a boil on her neck whose whole job is stand with a clipboard and wait for some1ne to discuss the fascinating world of mobile phones. The parents are wide eyed, so I guess she's good at her job. She's got jam from a donut on her top, but that's not stopping her. Wonder what would - a different kind of spread maybe. I've got a txt on my phone from my ironic girlfriend, who wants me to ring her just to talk. There's heavy life stuff going on with my ironic girlfriend, stuff I'm massively under-qualified to discuss. My accumulated skills for the day seem to be stain spotting, avoiding runaway children, and glaring angrily at people who cut me off in traffic. Answering heavy questions about the finite nature of a child’s mortality...not so good at. And especially not in txt speak...

They've put up the grand final display in the window of the local knick knack shop. There are a lot of people wandering around with wads of cash, and confused expressions, and in Tasmania, social functions depend on picking between a small porcelain pig and a wall clock apparently, such is the level of discourse. Anxiety is on the rise. It's like Xmas, but with specific stripes of paint on the presents. There's a girl pushing a trolley back and forth in front of the counter like she's rocking a child. She's got on 1ne of those T-shirts that supposed to be ironic, but I suspect it's not - it simply says God made me awesome on it in a Times New Roman red font - and she's giving lay by instructions to a girl behind the counter with a vacant stare, flecks of mauve eye shadow, and manual learned customer services. The details are roughly the length of the script of Das Boot. Precision pincer movements synchronised to the letter, involving mothers meeting children at millisecond precise moments and parcels being thrown from hand to hand. The girl duly scrawls down all the details, but only I can see, from my vantage point, she's actually drawn a pig on the notepad. The curly tail was a lovely touch. I sadly don't get to see the military collection from lay-by of the giant flag, but I imagine there was high farce involved. Lord knows my only lay-by experiences were at Fitzgeralds in Burnie, which involved telling some slack jawed employed to supplement his income football player from Cooee or Burnie to go and fetch an item from the back, and waiting 1/2lf an hour while he had a smoke, ate a sandwich, and flirted idly with middle aged women in the makeup section. He would then come back and say something about not being able to find...um...what was it again? Those blokes also filled in as Santa by the way when the real Fitzgeralds Santa’s were too drunk to make it in at work. There's an old woman who's smashed her hip being tended to by concerned relatives just down from the shop, her whole life now on display as she stares up at gaudy fluorescent lighting, being stepped over by football merchandise buying punters as she lies on the ground. The girl keeps drawing her pig, giving it her full attention, as life goes on around her. It says a lot about me that my interest is more captivated by her ability to - damn her - get a curly tail in a drawing right than helping an old woman, but I never claimed to be a helper...oh wait, another txt...

There's a radio station promotion just down the far end. It's some sort of teenage fashion parade. I'm not sure how you have a fashion parade on radio - someone told me once the English radio DJ Mike Read 1nce had a segment on radio called Jumper of the Week where he would spend 10en minutes on radio describing a jumper. I don't know if that's true. They've got some ruddy faced teenager on stage asking her to recount her worst fashion disaster. The microphone isn't working, it's hissing and cackling, and the woman holding the microphone is visibly frustrated, thus making it a disaster inside a segment about a disaster. Entire civilizations have feted plays about less poignancy. The woman with the hip injury is ferried on a stretcher down some stairs, with less care than my gift was wrapped if I'm honest. She disappears out of sight. I fret often about such elderly accidents. My Mum smashed her ankle getting the post a few years ago. Being hardy, she put herself on her own stretcher - I couldn't do that, pampered with middle class security. I hate getting old as it is - I don't mind the accumulation of pop culture wisdom, but the impending creaks, not to mention the dread of having a heart attack in front of slack jawed, muffin topped teenagers isn't appealing. The radio segment crashes to a halt in front of everyone’s eyes. The microphone troubles haven't gone away, and the ruddy faced teenager has been cornered anyway by white trousered clipboard girl, thus completing the circle of shopping centre life. The radio interviewer has her head in her hands in a chair and is being consoled by an effeminately haired blonde personal assistant offering Sustagen and hugs. Eventually, in a quiet corner of the mall, she has to record some nods and links to the webcam they have, which she deals with like a pro. She does this when I'm a queue for Red Bull and chocolate, dealing with the strains of being noticed by some1ne directly across from me. I don't deal with it like a pro, adopting my fiercest pout. Someo1ne pipes through some soothing music at ear bursting levels, and trapped in this hellish moment, I'd give anything for some Sustagen - although the wandering hands of the PA, I would say no to...

There are 2wo newsagents in the place I work now. I hate them both. 1ne is giving me Vietnam style acid flashbacks to the Penguin newsagency. Any time I pick up a magazine I expect a man to come storming down the aisle smelling of carbolic soap demanding I shell out 50c for a copy of Shoot! Magazine. The other is staffed by rude girls and indolent men, with narrow aisles that would torment a claustrophobic for hours - any time some1ne wants to pick up the Better Homes and Gardens magazine they have to suck in their guts if some1ne walks past. The first time I was in there I bought a bulky footy record and a paper, and the girl behind the counter didn't offer me a bag. She just stared at me as if bags were never invented, and in my surprise and retreat, I knocked 2wo books off the counter. Made her day. I could see her little beady eyes flickering with glee. Today, as she reached for my money, she knocked a packet of Lifesavers to the floor with her elbow. Vengeance. She knew I knew that I had got her back as well. Her beady eyes weren't quite as gleeful as the mint flavoured treat was placed back on the rack. I wish all my problems could be solved as easily as a clumsy girl can knock a packet of Lifesavers off with her tuck shop lady elbows. I've turned my phone off my now - irony and whimsy can go too far. I've no desire, as much as I'm trying to be supportive, to find an ironic girlfriend on my doorstep 1ne day. It's only then I realise I've already bought her a present for tomorrow. Ah damn it. Oh well. I wander off down the road, reading about a cat and a dog that are friends. There's something about stories about animals that are friends that always gets me. A mendacious girl with a broad smile almost accosts me with some nonsense in a leaflet, but I sidestep her. In her last attempt to get me to notice, she says a smile costs nothing. It may do, but I'm all cashed out anyway, so I keep on walking, letting her acrimony at being ignored hang in the air. I've done enough listening for 1ne day. Besides, I need to find out the circumstances of why the dog and the cat are friends...

Back in the car, I even ignore the hum of radio patter, the faux jocularity. I am, completely, at sullen peace...

Deriving from the Greek word Puxos

2010-09-19T04:29:00.000-07:00

My fridge isn't working. It's genuinely not working - this isn't the set up to a joke from the 30tys. It's making a sort of old person in a nursing home who's given up on life hum and whine, to the point I think an old person is in the house waiting for bingo and pudding. Such middle class problems I have these days. I went through a phase of almost biblical strangeness where every time I had some sort of gripe like, say, my house was out of orange juice, the TV would put on a child who had no drinking water to put everything in perspective. I think it was the kind of niche advertising marketers dream of. I had to defrost the fridge of it's elderly tendencies, which means I have to sit in my room of accumulated knick knacks. I feel old at the moment, a sort of world weary fatigue has settled over me. I'd love to have accquired some great wisdom at this point of my life beyond what was the B side to Debbie Gibsons single "Electric Youth". My fridge splutters its final breath as it sleeps. There was only a can of coke Zero in there. When I was little, I used to have a distinctly weird lunch every day in Scotland, something like Sugar Free, Caffeine free Coke in a gold can, and a packet of M&Ms. Even the local drug dealer thought I was a kook. And he had a scar of undefinable roughness, that curved around his nose like the demented handwriting of a serial killer writing in green crayon. Maturity would mean having the knowledge to fix a fridge in a rational sensible manner, but I've simply never accquired the skills. If some1ne asked me what my skills were, I'd struggle to name them. Casual deflection of accumulated irony laced girlfriends might be 1ne of them, but it's hardly an employable skill. My auntie, a simple woman suspicious of social climbers, is still capable of carrying up to 15teen bags of shopping around her arms when pushed. And she could fix a fridge.

My woodwork class in Scotland was housed in a proper woodwork factory, an almost abandoned quarry at the back of the school accessed only by skilled map readers and those who could handle the trek - the scent of pine chips and slave labor hung heavily in the air. I was rubbish at woodwork. I made a jewellery box that was glued at 1ne end and nailed down at the other. It would have been the Alcatraz of jewellery box if anyone could put their valuables in there to begin with. Our teacher was a portly man who smoked a pipe, who, smartly realising the futility of plight, simply left to smoke increasing quantities of weed, and not so smartly leaving bored hormonal teenagers alone with weapons, wood, nailguns and a girl called Kerri-Anne who liked wandering around groping everyone for fun. It was a tense atmosphere most days. The ticking of the clock still sticks in my brain, just waiting to get out of there. There was also a car in the corner - well the remains of 1ne. It was like the aging overly painted diva in the corner of the average Tasmanian pub - strictly off limits, with a musky odor, but still it's incongrous presence had it's charms. I know there was a kid called Martin who used to climb in it's rusting hulk, clasp the steering wheel and pretend he was driving to more exotic locations. He had a penchant for driving in big races in Monaco, every twist of the wheel an imagined obstacle or driver conquered. I appreciated the symbolism, since I'd have given anything to get out of Kilwinning at that point. It got so anarchic that class that eventually I just climbed out of the window to sit in 1ne of the local chip shops sipping Irn Bru with a straw, watching rain drops racing down the wall, until it was home time. At the end of the year I was presented with a copious form of achievements listing everything I was supposed to learn from that class. Condensation race bets, avoiding the wandering hands, and coming up with the most imaginitve use of your mind to escape the drudgery of life for a moment - none of them were on the list. I wondered today how I found the time to make the jewellery box, then I remembered, I bought an almost made 1ne for 5ive pounds...sadly the glue and nails were my contribution...

The next door neighbours could not only put together a jewellery box, but 1ne with a water feature and 2nd storey on top of the original construct. He now has a middle level job in England - he's moved on from jewellery boxes to corporate boxes, and swings a golf club around freezing golf courses to make connections that are short lasting but profitable. In Scotland, a corporate box is the ultimate status symbol, a goal beyond all other. I've never been driven to be held in the plastic and glass prison sipping chardonnay with the great and good. My golf swing will be another sadly unticked box in my lifes potential skill set. When I did that particular woodwork class, 1ne day I found a notepad down behind the rusting car, just as I was going to the cafe, as I had 1ne leg out of the window. It was from the 70tys, a sort of sketch of an unfinished idea, a blueprint, some sort of big kitchen cabinet with 1 100ed added extras, rubbed out and re-drawn. I know it was unfinished because the last page sketch was missing several lines, as if it's creator had just stopped dead at some point in the 70tys. I presume it had laid there for 2wo decades, a spiral bound paeon to regret and unfinished dreams. Well that's how I took it anyway. I was fascinated by it, because even then I was obsessed with regret and the fast moving nature of time. No one else seemed to share my interest. The neighbours kid looked at the sketch and tried to figure out the best way to finish it while Debbie - in between thinking about robots and Galaxy Truffle bars - wondered what I was doing wandering around with, quote, "a manky auld book". I think I put it back after a while, and forgot all about it. The wilds of an Ayrshire winter weren't the place for ideas forged from emotions - it was a rational, logical world. No wonder I couldn't build a jewellery box and they could. They had the knack of working out that if A fitted into B you could make C, where as I thought A, B and C had to have some deeper reasoning, some depth. Maybe if I'd changed, I'd have a row of ornately made wooden objects on my mantle, and a more practical mind that could see a way out of my mental box of malaise. Maybe my fridge would work...maybe I'd have a ticket to the Grand Final...

My fridge is given the last rites. I could get a new 1ne because work has an incentive program and I could cash in my points for a fridge. I leave it behind to go and get takeaway. My chinese takeaway where I live is fantastic, a mix of spices and bewilderingly racked magazines from the 80tys mingling together in a bazaar of treats. The girl behind the counter is usually flicking through a magazine to cultivate a deliberate air of cool, and some harried and harassed family is usually huddled around the faux oak counter trying to keep some screaming brat from demanding extra prawn crackers, like, now. I'm usually so easy to serve, it takes all day to get to me, because I'm lost in the maelstrom of screaming kids and pushy elderly women. The man in front of me has 1ne of those hooded tops beloved of men in CCTV footage, a grey melange of stains and fade, his eyes darting from fingertip to floor as he balances a box of fried rice on his wrist while trying to discipline a small child - a child with a surfers air of casual indifference spelled out in his freckles. Inevitably, the dance of rice and gravity results in a slow, almost comic tumble of white grains to carpet, and there we all stand, boxed in, as it spreads across the carpet. The kid barely looks up from his indifference, I've got too much invested in a theory in my head about the decline of the Manchester music scene to be distracted by the seed of the monocot plant Oryza sativa landing on shagpile, and the girl won't look up from the compelling world of the Kardashians to clean it up, and so there the man stands, covered in egg stains, child on his arm hating him, scooping rice from a floor while rain beats down the window in a Kilwinning style race to the bottom. Just for a moment he adjusts his hood, grimaces, and stares at the kid as if he can turn him to ash just through the power of glaring alone. He hands the rice back, leaves in a hurry, the kid trailing at his back, utterly boxed in by responsibility, worn down by it, frustrated by it. In my own world of self absorption, I push unknowingly past an old lady in a race to the Thai skewers, before heading home to eat off a paper plate, and return home, to a restful sleep, ready to wake and try again tomorrow...

I never quite resolve my theories. They remain unfinished. It's a wonder I ever get to sleep at all...

Monday 2 Thursday - Byzantine Labyrinth Of Suburbia

2010-09-16T05:29:00.001-07:00

Monday morning - I have the same recurring real life nightmare, and it always starts with me thumping my own steering wheel as the splash of rain water goes over my car. Inevitably, a 4our wheel drive will have just cut me off in traffic, and as I sit in my impotently furious state of middle class futility, a bus will push to a grinding halt somewhere in the middle distance. This will be adorned with a carefully managed publicity shot of 2wo radio Djs, both looking pleased with themselves for transporting jocularity into the ears of the nation. 1ne of them is dating a supermodel. I don't know a supermodel. I barely know a model let alone 1ne adorned with an affixation at the start of her profession. I pashed a Queens Quest contestant 1nce outside the Penguin football ground. Well, try saying that in southern Tasmania. No 1ne knows what the NWFU is, never mind the Queens Quest competition, and in the age of sexual freedom that is early 2tyteens Hobart, simply saying you pashed some1ne is a yawn extracting story. The radio DJs are thus able to in a single carefully staged publicity shot on the back of a Metro bus rub into me that my Mondays aren't filled with supermodel relationships or carefully stage managed pranks. They are filled with sharp left turns and showers that never seem to end however. My work installed a form of instant messenger to the computer last week, but that won't impress many at Vienna fashion week. Someone has scribbled under their moniker and logo on this particular bus the words ARE DICKHEADS in a sort of Verdana font style of graffiti, which is such a small victory against the forces of celebrity, it must be celebrated. The bus will pull off into the distance, I'll slam my brakes angrily because I've been held up at a red light, and there I will sit in the mid morning traffic helplessly unable to do anything about it. I think at these moments of some sort of overly dramatic u-turn that results in me heading to spend a day at the beach, but I never have, and I probably never will. There's a guy next to me at the lights with the same sense of futility, and some horn rimmed glasses only ever worn by nerds about to have a milkshake poured over their heads in an American teen comedy, and in a hopelessly pointless moment of maledom, we have a race at the lights. It's not a deliberate race, merely time killing engine roaring, and in a summation of our futile middle class position in life, a blonde girl with pink lippy roars past us in Daddy’s car, in a plume of smoke and youthful swagger. The metaphor is blinding, and the fact that she nearly ploughs straight into the back of another DJ infected bus and has to brake sharply is, as they say, a mere detail...

