World: Interact

No one ever said Cash Converters was some kind of magical wonderland. In fact, and if you don't know it's basically an 18th century pawn shop with a corporate logo, there are days I feel profoundly depressed as I remember the humiliating encounter I had in there selling CDs on one of the more awful days in my life, looking at all the CDs and items on the shelves and hoping they are simply sold by people trying to get a few extra dollars for the weekend and not some darker tale involving a single mother trying to flee and selling up in the process. OK, so it's a dark way to look at a 6ix dollar copy of BMX Bandits - but my frames of references can be dark at moments like this. A smug young girl chomps into a burger on one of the many TV screens, a plastic image of perfection stuck on a flickering screen with lines across her face. The staff mill around like overprotective parents, at times never taking their eyes off you as you paw through old Vanessa Amorossi albums trying to find a gem. There was this kid in there today, a fairly bland kid because I couldn't get a handle on their personality, mostly because I came in right at the end of the conversation the kid was having with his Mother. His mother was a harried woman in track pants with a neatly trimmed blonde bob, and she was swatting away child problems as she casually flicked through a selection of chunky VHS cassettes in eighties style boxes. I have no right to know the full context of the conversation, stuck as I am in the middle of a Cohen - Miller-Heidke - Zetlitz IPOD triangle of shuffling interface and still weighing up my options, but the mother turns to the child and says, quite simply, you know what I've told you about dreaming. I suspect it wasn't keep doing it kid, but if, at 1pm in a Cash Converters with military security studying you, witless radio DJs with half baked patter piped in through the headsets, and the faint air of a million desperate stories cluttering up your surroundings, you can't manage at least one or two little dreams to keep yourself sane, I would suggest you might just go a little crazy. As I walk out, head down, a gust of wind nearly knocking over a frail and bewildered pensioner, I noticed that next to Cash Converters, two stores down on the same street, is a giant liquidator store, which hardly improves my mood. The kid slowly trails behind his bother when he leaves, staring brightly at cheesecake and Heath Ledger posters as he walks with a purpose, while his Mum gets further and further ahead of him, texting blindly at a million miles an hour, her bob weaving in time with her key punching, her own dreams seemingly long ago dashed. I hope she doesn't blame the child, but for some reason, I think she does. As for me, I never bought BMX Bandits...the liquidation place has reminded me times are tough, 6.95 not to be squandered on Kidman based whims...

Fat sweaty girl from Big W was back today, fat and sweaty as always, putting books on a shelf. I wonder about exhaustion based entirely on stacking books, but that's her way. I've got things on my mind anyway, not just work stress, although fully in context by a greater appreciation of the fickle nature of life, not just the strange melancholia of the sandwich white female at my bakery, who yesterday was like a gambolling lamb in her haste to tell me she'd kept me a sandwich, but today seems incredibly depressed as she struggles with either paperwork or a particularly difficult Sudoku puzzle. For what it's worth, the work stress melts, and I buy a cake to celebrate the very act of survival that my Dad usually thinks is my forte. When I buy some cake, I'm staring directly as a poster of a well known footballer, in the window of a shop I haven't seen before. One of the female girls at the cake store, blonde, promotions model, over officious with the coffeee pumps, thinks I'm staring at her, and she flashes me a smile as she pours the coffee, one of those smiles which, as denizens of Hobart nightclubs would know, is an invitation to speculate as to whether or not 3hree seconds more staring will invite you home or invite the police. As one of said denizens, I'm well aware of the correct response, which is to flash the knowing smile which means get over yourself sweetheart, blue eye shadow girl has you covered. It's such a wonderful piece of non verbal communication that happens between us, I wonder why people use words at all - oh right, it'd be much harder to get a brownie. As I walk away, my place in the queue is taken by a shuffling, befuddled and confused homeless man in a white cardigan using a walking stick to help himself get around. He begins a series of unrelated tangential conversational jumping points to the blonde girl, mostly about a film with Anthony Hopkins and the relative merits of popular culture. He entraps the blonde girl in a continuing web of Grandpa Simpson conversation, without a single one of his points likely to end in the ordering of snacks or coffee. This allows to me throw another one of my little non verbal smiles, the one that says sucked in, isn't retail just a blast. As I walk off, I walk past a girl wearing deely boppers, with an imploring smile and a pile of leaflets she seems far too keen to pass on. I decline, I've had enough of human interaction for one day. When I look over her shoulder, the blonde girl is still being polite as she possibly can, as the old man is up to 1963 in his one man monologue play...I sincerely hope I get that way when I'm older...I've got a robe and slippers already looked out. I think I'll start conversations entirely about The Divinyls...that'll stump the young folk...

