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

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

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

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

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

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

Corporate Coffee still sucks

It's Saturday morning in Hobart and I feel old. The effervescent youthful hyperkinetic balls of youthful energy with perfect hair and teeth are loud and proud and listening to IPODs and fitfully recounting energetic nights out in a coffee shop queue while I stand like their shambling old Dad, or so I feel, and while I can engage them in conversation about Ladyhawke and Lily Allen I'm far too much a laconic laborer through life, a product of a laconic care little generation, to feel as excitable as they do at this time of the morning. To be honest, they wouldn't talk to me because I know from accumulated wisdom their tales of sex and drugs are simply over-exaggerated re-heats, like the ones I used to tell whenever I came back from the United Kingdom. They display a disturbing attraction to tracksuit trousers though, I will say that from my unscientific anthropological study over a re-heated and distinctly reheated cup of java that they, and I'm now old enough to say the young folk, lack a certain surety. I'm pretty sure when I told my over exaggerated stories about wild nights out at Regines, I believed what I was saying, I rehearsed my own hype. These young uns don't even seem to have a definitive ending flourish beyond I got in a taxi with someone and nudge nudge. The alpha female of this maruading pack of style and affordly priced cotton is called Chrissi, which I know because her acolytes seem to spend the entire time chanting a refrain that Chrissi is so bad, emphasising the final d with a Warrane hiss, as she preens and gathers macchiatos in her morning tracksuit, a devil may care attitude to hair care present as her bed hair piles lushly on top of itself. I search for some clue as to why anyone would follow her so slavishly - fashion, hair, the pace of her stories, a suspiciously dodgy Fonzie style attitude towards hooking up. Some sort of tiny glimpse as to why her mere presence inspires such chatter, and why a much prettier girl up the back is so quiet and rapt just to be there. I think I narrowed it down to 2wo things by the time I left. Either her tattoo, the one on her hand that was obviously too hip for me to work out was some sort of homing beacon, or the fact that she was quite prepared to open up a thick wallet full of green 100dred dollar notes and spread her largesse as well as her stories. I might be mistaken with my old man eyes, but I'm sure when she was relating her tale of thumping techno pashes, the prettiest girl up the back wasn't paying the slightest bit of attention to anything but nudging the girl next to her and rolling her eyes, although I'm sure she was incredibly greatful for the coffee, doled out with genuine store bought friendship and love...

The coffee shop is called Zuba - which I think is Greek for lukewarm - and the pace of the day is yet to really hit me. The lukewarm corporate brewed served with a grimace coffee washes down my throat with a brisk burning sensation anticipated, but it never arrives, as instead a sugary mess that isn't quite sugary enough doesn't so much slide down the throat as slowly trudge apologetically. Maybe I shouldn't blame the coffee, so much as a mindset that anything before 11even AM is intrinsically evil and wrong. Still when you decide to make it your mission to get out of the house, away from the hammock to see what Hobart has to offer, and people make you follow up on it, there's not much you can do about it. The girl behind the counter seems a horrible corporate hybrid of store trained service and toothy smiles, before turning around to give one of her underlings what we used to call a right bollocking in less enlightened times. Out of the corner of my wandering lazy eye I see someone I know - I wish I was better in situations where small talk is required but I'm just not, I always feel like I'm drowning in inarticulate 1/2lf thought out sentences and boring sentiment. I've actually got a friend who's lack of grammatical excellence drags me down to their level, until I'm speaking in tongues and saying words I don't even know with an extra Tasmanian syllable tagged on at the end. Although this friend has far more self confidence, our conversation is horrible, mostly because I'm trying to get away, uneasy and unsure of myself and apprehensive of any pauses in the conversation, trying to desperately fill them in the same way I've tried to fill in the lack of taste in my coffee with an overabundance of sugar. To my chagrin, just to fill in time I offer myself up for some conversational self deprecation, which I instantly regret. I make a mental note to talk myself up not down in future interactions, given the relative secrets I know about this friend, which when known rather falsify his self confidence. We part with a real commitment to keep in touch more just as the chastened girl who received the bollocking is forced by the horrible constraints of retail to get back on the horse, and under supervision remember that above all else when you sell the horrible coffee, sell the horrible biscuits at the same time...no matter what you do, sell the horrible biscuits...

