Susannah Hoffs teaches us about professionalism

So I'm in Melbourne at the moment - hence anyone who thought my brain had overloaded from too many paragraph related constructs. It's funny though how life continues to turn and turn in ever decreasing circles - I'm back in the same dodgy Internet cafe with the same dodgy piles of boxes marked "box" which could contain anything but allegedly contain water. I am over to see the Bangles and am pleased to say that they were great, although it was a little awkward when Ms Hoffs had to do Eternal Flame, as due to Bangles related reasons she didn't want to do it. However, she did do it, although Debbie had to help her, so it was good to see some old fashioned professionalism. The girl who was screaming for "IN YOUR ROOM!" all night got mixed up on the way to a Toni Pearen concert (not really, but ya know). Luckily, Mrs Kim from the Gilmore Girls has shoehorned me into a corner of a little Internet cafe jammed right up against the dodgy boxes, so in a raid, I'm probably in danger of being carted off as evidence. I'm struggling today, not from drinking, but because everywhere I've gone has had some severe sales pressure in every single shop. Not least of all Rebel Sports, where picking up a Melbourne Victory top to have a look at the price has been akin to being Ronnie Biggs. Oh well, at the Bangles concert, God served me up another kid in a wheelchair to make me reflect on my life (thanks again Jeebus) - and even though I was distinctly left wing and right on and unhappy to be at a casino owned and promoted by a multi national corporation and a government that profits on the failings of others (sister), the good news is, I won twenty bucks on a blackjack table so...um...don't...er...oh well, the woman who was penning me into this tiny seat has just left, so I can breathe again, so that's muted my moral outrage...now if someone could just take away these boxes (security)...

However, what I want to write about today is someone else at the concert, Sophie, the back up guitarist for Monique Brumby (who I always, always get mixed up with Deborah Conway - you never see them together), the support Bangle. Sophie was extremely young, extremely attractive, and yet, completely in the wrong band. Deb..sorry, Monique, isn't the rock chick that Sophie should be supporting, as she continually went to rock out with her guitar, coming to the front of the strage to rock out with her fender thrust forward, only for Monique to tone it down and then sort of go off on a folky bleh styling, leaving Sophie to strum alone and go back to her vodka with a slight air of discontented melancholy. Luckily for Sophie, she's still quite young, and go into another direction, but she did make me think about doing a job that you don't want to do, and doing your best, something I palably fail to do on a daily basis, but she was able to do quite drunkenly well. I'm not a good worker, and there's that sort of thing in your head about "oh why do a job you hate!" but it's easy and you don't work weekends, and if you can just get through the day without too many angry people, it's...well, it's still terrible, but you cope as best you can. We had a girl at work who couldn't do that though, she had a massive nervous breakdown in our lunch room. Me, sympathetic to the end, was mostly concerned that she cried on my Herald Sun, but the reason for her crying was that she couldn't get her name badge on. She tried and tried, and couldn't work out the complicated physical principles of magnet to cloth, and in the end threw her badge across the room, almost hitting a kid on the way out, and then we found her in the lunch room, staring blankly at a piece of tomato in her sandwich, and muttering something about all the people who wouldn't stop coming in...still, she was professional in one sense, her sandwich was very, very, very neatly cut, which I'm not suggesting was some kind of psychotic sign, some people just like their sandwiches in incredibly isometric triangles all of precisely the same length and style....

However, there was also a sort of showbusiness logic to Sophies choices (nice) of band to join - good experience and all that, and at least she can improve her station in life. There's a minorly well known actress down here in Tasmania who I won't mention - she's the kind of person you see third billed in a playhouse theatre remake of a saucy farce, you know the kind - who I went to school with. I was in her drama class, and because I was reasonably good at improvising things (that is, I could do all the work) she was always seeking me out for her group. She would tell me that she was studying drama quite intensely and she was working hard on her own script. I found that quite inspirational her passion, and sometimes it almost rubbed off on my nervous, adolescent teenage self, almost inspiring me to sit down and try and write something on my little 1994 IBM computer with it's warp processing speed and Sensible soccer game loaded on, ready to play. She was a method actress - whatever she was required to play, she would methodically ruin it, but still, she was intense and committed to improving. Then, when I moved to Hobart, I saw the quality of plays she was in, and thought, well, I'm sure it's just a matter of her waiting for her big break, she has a dream, at least she's doing what she loves...that was, until I was sitting at a Grand Final luncheon, and out came a series of actresses, dressed as different things, and there she was, dressed as a big baby to symbolise someone spitting the dummy as a player had that year...as she announced to everyone that she was a widdle baby, I'm sure she clocked me, I'm sure she knew who I was, but she never broke character, she focused on what she had to, but there was no doubting that her moment had passed...and so had her dignity, as she had to sit on the panellists knees...a skill I'm sure they teach endlessly in the Stanislavsky method...

