Finding a better place to play

The best way to write for me is usually in the morning, putting on a proper old school Cantaditas De Verano CD (I got about three novels done one summer listening to nothing but Tina Cousins), leaving a copy of the Herald Sun on the floor next to washing that isn't picked up and put away, with the TV flickering away in the background. Even though I live alone, I need noise, I always have. When I was living at home, I used to love when Mum and Dad would bugger off somewhere and leave me the house to myself, but within about five minutes the charm of silence and longer showers pretty much dried up (along with the hot water) and I'd have to put a CD on really loud. I was saying to someone the other day I once had to go down the car in the garage to listen to music on cassette because the only tape player we had was in the old Red Nissan but I realised I was being incredibly boring and speaking to someone who couldn't comprehend such generationally shifting horror, so I didn't push and mention the years Oasis were pretty good (Don't Look Back In Anger is good for writing as well since it reminds me of a girl I went to school with called Amber, and...you know). My room is a mess right now anyway, old Tracey Bonham discs, a poster of lost 80s band Fuzzbox, an unplugged DVD player, a slight sense of awkward mid morning confusion and self awareness, and a deck that could do with a good sweep. My collection of possessions continue to grow even in the midst of an economic crisis, a million little pop cultural references and fads or trends spread across the rumpus room floor. In quite a few ways I've never grown up, considering that I have not only a Hannah Montana advent calendar, but also because I'm still excited by sports, music, TV shows...it can feel like lazy shorthand at times, an easy way not to engage with your own life is to waste weekends watching Weeds S3 on DVD for instance, but it's comfortable. Someone who drove me into town yesterday was telling me that her mother, like, in the 1820s, used to walk up Mount Wellington for fun with her friends every Sunday to go to a pub up there. This should perhaps be some sort of positive moment where I take the wisdom of the 1820s, stop listening to T'Pau songs on the IPOD and go and do some...no, have ended up a visitor who's telling me an amusing anecdote about downtrodden poor people in crisis care trying to breed up their daughter for the baby bonus. Another lost indifferent weekend it is then, of afternoon naps, cups of tea and basketball games of no consequence. Part of being Scottish is being malcontented, so a peaceful safe healthy existence is boring and going out and getting drunk is just time you could have spent tidying up...we're a contrary people, we're not born to understand, and we've long since sacrificed our ability to invent in the face of dismissive put downs from others...I think my tea though is of royal standard, and on a quiet day, I revel in very, very small victories...

The Quarry, as I've mentioned before, remains Hobarts strangest pub - the only pub I know that has a gay bit which is the corridor between the lounge and the outside bit at the back where everyone freezes their arse off in heterosexual comfort. I don't know the sexuality assigned to people who sit outside the front in little tables that need packets of sugar put under the legs to keep them stable, but as we settle into a middling evening of pleasant conversation and cheapish drinks, a drunk is hurled, and I've very rarely seen a drunk hurled, I've seen them punched, I've seen them even kicked, but never hurled, right over our table, and by the owner of the Quarry no less. He's an unremarkable man in every way, plain T-shirt, plain jeans, unremarkable haircut, sensible trainers, but he's the most noticable man in Hobart at this point in time, no doubt soon to be the subject of some angry letters in the paper. He picks himself up and goes and punches someone at Irish Murphys for trying to get their hat back off him, the punch sadly not hitting a bouncer, and is evicted by a small elfin girl with a MacAuley Culkin haircut after resisted the flirtsuasion of a woman in a purple T-shirt. If walking around punching people gets you more chatted up than me, I'm doing something wrong. It's probably my sensible jumper. He comes over to us, and someone in our group tries to tell him where to buy drugs, and I realise this is not a conversation I want to be a part of, the meeting of two minds who believe in their heart that they are the physical embodiment of cool when in fact they are just Hobart middle classers who are about as dangerous as milk. I mean, since when can you buy drugs from Central anyway? I know you can get a tasty kebab on a stick. My eye is captured by one of the waitresses at the Quarry anyway, and he's disrupted our mutual glancings, although there is the possibility she's only glancing at the amount of empty glasses on my table or the striking resemblance of the guy at the next table to Mark Waugh. Eventually, our unremarkable remarkable drunken adversary tires of lurching his body to the right and leading with the left in a bid to get one of us to fight him, and is eventually after his fifteen minutes of fists are up taken away by Charlies Angels masquerading as Hobart police, which leads me to ponder over a cold beer the nature of a city where by a man in a football jumper is huckled away in shame with a sarcastic quip in his ear but a man walking like Igor challenging people to fights is able to wander around for ages with only the girlboy standing up to him and with nary an aggressive Maori bouncer in sight. However, philosophy is thin on the ground, and by the time we're back on how horrible Leigh Brown will be for Collingwood, we're on more comfortable ground...