Tuesday morning - Same red light, although the light dusting of rain onto the dirt ground and absence of rosy cheeked urchins off to school to get on their computers and post Facebook updates that so and so is a skank, I've decided to place my entire happiness on the ability of my sports team to move a piece of leather around a piece of greenery once owned by Aboriginal elders better than 22wo other randomly assorted strangers who have inverted values to my own team. It might be unromantic to describe an AFL Preliminary final in such terms, but I've just been speaking to my unromantic auntie in Scotland. She lives in a street where a romantic gesture is sending a txt msg that doesn't contain a swear word or an insult, so explaining the beauty of an alien Australian based sport down a phone line isn't going to be easy. I say this because 1ne of my teams elder statesmen is on the cover of the newspaper making 1ne of those old persons determined fists photographers have them make when they are close to death or unlikely to be in a physical condition to pose for an action shot. A woman at work walks past later in the day eating 1ne of the morning muffins so generously provided by corporate pseudo generosity, and says 1ne of those strange glib work phrases people feel obliged to say to pass the time. Something like makes you think. I don't know what makes me think these days, but the posed machinations of an elderly gent probably don't do it for me. I drove past a homeless guy on the way home last night - he was propped up in the rain against an ATM machine, his tattered rags the kind of tattered rags other tattered rag wearers would point to and say damn those rags are tattered, his eyes shut, his silhouette a despairing shadow of venom, despair and cheap wine in a cask. Did that make me think? I don't know - maybe. Maybe for as long as it took for the lights to change. That's the usual pattern of attention for the meandering suburban driver. Attention spans last only as long as 1ne colour of light stays constant, or as long as the patter of the radio isn't too inane or bland to make you press the off button...complex social issues? I can't even work my CD changer...

Wednesday morning - I've tried to suppress my Road Rage by biting down really hard on my finger every time I feel frustrated. I hate that every time I drive past my ex girlfriends old netball court it's so early morning empty, always sodden with rain and lots and clods of rubbish generally swirl around in the breeze. It's a little bit strange to see it so dilapidated, like seeing your childhood home have a garden covered in weeds, or seeing a favourite beloved auntie without teeth, but with stubble, so you have to suffer a rash inducing kiss. There's a red light that I always get stuck at, and today it's almost broken down, so I'm stuck there, alone, with my thoughts and a staticy radio hissing in my brain. For some reason at work, I've acquired an ironic girlfriend. I should explain - I engaged with this girl what I thought was a series of ironic and sardonic flirtations on the routines of work. I didn't know that they don't do sardonic in Margate. Now she sends me txt msgs about the alienation and despair that marriages where 1ne partner can't wash socks can bring. So I don't know if that means were in some sort of tense future relationship, if she's going to pitch up on my lawn with a bag full of stuff but it means...something? Maybe - I have a crush on a girl who works at an appallingly named hair salon, but I don't think that means anything at all. Irony is a dangerous thing. I don't know why everything got so complex - mind you, I had a relationship with Debbie back in Scotland which was a consistent battle between the emotional maturity of an 11even year old and a 12elve year old. Apparently if you can't understand the emotional complexity of an Orange Juice record, or preferred a Twix to a Galaxy Truffle, you aren't worth knowing. I preferred Sinitta. I had no hope. So I just sat swinging my legs on the circular brick wall that was my relationship bachelor pad trying to decipher the riddle that was Cosmopolitan approved relationship chat. By the time I get out of my car, my finger has chewed through and is covered in bite marks. I suspect that I need to acquire a new anger halting habit...maybe some mellow music. I hear some of Sinittas B-sides are particularly melancholy...

Thursday evening - I'm in some rapidly emptying car park, standing in the rain, not just any rain - Tassie rain that kicks and punches in the face like a drunk outside Syrup trying to nail a bouncer. Cars pass my feet, splash water over my shoes, and head home to eat some crispy fried food from plates and engage in amiable or otherwise conversation about socks or some such things. My "other" car I'm driving today (don't get too excited, it's like a 6th toe my other car - a defective abnormality of fate rather than some sort of Jay Leno style collection) has broken down in a miserable battery induced sigh of despair. The RACT man is explaining to me the nuances of a split battery while I hop from foot to foot awkwardly, not understanding a single word he's talking about. I don't know how many times I've stood in Tasmanian downpours listening to words I don't understand, sentences that don't make any sense. Break ups, bouncer edicts, friends fighting with other friends, car care tips....all received with the same bewildered expression on my face, the same hunched shoulders. I get back inside my car, stuck in suburbia, while the RACT man glues...things to things. I am left to stare over the fence into a nearby house. The occupants are a woman who is coarse in face and vulgar of finger point, and a man who is a slave to hair gel who I bet has never ironed a shirt because his beard needs trimmed. They are arguing in fluent bogan, with exaggerated hand gestures and swear words that end in N. I suspect later he'll send her a txt msg that proclaims love + vulgarity. I move my eyeline from their disparate points of view to a quite glorious beanbag, a bright orange illumination of radiance, a bean filled wonder from the era where every Australian owned an ABBA album and something that was orange only if the thing they wanted wasn't available in brown. It's probably a reflection of my attention span - mature issues, social complexities, they go by the wayside. Ironic girlfriends who could become real girlfriends if you aren't careful? Not even worried...but show me a beanbag, and I'm there. Explains a lot, my dog from up (squirrel!) attention span...I can't change...I won't change....my car starts after much tedious discussion, and I'm away again, swaggering through puddles, cursing red lights, fiddling with my CD player, and letting happiness come in fleeting cynical waves...

Friday, it may yet spawn something glorious. Must keep hoping. Something richer than an Instant Message installation...

Why I Don't Write Poems about The Sun

2010-07-25T03:58:00.000-07:00

JB-Hifi in Hobart is not a place for reflection or solitude on a day off. They remain as a store conceptually bound to the premise that no second shall feel unfilled with thought or consideration. If the thumping, ceaseless rock music of Metallica doesn't get you, 1ne of the ever friendly staff or a barging woman in a stripey top desperate to see exactly what you are seeing will surely impinge on the notion of considering buying. Not for nothing is this paeon to modern corporate thinking down some stairs and hidden away in it's very own thumpingly loud bunker - it's it's own world, it's own universe carefully constructed. It's not for me, often, simply because the narrow CD laden corridors of doom and the thumping rock music just make me tired and flee. However, it is worthwhile if you can get in, get Series 4 of Weeds on DVD, and negotiate the indifferent shop girl behind the counter with the hooped ear-rings who thinks both you and your choices are feeble and inept. This 1ne even places a hand on her contemptous boney impossibly young hip, and ever so slowly crawls towards the cash register, as if disturbed from a beautiful dream where she is rich and famous and doesn't need to work and all scum is washed from the streets. Her make up is ineptly applied, but I'm not sure if that's a statement of personal identity - who can tell with Generation Y? There's a manual on the counter, I see it sometimes when I go in. It's a red folder - and the red cover is a luxurious type of red, the type you see on Hugh Hefners couch - marked customer service, in silver letters spread across the front with no concession to humour. I don't know if she's ever read it, or noticed it to be honest. She swipes my card and hands me my bag and resumes staring into the middle distance right through me, as a student with a patchy beard and his home allowance to spend shells out for the new M.I.A album. He must wait, of course, to pay for his soon to be returned CD. I feel that if I was a character at the end of 6ix Feet Under, as I take my final breaths and a white graphic appears soundtracked by Sia that strips my time on earth to a point totally devoid of meaning other than 2wo random years seperated by a dash, I will reflect on many hours spent idling in queues while Hobart shop girls burden themselves with my purchases. Or I'll shake an angry fist at whatever reality TV show irks me at the time, it's really up for grabs...

In contrast to the corporate honey pot that is JB-HiFi, Fullers Bookshop is an oasis of calm. There's almost too much time to think, too much time to ponder. They play soothing music, calming music for the soul. I'm staring at a blue sign up sheet next to 1ne of the windows. It's a sign up sheet for the Fullers bookclub. I have in my hand a book about the history and origins of Sesame Street, because the story behind that show is incredible, but it's not really Fullers book club material. They underline suspiciously the low levels of commitment required in this book club, which just puts me off. Why start a book club and not commit? There's a coffee shop over the music book shelves, in a valley of psychology books. There's 2wo old ducks dressed like Miss Marple sipping coffee and having a conversation in short clipped sentences that seems to invoke nothing but giggles from them. I've never been in a book club, because there used to be 1ne in Scotland that always put me off. They used to meet in our school library in Scotland - we would see them if our Mums were late getting ASDA shopping to pick us up - a rum bunch of bored single women, the odd slightly demented pervert looking man with egg shaped head and dirty coat, 2wo of our own librarians making cash on the side, and a beautiful blonde with shiny blue eyes who always looked desperately out of place in her beanbag, legs crossed, as if assigned to the group by court order. She used to have to sit there with a sad smile, and we would hear her make what I felt were distinctly intellectual points, only to be drowned out by a chorus of battiness, attention seeking and demented ramblings about Star Wars novels. It was less a book club, other than her, than a care in the community program. We only shared eye contact once, as the pervy man stood to read his poem about the sun in an exaggerated Raymond J Bartholomew voice, every word either rhyming with sun or spoon oddly enough. I smiled at her from behind the reference section, and she winced visibly in a comic way before refocusing on the group. She never came again, and I never found out what happened to her. The man who wrote the poem about the spoon turned up the following week in a wig like the 1ne Phil Collins wore in the Illegal Alien clip, but that's quite another story...

I don't sign up for the book club. The girl behind the counter tries to get me to join - she has thick librarian glasses, and a tooth that sparkles in the fading daylight, a twisted gnarler that looks like it would hurt every moment of the day. Her boss tells me the credit card function isn't working, and she smiles so apologetically it's painful. I pay for my books, and add it to my ever expanding pile of things I don't really need. I nearly leave the little pile behind at the pub. The table across from me is positively raucous, as a middle aged brunette excitedly and knowingly talks about cricket to a Male accountant who won't stop staring at her breasts whenever she gets drinks. Propped up on the edge of a stool is a middle aged man with a pressed shirt and a double chin who couldn't look more uncomfortable if a fat-o-gram just popped out of a cake. I think he's leaving this particular workforce and he doesn't look happy about it. Or maybe he is happy - his tie is certainly happy, a gregarious swirl of colours and patterns, a visual representation of the maxim about not having to be crazy to work here etc - and he just can't wait to get away from these people. Given my own personal endless fretting about the nature of mortality and the finite nature of time on earth - and I accept these are not issues for discussion in a Sandy Bay pub blaring Fox Sports News to everyone - there's something painfully sad about the farewell drinks, something I usually avert my eyes to. Could I discuss the closing of chapters in life at a bookclub? Maybe. I instead of now finish my beer and move on, walking past the farewelled employee as he stares with unblinking eyes at his scrawled on farewell card, which is large and boisterous and contains a brassy blonde on the cover doing brassy blonde things. His present sits on the edge of the table un-opened, and the cricket fan brunette, perhaps sensing a lull in the conversation, begins to tell a joke. It's a shame that I will never find out the outcome of the crashing plane suspiciously containing 1ne man from Ireland, 1ne man from England and 1ne from Scotland - and of course, no pilot, crew or other passengers - but it's something I'm willing to live with...

So I end up after all this - books and DVD in tow - at the inapropriately named Welcome Stranger pub in Hobart. Oddly enough, the video jukebox is playing exactly the same songs as JB HiFi, although the place is deserted other than some stragglers playing pool badly, sending pool balls flying around the cavernous construct with careless abandon. 1ne girl outside almost vomits, but composes herself, gets into her Toyota Camry, and high 5ives her passanger as if she's accomplished a rich and rewarding feat. I saunter up the bar, where a small girl in a green shirt, no bigger than the glass she pours my beer into, asks me how my day has been, and whether it's cold outside. How to answer - glibly in both cases I should imagine. The strangest thing of all is I've stumbled into new friends, quite by accident. How to explain the strangeness of the new friend outing to a barmaid who says beer is "frothalicious"...I mean, new friends are strange things at my age, especially 1nes with kids and stories that I haven't heard before...I suspect though from the age of the barmaid that if I stick around we'll be talking about Twilight soon, so I move on. At least the Welcome Stranger gargoyle isn't here, Igor the uncommunicative from behind the bar, who they only let out of the cellar to ruin special occasions. I go back eventually to my new friends, just as a pool fight breaks out. Someone has nudged a black ball in with their elbow, and to the swooning sounds of some marble mouthed rapper, the protagonists swing blindly at each other, pulling each others semi expensive jumpers and flailing wildly as their screaming partners aren't sure whether to step in or try their mutually disgusting black and brown drink concoctions. We take it as a cue to leave, climbing into a taxi cab and heading home. As I put my foot and toe just outside the door, the music on the video screen makes a horrible hissing noise and sounds like it's about to break, and a single, aimless pensioner with a thick staticy cardigan and a moustache thick and hearty walks past mumbling to himself, a plastic cup full of coins, his eyes bereft of life, his shoulders slumped, as he walks like death to the poker machine, under which are his shoes, on top of which is his wallet...he may have settled in for the night, but for us, the night is well and truly over...

I sleep so soundly, I don't even think a marble mouthed rapper rapping at full speed with sick beats per minute is likely to wake me up...

Holiday Interlude - Tacos, Farewell, we hardly knew ye

2010-07-16T18:23:00.001-07:00

My Facebook page is pretty much an irrelevance to my life these days. I'm sure the Farmville addicts and the people debating whether the new M.I.A album is rubbish or not have a wonderful time, but I've got valuable things to do. Sure most of them involve fantasy Basketball games, but there's no doubt that the novelty of finding old school friends and finding none of them invented a new formula of Coke and made millions has worn off. However, on a rainy Irvine day, it was worth enrichening the pockets of Zuckerberg a little bit just to click on and find out that Tacos had closed. It's a strange thing when you find out sad news from home delivered in a sort of Arial font typed as an update - coldly and without explanation or further analysis by someone who's profile picture is them wearing a silly hat and drinking from a beer bong. And because the person who typed it is likely to be asleep or sitting a pub somewhere in said silly hat and...Tacos Closed? That was it. No more words. No explanation. Was there a ! or an OMG on the end of that sentence? I'm guessing yes, since that's very much the style of this updater. Never short of an OMG. Tacos, for those who don't speak Hobartian, was the somewhat magical Hobart restaurant down in Salamanca famous for serving gigantic fishbowl margaritas and...well I'm sure they sold food as well, Tacos and wedges or something. Essentially, it was the starting point for many hens nights, bucks nights and works nights out where people would hi 5ive each other all week about what a massive night they would have, only for 1ne of the people to imbibe far too much and have to be carried home vomiting in funny maragita based colors and muttering about how they were fine. And now, it was gone, and no one had the grace to forewarn me. I tried to talk to my auntie about it, but she was watching 1ne of her programs, 1ne of those 1nes where embittered minor celebrities try and cook some crockenbush and learn a dance routine while eating a scorpion in a jungle house while running through a field of electric daggers and being given marks out of 10en by Amanda Holdan. How could she understand...I replied to this Facebook death notice but I had to wait, wait until Australia woke up from it's slumber...just alone, mourning a part of Hobart lost to time (and probably the Austrians...probably turn it into Schnitzels version 2...)...