Of course, showbusiness is a cruel and fickle game - the number of bewildered, bedraggled and confused singers, buskers, and performers I've seen demean themselves across the world has long confused me - why do it? I know it's a living, but I kind of admire their dedication. When I was growing up in Penguin, we had all manner of people wander through the school, singing, performing, being the Wilderness society bear, and not one of them let their standards slip...except one...in about, oh, 1986 (we didn't have no Internet...) the biggest and best thing you could possibly own was a Coca Cola gold Yo-Yo. You got this by being part of the duped corporate masses (I've read too much Naomi Klein) and sending in 12 tokens from Coca Cola cans. Now, in spite of the seeming random nature of this dispersement of yo-yos, it still seemed to fall to the cooler kids to have the right to own these yo-yos (and me, since my Mum generally was quite a dedicated collector of tokens) and we would spend literally minutes a day perfecting tricks like round the world and walk the dog and the really popular trick of yo-yo goes down to the ground then back up to your hand - one day though, we were visited by the Coca Cola Yo-Yo trick team - now, there is a very good chance I've exaggerated this story in my head, that they weren't actually Americans or anything, and just a random bunch of bogans from Natone who were scouted Jim Henson style from the school playground, but in my head, they were Americans, world champions and were going to show us how to rock, yo-yo style...at least, that was the plan, and in fact what happened was about ten seconds in, one of the guys tried to do an around the world, which involves making the yo-yo go in a circle, and absolutely conked himself in the head with it. It made a seriously dull thud, and it definitely rattled him, and he was unable to continue to the high standards of the team...it might be an urban legend, but some say if you listen really closely, you can still hear his plaintive, haunting cry across the primary school playground..."Oh me fucking head..."...cascading over the hills with a beautiful clarity...

Dignity, professionalism, class and beauty...Susannah Hoffs, you have so much to teach us...and the yo-yo community...

The bewilderness and the Diamond

So a nothing day today, no humourous Asians, no cantakery, no e-mails, in fact the kind of day that at the end of your life you are supposed to realise you wasted in some sort of death bed moment of clarity - there's a great mythology about the wasted day as if you should have leapt up in the morning and driven to, I don't know, bungy jump, but everyone knows some days you just can't be arsed. This kid on TV said the good thing about Nathan Buckley was he always tried his hardest when "the chips were up" - that was about the best thing out of today. That and my Dad telling Mum on the phone that "Jim" Henson (not Bill, Jim) had been busted going around schools scouting for underage nude models with dickie bow wearing Dads who love art. I did go to school with several muppets, but Jim was never in the playground. It was also one of those days where you have many conversational avenues that really go nowhere. One of my friends basically told me I was a big fan of Gabriella Cilmi, and I told him I wasn't, until we realised we were arguing about someone who in 5ive years time will be as culturally relevant as Collette. What did amuse me was there was a promotion for Curleys Bar (the pain) and their new DJ, and you should have heard some of the nonsense musical terms they were using for his set - "electro crunk and macro beats" - the hell? I know more about contemporary music than anyone, and trust me, if they are plugging "thumping macro beats", no one knows what that is, and the guy will just play a longer remix of Rihannas Disturbia...I hate that song, "Disturbia, am I scaring you now!", er, no, the ghost tunnel at the Marist fete scared me more than you Rihanna, and that was just Grade 8s with silly string...yep, pretty pointless day in all, gonna regret it on my death bed for sure...

Speaking of my Dad, I've recently worked him out, and what he's all about. To all intents and purposes, he's a bit of an amiable old duffer, not some sort of shambling pork pie wearer, more a kind of I've got my routine and I'm not breaking it kind of guy. Him and Mum don't go out that much as a couple, because it would disrupt his timing when it came to cooking (MCs like a pound of) bacon (sorry for the random Vanilla Ice reference, but it was totally worth the edit) at exactly 6:42. He once said to Mum that they couldn't go out for breakfast on a Sunday because it was "boiled egg day". And he has passed on a fantastic legacy to me - a love of an afternoon nap. He's also famous for sitting in a chair not paying any attention to the conversation like white fuzzy noise is going through his head (this nearly had bad consequences when he had his minor heart attack...funny story...) and then sort of going "Oh, were you talking to me?". Now all this is fine, as he has his little life and his amusing foibles like, well like Jim Henson and like his complete inability to dance - but something sinister is going on, and I'm amazed it's just come to light now. His bewilderness, it's entirely fake and fraudulent. I realised something was up when I was talking to him about something like Dale Thomas (Collingwood show pony) and his inability to make a tangible career for himself, and he kind of spun around like I hadn't been there and said "were ye talkin tae me?" - I know he was listening to me, because he stopped his crossword when I approached and shifted to the left, and that's when I realised he was just faking, he just wanted me to go away. My Mum has busted him for this before, mostly for "Ye jist stand around looking stupid until somedae does it for ye" (in relation to the way if, say, he can't open a box, he 1/2 arses around until someone snaps the box open for him) but I was really quite surprised I'd never noticed it before, the cocoon of amiable dufferness was all a fraud, the jester playing out the third confused act before me...I was so hurt, so apalled, that while he was pretending he didn't see me, I nicked one of his Twixes...and I know he saw that...