The night is something of a success, violent movie scenes playing out in front of us notwithstanding. Once we ditched the braggers and the work chat and the people who tell us what they are making, it was a nice night. Eventually, as the night was winding down, and I was about to tell a fascinating anecdote about Yvonne Warfe, we're collectively hit on by a girl in a low cut yellow top with a drink that looks sickeningly coloured who thinks I'm Jo. I have no idea who Jo is, but I bet his blog is just delightful. It turns out I'm no Jo, which is given away by my lack of knowledge about accountancy. She's not a very good accountant though because her knowledge of tax laws is a little lax, as is her flimsy recollection of any part of a so called mutual friend, and to be honest, I think she's trying to help her friend pick up, which is difficult when her friend looks so much like the female equivalent of those guys in frat boy movies who have a milkshake poured over their head. How big a pair of glasses can be is a fairly scary proposition this close up. Eventually she isolates one of our group, and they begin a discussion about some TV show, which takes a frightening turn when she begins asking if he was a woman which person on the show he would marry if he was a female. Leading from the front so to speak, she asks us to list his main accomplishments (what, no one wants to play who's the most famous person you've met? I always win that) but somewhere between the third sip of the sickening coloured drink, the second verse of TI ft Rihanna and me finally finishing my half baked theory on the relative failure of sports teams, she decides he's arrogant. I love the little gaps in conversations that you miss, the way she's gone from full front chest attack to deciding that she'd take her television references and poor grasp of fiscal policy and her Millhouse like friend elsewhere, and she's gone from our lives as quickly as she came, falling for the alternate charms of a sickly pale school leaver in a distinctly horrendous black T-shirt who's all wandering hands, eyes that betray his excitement to be touching any kind of boob and limited sentences, but at least he's got opinions on the Unit. We leave them throwing a bizarre series of what we used to call shapes on the dancefloor, and head home, the night re-assuringly over by the safe bouncer free hour of 11...

However, we were one friend down last night. To the best of our knowledge, he was meeting us later having found a better place to play, hanging out with his other friend that to the best of my knowledge only he likes, and was meeting us out later. He never fronted, so his opinions on the Unit are unresolved, but after we asked where he was, he sent us a quite alarming text message, the tone of which was that he was in financial difficulties, wasn't ready to face us yet, and would get in touch later. We didn't know what that meant, we've been friends for 6ix years with him, and we're hardly judgemental people, nor the hardest people to face up to, after all, I just bought a Britney Spears album and I'm still facing the world. Hell, my most judgemental quality is on anyone who likes Powderfinger...so much...I was a little put out by this, I hope he hasn't lost his thumbs to the Yakuza or something, but my Glaswegian mother, forged in flint and ready one line quotes of Glaswegian social realism just thinks we doesn't want to hang around us anymore and we should take the hint. Fair enough, but it's kind of sad when you lose a friend, it's part of life though, and you don't expect it at 30irty. I am used to it though, after all, I moved countries three times in 8 years, it's just the way it is. In fairness he probably tired of my enthusiasm for Doll Domination. The first friend I lost was a kid who I only remember for having a brother called Tarford (no, really) who I kind of lost because I was sick in his house, not knowing about an early since passed allergy to eating eggs...that and he didn't get my Old Tarford joke...anyway, the point is, I've conditioned myself to the way life moves on, that nothing stays the same and if he has given us a hint, I wish him well. Of course, this philosophy doesn't get a chance to escape in the face of an indifferent head me off at the pass taxi driver who launches into a Meet Joe Black length rant about the social issues facing Hobart and how in his day you could chips for thruppence and still have change to get a unicycle home. For him, he's never moved on, failing to grasp the concept of time passing, and when he plays me a tape by Dave and The Crickets or some other 50s beat combo hipster fun fresh faced young kids, I'm left with the feeling that being comfortable that time is progressing, even if sometimes it sucks, is far better than being the 1992 version of me, and still talking about the expanding rap empire of Kris Kross...

