The Oliviertrilogy Part 1ne (TAFE killing time writing exercise, Jazzy Jims Hip-Hop Remix)

I was having an e-mail conversation today as the clock ticked towards my nightly parole from work about my pet hate for comedians who don't finish their jokes with a punchline but rely on intrinsic familiar whimsy to make a point - for instance the stand up comedian who holds up a copy of a toy magazine from the 80tys, point to say an ad for Wuzzles and can't come up with a more coherent joke than some sort of cor weren't they great Josie Long style fizzler. It's a strange hatred of mine because essentially I'm a bit lazy like that myself, I'm not always through with my thoughts bar I'm crowbarring a story about VHS tracking tapes in the middle of it. I don't always sum up with a pearler, sometimes it's just easier to throw in a reference to Orko and be done with it. I have basically followed the stringent comedy parabola of my time on earth though - where as now whimsy is the new comedy style, when I first moved back to Penguin I was able to thrive through a series of ripped off sub Hicksian routines which basically involved me finding fault in everything and walking around cloaked in misery. Not that I was living the part quite like Bill Hicks, as my main item of clothing was a rather rockingly bright Swedish soccer top with mad orange panels that made everyone go cool top. Yeah, but how many people died making it casual friendly passer by I would think. I was it. It was the searingly cold winter of 1992, and I wasn't really sure of my place in this strange Tasmanian town with it's obsession with overloading you with chips - 50c was enough to feed a family of 28ight - and I certainly wasn't going to try. In keeping with all of my inconsistent approaches over the year to personal presentation, the less I tried to be cool the cooler people found me and then I would think I was cool and then I'd not be cool because I was trying to hard and I'd tell everyone to F off and they'd like me again. And the more that I was unhappy the more things fell into place and became a lot easier for me, because I had a girlfriend, I had places to go, I had a social life and I was free of the weekly humiliation of trying to climb bars and ropes in an Ayrshire gym time and time again while the blue sky outside was engulfed in a horrible grey camoflauge. I was happy but unhappy, lonely but content. I would walk along a street miserable, grunt at passers by wishing me well, and they would like me more. Sadly I couldn't use my position to enlighten people to think themselves, as I really couldn't even manage basic thinking for myself, I just didn't let anyone in on the joke. One day, I was trying to distance myself from popular culture through a dismissive speech while dressed like the drummer from EMF and eating a Push Pop - I mean, who was I thinking I was? Clever? Adulthood only exists to reflect on the folly of youth I think, and if nothing else I've done a lot of reflecting, and most of it just involves me yelling what was I thinking at bemused passing seagulls until they too feel my pain...or want a chip, 1ne of the 2wo...

My Mum, she knew that my poses where no truthful representation of teenage disaffection, has a catchphrase of do you believe that? She uses it all the time, to the point it sticks in my head anytime someone tells me a story, and my natural reaction is to think it's untrue lest I be lead into a folly of belief and be as silly as someone trying to prove their intelligence by hitting their head to dislodge a coin. 1ne day she came to collect me from school because I was ill, and as I stumblebummed my way across the courtyard to her welcoming motherly arms she nudged the person she was standing next to and said in her typical Glaswegian way oh look out here comes fucking Laurence Olivier. Which requires only a brief dissection - she clearly thought I was acting up, like the great thespian of yore, pretending to be ill to get out of school because school was for corporate losers or something. If I had been living the Hicksian doctrine of life she didn't even believe I was Denis Leary. Those cynical Glaswegians, always with their finger on the pulse. And boy when my heart nearly stopped and I collapsed on the pavement was her face red. Ah there's nothing like a near death experience to sharpen the mind. Yes, her wolf crying radar was astray, and I was taken to hospital to confront an early question of mortality. I didn't have a lot of mental strength or indeed physical strength to cope with this sudden shift of events, and to be honest the nurses were a little bit too concerned with filling in charts to listen to flimsily consttructed routines about the corporate society I was forced into by society. I mean they had bedpans to deconstruct. And that was literal deconstruction not....you don't know what true reflection is until you are attached to some machine you were too zonked out on morphine to fully take in the inner workings of. It was only 1ne night, 1ne long night in a ward with a disorientated old grandpa who kept asking for Margaret. Due to my lack of sleep, and my hatred of beeping machines, not to mention brightly painted Burnie hospitals, I had a lot of time to reflect...meandering musings for Margaret had motivated a migraine in any event, so what chance did I have...