We started most of those 2002 nights, the weekend 1nes, at Irish Murphys, before they accquired some of the worst bouncers in human history, all thick necks and swagger like the extras from some horrendous low budget rap video. We would only venture into Tacos on special occasions. Special mostly meant someone insisted in having tea first. Special doesn't have the same meaning in Hobart. It can easily apply to some1ne is just wearing different shoes. I got my first ever hangover from a Tacos Maragita, a piercing screamer that stabbed me in the head and then came back for my wallet to make sure the job was done. I spent the following morning in a writers course writing extremely angry poems about death and hatred that everyone seemed to love. I think they were a bit disappointed the week after when I turned up with my novel filled with pop culture references and a plot twist that was oblique and obscure but made perfect sense to me. I like to think someone said "What happened to all the death" but I think I made that up. I also used to use it as a sort of reference point for taxi drivers if I had to ring 1ne up. Sometimes it's easy just to say the simplest word possible, not just when you are drunk, but to taxi control operators in general. Try piercing through a combination of radio crackle, tired ears and drunken stumbling vowels and say "I'm just outside the Victoria Tavern"...easier just to yell the word "TACOS!" and hang up the phone. Always worked. The 1ne time it didn't work, sadly, some1ne had the same idea. A man in a checked shirt had worked the same system, and he was above me in the social rankings. He had won a meat-tray at a different pub. His logic in a quickly settled disputed was that he needed to get home quicker than me to freeze the meat, and the taxi driver agreed and I had to wait in the cold for another 4ty5ive minutes just to get home. I was dreading some other inescapable piece of Hobart logic would mean some1ne else got a taxi ahead of me...maybe more checks on the shirt, or more knowledge of the best way past a traffic problem in Glenorchy. Suffice to say, to avoid further problems, I started just yelling "MURES" into confused taxi co-ordinators...

One of our nights had been planned for a long time. It was a flurry of e-mails, and youthful high spirits. Especially from me, who had emerged from the horrendous triangle of friendless years, and was now out and about. I was like Jay Z for a while, I ran this town, if by running a town you mean being able to co-ordinate 12elve people into a pub at an agreed time and getting them to have a socially acceptable night out, and doing it by e-mail. Yes, I certainly ran that town. As it unsurprisingly did before it became Hobarts most god awful pub, Irish Murphys was rocking, a band played aggressively in the corner - well, as aggressively as you can play Train and Maroon 5ive covers - and we were in the middle of the social vibe, dispensing japes to all and sundry. We accumulated an entourage of hangers on that night, and decided to go to Tacos to continue to revelry. It was hardly bacchanalia of course - I don't think you could soundtrack bacchanalia with covers of Drops Of Jupiter while a girl called Sharon talks about how everything is "frigged up" for 1ne thing - but it was a fantastic evening. People hooked up who are still together for all I know, and the band even came over to drink with us. We had an entire corner of the pub to our own party. As far I can tell, we never made it to the comedian set - why risk a night of being told the differences between men and women when you can sit and enjoy each other company and celebrate youthful stupidity? It was only on the way to Tacos that our now expanded group heard a suspiciously ominous thump and yelp. Someone had fallen over in the gutter and was now clutching 1/2 a high heel and a plethora of our attention...we had no idea who she was at all, we were confused, we were hungry and within sight of Tacos, I mean it was just right there, so we could probably do a runner if we wanted...

Her name was Alison. She was the height of a WNBA starting centre, which was handy if we wanted pickles from the top shelf, but bad for those lumbered with supporting her as she walked. She had straight black hair, thick red lipstick, and a pout that could stop a clock. She was knowlegable, intelligent, and drunk as a skunk. She had theories on George Bush that would make that same clock get up in a confused fog and call a taxi. She also worked in government, that much we all knew, dealing with traffic and traffic infringements - my joke about that being a fine job not getting a laugh. See, fine, fine...ah forget it. No one quite knew who she was a friend of a friend of, so no one knew who's responsibility it was to pick her up when she fell over. I was far more empathetic than I am now, but even I was growing weary and impatient of her stumbling, which I now realise is uncharitable, of course, but back then I had things to do...well I had nothing to do really, but the wedges looked good. We shuffled around in the fading daylight trying to work out who would take responsibility for her. She kicked over a chair in Tacos and that still didn't make anyone get up to help. The Tacos staff didn't seem to want to help - anytime we tried to catch their eye to get them to ring a taxi, they would disappear into the distance or find an unseen stain to clean up with Windex and a cloth from the Harold Holt era. I presume they had knew Alison, and were glad to palm her off, like an old CD to Cash Converters, onto some unsuspecting strangers. Eventually, after an hour of weaning Alison off the Maragitas and the nicotine and enduring a sort of life crisis discussion that seemed straight from the set of Dr Phil, Alison was able to attract the attention of Tacos staff, a lifeboat coming in to save her from the sea of self pity and doubt and Guinness up to the gills. However, all the training in customer support couldn't prepare our young badge wearing friend from the moment Alison looked deep into his eyes, said "no one gets me", and left, in a achingly poignant swish of denim and grace, like the final stanza of some semi-tragic poem...lucky she left when she did, it would have been less poetic 20ty seconds later, when someone fired up the Mariachi tape over the PA system...

Sometime later, a Facebook message pops up. It says "Tacos Closed! I know!" - I'm not sure how to debate this point, or what it all means, so I close the lap top, and read a book for several hours...goodbye Tacos...lest we forget...you are now closed...and I know...

The Incredulous Despair of the Conceptual Entity

2010-07-16T03:50:00.000-07:00

Another day, another luggage carousel. Another swirling mass of faux Armani, clip locks and zip up bags, another group of people conjoined with me in an impatient mass around a swirling conveyor belt of clear social segregation. The haves swagger away with their cases, privileged that the gods of the luggage carousel saw fit to give them the serenity only an early appearance on the belt can bring, and the have nots stay impotently furious, craning their necks desperately to try and avert the nagging feeling maybe the airline lost their luggage as the crowd thins and then thins again. In my case, at least I get to stroll past the conveyor belt with hand luggage, with a nonchalance I don't really feel. I don't mind airports, and even with Prestwicks garish purple swirling letters splashed across the wall, tartan bunnet wearing figures painted on the toilet, and total lack of amenities, I don't mind sitting quietly on a bucket seat reading a paper. I think it's a mindset thing - I've spent so much of my time in airports feeling my body float away and losing track of time studying crowds, I'm just used to it. There is 1ne amenity though in Prestwick - a rather tacky and gaudy cart style market stall selling cheap retro soccer shirts. I say retro, it's a clear sign of old age when they approximate the culture from your youth and package it as retro. I'm sure I owned some of those T-shirts in their original incarnations. The cart pusher and I presume stall owner has 1ne deep and furrowed wrinkle on his face that runs from cheek to jaw, almost like a scar, a scar inflicted by doubt and time I guess. He pushes the cart until he is just about happy with it, then slumps for a moment, but as soon as any1ne watches him, he puffs out his chest as if pride will not allow him to be exposed to the world as tired or out of breath. It's a strange spectacle, every step obviously painful, but he hides it well, flirting with a passing hens party and cracking wise to the newsagent. As soon as they go though, he sucks deep on nothing but stale air conditioned air and a sense of showmanship that keeps himself from toppling over. I myself am exhausted, sucking Irn Bru through a stubborn suck resistant straw made of hardy raw materials. I think everything was just more resillient in the past - god knows when I'm 60ty, there's no way I'm lugging a cart full of T-shirts into an airport. I'll be in my slippers by the side of the road yelling at traffic for keeping me up...it seems, somehow, pre-ordained...

Down, up, down, up, then up again I go, through the tunnels, mazes and labyrinthal nature of Scottish signposted routes. There's a girl sitting on the train platform crying, surrounded by cases, her hair an impossible style, a sort of Deal or No Deal cut but double the length and harshly straight, as if done with set square and ruler. I feel it un-necessary to intrude, since I'm cold, caught up in my book, and her sobs are somehow un-natural, whooping, the kind only made by small children when they are trying to stop their Mum from yelling at them. The crying girl disappears visually into a nearby train carriage but I can still hear her until the very last second that the door on the train shuts and vanishes into the middle distance, in true Scottish tradition so much with the mighty shove and heave of trains of yore -the kind you saw in books with billowing steam and waving flat cap wearing passengers hanging out the windows incredulous life could be this amazing - but more with a squeak of the brakes and an almost apologetic shrug of despair. My own train is running inevitably late, producing even more apologies - nothing personal of course, these apologies come in yellow fonts on blue screens - and even more of my life is held hostage to time wasting, to fate, to solitude and drifting moments. It begins to rain, and a bewildered looking German with glasses thick and impenetrable, the kind that should have window wipers or belong on a mad scientist, begins to ask a pigeon English version of what time is the train coming. My mind is pretty much shut down by this point, so I mumble something about not really knowing, and splashes off like a sulky child none the wiser, his fogged up glasses almost leading him directly into a thick red metal pole. The train, as it happens, never comes, the apologies giving way to harsher messages, the soft screen tone of yellow and blue now replaced by a harsh black and grey message, that flashes hypnotically against an equally black and grey sky, more or less absolving said train company of responsibility - probably those damn leaves. I watch it for a while, because I feel as though something has broken down, mostly my resolve. I also feel it's the British way...hey, we tried apologizing...now it's your fault...

My taxi driver is an avuncular fellow. He has one of those clingy student beards that seem unfinished and patchy, and I somehow envisage if he was telling a story, he would thump you on the back gregariously and let out a throaty laugh at his own wit. Funny though - those people are the most sour of drunks. He has picked me up from the UK countryside before apparently, although I don't remember him. He also likes debate, I can tell. Say 1ne thing, even polite agreement, and he'll twist it round to show he's a reasonable man. I was able to gather all this because on the way home, he stopped to help a fellow taxi driver directions, and they sat on the hard shoulder next to a petrol station swapping war stories, as rain danced on the ground in pretty patterns, and his radio station seemed perpetually set on M People. I'm not sure how you search for the hero inside yourself at 8 in the morning on a garage forecourt, but maybe I'm just too hard boiled. He thumps his taxi driving friend on the back, hard enough to make him wince, and walks back towards the taxi with the broad smile of the perpetually lunatic or over-caffinated. He's instantly off on a rant about how McDonalds workers get ahead in life simply by virtue of working at McDonalds or something. I myself have my nose pressed against the splash stained window, staring out at a million fields, all soaked in drizzle. For some reason, when I drive through Irvine, I'm obsessed by what's not there...where are all the kids? Where are all the people playing...even in bright sunshine, I don't think I've anyone playing anything. Swing parks unswung, fields unfielded, school playgrounds uncluttered by frisbees. I don't have a summation of this, and certainly if I shared it with Patchbeard, he'd turn it around and say the fields were full of kids and I was an idiot for even thinking it...his girlfriend, he says, is very fond of Irvine. I suppress the tempation to consider that this Canadian girlfriend may be some sort of conceptual entity, a mere figment and story telling device by which to make further points about immigration and the government. I'm just suspicious I guess, as I am with anyone in life who, like he, is going to quit their job...tomorrow, I promise. I suspect even if she is a conceptual entity however, she would be unimpressed and despondent at his lack of knowledge of how to go around a roundabout...maybe they teach it at McDonalds...

The man next door where I'm staying 1nce had a big husky and a small yappy dog that only shut up when the big dog yelped at it in a display of husky power. Beyond that, I can't tell you why we're talking in the driveway, in the rain, but he knows a lot about me. I love when people know you from fragmented moments of your past - and I realise there is a certain symmetery to the conversation. After all, I know him as the man with the dogs, he knows me as that boy that ate a lot of Creme Eggs. It's true, he did have dogs, and i did eat lot of Creme Eggs, but the fullness and richness of our days - the twists and turns of our rapidly passing into history lives - isn't prevalent in our rainy time consuming conversation. I presume he then went into his house and spoke to his wife about how much I'd changed. Well it'd be weird if I still looked 8ight. I shouldn't scoff, he's being polite, and anyone with a quiff so rich probably deserves some attention. I leave him with a promise to catch up before I leave that we both know will never be fulfilled and fumble with a key that clangs against the lock of the door in a strangely metallic and painfully teeth grinding way. Eventually, I make my fingers work properly, make them grip the key tightly enough to break the fortress wall, and go into the empty house. It's empty because my auntie has decided that I should be fed only on chips and gristle - I blame her, when really it's my own doing - and walk slowly up the stairs and throw myself on the bed with an overdramatic flourish. It has taken me about an hour to get from the airport to here, but I can't sleep because I'm tired, and I stare at the ceiling, and try and count the raindrops bashing off the window sill. Outside, some children actually are playing, leaping into puddles like they can smash them through force of will. I drift off to sleep to the gentle hum of the rain, and have a dream about a Canadian girlfriend with long blonde Melanie Adams like hair, who has just left me for some1ne who can make a Hash Brown properly. She's patiently explaining that's it's not you, it's me, and how could she turn down a McDonalds graduate. It seems even in my dreams, the irrefutable logic held within most arguments against myself seems utterly water-tight...

Still, it's her loss. She missed out on sharing my Creme Eggs...

When She Sang About Angels, and the Taxi Driver was late

2010-07-14T01:38:00.000-07:00

Strange as it sounds, I'm very much a product of my home town - cynical, jaded, tired, suspicious, likely to splurge on a ridiculously tacky item just because Pop Star X wore it - despite the lack of time I've spent there in my life. I had, until this holiday, never been out in it. Why would I bother - as soon as you get off the plane, there's a disquiet in the air. I have an uncle who literally won't cross the road to go to the pub lest the baddies out there get him and steal his wallet. So there he sits, fearful, with a chicken madras and a can of Stella, waiting for death. I could slap him. People try and create a menace in Hobart - the nadir was the front page in the Mercury which suggested gangs were slapping random Syrup patrons, to which I sent in a reply letter suggesting that those patrons presumably were just angry when Syrup DJs decided once again it was Dave Dobbyn O'Clock. I even sent it in crazy old man writing to the paper green pen. No dice. I don't know that I like my home town that much. I mean, I do, but there's something quite disconsolate about Irvine. There's letters missing in the facade of the Maritime Museum, the leisure centre is frail and crumbling, far from it's glory days during which denim clad temptresses with 80s Sharleen Spiteri haircuts would turn down paramours without even saying a word and excitable kids would learn just how to turn a pit of plastic balls into a bullies paradise. I stood there for a while just sort of staring. It's hard to explain how I feel about Irvine - I think it's a bit like seeing your old girlfriends on Facebook, being excited to see them again, then finding they lack front teeth and spend all their posts randomly attacking nonsensical targets like E-Bay and Youtube all day long like old women at bus stops. You can't help but remember when that person was...fun. Attractive. The centre of your universe. You can't help but be pained that no matter what you do, there's an entire chapter, entire events, you simply can't place yourself in or around. Things are just...different. Of course, this is purely an example, and in no way a reflection of actual events. Oh no...

Of course, 6ix shots of Tequila and a short and affordable cab ride can make anything seem exciting. Which is how I came to be standing on the wooden floor of Irvines version of Syrup. Well it seemed exciting at the time. I'm painfully aware of my limitations in the nightclub setting of course. I can't dance, I'm now probably far too old to like the music i like, never mind try and shake a limb or two to it, I'm painfully shy, and my stock in trade, jaded witticisms, simply rise to the ceiling and fall flat on the floor, unable to be heard over the thumping beats of David Guetta vs The Egg. At least Syrup is small, Irvines equivalent is positively cavernous, entire hens parties get wrapped and encased in the ebb and flow of the smoke machine, like ships going off into doomed horizons, never to be seen again, only the shiny glimpse of the fattest girls psuedo-ironic fairy wand guiding rescue efforts. As my friend is showing off her new boyfriend - and he's all aftershave and studied indifference, imported beers and shiny shoes, textbook stuff really, I've seen too many people like him to care and make conversation about Miley Cyrus - I study the DJ for a while. The 1nes in my nightclub of choice in Hobart, the Syrup massive, stare bored out the window and couldn't look less impressed in their Red Herring shirts, the DJs in Irvine are all excitable, middle aged cruise ship DJs run aground. This 1ne has a whistle, an honest to goodness whistle, and his hands in the air - I hate that he cares. I sink a shot of what could be fairy liquid for all I know, and out of the cavernous wooden floor, through the smoke and haze, 2wo girls carry the bride to be under - all hair dye and regret - each arm, as she slumps on the verge of unsciousness. She is somewhat inevitably shoeless, and as she is lead through the nightclub, through the smoke, as her tiara crashes hopelessly to the ground like some doomed in flight object heading for earth, and as we part in the traditional Scottish ach thats a shame guard of honor, the DJ chooses just that moment to launch his most excited WOO yet, and fire up some Beyonce...it just wouldn't have been the same if it was Dave Dobbyn...