My Dad right now is out on my deck. He's not in the hammock, but he's come to visit without really visiting. He takes a call on his mobile phone from one of his gossipy friends, a little mini cabal of power to the people teachers broken down by the man. I suspect to some it might be a little undignified a man of nearly 60ty sitting on a banana lounger having the same conversation for 3hree years about a job he never got, about a terrible interview experience that left him drained and questioned his very ability to hold some chalk. Do they still use chalk in schools? My Gran, one of my main memories of her was the venom she used to spit at the TV whenever I watched a childrens show called Charlie Chalk, her face contorted as she told the writers of the show to get a proper job like coal mining, as I balanced a white plastic tray with my dinner on it on my knee. Dad doesn't have many friends, because Mum won't be friends with his friends. One time in Burnie, we got in the car like homeless people who had just sold all their Shakira albums to Cash Converters just to hide from this weird science teacher Dad knew, all of which I remember about him was he had incredibly pulled up socks, always white, always pristine, always knee high. We stat their for hours, just talking about the world, until we presumed he had gone. I've turned up Shakira really loudly just to drown him out. It's not that I mind the conversation, I just think he loves the misery too much. He's using phrases like restorative justice and deputy principal just way too much, but like a man hypnotised on stage, he's always blinking bewildered wondering how his life turned out the way it did. I think he believes in the essential goodness of man, something I long ago disagreed with. Eventually he leaves, taking a pile of my books with him, a passing comment about the merits of Shakira or Andy Murray mentioned as he goes. I think he sometimes wishes we talked about more than sport, but neither of us make too much of an effort beyond that, and that's fine with us. I know at times he's tried or I've tried to get beyond what certain football teams should be doing 70ty minutes into a game, but it never works. At some unspecified point in the mid 90s, he decided my life would be infinitely better if I lifted bricks in some sort of body building fashion because my PE teacher told him it was a great idea. He said this would make girls like me, although he said it in far more cringingly uncool mid 90s sub Bruno Lucia tones. We had one incredibly hectoring session in the garage while he tried to make me into Lou Ferrigno, I said I wasn't a laborer from the 1920s, and the whole thing unfolded with a tedious sense of inevitability. Next morning, he came down to the breakfast table, sat down, and said did I see the Liverpool Coventry score...boundaries drawn, natural order back in place over jammy toast...maybe that's what restorative justice is...

My weekend is mapped out. Comedian tomorrow night with someone I like but who I hope doesn't talk too much, mean as that sounds. We've had entire conversations sometimes where my only words are yes and sure if I'm lucky. Lunch on Saturday with someone I hope talks for hours, so we know whats going on with his headspace. Maybe some flag waving on Monday. Some tennis player is on my TV, talking about what a miserable life she had, depression, some such gubbins. No one rings, no one talks to me, a television flickering in the corner with some early 90s videos. A glamorous granny is standing outside my window waiting for a lift, squeezed into some sort of Madonna like corset as she stands perfectly still in a howling gale. I'm not surprised at the effort she's made, she walks my window sometimes, and she truly suffers in her bid to stay young. Every interaction I have during the day at the moment makes me glad for the peace and quiet. I get one of my periodical spam e-mails from one of those companies that links you with your old school friends, and throw it straight in the virtual trash. I had an uneasy interaction with a particular comedian a few years ago, when I was dragged up on stage to do a bit of a turn. Got a laugh too. Afterwards, it became apparent that two people - having seen me on the stage with the comedian - that I went to school with wanted to talk to me, and they wanted a photo of not just me, but them with the comedian. Without seeing the joins, you would think we had just picked right up where we left off in Grade twelve, but there was a conversational sour point, something known only to us, I can't remember what, but it was enough to make me turn back and talk to the comedian about his other life in London, freezing them out until they left, a one night brief re-union that ended quickly. They never got their photo either. I try and learn something every day, take something out of every interaction, make a note, but I don't live up to that, some behaviours keep repeating. The glamorous granny is the last person I see for the day, as she bundles herself into a car pool, muttering loudly something about Karen, and how she's unreliable. It's the last interaction I see, tomorrow it begins again, the first day of the rest of my life, a blank canvas with people who will educate me, who will frustrate me, and in the end, vanish without a trace for the most part into blog anecdote and their own private space...

