The idea of primordial unity related to something existing in or persisting from the beginning

Miley Cyrus - "Party In The USA" (Official Music Video) HQ
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It's late on a Friday night, and I feel tragically old. I'm still too bitter that spoiled millionaire sportsmen don't care enough about me to win trophies, and find something quite sad and noble about it. It's my connection to the conversation this nursed grievance, and nurse it I shall. Outside the Victoria Tavern on unsteady legs, I see a girl sitting against a wall, a small elfin Pixie Lott looking girl with head slumped forward and panda eyed mascara streaming down her face. Her friends have long gone, disappearing I think in a click clack of heel in puddle motion towards Customs, while the girl lets off a flare of distress, in the form of the universally accepted Hobart girl sign that all is not well - a pair of silver heels with sparkles painted on taken off her feet and held aloft in the sky in her hands. She looks up at the stars with vacant eyes, and gently whimpers in the direction of a taxi driver. He has a large illuminated badge on his shirt, a neatly trimmed beard, and no intention at all of picking her up. It seems somewhat unchivalrous to have to step over her legs to continue the onward night, but there's nothing we can do to help her, since she's already being assisted by flak jacket wearing security and a bloke called Trevor. Trevor is the kind of man who believes Superman wears Trevor underpants, and runs his fingers through his fading blonde locks as he announces his name and with a firm grasp of the situation he lets the bouncers hold the girl up by the arms while he asks her repeatedly for her name. The security guard visibly rolls his eyes, but Trevor is undaunted, camply and gamely continuing his 1ne man quest to take a drunk girl and get a pash at the Observatory. The girl though throws her shoe in a last ditch bid for freedom, and in a flash runs off to join her friends, barefoot in a strange bogan Cinderella moment and sprinting towards the park. We stand agape for a moment, everyone except me, who's on unsteady legs and almost trips in all the commotion, and Trevor, who turns towards the bouncers and says it's obvious the girl was a lesbian, before disappearing himself into the night, a flurry of starched denim, misplaced confidence, and a swagger accquired from a rock band in a card game at a pub somewhere around 1984...

No one should be up this late anyway, the wending and winding of a night without conclusion leading to pointless extra bought beers. The Observatory isn't somewhere I want to be anyway, thumping techno and overpriced drinks can't mask that there's no one here at this time, the pretence of a good time swept away quickly by how bored and restless everyone is. It's my own fault, the expectations of a great night having long ago faded away - all that was 1nce left to do was to throw shapes and pretend everything is going wonderfully well. Lately though, throwing shapes is likely to mean a thrown out hip. To be honest, a girl I don't want to see I have to make conversation with in 3hree weeks time and the revelation has thrown me so much I can't enjoy any Miley Cyrus in this kind of mood. Party In the USA sounds bitterly ironic on an empty dancefloor. My friend tries to chat up the Claudine Longet a-like in the corner. Where her friends are god only knows, although I did hear 1nce that nightclubs employ dance floor fillers on slow nights. He bounces back just as quickly as he went over, and says all she said was she doesn't like irony, and then stood with hands on hips waiting for him to fill in some invisible conversational blank. I shrug, because I do like irony, and Mileys distortingly large face on the big screen exhorting everyone to party while she dances around with dancers pretending to be her friends on a dancefloor so empty a cleaner is visible off to the left, so near closing time he's ready to sweep the fag ash off the floor and talk about punk kids, well, it's like rain on your wedding day. My taxi driver home likes quiet rides, the distinctive sounds of Bhangra music and he has a smiling picture on his windscreen, a very toothy and direct smile. I can't get his opinion on the subject of irony though, because I've got a mouthful of marbles and a heart full of regret, and only 5ive miles til hometime, where I can slump in my own unique posture until sun up...

