Reflections on Melbourne and 3am conversational dogs

So I'm back home, and all is well - I went to Melbourne, no one stabbed me, I didn't roll around drunk and make a fool of myself (well, I did break a toilet door, but that was an accident) and to the delight of everyone I am now home safe and sound. I am annoyed at the nature of time as it seems to be allocated unfairly. Six hours in a hotel room, shut away from the world in a spa listening to Blondie, that goes in about three seconds, but six hours at work, that seems to take twice as long...not fair is it? Melbourne is now getting London like not in the awesomeness of it's shopping but in the veracity and intimidation of it's sales pressure. In the airport, some guy said to me "hey mate, I've got a question for ya!" and then when I didn't respond to his amusing sales pitch was kind of bagging me out to his semi attractive cohort for being rude. I was pursued many times by leaflet givers, who by Melbourne law can't speak to you so they just thrust bits of paper at chin level, and a Big Issue seller with tourettes who after mentioning the publication he was shilling would mutter "ferkcunferk" under his breath, obviously against his will, but it was hardly the warm embrace of K-Tel. By the time a man in Virgin had disrupted my idle flicking through the Hannah Montana back catalogue to try and pressurize me into buying something, I had had enough and just walked off. It's terrible that no one can just walk through a shop without goons hassling them, but there was one person I felt sorry for - no, not the artist/busker with his "I can't afford paintbrushes, give generously" sign, but the guy who was badly dressed as a badly dressed hamburger outside the hamburger store, with one eye to look out of, who was getting kicked up the arse time and time again...I know everybodys gots to make a living, but even with my aversion to sales pressure, I'd have taken his leaflet...then kicked him up the arse...what, it's fun...

I stayed at my friends house in St Kilda - I really like my friend, he's a good guy, but him and his wife are pretty high fliers - they are Qantas and I am Kendall so to speak - and they put this enormous pressure on themselves, like she works about 60 hours a week and for fun is doing a big fancy degree. Sometimes if you go there she's all stressed and you can mistake it for pure frost, but I'm oblivious, I just watch my Disney films (the one this morning was awesome, it was about two twins who played bask...um...I'll shut up now) and don't worry about her. It's a form of understanding. However, since I last went over there, and I haven't been there since the wedding with Daniel Giansiracusa and so on, they now have a dog, and after about five minutes, I kind of worked out why they have a dog. It's to fill in awkward gaps in their conversation. I really believe that they struggle for things to talk about - it's not that they don't get on, it's just they are funny in their ways, in the middle of an argument they call each other honey and sweetheart. I imagine their conversations are quite intense and edgy, so to break the ice, they go "Oh, look, the dogs eating my shoes! Awwww!" - so the dog, like Maddox Jolie, has to stay cute, or they will replace it with another dog that breaks the ice in times of stress. My family has a strict policy against dogs being taken in as part of the family and spoken to as if they are human - Mums friends Dad has a dog who apparently likes to eat it's dinner at one house and it's breakfast at the other, as if it's a restaurant critic - and my friends wife was having a go at my friend for not cooking the dogs chicken "as the dog likes". As I looked over at the dog, the dog was making mincemeat out of a coathanger, so I'm guessing the dog isn't that fussy there kiddo. However, I realised in the morning that, in fairness, I had begun filling in little gaps in the conversation by referencing the dog...oh did I mention the dog was so funny, he bit my finger, oh how amusing...and it was actually a lot better than having to talk to her about her DVD she had on, The Hills (Adam Hills wasn't in it) or her listening to my thoughts on Britney. Incidentally, the dog jumped on my bed at 3 in the morning, not the first time I've slept with a dog...am I right folks! Am I...is this thing on?