4teen, 4teen years of age I was, stuck on a couch at home, sipping soup from a straw watching midday television with celebrities dancing on the screen, somehow less famous than I remembered them when I had moved out of Penguin to the Ayrshire wilderness in the 1st place. No one in the house, hell, no one in the town really, since Mum had decided to make up for her lack of motherly faith by buying me something nice from Burnie. I don't know what could have made up for it really - a walkman would have been a good start. I was under strict bed rest for my illness, although the cheeky nurse who was cheeky in that Benny Hill kind of way before no doubt all the cheeky nurses were rounded up and given a lesson on political correctness seemed to imply my illness was all in my head. I believe her phrase was I was medically perfect. Saucy minx. Lazy eyed bitch more like. 14teen though...I had almost passed on, with nothing to show for my life. I had no more possessions after being stripped of my room in the move than a troll doll and a slightly and oddly homo-erotic photo in 2wo frames my best mate in Scotland had given me of him and me side by side as a farewell present. The morphine had just added to my medicated sense of panic, and I didn't think I could make it off the couch, and this could be my life, a series of lost days and nights on the couch distinguishable only by the variation of the blankets and shawls my Mum would cover me with. To say I was scared was an understatement, and I did't even a cool scar to show for it, just a band aid that may or may not have had a dinosaur on it, the soothing effect of his cheeky grin somehow re-assuring. I was not a resillient boy, I was pampered, an only child, my traumas were things like doing the dishes and not getting kissed at parties. Not this, not the Shawlshank depression. Not a faint humming in my ears, not a virus so strong it had rendered my arms as useless as an Ab King Pro. I spent an entire day watching a bug crawl up a wall, then back down, then back up again...I was tremendously depressed when that bug took a break from it's crawl up the wall to avoid a hard fall onto the shawl...well it was funny on morphine...

It took me a while to get better - oh sure, I got off the couch after a week, but people would tell me things and they'd go straight out of my head, and I couldn't really come to grips with basic requirements of my day to day tasks, like comebacks to insults and things like that. I was definitely shorn of my attitude, my sass, vim, and indeed my vigour. I missed my vigour most of all, that was my trusty sidekick. I was too new at school to get real sympathy about my collapse, though a girl at the window said I fell like an f'n something or other, and I think she did a good impression of me doing so. Besides which I think someone showed their underpants on the monkey bars or someone liked someone so my story didn't gain neither grip nor traction within the circles of influence. I was just some benny who fell over really. It was a little different in Penguin though, where I had acolytes, followers of my story. After all, when the leader topples, the followers can get restless. Which is a massive overstated way of saying some people who thought I was cool were worried about me, but I had not shown these people vulnerability yet. Least of all supercool cynical Vicki my pash buddy, or my stalker who used to watch me get off the bus all the time with rapt awe. Luckily most people were too kind to bring it up, so either they really didn't give a toss or my first theory was right and good old fashioned Penguin reserve kicked it, as we gathered at our 2wo am meeting point in Hiscutt Park to heckle the Milkman, and it was only as we dispersed after 2wo hours of psuedo-intellectual bollocks that Vicki asked if I was scared. Scared? I was terrified woman, I couldn't move, and the nurses...and I'm miles from home, and I have accomplished nothing yet, and...if you guessed that I shrugged and pretended with a curled lip that everything was fine, you'd be absolutely right. She smiled brightly, squeezed my hand, and said she was glad I was better. She then rolled her eyes and shook her head and said she didn't believe me for a minute that I wasn't scared...we parted as the sun came up over Penguin, and a new day began with me sneaking back in through the window trying to pretend I'd had a relapse and getting my arse booted onto the school bus quick smart...