I suspect what I may take out of tomorrow is another sandwich, but we shall see...

Post 150 (filling the void as easily as I fill a box with maps)

Ah, 150 posts, didn't time fly? I'm quite a self reflective person, actually, pretty guilt ridden because of my lapsed catholic upbringing where everything was a sin, but I find the accquisition of tastes and goods and CDs and posters (don't ask) and DVDs bought in London over time to be endlessly fascinating. I'm also a bit of a nervous person, I do worry a lot. However, there is a lot of things lying about this room at the moment that sign post the person I used to me (the signed Jessica Mauboy Idol poster, however, is a person I don't recognise). I wish I could find my diary (the only one I kept ever) from 97, so I could remember more about who I was, but at least today I had a better idea of who I wanted to be, in the self reflective glimpse of a well worn face over obsessing about statistics and figures. While I can't care like her, I was at least trying, so I was happy about that, and no, it wasn't because Barack Obama won and made me realise good things about life. I was more into Steven Gerrards 95th minute penalty...when you are trapped, genuinely trapped, it's good to have days when it doesn't get you down. The person I've become is OK, but there's a terrifying coda in my head these days - my cousin, who died two years ago, that scares me. He was only 39, and now his insurance money has been used to set up the business of his fiancees new boyfriend. She keeps going round to my aunties house and saying it like it's a good thing, but more significantly, he drove himself into the ground with hard work and I guess the short and fickle nature of life continues to scare me, as is the thought of someone inheriting my possessions, particularly my Weekend At Bernies Box set. I did learn a lot though, and have changed as a person, I really have, I get far less hung on on minor worries, but the motivation to live each day as full throttle is still questionable...

When I failed uni, I can't say I was sad or upset or anything that I should have been. I guess it was sort of like being on death row in a way, even down to the fact I had a last meal before facing parents who were a lot angrier than me. I wish I had been more bothered, but I just wasn't, although my Dad was pretty annoyed that my plans for the next year involved third year studies of Thelma and Louise (or as he puts it, do they come back up for a sequel?). My upthrusting and somewhat overambitious girlfriend was even more annoyed than they were, although she expressed that anger by not cooking the nights pie properly. Suggesting even gently though that the crust needed work would have been call for a slap however, so I kept quiet. As it happened, I thought I had a burgeoning career as a music journalist to fall back on anyway. I didn't really fancy explaining to my mother that I was working on a music newsletter on that fandangled new contraption called the Internet, or that I was going on be on popular alternatastic radio sation Triple J talking about my love of music, but in any event, when I was on Triple J, I think I was pretty genuinely rubbish and sounded about twelve (my girlfriend thought I sounded like Linus from Peanuts, and that was being kind). To be honest with you, that's a pretty big blur in my life that moment, except for the fact that because I was living with my parents, who were pretty unhappy with me, I had to sneak out of bed about eleven o'clock to take a phone call from Richard Kingsmill and was really expecting Mum to storm out and demand to know who I was on the phone too in the middle of a live cross. It probably says a lot about my state of mind though that what really upset me about failing uni was that I had a lot less Internet access to pen my thoughts on the popular music scene rather than what I was going to do with the rest of my life. I woke up each day for the first time in my life with literally nothing to do, and it was quite strange. I distinctly remember one day just deciding to go for a walk out of nothing else to do, ending up on a distant point on Kingston Beach, and just watching people doing things for hours. As this day unfolded in a sea of indifference, sea spray and fat joggers collapsing in the sand, a man on the beach had a heart attack, or he choked on a peanut, one of the too, and there was some incredible screaming from a woman in a black dress who sort of screamed to everyone that someone should help him, without seeming to offer much help herself. The man eventually got off the sand just to tell her to shut up. And although this delicious black and sand comedy was unfolding in front of me, I was so disengaged from all reality, I can clearly remember thinking, well, that killed ten minutes, and then went and had a lime spider that I paid for with a five dollar note I found on the beach. Not god I hope that guys OK or god I could help, but that killed ten minutes. Accutely guilty, I went back to the beach and watched as he was loaded onto the stretcher, and calling the ambulance man the c word (not cardiac) and thinking, well, I was right the first time...