When I was young, there was a coffee shop in the Plaza Arcade in Burnie, and while I couldn't tell you the name which is lost to time sadly, I could tell you it was where I would go like Norm in Cheers for a sympathetic ear whenever I was stuck working at Coles, and didn't feel like getting a relatively sympathetic nod from the car park prostitutes I saw when I was shoving trolleys around and trying to scav up my lunch money. Whenever I would get my own bollocking from one of the bitter desk bound middle agers behind the cigarette counter, or when life was getting me down, I could guarantee there would at least be coffee. When I emerged from the middle 90tys with a sudden and quite unexpected group of friends, I went through quite a strange change in my life, as suddenly I was forced to make decisions about myself. Not obviously whether I wanted to be good at school or getting myself fit, oh god no, but what I had to represent when someone asked me what music I liked or whenever I had to go outside dressed in fashionable clothes. I decided it would be a good idea to drink coffee, not just for the sympathetic ear but because it seemed all the trendy people of the era were doing it, although it was somewhat ironic if you remember 1996 that when I drank coffee, it was entirely a solitary experience given the popular TV show of the era. I also smoked cigars, listened religiously to trendy music and became a person that I really will never recognise, just because it felt like that was what I was supposed to be like to fit in. My coffee drinking era though came to a crashing halt just before I moved out of Burnie when the shop had a change of owner, and became less of a haven for enlightened thinking and personal space and more of a terrible nightmare with mood music, overly bright lighting, fudge brownies replaced with tofu laced creations that seemed to glow with evil under the lights, and worse of all communal sofas. It was completely Starbuckked up, before anyone used the phrase. 1ne night at rockclimbing though, I was able to entrance an entire audience simply through a line of university approved anti corporate sentiment. I was fully aware I was talking out of my hat - or beanie at the time, it was rock climbing - but I figured whatever I said, it was enthralling. Interestingly, it was part of a much wider malaise, where I really couldn't figure out whether I actually liked things or trained myself to like things, but I never went into that coffee shop again, and my fortress of solitude became the Coles pay office, which you could sneak into with the right preperation, and there I would sit without mood lighting, but with a horrible carpet with little staticy suckers on it if you dragged your Clarks shoes across the floor and touched something metallic. I definitely learned that sticking it to the man generally involved sitting on the floor alone and miserable while everyone else got on with corporate approved life. Oh well, I guess I showed them and their tofulicious ways...

Chrissi clicks her fingers and her cabal of tracksuited troops leave without finishing off their frothy lattes and departing with Adidas trainers and store bought bling clangling in an inelegant rush to a fleet of taxis. I myself am overly late for an appointment, but obviously the coffee is so delicious that I can't imagine anyone rushing away from it, while across the road a hippy guy is emerging from a bookshop weighed down by his own dreadlocks and the biggest bag of books I've ever seen anyone carry. I would grab him and discuss the effects of corporatisation on our culture, but he is rocking some very fine NIKE shoes, so I don't think he'd listen. A fat hipped Fijian table cleaner asks if I enjoyed my coffee and I say I do, taking a gulp of the foul liquid as I do and doing an unconvincing Macca thumbs aloft to confirm it. Guess I never did learn to stop liking things for the approval of others. I leave, with my only tip being don't give up your day job to the girl behind the counter, smiling like a benny as I go so everyone knows I really enjoyed the coffee, and wander down to the mall dressed in a less than fashionable waterproof jacket in anticipation of rain that never comes. There's a desolate and desconsolate girl Friday on the bench next to me, no older than 15teen, with mascara stained cheeks sobbing hard with her head in her hands. Her IPOD and mobile phone are set beside her, available even the most inept thief to lift. She picks up her mobile phone and studies it for a moment then begins crying again while her friend comes back with a bottle of Red Eye and looks as uncomfortable as someone listening to my anti corporate speech. She looks at me, I look at her and shrug, although I think she wanted the voice of experience to come over and say some words to fix the tears. Sadly my experience in trying to cheer up a crying girl mostly involves offering her a Butter Menthol, so I turn away and shift uneasily listening to Shakira as I do so. I have a strange, long ago flash back to all those tears years ago, all that angst, all that wasted angst, although it wasn't messaged by txt msg, it was face to face, but the result was the same. I hope she gets through it, and I know she will, but it doesn't make having to listen to her any easier or less poignant. So I head in the direction of another coffee shop, since my lift is running late, and sit down to enjoy a coffee from a nicer shop with prettier waitresses, a nicely drawn chalk board, and absolutely no music, none whatsover, absolutely no Presets...which I always am very relived about...

That the coffee is even worse, of course, is just between you, me and Naomi Klein...