Laurence Olivier? I couldn't manage it...I was fooling no-one...

The 1ne year anniversary post - Progress Part 1ne

When I was about 7even, Penguin, the town where I lived and grew up and learned how to make a lime spider in got a Soapbox, a shop in which all kinds of fancy powdered washing detergent was available in little buckets for you to scoop up with little plastic scoops provided Mrs Benson from Upper Hale St wasn't hogging the scoop. Around about the same time, we got an even more impressive new arrival - the ice cream machine that was allegedly only 1ne of 2wo in the whole world that at the time could take little bits of your favourite chocolate treat or type of nut and mash it up into the ice cream. The possibilities were limitless, I mean who didn't want to imagine what it was like to take a Mars Bar and grind it up into a lump of Vanilla ice cream? I think the mythology that we were only 1ne of 2wo places in the whole world to have this technology might have grown from some kind of weird Chinese purple monkey dishwasher story the denizens of the Dial Arcade were trying to peddle us in the early days of Penguins new shopping mall, but I certainly believed it. I told everyone in the playground of this wonderful technology as if I myself had invented the Death Star or found the mythical Bernard Toohey card for my footy card set. It's fair to say that because I lived in Penguin and went in school in Burnie, which was a tiny bit Palestinia vs Israel but with less actual fighting and more references to what mothers did at night, I was proud of our little town growing and thriving, especially when my auntie opened her tea shop, with the best free fudge sundaes in the world. Yes, it was a heady optimistic mix of soap, crushed nuts and fudge that couldn't be washed off my face with the strongest of facecloths the old Penguin in the mid 80tys. If there was flaws in the place, I certainly didn't see them, buoyed with enthusiasm and patriotic spirit. It's no surprise that 1ne day I stood at the bottom of Mission Hill Road and said that Penguin sure was a beautiful town. Even my cynical Glaswegian mother would surely have to agree that we lived in a wonderland, and if she needed any proof, she could simply hold some of her whiter clothing up to the light and inspect it for stains. One dose of washing powder from the Soapbox would surely be enough to impress even the most dislocated homesick Scot who couldn't let a single comment go without a snappy comeback...

If I was hyped up on the boom time that was progressive Penguin, it was nothing compared to Mr Phillips the friendly newsagent. To the best of my knowledge he was what you might call dating one of Penguins less morally observant Queens Quest contestants, and he was full of local hype and excitement - front of the float when the Fire Engine would sail through the town at Xmas dishing sweets to the kids, down the beach jogging and saying hello to tourists in the morning, a big gregarious fellow with a happy smile. I think he was possibly a little bit loopy on the fumes from his incredibly dangerous heater he kept at the back of his little newspaper selling desk, but anyway, whenever something would be opened or something new would come to town he'd be out the front of the celebration with a big grin and a big stupid jumper. To be honest, I think if I met him now, I'd hate the guy - I'd find his smile insincere and wonder if he was looking over my shoulder to see if someone more important than me was available to talk to and I'd wonder if everyone secretly hated him, but back then I found his fascinating. He was bold, he was loud, he had the run of the entire town, and he was sleeping with a vacuous blonde woman who didn't clog up the relationship with conversation or anything like that - every mid 80tys male dream surely? I figured this would just be my natural progression - I'd grow up in Penguin, marry a local girl, watch the town progress and grow into a mecca, and everything would be fantastic surely? Hell, I was young, what did I know about progress? To me, progress and change was always positive, and who couldn't be excited about staggering technological breakthroughs like the BBC Micro - as for Mr Phillips, the last time I saw him was about a week before we moved into our little flat in Burnie that began the downfall of the worlds own optimist, ie.me, before we moved to Ayrshire. He had some Korean tourists bailed up on the beach and was telling them the colourful history of the Big Penguin while they looked terrified and concerned. I remember thinking how lucky he was that he would see Penguin grow and thrive while I was stuck in a horrible Ayrshire rut, and in doing so completely blocked out that as he turned to say hello to someone else, the Korean couple fled as fast as their legs would carry them, in a completely different direction, maybe heading towards Ulverstone...