I tend to find with my friends, as long as I can stick to non controversial topics and kind of steer the conversation onto general matters, I'm OK - I'm very good at ignoring fights and flare ups - however, what I do find is that when my friends start relationships, I do more talking to their partners than they do, and it's kind of odd. None of my friends have been in super healthy relationships - at least, so says the guy who's main relationship with someone involved me playing ATARI a lot more than talking about feelings. The friend I stayed with, when I stayed there during their wedding week, was packing his suitcase for the honeymoon and she was taking clothes out and throwing them on the floor, and sort of passive-aggressively saying "Come on now sweetie, don't take that" - I couldn't live like that, and this morning they were arguing about whether a shirt was washed. Luckily, at this point, the dog, as if trained, began cutely chewing a hairbrush and diffused any kind of tension - that dog needs it's own sitcom. What I should mention at this point though is that my friend, he kinda sorta maybe had a girlfriend when he was engaged and maybe kinda sorta got busted and now he rots in purgatorial hell for the rest of his life, engaged in arguments about trivialities knowing that the subtext to every argument is still you cheated on me and I took you book so I have the moral high ground - it might be a conversation about the washing, but there's definitely a moral high ground that has been established. I just don't know why you'd want to live like that, spending every single day on edge and communicating through a pet - maybe it's just me, I mean, they look happy away on holiday together, but they put themselves under so much pressure I just worry about the quality of their lives at times. And to be honest, especially with her, I don't think having a visitor sitting on the couch loudly bagging out the state of todays popular music scene helps (although if the dog chews my fingers, maybe that helps?)...

Anyway, they don't know I gave the dog a big boot up the arse for it's cheek, so keep it to yourself. Now, to get back to the subject of sales pressure, there was a kind of sadness to one aspect of Melbourne sales pressure - the hookers are out on the streets at about 10 in the morning. It's the kid of urban nightmare we don't have in Tasmania, big urban developments left to decay and rot, big unfilled shopping centres full of broken down hopes and piles of rubble, with bong shops that sell hardcore heroin and hookers on the corner, large women pulling their underpants out of their skirts as you get the tram into town, or skinny bewildered women being watched by up to five pimps as she stands on the corner. Maybe we do, and I haven't noticed. In fact, the only obvious hooker I ever saw in Hobart was the one handing out leaflets to the soldiers off the boat. I still wish I'd got one of those leaflets. Anyway, the whole thing was incredibly and quite desperately sad and sleazy, at any time, never mind at ten in the morning. However, what was interesting was that at night when we walked back from the pub, after a man, a man who looked suspiciously like Brett Climo, not that it was, but just saying, had rather timidly and somewhat awkwardly picked up a hooker in his 1974 Honda Civic and drove off, the car was tailed by an imposing and dangerous black Lincoln style car, which obviously and clearly was the pimp making sure his prized asset wasn't in any danger. Or maybe he was off to steal Brett Climos wallet. I don't really have any moralising to do about people who pick up hookers, I mean I never have, but it does some awfully sad and heartbreaking when you see it at that basic level with hookers standing outside day care centres with people pushing prams past them. So while I don't pretend to fully understand the motivations of Brett Climo, the whole scene did make me homesick for Kingston, where our major danger isn't pimps and hos, but the price of a big of Werthers Originals at Coles going up and up and up...

Me? I was inside the pub unable to chat someone up I fancied because they were part of a hens party, and it's a fundamental rule you can't crack a hens party, but that's a story for another day...

Fashion

Yesterdays post about sales pressure probably made me sound like a paranoid old grump, but I was thinking about it today, and I went into Cash Converters, and three people were converging to watch me and make sure that I wasn't stealing 2nd hand copies of the American Hi-Fi album or pressure me into buying a copy of Meatballs. I wasn't quite sure, but it was really horrible. The proportion of staff in the store to me seems a little high at 3:1, especially in a hovel of a 2nd hand store. Cash Converters where I work is pretty horrible, and has a funny smell in it. I can't imagine what possesses people to shop there, never mind steal anything - I was only in there to try and find a copy of Eat Your Peas, the old Martin/Molloy album - or cause havoc in the cassette aisle.