Those missing letters on the Maritime Museum really bug me you know - although the locals for what its worth seem more intent on discussing why the Polish workers haven't built their bridge yet, thus condemning the whole town to...well, an extra 1ne minute going round a roundabout more than usual, but still...my hangover is somewhat subdued from last night. It's getting dark by know, although I am old, that might be fading eyesight. The wind has whipped up by now. Eventually, I sit down and wait for the bus home - the bus home is now a combination of 3hree buses home, combined by mergers and budget cuts. I'm watching a man who should know better kick an ATM. Not just kick it, but positively Jackie Chan it in a way that makes his Nike swoosh fly through the air, his spittle flecked anger towards this harmless giver of cash positively frightening. I study him for a moment, as his cheeks pinken and purple, his eyes cast to the skies as if his world has crumpled. His beard even seems to redden, under the kind of burden that only the failure to get cash from a stationery object can bring, his Tommy Hilfiger jumper almost wrenched from his body in a flurry of arms, limbs, pin numbers and discarded Irn Bru bottles. The old woman in the queue behind him spins hard on her heels and walks away, tutting at no 1ne in particular. I don't especially feel the need to get involved, and I bury my head in the paper, re-reading again a nonsensical story about a woman who lost her keys and needed help to find them. The man in question walks away after a while, and a cheeky 50ty pound note pops its head out of the slot for a moment, winks, and then retreats back into the ATM. I'd tell him, but ya know. I'm not nearly awake enough to engage in the hustle and bustle of getting on the bus first, the rabble and froth and bubble by which men fake limps and women pretend nearby kids are their own simply to get on the bus first and a seat up the back where they can stretch out. My indifference earns me a seat next to a computer nerd with thick glasses and braces she could only have welded on, and it's then as I try and stretch out I see a high heel stuck at a jaunty angle in the gutter...

Outside the nightclub, I'm suffering from smoke inhalation. 1ne brave member of the hens party has managed to retrieve a shoe from the wreckage, and she holds it aloft triumphantly, the high heel shimmering in the moonlight. I smile meekly in appreciation, because I'm bewildered and unsure of where I am. The fairy liquid is kicking in after all. My friend is bouncing around in a hyperactive new relationships are boss kind of way, and I'm eating a chip that I believe was dug out of a labyrinthe pit of pure grease at some point in 1984 and left to sit on a bed of oil ever since. I'm sitting in the gutter eating this chip, studying it in fascination, because anything is better than eating it. Even the DJ has left by know - we watched him leave, he seemed smaller somehow, as if he had assumed a character before, and without his whistle and ability to yell he was without soul or purpose. He slumped over his record crate as he loaded into his van and launched the most mournful sigh imaginable into the night air. I sympathise to some extent with people who spend just a brief moment of exaltation as a wacky character then go back to, I don't know, a typing pool - I used to live with a girl who was the Chickenfeed Chicken, and when the costume was hung on the rack, it was so lifeless it was sad. I presume he had to go home to prepare for his stint at Hospital Radio. We waited a long time for a taxi as it happens, until the hens part left, leaving behind the infamous shoe in the gutter, departing in a swirl of casual vomit, glitter, floods of tears and 1ne of the worst attempts to pash a stranger I've seen. The DJ left, driving his mini van crammed with so many records I don't even know how he could see. Hell, even my friend left in the end, pashing her new boyfriend as if she'd just discovered the joys of tongues. And so there I was, alone, under street light, surrounded by the flotsam and jetsam of a night out, under a neon sign that flickered horrendously loudly in my ears, eating a chip that could mostly be described as ambivalent to the notion of taste, with a sticker attached to my shoe for the nightclub that couldn't have been more gaudy, with a taxi on my way that I had no idea that I would be picked up by a taxi driver with a neck the size of Ecuador, who seemed oddly addicted to CDs of impossibly beautiful female singers that didn't match his SICK FUCK tattoo on his knuckles...

Understanding home? I couldn't get in a taxi without feeling dizzy and confused...no wonder my head still hurts...

When we can't decide, we hope that you'll on my side (Or why I went away for a while this time...)

2010-07-13T02:31:00.000-07:00

It's 10 am, in a Scottish branch of 1ne of those horrible adjunct supermarket cafes that dot the landscape, blight it in many ways, enhance it in others. Sure, they are soul-less, manned by embittered plooky face plump lassies who hiss your order by elongating the final syllable of the word, but hey, the coffees cheap. It is what it is. I find the strangest thing about going back to Scotland is that the little differences, after a long time away, jar more than the obvious 1nes. Sure, there may be a bewildering series of new roads to travail and stranges rules and regulations to decipher such as the 2 queue system in the bakery, but alcohol sold in the supermarket? Wee women in coats pushing trollies THAT quickly? Mind spin. My coffee, well, it's swirling, frothing, spinning and dancing in milky patterns around in my mind. I wonder if I concentrate just hard enough, I can make a dolphin appear in it's swirling patterns, like a Magic Eye picture. If I could, I'd probably sit in this faux cane chair forever. I'd probably fall in love with 1ne of the plooky face plump lassies and we'd raise plooky faced wee weans and argue about money every Saturday night over a Chicken Madras while Ant & Dec comedically bicker on our TV screens. Who knows what might have been right? I've got Smoosh on the IPOD, for no discernible reason. Across my shoulder, a youth in a red hooded top is blanking out his girlfriend, herself being all bad hair weave and over ambitious gestures arguing about money I presume. I tend to find in Scotland, the girls are very over dramatic with their gestures, clipping the end of their words, throwing their hands up in the air trying to communicate to emotionally stunted boys with lifeless eyes who are too busy thinking about football or boxing or something...I lifelessly watch him for a moment, stirring my coffee in opposite circles simply to break the monotony. I know life will go on of course, I could stare into the middle distance forever, stirring coffee, making patterns, hitting the repeat button on my Smoosh album until I got tenure of the faux cane chair in some sort of retirement ceremony. I could sit all day wondering why so many Scottish girls are so angry...but once We Our Own Lies finishes, I sadly know time is up...a rented suit waits for no man...

The girl in the rented suit shop asks where my accent is from. I wish I had the heart to flirt today, but my eyes are hurt and scrunched, and she's only being shop polite. I smile a thin smile and say Tasmania. I know what's coming of course - after a month, I can usually tell, it's all in the phrasing. She somewhat unsurprisingly has a cousin that lives in Tasmania. I think after a while this is akin to a hairdresser pretending to be interested in what you are doing on the weekend. My hairdresser in Burnie was interested, but not today, no need for 15 year old unrequited love stories today. And besides, maybe she does, or maybe she needs a tangent, something to kill time between DJ Havana Brown songs and measuring the inside pant leg of strangers. Moreover, this is her store, her domain, not a chain, and that at least is something to cherish. That DJ Havana Brown CD - that's her choice, the magazine she reads...that's all her. My suit will later sit crumpled and disrespected over a stairway bannister which seems a little bit of an ungreatful way to cherish the precious nature of individual choice, but I think my tip said it all. I'll stare at it for a while, because that means I don't have to put it on. I've got an aversion to trying suits on. My Mum will sometimes buy me a big buttoned and well intentioned jumper. I'll stare at the button and make some joke about old man cardigans, anything that means I don't have to parade around in the outfit. Today, I'll probably have spent most of my day talking to my auntie about volcanic ash. I know this is easy conversation, but my heart really isn't in it. There's a girl at work now who about 6ix times now has asked if I watch Dancing With The Stars. After the 4th time I said yes just to stop her asking, and now am able to tune her out easily and think about other things rather than having to explain myself. I'm a people pleaser. My auntie isn't really into notions of individual choice in the sphere of retail. She just hates Iceland and all the ash it spews forth. It's then I realise I haven't really listened to a conversation properly all day, and have had other things on my mind. In fact, it's just then I glance into the mirror and see the same lifeless eyes as the boy in the red top had earlier. If only it was a day for smiling, I'd have laughed at the grim co-incidence all day, then patted myself on the back for not saying it was grim irony, and mis-using the word...

Another coffee, another morning, not long after. This shop is somehow even more corporate than yesterdays, unglamourous, right in the heart of Paisley, tracksuit wearing mothers taking a break their most important clientele. 1ne of the kids is throwing spoons around like javelins. No one stops him, no one even moves, and he learns to run the world through pure anarchy and noise - bit like PETA in kid form. This coffee is far more acidic, for some reason, pure early morning airport, like a practice coffee. It's gluggy. I haven't had 1ne like that since the 1ne I had at a Manchester Truck Stop just before I went to Switzerland that was just glug with 2wo sugars. I'm flicking through the paper, but it's nothing but faux controversies and sad eyed celebrities emerging from rehab blinking into the light and calling their publicist. I was glad to get out of the front of the car I was in. Why they thought I'd be the one to make conversation, today of all days, I'm not quite sure. I hate being in the front of someone elses car, so tantalisingly close to the radio but never given permission to turn it on. When that person what is driving the car - as they say in London - is flicking through their own struggling roladex of conversational topics only to settle on hows work, the desire to hit the volume and tune out even if it's only Train on the CD player is hard to fight. How is work? It seemed like a strange question - after 8eight weeks, I couldn't even answer. I was still trying to remember after my 2nd cup of glug. This 1ne didn't have sugar in it, I thought I'd try my glug pure. The Scottish way. My family of course don't speak, and I hadn't really noticed them coming in. 1ne audiciously has a glazed donut, which is weird, because I hadn't seen donuts for sale. And I'd really like a donut. On such incidents, war can be declared you know. Of course, on the day of a funeral, how can you possibly wonder about sprinkles, you can't really kick up a fuss. But damn it all, if I'd like someone to to clock little Jimmy Javelin over the head. Hell, I'd do it myself, if the reward was a donut, but such is fate, of course, the procession must move on...

My leg is pressed up against the radiator in the community centre, 1ne of those old sharp 1nes of whitest white and sharpest sharp. I would complain, but it's a funeral, it's not like it's allowed. I have a keen eye now at funerals for the truly upset and the sandwich stealing hangers on. I also know in all 3hree funerals I've been too, I've stared mostly out of the window and taken no real active interest in what's going on. I can't cope with it, I hate it. I hate people saying somehow playing a badly muzaked version of their favourite song and making a pile of sandwiches was what they would have wanted. Clearly, what they would have wanted was not to die...but I digress. My auntie is doing a tour de force of the room telling everyone she hasn't cried yet, which seems faintly wrong, and I've had so many sandwiches I suspect people are nudging each other wondering who I am. My uncle, if he hadn't died, would have eaten a lot of sandwiches, amongst stories of urban Glaswegian deprivation only partially true. I miss him. I'm sure it was a lovely service of course, probably shouldn't have let my leg burn or stared out the window quite so much - and in a moment of quiet reflection on the sandwich table covered dance floor of whichever Coatbridge association this reception centre truly represents, while resisting the chance to engage the group in a morale boosting game of darts, a girl comes up to me. She's always fancied me, I thought she was my cousin when she wasn't, and had it been the 1980tys, we probably could have got her and I a sitcom deal such was the hilarity. Her Mum joins her, and they engage in some nudging conversation which is somehow meant to indicate she'd dump her boyfriend for me. At least that's what I think - no one is QUITE that keen to engage in nostalgia for how she used to laugh at my jokes. I probably was meant to re-ciprocate this conversation, but I don't have the energy. As is the modern way, we promise to be friends on Facebook, and her and her Mum seem oddly excited by the prospect. It's all quietly disconcerting. Someone takes a photo of me, almost without me noticing, and there in someones camera I rest, a million miles away, my expression glazed, my sandwich 1/2 eaten, and a moment frozen in time forever. They'll probably stick it on my summation in death cork board 1ne day, and a circle will be created. Maybe someone will note it on Twitter, in a far more succinct fashion than I can...

I walk back to the car, put on Smoosh, and fall asleep for roughly 3hree days. The fate of the suit, sadly, remains unrecorded...

A past full of landmines and safety cards

2010-04-06T15:14:00.000-07:00

It's cold where I am. Cold enough that random strangers feel the embedded need to tell me it's cold. Embedded in their routine, they don't stray from strict caricature, and I don't see them enough to flesh them out into 3D forms. They exist in anecdote, a fleeting moment stripping them of richness, and reducing them to, say, woman in grey coat, who tells me it's cold. She then gets on the bus and I'll never see her again, unless of course it's hot the following day, and she'll emerge with hankie on head to perchance mention it's warm. I saw an air-stewardess at Manchester Airport passing me by once. She walked in a perplexing way. Her upper body was perpetually moving, animated, swinging arms, taking orders, giving orders, her mouth never halting. However, her legs were moving like an old woman. For all her animation, it took her about an hour to get across a small stretch of airport. She was also ridiculously gorgeous, a mane of blonde hair cascading across her uniform like some character from the a romance novel, for a change was drawn well. I knew she was beautiful because the guy across from me, a sort of Nudge from Hey Dad a like when Hey Dad was a fond nostalgic memory and not a cesspool of disgust, was hypnotised. I don't know he she saw him looking, but he was entranced, he watched her arms swings, her legs barely move, he might even have let some burger dribble onto his jeans, his eyes were wide with wedding plans...and just like that, they were all gone. She finally made it across the airport, he went back to his book, and I went back to listening to badly compiled mix tapes with endings and starts all a jumble. The thing was, this entire movement of eye to stewardess took what, 1ne minute - theres members of my family I don't feel I know as well. And I could have could it all wrong, sketched these strangers wrongly, judged their movements incorrectly. It frustrates me sometimes I can see these interactions and then they pass - like how we used to blow dandelions in the wind and watch the petals scatter onto the horizon. My Dad was with me on that flight, and he just remembers how delicious the bacon sandwiches were. I try and engage on whether that trip to Manchester had any consequence to him since it was an exciting adventure. I mean, remember, you drank with the New Zealand Cricket Team, remember the belly dance...no, bacon sandwiches. Fine. Guess I got this observational detail from Mum then...

I can't really remember whether anything I did in London had consequence or not to be honest. If it involved more than a cute story or too, I'd have felt it by now. Sure, I had to vote from the Gothic weirdness of the Andaz hotel, trying to convince a camp Arab guy from reception that it was possible to fax Tasmania and yes it was a real place, but there was a faint air of dis-satisfaction that gnawed at me all weekend. Even at somewhere as grandiose as the Tower of London, I was more distracted by a noisy group of Bosnians than any rich and rewarding conversation. I felt fitful. It's hard to explain, and yet at the same time it's very easy. There's a girl I used to like, and every time I have drinks I espouse her name as if I'm going to do something about, even though the ship has not just sailed, but it's been sunk, retrieved, and then sunk again once it's been fossicked for scrap metal and historical purposes. And yes, when I'm drunk, it comes up again...I wish I could stop. There's a Japanese guy at the Tower of London - he's part of a crew of strange orange jacket wearing Japanese people, clad in the same garment, muttering around the edges of the Yeoman Warders speech about Anne Boleyn. I know I'm at least in 1ne of his photos because he apologized, shooting over his shoulder to take his girlfriend standing in front of a big spear while I shuffled around in the background in a Bangles T-shirt trying to not giggle at one amusingly named torture implement. And all weekend I weighed up in my mind whether, when he prints that picture, I'm smiling because of the amusingly named torture implement or frowning because through a hangover haze I realise I've just talked the same rubbish I always talk and must be a crashing bore after all this time. I guess I'll never know unless I accidentally find myself on a Japanese Facebook page, pondering why I had that expression on my face. The Noisy Bosnians have a much better, less stressful, more youthful day than I had. They neither drank mulled wine nor had any kind of angst. In fact, such was their joi de vivre, I imagine that it was all forced somehow, a strange contrast to my own sulkiness. As it happened, my mood was picked up somewhat by a Japanese girl and a Pret A Manger sandwich, but that's possibly too boring a story to expand...I think in her picture, I'm smiling? Can't be sure...