Better to move on wishing everyone the best than look back at Amber I say...

The Welcome Stranger (where friends and strangers sometimes get poor service)

So while I was writing that last post, I had this incredibly cred run of songs on my IPOD, cred to the point I actually thought, did I mix up my IPOD with someone elses? - well, I presume Stereolab are still trendy - and it was all this kind of odd indie nonsense. Naturally, I was quite cheered when S Club 7s Bring It All Back came on. My conversion from a Triple J rock snob to someone not averse to a pop tune would have been posted here if it had been a particularly interesting story that wasn't I quite liked The Beat Goes On by Britney Spears, and that's it, someone call the editor, there's gold to be published! Anyway, S Club 7, they were OK - my cousin (the one I sort of don't like), I bought him Bring It All Back one Xmas (the same Xmas I went drinking with Russell Robertson) and rather pompously gave him a bit of a lecture about real music and real songwriters...you know, I like to spend Xmas turning into Jane Gazzo (not literally). His response was to say I had a stick up my arse and put a Roy Chubby Brown DVD on, and then we had a massive fight because I was rude to his girlfriend. OK, so it wasn't exactly Deck The Halls at our house (we've had on and off fights ever since we were kids and he turned off my imaginary TV). What was really interesting about that Xmas was that he told me a story about one of his mates who went into a cafe in Penguin and tried to play some songs on the jukebox, only to have "We're Going To Ibiza" by The Vengaboys come on, and the record got stuck so about 14 times in a row We're Going To Ibiza came on, until everyone got up and left or threatened the management with violence and they all had to slink out in embarrassment. My cousin told me this like it was a hilarious story, while I (still in rock snob mode) shook my head and went, gosh, how awful, a cafe playing pop, didn't anyone have some emergency Sidewinder to play? No one had The Blackrock soundtrack to hand? Honestly....

All of which leads me nicely to the latest in the good pub guide to Hobart, and my long, long night at The Welcome Stranger. The Welcome Stranger (in Harrington Street, if you have a pen) you would think is a pub that, with a name like that, would have some men in tweed gathered around the bar as you enter engaging you in conversation like a lost soul as soon as you hit dry land after a long voyage to the island...I've got to stop watching Two Thousand Acres Of Sky...but of course, in true Hobart fashion, it's nothing of the sort. I can't remember why we went there, but I think it was because we wanted to play pool on my birthday. It wasn't the greatest birthday ever, let's put it that way. If you've ever had a birthday where you want to get drunk but no one else does, it was like that, only I wanted to gargle Jack Daniels at 4 in the morning while my friends were thinking light supper and a glass of milk - you know, different wavelengths. So The Welcome Stranger, it has a pool table, so we go there. Now, I remember very very clearly that Port Adelaide were playing Fremantle on the television (hold your excitement) and where you got your drinks from was a big giant open bar area with two staff behind the bar. The male staff member had this weird Bad Boy Bubby thing going on, he sort of had his tongue on the floor as his mouth was fixed in a wide open space, his body was vaguely lolling in the direction of the flickering Foxtel TV, his eyes rolling back in his head in his complete determination not to serve a single customer. It was futile trying to get him to move, never mind make a move to pour a drink. After about ten minutes of waving my hand in front of his face, I gave up and tried to attract the attention of the female staff member, a Max Sharam lookalike who seemed to take an inordinate amount of time cleaning one glass. I certainly admired her dedication to her chosen craft of individual glass cleaning, but it made for a long night as we waited for one of them to get the memo on customer service. Eventually, my patience was rewarded as Bubby snapped out of his Matthew Pavlich induced coma, and poured me a mediocre rum for five dollars, and grunted something about ice...had he sold me drugs, it might have taken the edge off the Manson family vibe...certainly no one in tweed was putting their arm around me, put it that way...