Things were different when I moved back though. The teashop was gone, the Soapbox was gone, I presume without being able to accurately recall that other countries and towns had discovered the secret of putting nuts in ice cream by turning a handle. Mr Phillips appeared to have gone AWOL as well, or perhaps the demise of the Soapbox finally sent him over the edge. I don't think I would have been impressed anyway by any of my old pleasures after 4our years of Scotland taught me that everything was pretty much rubbish and enthusiasms were for people asking for a slap. I found that the more bleak and world weary and fatalistic I was when I first moved back to Penguin, the cooler I was and the more popular I became, but I stood for nothing much, and found fault in anything until the act became tiresome. Sometimes I would try and reflect on what had changed in my outlook and why everyone annoyed me so much, but I was just homesick and lonely, and I was hardly unique in being grumpy. I hadn't expected the bubble gum chewing vacancy in the eyes of the girl in the milk bar with the big hair and the pink streak through the middle of the thatch. I hadn't expected anyone in Penguin to feel sad or down because it just didn't compute to my memories of the place. She was down though, she would chew her chewing gum with perfect unmoving arrogance while you waited for a dollar worth of chips. She annoyed me, and I was also annoyed she stole my pose that I thought I'd invented, and every time I went in there we exchanged ever more terse grunts as I tried to show her that I thought life was more horrendous than she did and vice versa. One day in town I saw her getting out of an incredibly fancy car and she was smiling, and I figured when she saw me after a brief period of recognition that she would realise that she had lost, after all she was in a fancy car and giggling and without pose, but when she looked at me I realised then that I was holding a teddy bear in my hand for my pash buddy Vicki, with a Care Bear style love heart on it, and she eyed me evenly and victoriously. It's hard to hold a grunge era disdain for life while holding a big teddy bear and stupid I've just been pashed grin, and she looked triumphant as she smiled at me. I tried to mouth something akin to we'll call it a draw, but it was too late...damn bears...you can never out-run them...

There was a particular shop in the Dial Arcade that wasn't filled for ages - I think it had been a pet shop then a pizzeria then nothing then a shoe shop then nothing again. There were receipts on the floor and it was easy to get into, if you knew how, since it was abandoned and the early 90tys weren't a high point for the security forces in Penguin. The whole town was more or less wide open for slack jawed teenagers to wander around in, finding places to sit and pash and drink, and even the library was easy to get into if you knew how. I only took advantage of this freedom once - we set up for the night, Vicki and I, inside the abandoned shop, on a sort of date while drifters and wanderers shuffled through the place. I had snuck out the window early in the morning just to get there, almost breaking my ankle on the train tracks in haste. I was excited to be honest, there was a thrill involved in lock picking and such like activities to be honest. As it happened, in many ways I had made progress - I had the run of Penguin, I was dating the local, but the surrounds weren't the romantic wonderland I had thought of when I was younger. Unless you count finding 20ty bucks on the floor romantic. We pashed, obviously, because that's what we did, we drank cheap rum and talked a bit, but the excitement of teenage deliquency wore off pretty quickly for me, and I wasn't the big supercool nihilist that I had made out to be - in fact, I was cold and depressed, shivering in an abandoned shop and feeling like I was the only person on earth with this collection of feelings and fears. There was a girl hunched up in the corner when I walked past, and she frankly didn't look well. Vicki was unkind to her and to my concerns, but relented and checked she was OK. She was, I think. I did wonder what Mr Phillips would think about the scene I had wandered into and then out of a little later with a hangover, a scene that I knew I didn't want to wander into again...