Stansted Airport isn't the airport for lovers of fine architecture. A sort of homeless vagrant had paced up and down the train for a bit, being hassled by security for his own failure to distinguish one train station called Stansted from another. Up the alleyway, up the escalator, bag sprawled smugly across my bronzed (ha) shoulders, I knew my airport, I had been here before, I was ready, a traveller on the move. I casually adjusted my watch, and sat at an Internet cubicle to kill some time. A Facebook popped up on the screen from the girl I used to like, but I ignored it. Not out of spite, but because the flinty flickering screen would eat my words and make me sound like, well, someone who couldn't tell 1ne part of Stansted from the other. A hassled looking couple were bickering next to me endlessly. She was blonde, in a camel coat that made her look like a detective or something, and he was French I think. They couldn't cope with the complicated interface of keyboard and booking system and were in danger of missing their flight, not to mention the complicated interface of pound coin to slot. Oh to be young and innocent as a traveller again, to feel as through such things were marriage breaking hassles. I decided to intervene to stop the small child next to me hearing such filthy language. I pressed a pound coin of my own money into their internet kiosk slot, flicked the buttons to help them print off their boarding card, and solved their problems under a disgustingly broken Stansted Airport light and next to a kid pumping out some JLS on his IPOD just to get away from the swearing and the angst...yes, I was feeling good, I didn't care what I had said in a drunken state, about anything angst related, in fact, I was a healer, a repairer of marriages, an experienced international traveller with wisdom to pass on. At least, I strolled around the corner, looked in my bag, realised i must have left my own printed out boarding pass on 1ne of the freaky spiral desks at the Andaz, and had to make my own trek all the way back round to where the couple were just finishing up their boarding. They kindly offered me my pound back, and it was lucky the little boy had his IPOD in, lest he hear several words that in days of yore would have got me thrown in the Tower of London...

It was cold on my flight from London to Glasgow. I know it was cold because the air-stewardess - not breathtakingly gorgeous on RyanAir, it would blow the budget - decided to use it as break the ice small talk. I have a horrible nightmare that 1ne day I'm going to be on a budget airline that gets the passengers involved in some sort of mid flight game...duck duck goose or something horrendous. The head stewardess is fierce of face, a sort of older, broken in head stewardess, ground down by routine and constant RyanAir flights hither and tither. She's terse, her tea pouring skills generally slapdash. I felt bad staring at her and waiting for outbursts. My own at work demeanour could do with a touch up probably, and I don't even make tea for Little Englanders slapping the front of their Suns and speaking proudly of their hopes for David Cameron. I said to my friend when I left Melbourne how odd it was that Virgin Blue play Kate Miller Heidkes "Last Day On Earth" just as the plane takes off in a rather disturbing juxtaposition of song title and potential disaster, but here, I'm sitting on my own, and any whimsical observation about the James Nesbitt voice over that pipes through the plane 6ix times a flight would be lost on the Little Englanders sitting next to me. The wife is a sort of Pat Butcher from Eastenders blonde bouffant headbutt (yeah! yeah!...no one gets that...) clinging old woman with a botox forehead, her husband a living breathing Jeremy Kyle visiting caricature of a man who says what he likes and likes what he says. Mid flight, she pretends to fall asleep. I know she's pretending because she keeps turning away from him and looking at me, but any time he presses her on the shoulder, her eyes clasp tight. Her husband instead engages the man in the row next to him in political debate, and she looks at me like the weariest woman in the world. I am, as it happens, no help to her. Not politically minded, and not particularly awake to offer a re-assuring glance. I read my Bill Walsh book from cover to cover and didn't even tell her she'd soon land at an airport with tartan "bunnets" painted on the toilet doors, the phrase Pure Dead Brilliant painted in a purple mantra across the walls, and some of the most incomprehensible wee men doddering about an airport you could ever hope to find...

She'd have to find that out for herself...

Back to saying nothing, but the location is different

2010-03-31T17:13:00.000-07:00

(You'll have to forgive my long 3 month absence sans explanation. I'd love to be enigmatic about it, I just lost my way, began to think all my writing was awful and repetitive, and er...discovered Sporcle. Nothing too fancy, no time, plus tedium of the brain. Just the need for a break as a result of paucity of ideas. Oh and I'm in the UK right now...so saga, begin...)

I have no idea sometimes how to articulate the ideas in my head. It's 3pm on a Manchester street corner. It's cold, it's bitter, a porter at a 5ive star hotel is kindly looking past my sloppy combination of Bangles T-shirt and black Adidas trackpants to sycophantically wish me a good day. My head hurts, and even more complexly, my ribs do too, although how that happened I don't know. I'm expecting tension, maybe that's why. The cold seeps into my tired eyes, forcing them open like some Clockwork Orange stunt double showing Mal McDowall how it's going to be done. The porter is looking at me like I'm an idiot with a fixed rictus grin on his face, wondering why he's been holding the door open for 5ive minutes without me going through it. I shrug, and exit anyway. I'm dreading the beggars. I'm dreading the self serve Mancunian supermarket counters. Last night I'd stood bewildered for a good 10en minutes while a burka wearing shop assistant and her aggressive boss, moustache twirled, draped and luxuriated across his face, tried to figure out how to process an 89p Brownie, and not even the animated Sainsbury JPEG women with no thumbs on the display screen could help. I thought when I got back to my hotel about my obsession with nothing, with strangeness in life at the expense of meaning. I can notice an animated woman repetitively showing shoppers over and over again on a computer screen how to process Vimto and random Murdoch newspapers doesn't have thumbs, and yet, beggars, I pretend they don't exist, especially given their cruel homeless juxtaposition with my 5ive star hotel. I walked past one last night of course, a proper homeless person, not a Manchester scally with a flash watch trying to hit you up for change. I was eating my aforementioned brownie - it was unwrapped, and probably a health risk, but watching a fight in Arabic for the sake of 89p became peversely entertaining after 5ive pints of Guinness - heading for a room roughly the size of Monaco, and on the way had to bypass a shivering homeless man, with a nary a care for the personal difficulties he must be able to articulate in HIS blog. Not only that, I had walked past the same porter with nary an acknowledgement of how crappy it must be to open the door for someone so clearly drunk he can't put a brownie in his mouth for love or money, and past a cleaner overloaded with vacuum cleaners to point of comic impossibility who still had to stop and say in broken English good evening Si...like I said, I can't articulate the ideas in my head all too well, but it must all add up to something...

My breakfast in this hotel had been both invigorating and clumpy. They had poured all their ideas into the bacon but failed horrifically on the toast. I like to think the chef in charge of foods A-M had been great but his N-Z sidekick couldn't cut the mustard, which starts with M so he'd have to...across from me is a portly businessman and his shorter, thinner haired, jowly cheeked companion. They both look like the kind of men who sit in hotels all across the United Kingdom lamenting a culture where you can't pinch the bums of secretaries or call them darl anymore. The more portly man doesn't mind the horrendous toast. In an instant, a curly haired girl will sweep at a million miles an hour across the breakfast bar, picking everyones toast up whether they want it or not, a juggernaut, a go-getter, if what's she's going to get is toast. I don't know if she's the expert on all things bread, if rolls is a step too far. Pre that moment, I suspect the jowly cheeked man, between sloppy, ugly attempts to devour his egg without making his mess, is about to discuss his previous nights adventures, given the way he is leaning forward, desperate to speak. I sense from my own hardbacked chair that this adventure is going to be exaggerated, and the black bags under the eyes of the portly gentleman have been gained from years of sitting awake having to listen to these overwrought stories. Instead though, the jowly man lets his face sink a bit and says his wife might be leaving him. There's no build up to this statement, it just comes out, hangs in the air, bounces off the ceiling fan whirring over enthusiastically above all our heads, and lingers like the smell of last nights garlic bread still coming from the kitchen. The portly gentleman sits up in his chair, is about to offer something...sympathy? Indifference? Coldness? Warmth? He puts his hands to the side of the table, puts down his paper with the latest scare about killer drugs on it to 1ne side, and takes a deep breath...only to be saved from an uncomfortable conversation by the clearing of toast and the sound of desperate apologies that grown men in a 5ive star hotel couldn't bake bread. The 2wo men don't mention it again, and leave in typically English uncomfortable silence puncuated by bouts of strained breathing. They even leave before the 2nd bout of toast. It's not just me, then that can't articulate the thoughts in my head...

My brownie, by the way, was delicious, well worth the 89p. I had spent most of my drinking - not in a problematic get me on Jeremy Kyle type way of course. In fact, I'd mostly drunk chocolate milk to be honest, but what the hell. I stood outside some trendy record shop clutching a bag full of vinyl and trying to chat up some girl from Northern Ireland with my knowledge of Sky Ferreira songs. She in turn began to articulate a tedious series of problems within the advertising industry that made my mind wander free and over imagined hills far away. Across from me was a small child, no more than 6ix years old. She had on a white dress, white tights, and wore the smile of the perpetually bewildered. She held in her hand a small snow dome, the kind exchanged between relatives who hate each other. She's looking at it with contempt as she shakes it, and holds it up to my eyeline, clearly disgruntled by this gift she's been given when up until now, she had been relatively gruntled, all the while her over burdened mother struggles with shopping bags and her inability to smoke and txt at the same time, not to mention her struggle to carry off the same haircut Lindsay Buckingham had in the Holiday Road video clip. I shrug in the direction of the kid, as if to say we all got problems, since in my lughole I'm hearing things about the advertising industry even Wil Anderson would say were trite and boring. We exchange glances and move on, returning to our respective tedious worlds, and while I would ponder the benefits or disadvantages of discussing life non verbally with a 6ix year old, I don't have time to get thoughts in while I'm being assaulted verbally with advertising pitches and tales of Dave the Religious bigot in her office. The only way out - to be fair, she looked cute, she had a smile that could light up a room, but sadly communication skills that could black out New Jersey - of her web of advertising conversation is to say something thats been on my mind for quite some time. Have you ever noticed, I say while she pauses for a drink of Volvic, the lady from the Sainsburys demo cartoon doesn't have any thumbs...

I hacked all these thoughts, conflicts and ideas into a hashed up mixed up e-mail that I wasn't happy with, and then slept the sleep of a restless man surrounded by pretty things who would trade them all for respite from ribache, old man ribache. Back in the present, the cold is agonizing. I've eventually negotiated the tricky man holding door open - exit the hotel matrix without too much difficulty on my end. I still feel as though my sunglasses are an un-necessary extragavance though. My taxi provides a swirling addition to my hangover, festooned with spots, bright colours and an out of sorts cockney taxi driver who ends every sentence with the word proper, even when the original sentence had ended with proper to begin with. His head is shaved to the bone - his face a strange mash up of other faces I've seen before, resembling several people but looking like none, and his shirt has 1ne sleeve longer than the other, as if to cover some crass back alley shoulder tattoo it's best not to talk about. After we dine out on the conversational snacks of immigration talk, he loses interest in me and begins to talk on his phone to another cab driver I presume, stopping only to adjust the volume up and down on the radios Tinie Tempah song and - as with all cockneys - discuss the price of fruit and ask hows yer favvah? Eventually as we pull toward the scrap iron garage that passes for my cousins house, he begins to soften, shrink in size, begin to speak in a poetic articulate voice that sounds as if he's had a Cockneyectomy. All he says softly is I've put myself out, don't let me down. No more, no less, but it's said in a voice of such genuine poignancy, it's strangely hypnotic. Of course, it passes in an instant, the moment he bumps over the latest piece of scrap iron accumulated by my cousins gypsy village, but I wonder why a gruff poorly shirted Cockney taxi driver is able to take 8eight words to say something meaningful, when I'd take all night. When I get out, a guy working on his car hisses in the direction of the taxi driver, the taxi driver hisses back, and all beauty is lost under a grey sky. I scurry off to my cousins, stepping in a puddle of what I pray is rain water, and leave them to it. It's time to turn my brain off, eat curried sausages, and watch bad DVDs without ever telling them I truly hate wine, please stop pouring it...

It's a privilege I feel I may have earned...

The Observatory - Mans Worst Friend

2009-12-20T02:00:00.000-08:00

The Observatory, Hobarts third best nightspot with a y at the end, isn't feeling like a magical wonderland as I stand in the corner. It's a farewell party for someone, technically a friend, but someone I kinda sorta stopped thinking about at some in 2005, but we're kept together by the chords of fantasy sports games and jibing e-mails that refer to long gone incidents far too tedious to recall. In a moment of eerie presience the DJ seems to be fixated on playing that Brittany Murphy song from a few years ago over and over, which is the first time I've thought of her since my DVD of 8ight Mile got stuck in my Mums player and I had to pull it apart with a screwdriver. The bouncers don't even care anymore, they stand in a semi circle around the dancefloor talking about Manny Pacquiao while a minor disagreement threatens to spill over, and in the far corner, a man with a ruddy complexion and a nose you can use to cut cheese is standing up against the wall, asleep while standing up, long beard flowing across the dance floor, drink precariously hovering in mid air about to crash down onto the ground and scatter glass at the feet of idling school leavers awkwardly sharing a 1st kiss. 1ne of the bouncers pokes him with a fat Samoan finger, but it doesn't stir the man, and he gives up after a while, going back to his discussion and making ribald suggestions about Rihanna that he would never have the self confidence to assert if he actually met her. My friend is tired, and I realise I should say something profound about our friendship - but there's not much to say, and so I just buy him another drink as he begins to talk idly about how the barmaid won't accept his gift vouchers. It's 2wo in the morning, when such things really matter. The 2wo guys who were fighting are now being ticked off by a bouncer, and shaking hands like naughty school kids caught in the playground punching on and made to apologize by the teacher.

The barmaids name was Carmela. She was younger than I ever remember being, the kind of young where every birthday is still exciting and lifes horizons are no broader than finding out the latest sparkle to stick on your mobile phone. She has a tattoo on her arm that snakes and cascades, and she says it's tribal. I say it's shite, because cocktails provoke forthrightness. She giggles in a corporate way all service staff are required to and pours me a cocktail. It's my final drink, and I indicate as much. I'm miles away from being drunk, having drunk water for most of the night in a follied attempt to stay up for some soccer later on that night. My knowledge of popular culture allows me to talk openly about the band of youngsters cavorting around the stage. It's lucky I'm not drunk, I'd think she liked me, but I can see she doesn't. Since her eyes trail 1ne of her co-workers around the bar and back again, and our chat, while brief, is meaningless, and I don't think I'm 100 times cooler than I actually am. There's a thumping dance beat on the video screen, but no thumping dancers. She's peturbed by the empty dance floor, the lack of business tonight, and in the middle of her chat drops in the word perspicacity, which you certainly don't get from the tiny blonde hairdresser barmaid at Customs House. That 1ne couldn't spell perspex. Her co-worker wipes some spillage off the bar though, and she turns into the hairdresser barmaid, speaking in short, breathy sentences in his direction, and saying no words longer than cat for the whole conversation. She finishes by tossing her hair and giggling like an idiot. When he leaves, she tries to pretend nothing has happened and return to normal, but I must have an expression on my face of surprise at her suddenly beimg dumb struck. She shrugs, says like you've never pretended to be something to get a girl, then goes off to tell 1ne of the bouncers the girl with the angel wings on has vomited again. The girl with the angel wings, I can confirm, is vomiting, although it's short, struggling gasps rather than anything significant or messy. She has 3hree colours in her hair that don't conform to nature, a big hole at the top of her tights, some hastily created angel wings, and she's vomiting on the floor of Hobarts 3hrd best nightclub that ends in a Y. She looks plaintively up at a bouncer who's about to kick her out and 2wo of her concerned friends who are stroking her wings in consolation and says she's too old for this shit. Whatever this shit is, I'm afraid I can only concur, but I've some well worn anecdotes to recount over my final expensive cocktail of the evening...