There's not really a lot to say about Tasmanian fashion. I don't think there are many Anne Maree Cooksleys wandering around Hobart waiting to be discovered, not too many high fashion stores full of expensive designer clothes. Most people think everyone in Tasmania wears flannels and slippers to begin with, so why worry? The reason I wanted to write about fashion is because there's an advert on the radio that makes out the Spanish and Italians are better than the Tasmanians because they spend a lot of money on clothes. Now, I'm no oil painting, or Leilani Kai if you will, but I know that when I come back from London with, say, an expensive T-shirt (my Colombia Records T-shirt was the worst) no one is going to give a toss here in Hobart, and there's something quite re-assuring, and indeed cheap about that. To give you an example, there's a really, really, really hot girl who works behind the bar at Central (you know who she is) and one day, I saw her in JB Hifi, and she had on pink fluffy slippers and a purple T-shirt and tracksuit just happily flicking through the CDs. Had she been in London, I think she'd never have gone out to HMV in anything that cost less than a grand, but in Hobart, there's nowhere to spend a grand, so why bother? I know that as long as I have jeans on, that's all the effort I need to put in. The problem is, I'm completely out of shape - maybe if I looked a bit more like Todd Sampson, fashion would make me look better - and I know that if I wear a baseball cap I look like I've got a terminal illness, if I wear flash sunglasses they look stolen...

My favourite fashion store in Hobart, and I don't know if it's still open, is the semi legendary African Delights. It's probably my favourite store because of one of the most hilarious radio ads in the history of the world, as two middle aged white guys discuss "do rags" and where one of the wiggers got his "bling", and of course, he got it at African Delights, Hobarts official home of "homeboy gear" (as opposed to those thousands of bootleg stores full of basketball tops from the Burstin Celtics). I love people wearing homeboy gear, especially incredibly white pasty gentlemen who hang around outside Subway dissing bitches and less fly boys than themselves. I'm always really impressed that in Tasmania, Subway is the official meeting point for homeboys, because bling wearers gotta eat healthy y'all. I don't wear any bling, but I bought a Pittsburgh Penguins hockey shirt in Burnie, and I thought that the old people were eyeing me suspiciously. I couldn't go much further though in my homeboy career, as I am amazingly white, in fact the only album I owned at that time was the Lisa Loeb album on cassette, and I bought it from a girl in a record shop in Burnie in a pink T-shirt with a photo of her puppy on it. I can think of a few less black scenarios, but not many...even The Cosby Show is less black than two white people talking about Lisa Loeb...

Of course as I mentioned before, the peak of Hobart Fashion is a mention in Attitude, the Hobart Mercury rather poor equivalent of Hit Magazine in the Herald Sun. There was a very large, very angry Aboriginal girl in the middle of the mall back in the days when the mall was a trouble spot, and she basically ran the whole mall. Her fashion style was simple - she wore black, and she wore it angrily. She even yelled at Dancing Man one day. And she got in Attitude as a style icon. In Hobart, as long as you are vaguely attractive, you can pretty much set your own fashion agenda, no one really cares. Sandals with socks? Dressing entirely like June Jones? Ugh Boots and a puffy jacket? Sorted. The only ever dispute I had with fashion living here is from a night out at Customs. A hot girl had the same jumper as me and she was allowed in and I wasn't - why did we have the same top on? I have no idea, but it was pretty obvious that we were at a beautiful/ugly impasse. There was nothing between us except our faces, and she had an advantage. I like Customs, but this was one time where they even outdid the violence of Syrup or the vomit ban of Irish. In the end, I got in after one of my friends threatened to go to the papers, and she ended up spewing in the toilets for about 3 hours after eating a dodgy prawn while her friend said "she'll still be right to root later".

Fashion may go out of style, but class, it never does...

Sales Pressure

When I go and see if blue eye shadow girl is working (she was today, she looked lovely and happy) I always make sure to avoid the book section. This is, as I said before, because there's an old woman there with glasses who seems to spend twenty four hours a day, seven days a week working with her book mobile to restock the bookshelves. This means that if I was to pick up a book, she would probably ensure that I couldn't read it, glance at it or even pick it up without picking up on it and saying something like "wow, must be a good book!" - I really hate sales pressure in a store, you know when someone in a store makes sure you are buying not browsing, and it means that I will never go into that store again. Which is weird because my glorious job in the bank I'm constantly pressured to sell, sell, sell, so maybe I just don't like it in real life. I hate anyone trying to sell me anything, and I don't care how rude it appears. Yesterday was the pits. I was walking through the shopping mall and this woman went "Hi! I was just waiting for you! Like you were for me! What's your name!" - I just kept on walking. She was from the WWF (not the organisation my beloved and beautiful Leilani Kai wrestled for, the panda one) and it just so awful and cheesy, it really annoyed me. Unless she really was chatting me up, in which case...never mind. What kind of future would we have - throwing red paint on animal haters? No thankyou.