It was progress, for sure, but I really did want to just eat an ice cream with nuts...

Sleeping alone in a field

If Moonah through circumstance remains, poetically perhaps, the winter of my discontent, it's probably un-surprising that my happy memories are all pretty much tied to my years living in Penguin, shopping at Cut Price Sams for Bubble O Bills and having really long summers out the back trying not to hit a cricket ball into the pampas grass. I'm aware as I get older that it wasn't Penguin that was so wonderful so much as my youth, and my ability to run around and around in a circle until I fell down if I so wanted. It's probably one of the reasons I don't go back - the family Xmas of 2000 nearly broke the spell and allure and I don't want to do that. Everything I ever learned in life pretty much started in Penguin, fashion, how not to ask for a Golden Gaytime, that when the siren sounds at a football ground you really should come off. To explain that, at 1/4 time in Australian Rules Football you used to be able to walk onto the ground to hear the coaches address to the team. It's where I learned all of my swear words and where I saw the classic 80tys moment of women with paddle pop sticks scraping mud off the players boots. It's also where I heard the Penguin equivalent of I Have a Dream, a coaches speech about netballers and skirts which is still being recited in pubs to this day. We were playing Latrobe, and at 3/4 time, as the crowd dispersed, I probably saw something in the shape of the clouds that I had to study, and as I stood staring up at the sky, the game was held up for about 3hree minutes while I wandered around quite oblivious to the drama, until an announcement had to be made over the PA can that kid get the hell off the ground. That's why I was so happy in Penguin, I could just wander around thinking and playing, without a care in the world. It surprises me sometimes when my Mum sometimes says I was a whinger when I was younger, because I don't remember ever whinging about anything other than the time Joe Brown turned the hose on me or the time they took off Wide World Of Sports and put on some nonsense called Live Aid...I mean who's going to remember that, Peter Gilligan reading the sports, that's what the people will remember...no wonder I went to my room all day, huffing and puffing...

One thing I realise I've lost as I've got older is summer - summer in Penguin was always a fantastic treat. As soon as the last of the board games was packed away and the last school chair was on the last desk, summer began. Even though by modern standards, those summers weren't exactly technologically exciting, since the most exciting advance we had was when it was really warm we could tune in Melbourne TV, it was still fun. There was a little general store around the corner with a KISS make up set in the window - still there in 1992 - which seemed like Willy Wonka to a youngster, given the amount of chocolate that was available, even though in hindsight my description of the owner of the store simply sounded like wonka. By the time I moved back to Penguin after 4our years of living in Scotland, everything seemed incredibly small, including my mind, after a large dose of what you might call the real world - drug dealers at school, that sort of thing - and flint hard Ayrshire cynicism. To my discredit I was horribly snooty about the place even as everyone around me worked overtime to keep my face straight. I was a little bit like Mums friends sisters who picked up the local paper, the Mercury, and bemoaned the lack of news about Scotland when they were here on holiday, and I'm sure that the fact I couldn't find the right kind of bread to toast caused a few troubles, little pains masking life changing despair. The little kid who stood at the bottom of South Road and said Penguin was a beautiful county was long gone, and I think it took a while to rediscover my love of the place. It was the little things that made me rediscover why I liked the place - particular ice creams, friendliness in the newsagents, and probably the tranquility of Hiscutt Park. Once I found my spot - the spot in which I could compose my thoughts - I felt a great deal better about everything. That when I listened to my thoughts, they were poisonous and bitterly homesick, I find that natural, logical and it certainly wasn't Penguins fault...apart from the people who laughed every time you asked for a Golden Gaytime at Alannah Hills Dads Milk Bar...that was entirely Penguins fault...