Kingston and it's dystopian suburban landscape isn't the place to nurse a hangover, not 1ne mixed with sporting bitterness. The rain bounces in patterned monotony off the pavement, deflated balloons from the losing team sweep along in the melancholy, gathering in drains and puddles while winners drink in rain soaked back yards and play Mark Seymour until he goes out of fashion. A sort of ironic joke that cheers me up on a boring day if you will. I'm walking and whinging, the Scottish national past-time, and I walk past 5ive divvy vans and police cars are stacked by the side of the road. Inside the back of 1ne of them is a baseball capped youth with arms behind his back, fresh faced and in a hooded top that makes my old eyes hurt, a collection of configurated swirls and triangles too busy to quit. He's barely visible through the fog of tinted windows and my own inadequate eyesight, but I can't imagine what he's done to provoke this kind of vehicular presence, and I swear he visibly mouths help me as I walk past, but it might be a mis-interpreted curse word in which case I hope they throw away the key. I don't even know why I left the house, but I felt the need to and so here I am, walking aimlessly towards Big W in store bought shoes so old they are falling apart. An old man in a blue old man singlet at the counter is bailing up a young girl about lawn care, but she's not listening to him at all, looking over his wrinkled bare shoulder to check out the clock or her reflection in a shiny surface. Her mind might be on her own night out, her own search for Trevor, or heels in the air or a crowd of dancers throwing shapes in a random fashion...it's certainly not on lawn care, and the old man gives up with an angry thump of his giant fist on the counter, at which point the PA system begins to play Party in the USA and somehow my weekend feels circular, a suburban Ouroboros everyone else is just a fleeting part of...

The feelings of disappointment will fade in time, but at the moment they are all consuming, a sort of dull thud in my head, the strain of avoiding people in the future mixed with fatigue and a lack of will to get anything done. The kind of feeling where a stray chocolate wrapper can be the cause for melancholy reflection on how terrible life can be. At least that's how I did feel. My Dad had the presence of mind to make me laugh uncontrollably with 1ne of his senior moment antics, and everything just feels better. The fatigue is still there - when I walk home, the police cars are taking defiant girls and mouthy boys off to the cells, but I don't have the patience to pay attention. There's a middle age man with a tight T-shirt and a yappy dog on the end of a lead standing outside the general store as the last of the police cars screams uncontrollably down the road. He's shaking his head with moral disapproval so strong, it's Rebecca Wilsonesque, so hissy and clicked from the back of his tongue, even his dog looks sad and tries to escape. His meagre bag of single male groceries doesn't even extend to the purchase of desert, but his moral disapproval begins to unfurl with a rant about kids and where are their parents until he almost gets to the phrase in my day...I realise that I've looked at this weekend very negatively and could easily end up standing outside a general store looking for naughty kids to chastise before taking my individual jelly cups home for a party. I find at least some redemption to my horrible attitude in sticking my tongue at the guy in a fit of immaturity, and then leaving as the rain falls down, the sound of rain battering off the ground, the world not quite a better place, but at least something to cheer me up added to the suburban repetition of an ill starred weekend where it never stopped raining, and no one was nodding their heads like yeah, no matter the motivation...

Now, if I can hide in the house 3hree weeks from now, everything will be OK...

Miles McClagan - 7 Things

So obviously Collingwood lost, which was a shame, but I'm over it, it frees up a lot of time on weekends. I have been amazingly lazy today, I've sat around watching Bill Bailey DVDs and eating Milky Ways on the couch. I was even bored enough to consider going back to Yahoo Chat, but I'm never that bored. Besides, they still owe me for my work for them the Yahoo people, so I've sat it out since then. Sundays are always slipping through my fingers, I work really hard all week (comparitively) to get to the weekend, but all I've done with my weekend is go to JBHIFI and watch Collingwood. I've been stuffing around on Youtube, watching old videos, and I rang my Mum in Scotland, just to find out the news in Scotland. Not much she said. Well, I said, can't you just tell me something interesting and she said no, I'm not being your narrative device, come up with something on your own. So really I got nothing. I don't even have a pet, and I'm sure you don't want to hear about one of Dads friends trying to be my friend and down with the kids and talking to me about Sneaky Sound System (of all the sound systems, easily the sneakiest!) - see, i really got nothing...if only I had a dog...