I think the worst moment of this strange few months of nothingness was probably my experiences being paid (in experience as Hank Hill would say) to trim branches. I am definitely not cut out for gardening, and would sort of lop and hack leaves with mad abandon, hopefully not killing the plant. I didn't even have the muscles that would have got me noticed by the bored housewives of Kingston anyway, so it was pretty much just not killing plants, and drinking juice if I was lucky. My girlfriend got me a job interview with a company who wouldn't tell anyone there what job we were applying for until day 3 of the course. Our leader, a camp guy not unlike James Van Praagh, took his time for telling us that we would be going door to door selling knifes, at which point a little pantomime voice in my head said "Oh no we're not" (especially during the company song) and got out of there pretty quickly. Worse, I had a job interview with Vodaphone where, in a simulated call centre exercise where the caller (a character actor called Kevin no doubt) was trying to find Vodaphones number (ooh you tricky minxes) I couldn't find Vodaphone anywhere on the computer, until the voice on the other end of the phone broke all sembelance of character and told me how to find it - suffice to say, someone was lopping branches the next day. And then, the final indignity - no, not collecting the dole, although that was depressing enough, being swallowed up by endless forms and the cold wind of the courtyard - but selling CDs at Cash Converters. I found this a lot more fundamentally depressing than failing uni if I'm honest, being trapped in that tiny little room with the appraiser looking at my Martin/Molloy CDs as if he was appraising a gem. No one needs to go through the painful process of selling a CD to try and live, and having an awful man in a starchy white shirt stroking his beard intently and smirking as he offers you two dollars a disc...his attitude grated with me violently, and when Kingston Cash Converters closed down a few years later in a flurry of unpaid bills and left a big pile of letters under the door, well, I wasn't especially sad, let's put it that way, and if that guy lost his job, I can suggest he might give me a call, I wouldn't mind appraising your valuables...

My parents and my girlfriend (if she even remembers me) will no doubt believe that it was their love and support that got me through this difficult time, but don't listen to them. Who got me through was a Chinese lady called Xu, who worked at the Hydro. I worked at the Hydro for three days, on a strictly temp basis, and my taxing job was to put maps in a box. Why wasn't really explained, but they put me in a big room with a lot of boxes, lots of chairs, a Commodore 64, a fridge full of small orange bottles of pop, but strangely, very few maps. The whole thing was incredibly strange, and had it been a few years later, I would have suspected I was being set up for something high-larious on Scare Tactics. So I kind of threw the maps into the boxes and set off to get some water from the vending machine (my tolerance for orange pop untested). Xu, my boss, asked what I was doing, and I said, well, maps went in box, now water comes out of machine (I was quite literal in my descriptions at that point in my life), and I remember this amazingly clearly...she gasped. Now, I hadn't had anyone ever gasp before (except my girlfriend...am I right folks...ah never mind) like it says in novels, but she quite clearly gasped. It wouldn't be a stretch to say she swooned. "No-one," she said in a soft, amazed voice, "has ever, ever done that so FAST!" and she took my hand and told everyone in the office about the incredible boy who could put maps into boxes. Then, I swear, they let me play on the Internet for the rest of the day as a thankyou, and they bought me a muffin. After six months of being yelled at, told I was useless, told that I wasn't going to amount to anything, after six months of my girlfriend whipping me (mostly at that skiing game on the ATARI) I actually had someone being amazingly kind and nice to me. Sure, it was a little bit mental, and I felt a bit like I was being severely buttered up to do something really unpleasant, like fire someone or go and kill some anti Hydro protesters, but it was definitely something that I appreciated, that someone finally made me feel wanted, and probably woke me up and engaged me in what I was doing for the first time in a long time. The gesture was so appreciated, I positively bounded into work the second day, to see Xu wearing short workout shorts, a winter coat, and furry winter boots, and the entire office huddled around a computer talking about an online horse racing "be the jockey" computer game the entire office was playing...it was a nice world to visit, but not to live in....

And of course, the next day, I left, but that, as they say, is a story for another Mauboy...