I don't know that I've ever pretended to be something to get a girl, I can't imagine wandering around a nightclub saying I was a spy or a merchant banker just to impress some1ne. I don't have the presence, I don't have a great ability to lie under disco lights. My cousin, the 1ne who died, used to buy sports tracksuits from his local market and pretend he just signed for whatever team tracksuit he had bought. His attempt at a New Zealand accent 1ne night was Guttenbergesque, but he still picked up a Blackpool barmaid. I tell this to my friend, as another of the travelling party we're hanging out with - who earlier bought me drinks and said his wife was his "better ho", Stephon Marbury style - has decided the girl with the angel wings is his perfect pick up, and he nods but he's not really listening. The girl with the angel wings somehow managed not to be thrown out despite her stomach troubles, or lack of support from her store bought Kayser Platinum. My farewelling friend looks quite sad to be honest, which for a man of exceeding self confidence is surprising, but then it is his farewell. I can only hope at this point he doesn't put his arm around me and say I'm his besht mate. Luckily the man asleep in the corner wakes up and causes a kerfuffle - I love that word so much - and is dispatched into the street with pretty aggressive kick. It is, in the words of Christian Bale, fucking distracting, but in a good way. My friend had wanted to say something I'm sure, a thankyou for coming or something like that, but in the end it was all lost in the kicking up the arse, appallingly sloppy pashing on the dancefloor, and the fact that the kerfuffle allowed him to simply go with the tried and tested conversation - remember that time at work with the water bottle. Oh yes...see I'm male. It's far better this way. When my Dad is proud of me, he doesn't tell me, he just puts a cup of tea on and breaks out the good biscuits. It's better to leave on these terms quietly and quickly with a short wave...and far better than awkward morning regrets when you stay out too long and see, and I mean these on both sides given the pashing going on on the dancefloor, exactly what you've picked up the night before...

The man asleep in the corner at the Observatory is 1ne in front of me in the queue for the taxi on the way home. He's doing an involuntary Tassie 2wo step, hopping from foot to foot, at any moment likely to snap in the kind of violent outburst the Mercury warned me about. He folds him arms, then unfolds them, then puts them by his side, then folds them again, perpetual motion, all leading to a grievance of some kind. He also has a cut lip, and the taxi driver at the front of the queue won't pick him up, instead driving off and leaving both of us standing there. I know the grievance look by heart - my Dad has it all the time when he's drinking. It's usually about how his Dad never loved him. Sadly for me, I've got 1ne of those retro New Zealand cricket tops on, the beigey 1ne Richard Hadlee used to wear. Mums right, I shouldn't wear it out, but it's so damn comfy. I think for a moment he's going to racially abuse me, but instead his gaze falls on the girl with the angel wings and my earlier Stephon Marbury aping friend, who are walking along the path engaging in a quite open, but utterly wrong display of open mouth pashing. He stops moving and narrows his eyes as he watches them disappear down a lane in Salamanca, his entire body leaning forward, as if the weight of the world has been lifted from his shoulders. He then swears really loudly into the air, and begins laughing. Out of nervousness, I laugh to, as if to say, hey, yeah, that's pretty messed up those 2wo huh, now please don't stab me. He then begins to walk all the way towards to Irish Murphys, on unsteady legs, just yelling something that I think is supposed to be get a room, but ends up being geratraotoon, and he collapses giggling face down on the path, where he still may be for all I know. I look up at the Observatory as I get into my taxi, and my farewelling friend is now on the top deck. At least i think it's him, sitting on 1ne of the couches, talking to a girl I know works in the ANZ bank who manages to mix the hotness of the average 60tys model - big beehive look, very Longet - and somehow the earnest sadness of a suburban poet as she stares across the counter. At least, that's what I think I see, I can't vouch for it. I hope that's what I saw anyway. Farewell my friend - we will always have the water bottle...good times...truly, good times...

As for me, I go home, put some Megan Washington on, and go straight to sleep, having picked up nothing but fatigue...

Solipsistic Postings from Burnie - If I can't be a star I won't get out of bed

2009-12-18T23:48:00.000-08:00

It's 6ix am on a sunny mid December morning. I'm somewhere in the middle of Tasmania spooning beans onto toast, having realised my complaints that the Angry Angus advert was racist wasn't providing enough fodder or interest to turn random words in a conversation which would henceforth kill enough time for me to fail to notice I seemed to be eating beans which tasted like eggs and vice versa. My Mum on the way up to Burnie had told for the umpeenth time about how I stood at the bottom of Mission Hill in Penguin and said Australia sure was a beautiful country. I don't recognise that person of course, how optimistic they were, before slow moving Volvos and batteries that always seem to cut out at the wrong time broke me down tiny grudge by tiny grudge against the world. As part of returning to Burnie for a family re-union we pieced together a large group of photos on card to put on the kitchen wall of the party venue, like the kids from Why Don't You, and I got obsessed and maudlin with all the 1nce youthful faces frozen in photographs that were going to be at the party withered and depressed, although I didn't apply that standard to myself of course. I just saw 9ine year old me at the Irvine Magnum ice skating rink in a top I would kill to own now. You don't communicate any genuine thoughts or feelings though while spooning beans onto toast in the middle of Tasmania surrounded by your parents, truckers, and someone elses kid you've squeezed into your car at the last minute. It doesn't help that the owner of this retro fitted truck stop style diner has decided to blast Kid Rock at full volume, as if his Alabama tinged party invocations have any relationship to this setting. Trying funny things? Yeah right pal - these beans are hilarious, and if I smoke any funny things, my Mum will give me a clip around the ear. That's the thing with these weekends, if I ever get into a car with my Mum and Dad it's instantly like I've regressed into a small child. I even sit in the back, and even though I'm reading a Malcolm Gladwell book and trying to make intellectual conversation, objectively if I applied memories of past behaviour to this situation of being trapped in the back, I should be shuffling a collection of Mercantile Mutual Cup Cards and praying Mum doesn't find out I haven't done my homework. It's the straggly kid who makes the most attempt at conversation. The last time I saw this kid he didn't understand object permanence, now he's talking about his girlfriend and his new job. He says new job with such confidence, I think he's going to start working as a junior associate at Jackson-Steinem. Instead, he's handing out cheese on sticks in a mall. He calls it a career opportunity. Maybe he's right, but my Dad has already started giving him "the rubber ear", and has drifted off into his own little world. Come to think of it, he had that expression on in the ice skating photo, a world where fuzz and static replace the pain of thought, and a man can comfortably chew on a lukewarm 3hree day old diner sausage without hearing a word, and pretend to himself it's quail on a cracker...

My local shop in Burnie still, just about, stands to this day, although it is noticably run down, the shop traffic seems to be low, and I'm sure the same Bubble O Bill I didn't have enough money to buy after the school cross country championships in 1994 is still in the freezer next to the faded Peters standee, probably from the time Wil Anderson advertised Maxibons. Or was that Rove? I see someone out of the corner of my eye I went to school with. He used to write letters to WWF wrestlers in primary school, but hardly any of them wrote back. He wrote to a lady wrestler called Desiree Petersen 1nce. She wrote back. I think only her and Bobby Heenan wrote back now I think about it. He had asked her about why she lost all the time, and she wrote back a ridiculously nice letter on fancy notepaper that explained a win wasn't far away and she was working really hard in practice. I was thinking about him the other day because I saw a picture of said lady wrestler still lady wrestling in 2009, and she has Queen Mother teeth now. I realise that I've boiled down what is now no doubt a 31 year old man with all the complexities, subtleties, highs, lows and life experiences that age brings down to a glib anecdote from 1985, but he would just remember me as that kid that cut his knee and needed stitches after we ran down the hill following the school fete. I'm not sure what type of conversation we could get out these mutual memories, but I'm not sure it would be meaningful. He's got a basket full of baby food and flavoured milk, and argues with the shop keeper when his change comes back piled up with coins instead of notes. He makes a gesture that indicates he has no pockets, but the shopkeeper is un-moved. He turns around to me, grunts, and says service at this shop has gone down hill. I say something incredibly like I hear that or something, and he nods as if to say this guy gets it. He obviously didn't remember me, but there we are, now stuck together in a 2nd glib anecdote about change, milk and the decline of the service industry. It's only as he walks away I realise something about his T-shirt. It's a John Cena T-shirt, and if you don't know, John Cena is a wrestler. I have a feeling this whole thing, this whole incident is some sort of manufactured welcome back to Burnie set up, and would have reflected on this moment a bit more had, at that moment, the shop keep not called my wrestling fan school mate a very rude word, handed me change in notes, and said he does it every day to wind him up but don't tell him. Don't worry mate, your secret is safe with me...

There is, when I get to the party venue - when I say venue I obviously mean someones unmowed back yard - an inordinate amount of cheese on sticks. There is some cold meat cut into little circles, but there's so much cheese it's lucky I'm not lactose intolerant. I would bring out my lactose intolerant joke I stole from Greg Fleet 1nce upon a time, but not yet, save something for the twilight hours I say. As it turns out, this proves to be a prescient decision, the kind of divine omniscience you don't expect to have in a backyard full of cheese and small children kicking you up the arse like you have the Toyworld Bear costume on. My cousin, 1nce stout of mind and robust of prank, has decided that I'm the person to divulge marital and family woes to. I wonder on the Sunday why me, by the Monday I've been invoked as the cause of a row and then apologized to profusely for incorrect interpretations and by Tuesday it's like it never happened and I've done nothing more offensive than eat too much cheese on a stick. My cousin doesn't blink for 10en whole minutes, his beer is undrunk and untouched, his brow is furrowed and there seems no escape for me. The girl with the large breasts who seemed to agree with me Powderfinger sucked seems to be slipping further and further away from my follow up chat we had promised each other, and here I am playing a Celtic top wearing Docca Phil. Ah Docca Phil, curse you and your need for everyone to talk about their problems. You want problems? I can't get a Samboy chip for love nor money at this party. Plus I can see my old house from this backyard and seems to now be being used for drug deals. My cousin and I aren't especially close, but I'm nothing if not a good nodder. I know I'm old now because I'm attracted to conversation. This isn't the conversation I wanted to be attracted to, and later when the girl with the large breasts sort of lead with like don't you find like the rise of like Lady GaGa like really amazing...like I have to go now, there's a drug deal being done in my old back yard. Damn you Samoan "quick purchaser"...I think my cousin is ready to belt someone, since his wife has been ignored for about an hour by everyone here and really isn't welcome at this party. I think I would like someone in my life I could just e-mail 10en conversational topics to per week, and then just bat and forth ideas with. Fat chance right, it would break down immediately when 1ne of us cracked and fwd a picture of a cat wearing a santa hat with "OMG CUTE" in the subject line. No wait, he is going to punch someone. And then I see out of the corner of my eye a big plate of cheese, make the joke, and he calms down, laughs and sips his beer. As he does so, his wife runs her fingers through her hair and looks so desolate, I would feel sorry for her were she not kinda sorta evil. I'd pass her some cheese on the way past, but the girl with the large breasts is over by the drinking fountain...

It's still sunny when I'm drunk anyway before all that happens, fading sunlight, but still bright, a typical Burnie day where the sun is out but you need 3hree coats on. I'm narked I haven't had a chance to go into town yet, narked that they only have Perroni beer and 28eight types of cheese to pick at...the kind of concerns that could comfortably be picked apart as trivial by a war veteran. I'm sitting on a plastic bucket seat, my tracksuited self is pushed forward on the edge of the seat, and I'm agitated. 1ne of my traits I hate about myself, other than my addiction to wearing a Celtic "Bogan" top from 91/92, is that when I'm drunk, I'm likely to find a particular aspect of popular culture annoying and feel the need to tell people about it. In this case, it's an otherwise innocuous sentence at the end of Tadgh Kennellys book where he says he watched the Hangover and it was really funny. Why is that in a book? It just seemed such a terrible piece of writing, like the worst kind of hackneyed Twittering. I'm saying his aware that no one is listening to me but I don't care. Someone across the fence across the way has turned their sprinkler on and my auntie gets a tiny bit of water on her blouse, and everyone is paying attention to her and no one is paying attention to me. Except for 1ne wrinkly old 1/2lf blind lady with a reasonable stab at a mullet that like all 1/2lf blind old people at a party gets the most comfortable chair and first crack at the fudge, much to everyones secret chagrin. She says something about me and my books...I didn't know there was a me and my books, but that's what she associates me with. A learned man, a man of letters and words destined for higher educations highest peaks. Or just a book about cricket, I don't know what the reference is. She says it again, and I shrug aimlessly. Burnie is making me uncomfortable, all these references and faces with more wrinkles and bits of trivia that don't quite make it into an anecdote. It's only on the way home I remember this old woman and I had a conversation at Burnie market (loosely described, a rather feeble attempt in the Roelf Vos car park 6ix weeks into 1993 that didn't catch on) where I had used the word solipsistic in a sentence. She had simply said "you and your books" then said are you buying some of my jam or not? It was a fair point, and I bought 6ix jars for a fiver. I was 8eight. Yes, me and my books...and my jam...and the old house where I snuck a girl in 1nce and then nothing happened because we ended up watching Rage...

Solipsism is the philosophical idea that one's own mind is all that exists, or to put it Glaswegian the idea that you are the centre of the fucking universe...after 1/2lf a bottle of rum, it's entirely possible to feel a whole town stopped when you left and never moved on...ah, philosophy is wasted on the drunk, pass me another slice of Edam...

Jack Frost nipping at your Internet Kiosk

2009-11-30T00:51:00.000-08:00

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

2009-11-25T00:57:00.000-08:00

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

2009-11-22T00:39:00.000-08:00

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...

2009-11-15T01:03:00.000-08:00

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

2009-11-09T00:01:00.000-08:00

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

2009-11-04T00:34:00.000-08:00

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...

The passing of time through a DVD collection

2009-10-31T01:02:00.001-07:00

I've been utterly lost in the last few days. Not in bad, I need to pen a memoir about my terrible life kind of way, but certainly I've been suffering some end of the decade restlessness, to the point I finally upped and got rid of all my wrestling DVDs from their boxes. They didn't change - put the disc in and they'd still spark and crackle with the faux excitement only wrestling can claim to provide - but I did, and so out they went in a flurry of plastic and hard rubbish. Somewhere there was an invitation for me to go to a work farewell, and my lack of attendance meant that some cheese on a stick was eaten by some1ne else, but I'm sure they'll get over it. It's not like I'd be spinning some fascinating new anecdote for anyone. I've become so adverse to small talk that the thought of it breaks me out in hives, and even the cheesiest cheest on the stickiest stick can't make me get in my car and attend. Plus it's my day off - so much cleaning to do. Cheerfully, the clean up allowed me to find several photos of the sparkling eyed child I 1nce was, the 1ne who laughed at puppets endlessly and was happy with tomato soup for his birthday. Ah poignancy, why are you always brought on by the scent of Mr Sheen and the discovery that several of my childhood possessions can be exchanged for big cash prizes? To be honest, every time I clean up I just end up abundantly conscious of how much time I've accumulated on earth, but I don't do it from the accumulation of photographs, lost loves or signed photographs from lady wrestlers I 1nce upon a time knew, but from an accumulation of popular culture crap. Seriously - when did I like Blur enough to want to read a book on them? When did I get a poster of Chloe Sevigny - must have been before the Brown Bunny incident. When I did I like Friends enough to buy box sets? Who's Scott Miller and why did he sign a Westpac Olympics flag for me? I then usually completely lose my train of cleaning thought trying to piece together little bits of how I got to this point of my life. It's not the best system in the world, it's not a system that usually gets me to hard rubbish collection day with a perfectly organised and catalogued collection of treats for the binman, but it does waste an entire Saturday, it does kill time until lunch, so in it's way, it becomes the recurring memory of my unremembered weekends - nothing specific, they all feel the same, all that changes is the outfits...