So my neighbour is out at the moment, watering his garden. He's not my favourite person in the world. Apparently, the old people who owned this house used to have him round all the time for wine and games of Go Fish, and when I moved in he tried to continue the relationship and of course, I wasn't having any of it, so he got a bit weird. I've become convinced over the two years I've lived in this house that something other than red wine drinking was going on - looking at him and his bearded face and open necked shirt, I think they might have been swingers. One day, when I was watering the garden, he actually came over and moved the hose onto a different set of flowers when I wasn't looking, just because he had made that decision. When I went over and changed the channel on his TV with a universal remote control, he seemed unimpressed weirdly. For some reason, I have about 6 universal remote controls in my drawer, and I have no idea where they have all come from (1). Also, when I bashed my car off the driveway gates when I was backing out one day, he sprinted from his house, waving his arms around like a mime artist and pointing at my busted tail-light. I was like, I know, I'm not stupid, I'm not Anna Nicole Smith, I am cognescent of the fact I've dinged my car, but he continued waving his arms around like a mad thing, and then leapt dementedly over my small brick wall to get himself between the car and the road, just so he could jab his finger at the broken light. I drove off and left him standing in my driveway screaming after me something about "the RACT fuck". He hasn't spoken to me since my failure to acknowledge that I knew that he knew that I had hit my car, but he's always got really weird things outside his house for sale, like one stove would be normal, but why is he selling different stoves outside his house week in week out? And he was selling bags of manure last week? Incidentally, at the garage sale we had before we moved back to Scotland, I made 1800 dollars and sold one kid a beanbag that I stuffed things in, like toys and carrots, just so he could have a nice surprise when he got home(2). My neighbour is now putting things in his van - I think he's looking into my living room, probably got his eye on my stove...

The best neighbours we've had were the ones we had in Scotland. In Scotland, we lived in this really claustrophobic circular street where everbody always knows your name, and they're always glad you came (as long as you don't nick their parking spot). They (our neighbours) were great, even though they could talk and talk and talk. When we moved out, they ended up with this really large brown haired woman in our old house, who they rather touchingly hated on principle. She bagged out the wallpaper in my room - my bedroom had a soccer theme and was in the colours of my soccer team St Mirren, with black and white wallpaper (3) and she hated that. Out neighbours just totally ripped into her for bagging it out, and a big street feud was born. Our street was always having feuds though - we had this woman called Big Irene, her husband only had about 3 fingers and was always massively drunk and threatening to batter people while staggering around the swing park, he tried to kick one of my friends off his bike once and fell over in the sandpit and was still lying there two days later, and she was always sticking her bib into everything. She went across the road once to ask a bloke putting a garden gnome in front of his door if he had a permit to put it up. The blokes not unreasonable response was to threaten to shove his garden gnome where the sun doesn't shine. I remember when my home town got cable TV - we were one of the first trial towns in Scotland to get it, and we got it for free for the first two months. Incidentally, when we used a screwdriver to turn one of the screws four turns to the left, we got every channel in Europe for free. Big Irene was outraged (who told her!) and she was threatening to tell everyone on the council about this scandalous use of the box until someone threatened to then tell her off to the council for her husband urinating on the mini bus. She still lives there, and last time I was home she brought me round a big bag of Tunnocks Tea Cakes, oranges and Cream Eggs, like I was four. I think she was just "daein her nosey", and she surely remembered I was allergic to oranges (4), but her gesture was uncharacteristically nice. I think she liked me...that's even more worrying...