The worst store for sales pressure here in Tasmania, apart from JBHIFI chasing people trying to watch the football out, has always been Angus and Robertson in Hobart. I suppose the one thing you can say about them is at least they are subtle about it, and I suppose it is very annoying that people are looking at magazines with Ana Ivanovic on the front and then leaving without buying so much as a piece of crepe paper or a highlighter. However, how they do it, whether you are in the bookstore or the newsagent part, is to suddenly appear, almost but not quite push you out of the way, and then start stocking the shelves right next to you and almost pressing against your elbow until you leave. It's really awkward and uncomfortable, more than you would know unless you've gone through it. And they never send the attractive staff, it's always the the oldest staff or the mingers or fat blokes they send. I remember (and I apologize for this) when I was about 16, I bought a Playboy (I'd like to think it was irony) and the woman audibly grunted in disgust. Way to make feel me less self conscious. That's probably real sales pressure, when you take a magazine up to the counter and they don't want to sell you it, they'd rather you bought something else. It must be a newsagency thing - my local newsagent where I work actually will come and put magazines around you in plastic as a demonstration that magazines are for buying, not reading. I hope Blue Eye Shadow Girl doesn't do this...

At Melbourne Airport, the worst job in the entire world has to be being the guy who has to shout at people to try and get them to buy credit cards. This is sales pressure where I feel sorry for the person who has that job, and not just annoying sales pressure like the girl at Guess What puts on you just because she's annoying and wants you to leave so she can get back to New Idea and her Kit Kat. It must be a terrible job to yell at people as they go down a concourse, with harassed kids and luggage that hasn't arrived, to try and get them to sign up for an AMEX card. At least the girl who yells at people to offer them free wine has a gimmick - free wine. This guy doesn't even have a free pen to offer people. I can imagine him psyching himself up in the changing area, taking deep breaths, trying to convince himself that today, if he's really on song, he can sell one, just one credit card. I actually spent some of my unemployed time (when I wasn't sleeping with a netballer and watching daytime TV) pissing around on a course that was going to teach me how to sell knives and the people at this course got really, really fired up by the motivational host, and were actually chanting "sell, sell, sell!" - I did too, in fairness, because it meant I got a paycheck that I got to spend on gifts for her, but I wondered how these people were so conned. You were going to sell knifes door to door? Safely? And make millions? Yeah, and I'm dating Jodie Low...

I've mentioned before about the park in Penguin and how after dark before they cleaned it up you could pretty much get anything you wanted from drugs to hardware from the local "youths" - however, in Burnie, it was the opposite, the sales pressure in the park came from people trying to take things off you, the local muggers. That's a pretty extreme form of sales pressure, people trying to take your wallet off you. Burnie wasn't rough by any means, but it had a large, winding track that had no lights at all, perfect for your workaday mugger, pressuring you into selling your wallet or wedding ring, with none of the charm of the local Penguin kids. I remember seeing someone mugged at Carols by Candelight, the last place you would expect anyone to get mugged. Friendly carollers, school kids with candels, probably a performance by Julie Anthony, and knife crime. Don't they all go together? I saw this guy try and mug a woman for her purse but thankfully for everyone, he didn't get it, and I swear the reason he didn't get it was because people who were walking past stopped and went "Awww...don't" and he was all "Shut up" and trying to look menacing and they were all "Come on, it's Xmas!" and he just sort of wandered off bored and a bit bewildered. In the end, he just wasn't good at putting sales pressure on - he'd have lasted one day selling credit cards at the airport...

You don't think he got the knife though off a knife selling course do you?