It's Friday, it's the same flourescent lights I'm always under, same shops, same books, same time to kill. Panda Eyed Girl has flickering alive eyes, sitting as she does behind the layby counter of Big W where I work for 1nce up and about and alert, as if she's really swallowed a motivational lesson. She's explaining the refund policy in accurate detail to a single mother who's attention is instead taken on perving on 1ne of the stockboys. Panda Eyed Girl blithely ploughs on with her spiel, and begins to try and build some rapport with the single mother with an oddly heartwarming tale about bike and Xmas that you could probably read on her blog or her Twitter feed. I bet she's on Twitter. I might look her up. I'm surprised at her story though - it doesn't feel right considering she's normally slumped over the edge of a desk reading New Idea and passing less than well thought out opinions about Lleyton Hewitt. I guess I shouldn't judge. The stockboy has no idea he's become the object of a perv, and goes about his duties quickly and quietly. I don't know when people began looking so young. He's positively glowing with health where as I just look like a yawning coughing mess. I work with a Twittering girl - not that she's on Twitter, but she jibbers like she is, 140ty characters of inanity right in my ear every minute of the day. No wonder I look such a mess. Too much GBH of the ear-hole. Panda Eyed Girl for the first time looks reflective and mature as the customer pushes the bike away gently, almost pushing it into a standee in her gazing at the healthy youthful glow of the stock boy. It's definitely strange to think of Panda Eyed Girl being the mature 1ne of the situational moment, because I realise I've been flicking through a cheaply priced copy of a Yo Gabba Gabba book. I also realise the most poignant moment from my Xmas childhood was getting a trampoline when I was 6ix that ended up being an absolute nightmare because it would always give me an electric shock off the metal edges, and gave me a phobic tick which carries over to this day where I expect everything to fry my fingers. I don't think I was ever young enough to be perved on, although I was relatively clueless at that age as to whether people liked me, but I do remember the exact moment I went from torpor channelled through irony, from being young and disaffected and thinking my entire childhood was shit because I didn't get a video camera in 1990 to genuine affectionate memories being something I cherished. In that sense, I've suddenly had a connection with Panda Eyed Girl, and I would have told her that, if it wasn't weird, and she wasn't having to pick the eyes out of a ridiculous debate with a customer as to whether something was 18.99 or 19.99, a debate that for all I know is still going on, an ouroborous of debate unsettled even after the metal gates had clanged to the ground ending another Big W day under the Big W lights...

It's lunchtime, and I'm sitting in the food court restlessly picking at some wedges. At the table next to me is a very old man in need of a tan eating some scran as part of his calorie plan. He has a flip book on his table, precariously balanced on the edge of his tiny eating space, with bits of pages highlighted and crossed out, a manifesto for life that would be more impressive if he hadn't just dropped 1/2lf a pound of fried rice on it. Deftly he scoops it onto the floor where later a harried cleaner will pick it up, and only if she's having a good day will she forget to swear about it. I hope she blames the mess on no good punk teens - she could not have been more wrong. Personally, I can't entirely empathise with the old man - it's hard to empathise anyway listening to Josie and the Pussycats on an IPOD - because I'm more concerned about the state of the new book shop. 1nce a gleaming corporate paradise, it now has boxes piled up everywhere, in front of the music books, and the nice man who used to listen to pleasant classical music on his IPOD all day long seems drained of life by the incessant playing of Deep Forest and a thin old woman who appears every so often in the store to seemingly pore over profit projections. Poor guy - from Prokofiev to Profit Projections faster than you can say promotional book launch. Soon he'll be wearing bunny ears at Easter or be dressed as an elf at Xmas and the whole thing just won't feel right with me. I might have to buy my books at KMart and avoid that horrible woman with the grey curly hair just...just a horrible thought. The old man certainly couldn't care less, he's busy dumping a pile of rice on the floor the size of a small country, some of it landing on his shoes with a grumpy greasy thump on his brown shoes, which he doesn't even notice in his haste to highlight another passage of his flipchart. I consider him for a moment a sort of Ned Flanders figure, only much older and wrinklier and more sauce on his cardigan. Sort of sitting around, finding passages in flipcharts to censor and bring to everyones attention - but just as I'm able to subtly crane my neck over to see what he's doing, a woman gets her foot caught in the escalator, and a crowd of ambulance chasers trample over my dinner in a bit to get a front row seat to the carnage...

The hubbub subsides, but the 2wo girls next to me who rushed over to ambulance chase are still there as I take the last wedge and eat it's tepid goodness. The 1ne on the left is impossibly pretty and the 1ne on the right isn't, but makes up for it at random intervals by slapping the pretty girl on the back in a supportive way, but also with enough force to get rid of any anger she feels about having to spend time with this person and her inane stories. And also to suggest that whatever genetic gifts she missed out on in the looks department are balanced out by a genetic ability to mask low key hostility in a faux friendly manner. They both have the same T-shirt style on as well, black and sparkly, so I get caught up in whether their friendship is a continual game of 1ne-upmanship only 1ne person can ever win. The pretty girl though is depressed, since her boyfriend has just dumped her. She folds her arms and screws up her face when she begins her story as if she's dis-interested in her own words, but soon she's emoting as if she's just typed a combination of a semi colon and shift/0 on her computer. It's a completely over blown performance, worthy of an out-take from The Brown Bunny. As she raps up, she declares the problem with her ex boyfriend is that she loves him but she's not in love with him. Her friend is used to these McGrawesque nuggets of pondering, and barely stirs from her thickshake stirring, but I to this minute have no idea what that means, and the old man, a peripheral figure in my day until now, decides this is the moment to stare at the girls like Henry from Portrait Of A Serial Killer, and simply say to them loudly a 2wo word cursing phrase popular in Tarantino films. He then leaves, disgusted, and storms off into a chemist where he transacts as quickly as possible with the guy behind the counter, while the girls stand open mouthed, frozen in mutual horror at being dissed, and a small jockey like man 2wo tables over laughs so hard at Grandad swearing, he knocks over a coke and gives that poor unseen cleaner so much more to do later on in the day...

Isolated memorable incidents in another wise dull month...I appreciate them whenever they happen, I truly, truly do...still stuck on Scott Miller though...

Untitled

2009-10-26T01:31:00.000-07:00

It wasn't meant to be like this of course - of all the ways a long alcohol fuelled night out could end, the last thing you want to be doing is babysitting the birthday boy while he mardily huffs his way through the dying moments of his own party, while you wonder exactly what you spilled on your retro Ghana soccer top to make the white fabric look such a stupid colour and pine for the sanctity of a warm shower. While you wonder exactly where the brunette you were talking to about Aimee Mann - hoping the knowledge of at least 1ne trendy singer song writer would hide that really you were going to see Britney Spears in 2wo weeks time, only to find out she preferred Britney all along - had gone, what cab she had got into. While you wonder if the denizens of the Republic Bar would have been a lot more impressed if you had worn a communist East Germany top. While you wonder exactly why the man in the grey shirt at Central was so horrifically rude to you, as if the patronage of an African Nation on a soccer top had personally offended him, while he didn't know his own staff were behind his back pulling faces at what a loser he was. While you wonder exactly why people get together when it just makes them miserable, why all the txt msgs are sent when you could just send 1ne to say it's all over. While you wonder why the guy throwing up in the dying remains of a puddle has been completely abandoned by all his friends, who are telling a frankly tedious anecdote about the last series of Heroes and how if you freeze a crowd scene at the 24:27 minute mark of episode blah blah and squint you can see someones girlfriend. While you wonder who Sharon was and why exactly the graffiti on the wall you walked past was so mean to her, and to her fondness for what the quality papers would call a sexual act. While you wonder why people bail you up in the corner and tell you nervously what their dogs favourite TV show is - like I would care! So many thoughts, all of them immediately distracting from the fact that you, yes you, have been officially chosen to guide this night through it's concluding stages, to sit with someone and wait for a taxi. I wanted to ask a lot of questions of course as to why exactly I had gone from such a Lambadaesque dance to sitting on the ground being the supportive friend that I always am in the space of about 10en minutes, but maybe it was 2wo hours had passed, maybe a whole day and night. I've lost my ability to judge anything, my night is now in the hands of the poor Indian cab driver who seems to always get me, the 1ne with the loud Bhangra music, and the weary sense of resignation that comes from being the only mean with a work ethic that means you pick up stray would be Ghanaians at 3hree in the morning...

If the cab had come 5ive minutes earlier I would have missed an argument. She was all in black and yelling about how she did all the work, all the housekeeping, she was restrained not just by her dominatrix style belt and girdle combination but by the moral high-ground, the right to wag a finger and quote financial receipts. He didn't care, he was about to fall over, face down and undignified outside a kebab shop. His leg was the giveaway. It was shaking all over like a fuzzy tree, but never in the same direction 2wice. All he has to offer in this drunken state are words that suggest his own girlfriend knows Sharon, or maybe is Sharon, maybe it was her castigated on that wall. She doesn't even flinch or deviate, she just stares right through him and walks off in a direction he can't work out, and there he stands comprehensively defeated, forced to drunkenly harangue strangers for pennies so he can get a kebab or a cab home. A million type of the same argument pass through the streets, but there we all sit, frozen for a moment together, before he falls over in a heap and curses his own legs, his own pair of shoes, the sky and the moon, anything but his own lack of coherence. I don't what he expected when he left the house in the afternoon - I don't know what I expected, I don't know what Sharon expected from her life, but it seems as though it should all have better than this. In a fitful moment of irony, just to blank out the grumpy companion and the rant about how his birthday party was ruined by poor catering, the Beatles In My Life comes on my IPOD - yeah, good 1ne John, places I'll never forget, good on you. Or did it come into my head? Or was it Miami by Will Smith? Who would know...damn licorice shots...confusing my memories. Had I really left a really tender hug for this...

If the cab had been 10en minutes earlier, I would have missed the man on the ground being arrested. I would have missed wondering exactly why the "huckling" - as we call it in my country - of the drunk for lewd conduct and drunken behaviour was left to tiny blonde women, 1ne of whom had the hairstyle of an 80tys lady wrestler, primped and crimped and god knows what else. It was lucky he went quietly, but then there were several impotently furious steroid addicted bouncers looking for someone to hit, frustrated everyone has well behaved. No wait, that's behaved well. I'm slurring my words, I better not say anything lest I get huckled into the back of the van. I've never seen a man dragged from his resting position into the back of a police van be quite so accomodating. He seems to have completely given up on all resistance, on any kind of life. I think for a moment he might be dead, until he lets out a short sharp burst of wind, and then disappears into the night to sleep it off. Up the road, a pixie pale girl with a pink streak in her hair is reaching for a discarded shoe that has fallen off her foot, but like a drunken Sisyphus, she's condemned to never quite co-ordinate her arm in the direction of the heel and loses her grip on the sparkle encrusted item every time she gets near it. It eventually ends up somewhere near The Quarry, or Irish, or some god forsaken pub with limited attraction to the sober. She gives up on the pursuit of the high heel, and folds her arms in frustration, while 2wo rampaging bulls on a footy trip push and shove each other in the middle of the rod, desperately macho but equally hopeful this will do, that they can sort out their aggression with chest bumps and fist shaking rather than anything meaningful. Sums it all up really - a night of bare minimum effort. Should have said this instead of done nothing, should have apologized more meaningfully instead of infusing it with sarcasm, should have demanded that the shop actually go to the trouble of cooking chips instead of just defrosting them for a minute...we all should have tried harder I guess, but we only had 12elve hours to get it all in, and there's nothing we can do about it now...taxis here...not quite on time, even the driver can't be botherd at this time, I mean his Bhangra music is suitably muted for a start...

It's 4our PM by the time I can even type this. I've been in bed all day, covers pulled over my head, sleeping through an argument outside my window that's left a glass bottle smashed all over the ground near Barry Tossers lawn. I hope it wasn't me that did it, although part of me wouldn't mind. Everything is still. My unfinished book about Dillinger is sitting near the fireplace, and I don't remember starting to read it. There's a txt on my phone from the brunette, but I'm too tired to get up and reply. It seems to be a reply to 1ne I've sent - I don't remember sending it. There's a Temper Trap song on Channel V. I don't remember turning Channel V on to be honest. It does remind me to pretend to like them next time I'm out in public though. The Republic Bar might just go to the top of my list of pubs that don't really care about the responsible serving of alcohol policy. Why do I taste licor...oh yeah, right. I can't even get off the floor to go and make toast or some basic single man lives alone staple, I don't even have SpaghettiOs to do the easiest meal in the world. When I finally get up from the floor, I look down the road and see a man in a GreenT-shirt from Greenpeace standing by the side of the road in faint drizzle tapping his foot, and I wonder what he's doing there, standing in splendid isolation near my house, not a soul near him. I can only presume he's waiting for a life given he's holding bundle upon bundle of leaflets and has no 1ne to hand them out to. An old woman is the only person remotely in sight, and when he approaches, she swears at him and pushes her trolley curtly past, leaving him looking a bit sad and grumpy and staring at his Doc Martens. Eventually his lift turns up, and he throws down the leaflets in a fit of pique, and there they sit to this moment, because no 1ne can be botherd to go and pick them up. I would go and do it myself, but there's a DVD I've been meaning to watch for ages now, and I really just can't see myself getting round to it...

I'm not sure what the point of going out is, when the entertainment is so rich just from staying in...and txt msgs really are the new talking to people...

Post 300ed - Perpetual Bliss, or at least, the fleeting kind

2009-10-14T00:38:00.000-07:00

I've been pretty caught up lately in a personal drama - oh look, there's another e-mail about it - that I've neglected to simply step outside and wander around and just enjoy my day. Sure, it's been impossible to do that lately because it's incessently rained in Hobart, which is good if like me you never want to mow your lawns but bad if you want to do something. I've felt like I used to in Grade 2wo PE when I was trapped against the music room window with my little face pressed against the glass, praying that the music teacher wouldn't dig out the triangles for an atonal crack at a Peter Combe song, and that sun would appear allowing us to settle that long and disputed teeball game that had gone to extra swings. I had plans to blow some of my money on DVDs, which isn't good for a writing career, but hey, it's probably too late for that anyway with all the time I've taken up doing nothing lately, unless someone wants a short sardonic review of Twisties sent in on Twitter - that's all the time I have right now, 140ty characters of time. As I was wandering through the shopping mall clutching my meagre collection of pennies and comedy DVDs, blue eye shadow girl was finding the going tough. She was walking past when a girl she worked with grabbed her arm and began an elaborate and deliberate apology for some unseen slight. The girl apologizing was pale, nervous and slightly edgy, as she tried to point out some tempery tantrum was directed at Blue Eye Shadow Girl, but some customer who had pushed all the wrong buttons. As the Veronicas faded out over a crackly PA system, and a bikie guy strung out on medication lay himself down on the ground for a little rest, blue eye shadow girl put 1ne hand of her hip, said it was fine in a manner of cold indifference, then walked off with slow, deliberate steps, bowling back to her place of work with efficiency and speed, before asking her co-worker very gently and softly if she could remember the last time she was happy. Then she stared up at the lights for an age, while the biker curled up in a defiant ball, the girl who apologized stood looking down at her shoes and shuffled 2wo step style on the balls of her heels, I stood inanely, about to get bowled over by a large woman with a pram, and the Veronicas were quite unphased by the whole situation, gamely starting exactly the same song, from the same place, on the same crackly PA like the slightly worse version of The Blakeney Twins that they are...