When we moved back to Penguin we lost that sense of claustrophobic street living, and life was pretty dull. We lived in a house that wasn't really near anything - apart from some train tracks and a bakery that you couldn't see in because the window was just covered in awards and certificates. The guy in the bakery would always tell you the Queen opened his bakery, but I think that was complete rubbish. He had some really attractive staff, so I was quite proud to say they were our neighbours, even though technically our neighbours were on the other side, a family of Mormon adhering Koreans who's kids wore suits and who's mother I saw once sitting mournfully on the Penguin swings, drunk out of her mind, singing Chers If I Could Turn Back Time. I've never won an award for my cooking, although I did win one share of the Wynyard Hotel in a poker game when a friend of mine made it up as a prize when he was stoned (5). The bakery made the worlds best lamingtons (I don't really trust pink lamingtons, I have a natural suspicion of them for some reason, and am likely to ask for brown ones only (6)), and it was where my school bus would drop me off, right out the front of the bakery. My current best friend used to get off there too, and sometimes she would see me but was too shy to talk to me (isn't that sweet?). Our school bus was always full of trouble and incident - one time, I was sitting on the bus and threw a Push Pop at someone and got thrown off by the bus driver. However, what I do know is that my first kiss (as in proper pash, not just kisschasy), if you think my neighbour was the bakery, was actually out the back of my neighbours house. It was with a girl called Vicki, a blonde girl who was 16 to my 14, and the circumstances of our intense pash are lost to time. She worked at the bakery, and she kissed way, way, way harder than me - I guess I wasn't as hungry as she was, she was seriously intense, but hey, it was a good pash. Incidentally, that line, about her kissing harder than me, that's from a song by Tracey Bonham called Kisses, and that's my favourite ever song (7). I don't know what happened to Vicki, I didn't see her much after that, in fact the last time I saw her, she was pashing another boy called Joe, but she looked at me and winked as she was doing so. I now think that perhaps had I stayed in Penguin and not lived in Burnie, maybe me and Vicki would be the power couple of Penguin...she was certainly ambitious, she wanted to go and become the guitarist in Guns and Roses, and let's face it, the way that bands gone, she probably was at one stage...

However, the main question of this freeform jumble of thoughts is.... So...how did I do? Good? Bad? Indifferent?

Tasmanian Intellectuals say no to Chungking and Miley Cyrus

So today, I was really lethargic, I stuffed around at work doing some idle plotting involving Google and, er, Google Earth, as part of my new ambition to join the committee at Kermandie Football Club within 2 years. Now, I've been told there's no such place as Kermandie, but there is a swing park, and a pub, so I'm going to stake out my territory by spending some time drinking warm beer in the pub and making some quips that are on the knuckle. I've been reading various books for inspiration - Alisa Camplins "Flying High" of course (with quotes from Alfred D Souza), Steve Waughs "Out Of My Comfort Zone", and Dave O'Neills "Unfit For Life - A Handbook" (OK, that one, I found in my little basket of books, and I have no idea what the hell it was doing there). Hanging around football clubs and reading books by unfunny fat comedians is probably not the intellectual path in life that I hoped I once may take. I chose a path of pop culture references some time ago (Swoop over Satre my friend called it) and I stand by it. Sure, I can derisively snort at things with the best of them (go on, just mention Bernard Fanning) but my idea of an intellectual discussion seems to be (with my friends) the positioning of women on sports programmes as bubble headed seat fillers (I'm watching one now, interviewing a soccer referee and asking if he, tee hee, does his hair? Even the beautiful devine not quite as beautiful now she's married Christi Malthouse is reduced to being asked "is it cold?" on a weekly basis by her intellectual inferior "Quarters"). I'd love to sometimes sit down and discuss something other than "did you see that girl being sick in the pot plant?" - and then at other times I think, god, what an insufferable bore, why is he talking about the social history of letterboxes (someone really did to me once) when there's a new Miley Cyrus single out? Besides, Tasmania, as much as I've tried, hasn't quite proven to be the Left Bank in my search for intellectual enlightenment...maybe that's my fault, because I've hung around Penguin football club too much, and that's where you are an intellectual if you ask for a Kit Kat...

When I moved to Mt Stuart, aside from living on the edge of a cliff, one thing I always wanted to was go to the State Cinema. The State Cinema is of course our fearsomely indepdent North Hobart cinema which loves to show really smart films from Iran, and it certainly isn't the kind of place where you sing "let's all go to the lobby" as you queue up for a choc top (maybe you can queue for a helping of flavoured salt). I don't know anything about films - as you may have gathered from the constant references to Cop and a Half with Burt Reynolds. I know a fair bit about music, but films, I have no frame of reference. However, my friend told me that it was a good place to pick up, and what intellectually minded mid 20s foreign film buff wouldn't want to hook up with a fresh from Burnie uni student who's idea of culture was to dismiss Weekend at Bernies II as a little lightweight? Still, along I went, I tell people I wore a tuxedo but that's not true - it was everyone else that wore one. Even the female uni students. It was a big night at the State Cinema, the premiere of a new French war epic, and certainly no time ask if Plastic Bertrand was making a cameo (I know he's Belgian, but I felt under pressure). My main memory of the evening, apart from my obvious discomfort, was that people were queueing up, man at the football style, for mugs of tea in proper giant mugs, which was a long way from the 8 foot plastic coke cups of Burnie cinema legend, which people only bought to peg at the screen (who would do that, shameful...certainly I was never thrown out of Space Jam...). Apart from the good quality tea and the tuxedos, I vaguely remember that the film seemed to involve everyone in France getting cholera. Well, not everyone, just the women, and the only way the women could be cured of cholera was to take all their clothes off, lie on the ground, and get rubbed. And that was pretty much the film - got a standing ovation it did, and that didn't happen with Space Jam. One of the intellectually minded mid 20s foreign film buffs called it a harrowing contrast between light and shade, which I guess was why my mate went to see the film another 12 times - all the shade. And all the contrasting light. I went home to watch Lano and Woodley. It might not have had openly pervy buxom women being rubbed with dirt as a cure for cholera, but it had a man saying "burnies, burnies, carpet burnies"...somehow, it felt a little more me...I mean, I only went back and watched the cholera epic 4 times...