I admit though that I love people who spend all their time thinking about the old days. Moods are so interchangable that thinking about a glorious past is to cut out all the negative feelings, and focus on how wonderful it was to live in the pre 87 economic bust. There's a pub in North Hobart called The Black Buffalo, where only the barmaids stay young. A man pulling up a bar stool at 40ty can very quickly find himself waking up at 60ty with David Byrne handing him a big white suit and posing some questions. Time stands eternally still, a parade of blonde uni students left to fend for themselves amidst a stream of innuendo and routine from the patrons. To them, to the patrons, it's a mecca, an old fashioned pub, but there's a dining bit attached to it, a big glass room full of wooden furniture and good new fashioned family fun as kids tuck into fish fingers in a basket. Even though only scampi should come in a basket. It's a strange meeting of old school thinking and new school thinking, as manly old men in flannel shirts bemoan a world that they don't understand before heading over to the football to do the whole thing in an entirely new setting. Never breaking from a long established pattern of nostalgic yearning and fast drinking, they must have had a day when the plans for the adjoining family restaurant were unveiled and grumbled about it as more modern thinking. The trouble with nostalgia is it clouds every moment of the present. I had to cut myself short, and still do, when I start muttering about how football was a lot better in my day. An old boy meanwhile is in the corner of the pub, hitting physically one of the computerised betting machines. Disgustedly, he curses in the general direction of the ceiling fan all kinds of curses at modernity as the blonde behind the bar contemplates just how long it will take to finish her degree and get out of there, and a bespectacled barkeep fills in his football tipping and pretends nothing has happened. Our eyes are all drawn towards the simple fact that the betting machine isn't plugged in, but we figure from the craggy drawn lines on his face and the Maurie Fields style way he keeps saying the phrase mongrel that the old boy deserves to let off some steam, and besides, I know tomorrow I'll be stuck in traffic muttering similar curses about how, in my day, we didn't have so many gas guzzling 4WDs, and when I curse, I'm sure I'll miss a gap by which I can accelerate through the traffic...Black Buffalo, warm me up a barstool, I don't get todays modern world, I need the horse and cart to make a comeback...

My Mum used to say when I asked her that the best day of her life hadn't happened yet, a typically Glaswegian response. My best day - concession being so far - was probably some time in the golden summer of 1986. It was the year my trampoline flew down the street in a hurricane and we had to chase it down the road. That trampoline, even with it's ability to electric shock me in a variety of ways, was my crowning achievement in my first 8ight years. A real realisation of a goal, in that I had spent most of my year nagging, cajouling and seeking a trampoline, and then when I got it, I felt like I needed a cigarette, such was the satisfaction I felt at my achievement. That would be a candy cigarette of course straight from that little packet with the drawn on cowboy before a tedious family group got them banned. I had planned an entire summer of doing nothing but bouncing, lying, and then bouncing some more. Before then, one of the nuns organised an end of day softball game, which to me just got in the way of lying on a desk with Sarah playing Operation. Such tedious nunnery was an early example of the nunny state, making people do things like play sport when there were perfectly good board games to play. As it happened, I hit the winning run, off the last pitch of the last action of the school year of the best year I had had to then off the school jock in fading sunlight to general approbation and appreciation before heading off to a blistering summer of excitement. Even though this scene plays out in my head like the dying scenes of Major League, some things don't add up. Was it really a big home run or did I just bunt it and someone else scored? Was it fading twilight or just lunch time? Was it the school jock or the school nerdy girl with hair in a bow and an inhaler who pitched the ball? Do I just remember it all wrong and have elevated it to some magic moment? The last time I was in Burnie, I began to doubt myself, lay down in the middle of my old school field, and decided that whatever the truth, the past didn't have this obsessive desire to video tape every single moment, which made me happy that I could tell my own story how I wanted, and let it stand as a perfect moment. As I said, it's why I don't go back to Burnie or Penguin all that often. As I lay in that field, a janitor began mowing the lawn around me, but I didn't care, I was happy, content, as I always was, and not even Groundskeeper Willie on a Victa was going to disturb a long stream of happy, fantastic memories...

Then I come back to Hobart, and create new memories that for the most part are equally good...I guess you could say things aren't too bad...