There's a little part of Penguin which is probably nothing like I remember it at all. During my homesickness phase, when I used to crawl out the window in the early hours of the morning, I would get fit by just wandering around until morning, making accquaintances with cheerful milkmen and being a general loiterer. There was 1ne particular morning though, it was sometime around September. I had spent most of my birthday being a horrendous brat, but something was different. My anger wasn't real for the first time, it was a self conscious show, an act that belonged in vaudeville. After all, I had a large amount of cash, a sort of girlfriend, a secret codeword to get free milkshakes from Alannah Hills Milk Bar, and everyone was being so gosh darn nice and friendly, I did fleetingly wonder what exactly it was about Ayshire I missed. After all, on my last day at school the nurse had to break up a fight between two girls who were using ping pong bats as weapons, and a local drug dealer had given me a pep talk. Were such thoughts that this, this new life, this existence was somehow better, were they wrong? I sat on a beach 1ne morning trying to summon up the anger to continue this persona I'd created for myself, while damning the beautiful sunset that was spreading out before me. My blank expression, confused mind and less than impressive pencilled in moustache somehow convinced a neanderthal with a shaved head that I was staring at him and his oddly camp dog. Although it was the size of a truck it looked too much like Frankie Howard to be frightening. The owner was in the middle of some kind of rant about how it was his beach, his sand, his water, and it wasn't the place for moody jacketed Scots to be sitting and staring...of course, he would probably only realise long after he had delivered his mid morning sermon that while he was delivering it, he was standing directly in the middle of 1ne of his dogs dedications to the new morning...I laughed for hours, then felt guilty that I was laughing in this new place, and then thought, what the hell, and laughed for hours again...

The bikie guy lay on the ground for pretty much my whole lunch time. He was quite happy to kick his legs like a baby on the ground while people just stepped over him. His girlfriend gave up on trying to stir him from his position on the ground, a plain girl with a mouth that could eat an apple through a letterbox, with a tattoo blue and mis-spelt, and walked off and left him in a flurry of cheap pink heels clicking on the ground and loud exotic swear words. He rolls his eyes in my direction, but I know better than to get involved and wander off for my daily battle with Subway. The girls in there are white and pale, as if they are perpetually locked in the back room with the awkward clumsy benny with the curly hair who always drops the sandwich, and he's drained them of all their lifeforce and enthusiasm, as if the sheer repetitive act of putting meat on bread until the end of eternity means they can never smile 1nce. Outside Subway there's a group of mardy teenagers slumped in the sun, all long hair and uncrushed dreams, all hopeful smiles that mask impending evil and cruelty to those they deem unsocially suitable. At the next table, there's 2wo efficiently dressed middle aged black and baggy eyed men in matching business suits, who look absolutely desolate and miserable and slumped over in wicker chairs as if the world is ending. As a kicked school bag flies over 1ne of their heads, they sit and discuss a jail sentence for 1ne of their associates over a rapidly cooling piece of bread and filling, while the kids sit around giggling and laughing except for 1ne kid sat up the back, with a fringe over his eyes and tuna melt dripping on his jeans who never takes his eyes off the miserable table, making that same silent vow everyone makes but never lives up to...I'll never be like them...you couldn't pay me enough to get that old...

The radio DJs on my inept car stereo system certainly sound happy, babbling away at a fantastic rate of knots about absolutely nothing before throwing to Cascada for the 8th time that day. There's a pile of bills in my letterbox, and a collection of hapless unsmiling bra models in a Target catalogue scrunched up the back, face up in the rain, trying to look respectable. My next door neighbour is telling a tedious anecdote to his friend about soccer, some vague point hidden in the middle about how his satellite dish is set up and how massive his plasma TV is - I hope he's not compensating for something - and how everyone will gape in wonder at the sheer clarity of Mark Bosnichs head tonight. Since we don't get on, he watches me walk up the path slowly before resuming, as if I'm going to steal his satellite secrets. There's about 12elve answering machine messages on my phone, all similar themed, all repetitive gossip without any new information. I'm tired of the bad news, and slump on the couch to watch some DVDs, while my neighbour fires up his satellite system as loud as it can go, until some blameless creature on the moon is wondering what the noise is that's keeping him awake when he's got nightshift in the morning. It's a bomb of sound and fury that I can imagine he's suitably proud of. He's probably showing it off in front of assorted acolytes, hangers on and people seeking free BBQ shapes, at least, until it fails, which I know because I can hear him yelling at it, the power goes off or he loses the feed, and in a blaze of curse words, social failure and cheezels flying across the room, I feel much happier to sit with a glass of Fanta, an individual fruit cup, and the self satisfying notion that comes when a hard day at work is rewarded with the failure of my hated neighbour...

Blue Eye Shadow Girl, when was I last happy? Oh, about 5ive minutes ago...

Post 299ine - The Cheese Sandwich Epic Part 3hree

2009-10-12T01:57:00.000-07:00

"Have you ever punched anyone?"

His name was Tad and he didn't like me. When we first met, I had gently asked if he was named after the band Tad, in what I thought was a simple, easy gesture of musical knowledge from 1ne edgy loner to another. He looked at me as if I had sent his 1stborn down the river in a basket of reeds. Tad was the same age as me, but looked much older, to the point where I wondered if he was just bluffing, if he failed Grade 1ne or something due to emotional problems or an inability to colour in isometric shapes. If I'd said isometric shapes, he'd have presumed I was gay, and I felt through all the time I knew him, he really wanted to punch me. He didn't like foreigners, and he definitely didn't like being a foreigner. He probably didn't even like the band Foreigner, and thought they should have stayed in their own country. Even a simple question during an otherwise unremarkable game of Truth or Dare, petering out of the dying embers of a midnight bonfire would give him an opportunity to chide and jibe. Of course, I didn't realise he had designs on my missus, and those designs didn't mean he created Vicki's style of flannel shirt. Give him an inch, and he'd take an isometric triangle...cos he wasn't good at maths...or making lists really...

"Broke someones nose last week," I said, shrugging and sipping the remainder dregs of my Coca-Cola, relieved that unlike in Scotland, buying a Coke wasn't an excuse for strangers to jump out of bushes and demands "2wos on yer can man..."

"He did," said Vicki, nodding and putting her arm around my shoulder. "Broke someones nose!"

Tad eyed me coolly and evenly and then shrugged. I think for a moment I had his respect, but it was fleeting, and he stormed off, kicking some bark while he took up this new information, only returning after realising his Mum wasn't around to pick him up. What it was with Penguin and bark I have no idea, but it was everywhere, as prevalent as the sea breeze, the old fashioned sense of community, and the way every couple in the shop would smile amiably at strangers, but not at each other, part of an interconnected maze of terraced houses with men pushing lawn mowers on the weekend, so they never had to have a conversation about feelings...

Her name was some lost to time old fashioned name like Doris or Edith or something. All I knew about her was she was really good at sewing. I knew this because my happy pants, or my alleged happy pants, never even cracked a smile compared to hers, which ended up in the Advocate, our local paper. There she was, smiling an awkward smile in a space filling article on page 12elve next to a story about Paul Keating being vain. That was really I knew until the fateful October day when I was standing in the library reading an overlong and overly detailed war history which my history teacher scathingly referred to as "male", when Doredith came bowling up to me nervously, said she liked me, and then ran away before the "ked" syllable had even had chance to form...

"Did she...did she just swoon?" - the only swoon verifier around was a kid who was about to be expelled for blowing up a science block who didn't know was swooning was, so he shrugged and walked off looking at me strangely. I had never made anyone swoon before, let alone someone with the ability to the knock up a cardigan in an afternoon. Still I had a girlfriend, and the girl at school that I actually liked told me Doredith had lumpy arms, and shook her blonde mane sadly as she told me that. I tried to ask if that was some weird Australian term, but apparently it was literal, she just had big lumpy arms. Maybe from all the sewing. And that would have been that, I would just have let her down gently and simply and accepted it was the only time in my life anyone would swoon in my direction that wasn't suffering heatstroke, if it wasn't for her fired up, medium sized but very angry boyfriend, demanding that since his lumpy arms cardigan knitting local celebrity what the hell was her name again girlfriend had just dumped him for...well me as it turned out. Given that all this happened in the space of about 2wo minutes, I might not be giving the chaotic nature of the day the verbal clarity it deserved, but suffice to say I had gone from quite blamelessly reading about Churchill to being in my own battle. My fists were unaccustomed to the spirit of the Blitz, but fight I had to, for 1ne simple reason...

"Wait," said Tad, round the bonfire. "I'm confused, were her arms really lumpy?"
"Shush Tad," I said, wagging a finger in his direction. "You are distracting me from my story..."

I had managed to somehow convince at least some of the school population that, rather than being a street where the most heated battles were fought over "Mock Wimbledon", we were a hardcore Ayrshire palace of violence. Dreghornesque in fact. Well I did know a drug dealer at school, and I had a knife pulled on me in Kilwinning, so ya know, I had some street cred. And a hat from Urban Hype that made me look a bit eccentric. My problem was, during a playfight that I got dragged into, someone had said I punched "like a rainbow" - as I found out, this didn't mean I punched like Bungle, but punched in a strange camp arc, arms swinging blindly. It wasn't the most cogent metaphor in the world, but it definitely hurt. And to be honest, I couldn't punch at all. My previous attempts had been horrific, from the time I was 10en where I put my fist on someone jaw and just sort of lamely pushed, right up to the apparent rainbow room efforts of 2wo weeks ago. So I had to fight, but it was just going to be embarrassing. All the hard work, the trip to Zeehan where I won everyone over with stolen Steven Wright jokes and sardonic quips, all the banter, all the social climbing, all the standing around on the tennis court looking moody, even having not only a girlfriend, but a stalker and a girl who swooned over me with lumpy arms....

"Then I broke his nose," I said, shrugging. I took a sip of my can of Coke, threw it on the bonfire, and let all the goodness that comes from an act of violence at that age wash over me. Oh yes, Scotland represent, who's the man? I carefully omitted that I was actually terrified, he had charged, tried to put me in a headlock, I had blindly put out a benny fist in panic and somehow managed to subdue the charging nerd - dangerous bouncer sized Maori if anyone asks - with a reckless knock to the schnoz that left him needing attention from the school nurse. All in front of about 7even people who really hated him and liked me and who instantly turned it into a vicious boxing triumph. What did it matter - see that edgy climbs out the window loner over there? He's a bit tasty...stay away from him. Tad bristled visibly from underneath a floppy mess of hair and tried to look indifferent...but he couldn't help himself...

"And then what happened?" he said. Damn it, he's hooked on every word. Look at him listening intently...

"Got suspended," I said, puffing out my pigeon chest. "And then I had a cheese sandwich..."

The peak of my social life, as they, was coming...

Post 298eight - The Cheese Sandwich Epic Part 2w0 - the buttering the bread interlude

2009-10-11T01:20:00.000-07:00

It's 3hree am on a cold Sunday Morning, some lost and damned point of late 1992wo. I'm standing outside a phone box, because boffins are still tinkering with the Internet and the only way I could find out whether Liverpool beat Sheffield Wednesday or Coventry or some other rival group of men in matching coloured shirts in a game that had epic importance some long ago time. It's raining, but I couldn't sleep anyway. I'd been laying awake listening to the rain thump down hard on the ground, looked out at my bare and empty room which was only adorned by a horrendous spongy and sparky carpet, and a Troll Doll I'd been given for luck, and been bitterly homesick. To this day I can't see a solitary troll doll on a garage sale table without feeling strangely alienated and miles from home, even if the table is just around the corner from my house. Unable to speak I had sprung from my bed, taken a regulation supply of Monte Carlo biscuits from the fridge, and walked around until I knew from the maths in my head that enough time had passed for a final score. Except it hadn't. Daylight savings. Damn it. So I sat on the fort for a while kicking bark from the top of the fort to the bottom while pools of water formed on the ground. I didn't really care about the football, I just need something to do to take my mind off things. There's a milkman across the way as the rain falls and I pull a coat over my shoulders, he's making slow deliberate steps through deep puddles on the ground, and he sees me sitting on the fort throwing bark on the ground in a thunderstorm. I don't like a bit poetic, just sad and depressed.

"Want some Milk?" he says, possibly the only thing you can say at a time like this. He certainly wasn't going to give me a hug and a backrub. Too weird.

I was kind of torn between accepting the milk and telling him where to go, since I had an image to maintain as a surly edgy Scottish loner who spent his time wandering from milk bar to post office. Then again, he was lucky he wasn't on the wrong end of an outpouring of conversational confession about how sad and depressed and homesick I was. I think I just took the milk and said nothing, which was the best of all worlds. Edgy loner be damned, I needed my calcium.

My girlfriend Vicki was in the queue for the phone with me. She knew where I was when the knock on the window failed to rouse me, either out the back of Mitre 10 sitting on a crate, loitering around the edges of the football ground huddled in the grandstand, or in the park. Luckily she lived near the park, so if it was the 3hrd option, it was a real time saver. Her parents were scholarly and concerned about their daughter. They both wore glasses and talked about Male oppression while their daughter smoked and ran out her window every night to hang out with kids in abandoned shops. Still, I wouldn't imagine the brochure involved hanging outside a phone box in the rain listening to tales about how Paul Stewart wasn't fit to wear a Liverpool shirt. She was understandably surly, and was openly argumentative about being forced to idle away her beauty sleep on some stupid game. And it was stupid. Very stupid, especially frittering away 5ive dollars in gold coins just to get a soccer score. I should have kno...

"You never take me anywhere!" she said, hand on denimed hips, while I fiddled with my Joe Bloggs hat, since I hadn't entirely committed to edgy lonerness, and was still at least partially wearing a hat that made me look like a member of Urban Hype.

I didn't know to be honest we were at the take each other places stage. "I take you to the Dial Arcade!" I said - and I did. I knew I shouldn't have introduced her to Tad. That's the band, but Tad the far more genuinely edgy loner who could grow a moustache wasn't helping either. He smashed windows, I just looked at them askance or took a wry sideways glance at them. I didn't help myself either by 1ne day, on a heady mix of cigar smoke, cheap cider and urban alienation in the middle of the park, I had the temerity to express, of all things, an enthusiasm. And not just for anything, for laser tag. I was quick to pass it off as irony, but it wasn't a good move. A few years later I could have steered the conversation back to Portishead, but we didn't have Kurt Cobain in Scotland, we had to make up our angst. Hard to be angst ridden watching Wogan 5ive times a night...endless "is there a little bit of you in the character"...it's a deep question, but not 5ive times a week...

There was a man in the phone box holding in our perpetual argumentative state. A man named Nigel from memory. He had big teeth, big illuminated teeth, and he was telling someone how much he loved them. He looked desperately out of breath and he had a cut on his hand that he was fiddling with in agitation. He looked at us standing in the rain and held his non bleeding hand up to the air. An apology of sorts, a stigmatic apology of other sorts. I was still drinking my milk and fiddling with my hat 1/2lf an hour later, by which point Vicki had flounced off to discuss the notions of patriarchy with her parents. She left in a burst of relatively foul flouncy language, most notably insulting my hat. That really hurt. The hat had done nothing to deserve that. I could tell that things were going wrong when she wasn't even interested anymore in my stories about fringe work at Atlantic 252, our supposed edgy radio in Scotland, and when tales of prank calling a member of Texas aren't winning friends...

Nigel apologized for his lady trouble. I said it comes when you cheat on your wife. He smoothed the edges of his tuxedo, having 1nce again made up some fake business awards night in Devonport as an excuse to see his paramour, a woman named Evie who sliced meat like a princess at the Cut Price Sams deli. He wasn't offended by my chiding, after all it's what edgy loners do. Chide. He offered me a smoke and explained patiently that the sex was great and he always left with the best off cuts of bacon. I didn't know if it was a Bottle Boys style entendre so I just quietly shared a smoke with him in the rain before putting my coins into the slot, and letting the magic of the camp bloke who read out the soccer scores on the Premium phone line hopefully deliver me some good news. Whatever the Arsenal score was though was obscured by Nigels plaintive parting greeting...

"It's alright for you though, being part of Penguins glamour couple!"

What was to come of this confused and distracted young boy was unclear, locked into so many different emotions even the writer of the Sons and Daughters theme was exhausted, but at least he knew where he had come from, and that, as they say, was somehow even more troubling...

We won by the way. 3-0. Cop that, idiotically shirted away team...