I'd quite like one day to do a public reading of one of my novels or some of my poetry, and I'd do it at the Republic Bar, North Hobarts home of intellectualism, hippies, and left wing rhetoric. I've mentioned before, when I first moved to Hobart, it was a pub that had topless barmaids, gun fights and steel bars on the window - now, it's got Tim Rogers playing strummy guitar rock and telling people who request Berlin Chair to get fucked...anyway, the point is, they regularly have poetry evenings, advertised on blackboards on the path. Now, I did a poetry and writing class at TAFE a few years ago, and the big climax was to stand up and read some of our work at some upstairs tea room midway between North Hobart and town - my timekeeping was a horrible issue a few years ago, and I really couldn't find a park. I stepped into the tea room, took in the atmosphere, and then realised I was in the wrong tea room, and went next door. I had to go up a spiral wooden staircase and I was really nervous - when I went to the top of the stairs, I saw a lot of people sitting on beanbags smoking dope, and making intellectual purring thought noises in the direction of a girl who roughly weighed as much as a bottle of Mr Sheen. She was dressed, not unreasonably, as a fairy, a goth fairy in all black, with blood red wings, and she was reading a poem, again not unreasonably, about her boyfriend - let's just say, you'd be amazed how many words seem to rhyme with castration. Suffice to say, her boyfriend wasn't coming out of it well, and with every rhyme for castration, she would swing her wand at a light fitting, and let out a shriek. Naturally, this was going over incredibly well, especially at the end when she began stroking a little plastic cat. Ah, performance art...and understandably, I looked at my own writings, which were very much "hey, what's the deal with S Club Juniors? Huh? Am I right folks?" and absolutely bottled it, going back to my car. I didn't even stop for my special muffin...

Of course, not everyone shares even my slight desire for intellectual discourse - and even I find it sometimes a little uncomfortable - and not just with my friends who are really hoping Chungking break into the charts. This one time I had come back to Burnie for a party and was having a lovely chat with someone about what happens at parties when you get someone drunk and make them laugh for no reason at all, which was kind of intellectual when this girl, and I will preface this by saying she was really really nice and one of my best ever friends, announced everyone had to be super quiet. I presumed it was going to be a cake or a speech or maybe a clown (lousy clowns, lousy lack to tricks, oh what could it be, is it water? No it's conf...er...). I figured that this would be an important moment in our friendship, a time when she was going to get up and deliver the kind of "we'll all be friends for life" emotional speech you only ever see in the final episode of teen dramas. So I twisted in my beanbag, and prepared to be touched (not in that way, matron). At which point, she's gone into her little shelf of DVDs and pulled out a newly bought DVD of...Friends, Series 1. "I thought we could watch the Smelly Cat episode!" she said, which as party stopping speechs go, is up there with "...and I said, really contagious!" (is Gary Larson intellectual? I could never tell). And so, that's what she did, she put on the Smelly Cat episode of Friends, and made everyone sit in absolute complete silence, which, if you've watched Friends lately, you'd realise is Friends natural setting when people watch it...no talking, certainly no laughing, just absolute, complete, perfect silence...

I better go for now though, I think my next door neighbour just got cholera...