When we adjourned to the pool room, leaving Bubby to be Pavlichtonic again, we were unsurprisingly the only people there. I don't know why, considering the warm welcome all strangers seemed certain to receive. So we stuffed around on the jukebox, and tried to make our only drink for the evening last for three hours (in that dogged aren't we all having a great time way, we ploughed on as if we were raging like that girl in the dry cleaning ad). To pass the time, we began putting songs on the jukebox. Now, since it was my birthday, I was going to put one Britney Spears song on, just for old times sake - however, this was a no go zone, as Britney Spears is not an artist to put on in a pub - a very kindly Auntie picked a Britney song for me on a Paris video jukebox, and the reaction wasn't favourable. So even though we were the only ones there, I learned from my Penguin roots that it had to be rock music (or The Gambler) and I didn't put on anything more unfavourable than Khe Sanh or The Divinyls. We're Going To Ibiza was unavailable. Alas, and I swear to this day it was an accident, I was trying to put on Pantera, I put on Anticipating by Ms Spears somewhere between Metallica and I Touch Myself. And of course, in true sitcom fashion, by the time it came on, there was us, three massive giant Maori bikies, and two patrons with a fixation for blue shirts, denim jackets and drinking beer as if it was going out of fashion. Of course, the bikies didn't take to kindly to Britney, and threatened immediately to rip the head off or gut (one of the two, nice to have options) the person who put on this fucking shit...so I casually suggested it was Bubby, and they went out and...of course, I said absolutely nothing, and completely focused on knocking the little yellow balls into the little nets on the end of the table with the stick thing. I was so focused I won off the break...and of course, vacated the premises...

Naturally with my birthday going horribly wrong, I was in a pretty bad mood, and stormed out, certainly not feeling welcome, but I decided that before I went, I was going to try and win some money on the poker machines in the glamorous "gaming area". I don't know why this was, as I'm normally quite anti gambling, at least apart from my yearly bets on the Grammys (made a mint on Steely Dan one year). As I was progressing through the evening towards the poker machines, Bubby suddenly came to life and started shouting "Yercan'tgointhere..." and pointed to a giant sign on the wall. "Carnyaread...cleaning!" he said, and certainly, the sign said that there was cleaning, although I failed to see how the presence of a steam cleaner would affect the gambling experience - if anything, it would enhance it, given I wouldn't have to listen to the music of the machine as all the noise would be the steam cleaner and I would find that soothing and I could thus concentrate entirely on what I was doing, free of burd...I could see my line of argument wasn't swaying Bubby, who again began lolling into his pre cleaning state. My friends tried to get me to leave, but I wasn't really in any kind of mood, and again went to go into the poker machine bit, and again, he pointed to the giant sign. At this point, I noticed out the corner of my eye that at least three people were in the tiny little red seats, and they were indeed playing poker on the machines, with an obsessive gambling nature glowing on their little faces, the kind you only hear about in fables. "What about them?" I said, pointing, "how come they get to use the machines!" - ooh, I was mad, I was on my (Sean Micallef) high horse and about to say something about communism - Bubby stroked his dribble soaked chin, and then nodded. "They," he said, very slowly, "gots nowhere else to go...can't get rid of the pricks...big problems...". He then went back to stroking his chin, while behind him, a glass was really, really gleaming...

And a little voice in my head said, it is time to go back to where we used to be, and let's enjoy it...