As it happened, I should have realised this before - Dads family is pretty nutty. Out of his whole family he speaks to one sister, the other one he spoke to having buggered off somewhere about two years ago, never to be seen again (last we heard she was dating Rangers reserve goalkeeper from 1973). So he probably got off lightly with a minor streak of insanity relating to pretending not to notice people. His sister worries me, the one he does speak to. She now lives in a big flat in Glasgow which is staggeringly filthy with about, like 6 rooms, 3 of which are completely empty, and the other three split between her, her ex husband and her son. When Dad and I went to visit them last though, they steadfastly and categorically refused to let us into the living room. No idea why, we had a suspicion possibly they had had their furniture taken away or lost in gambling debts, but all five of us had to go into her room, her bedroom, a tiny room with filthy dog hair matted chairs, and yes, the five of us had to share the room with her two massive dogs. Categorically, and somewhat unusually for her, she would not under any circumstances tell us anything about her life (she was going into hospital, dunno what for, but we only knew because it was the excuse to keep us away), which considering she usually bigs up her kids as if they were the Veronicas, was really creepy. Instead, she made stilted awkward conversation about American Idol, particularly about the Neil Diamond episode. Now, I'm not a Neil Diamond fan (ooh get you, aren't you cool, what blog boy, he's not as good as Miley Cyrus?) but I did happen to mention Neils Crunchy Granola Suite, mostly to keep the conversation going, which I only knew because it was often a Tony Martin reference point on The Late Show. She went palpably mental with excitement though, since I'd given her a conversational out to make the day easier, and every second sentence was about Crunchy Granola. No matter what we tried to talk about, it was back to Neil on the TV or some sort of "Oh there's NOT a song called that!" reference and some creepy fake laughter. That was when the dogs weren't doing tricks to pass the time. I don't know if Neil Diamond has ever been used as a desperate please God don't ask us about our lives conversational crutch, but I think he'd be pretty proud of it if he knew, probably writing a song about it...but it was a bewildering, bizarre day, and by the time we escaped (and they escaped us) we were all relieved to go back to our own worlds (ours revolving around train station chips and gravy)...still, his sister did make a mean toastie...

Thinking about this day, and the complete lack of conversational impact, it often makes me think about my own life and how I present myself. I've had my share of mad moments (by, oh, November 2009 this blog should have covered most of them) and irrationality, but nothing as strange as a grown woman talking about Idol in a room no bigger than a cupboard, with a locked living room and dogs given the run of the house. I think my Mums side of the family, level headed Glaswegians of the "yer talkin shite" plain speaking school, watered down most of my mad tendencies before they got really out of hand. I just think though it's a lot easier sometimes to talk about music or art or literature instead of actually saying something that has an immense amount of impact - I've got this mate, he's a fairly straightforward kind of guy, likes his beer, loves his parents, unless he has a girl locked up in his basement that we don't know about he's a regular every day guy. A few years ago he got fixated on this girl called Connie, and I think she kind of liked him to, and that was great, except they couldn't (like me with blue eye shadow girl I think) just go and say, look, I like you, let's go out...one night they were both out, not together, but they saw each other across the metronomically swinging beating dancefloor of Syrup nightclub. I was probably not let in on account of my T-shirt looking vaguely like a soccer top...again. What I do know is, it was his chance, his chance to tell Connie he loved her, his chance to really say something meaningful, poetic, insightful and above all else true. He looked her in the eye, she looked at him with a cute and lustful smile, and he said something that would resonate in her heart forever. "So," he said, "that new R Kelly single...it's...good isn't it?" - and she said yes, and that was it, the moment lost, the initiative unseized as they slunk off in different directions...his head lost in the eternal bewilderness that is every day living...

And yes, as you would have gathered, had he mentioned Neil Diamond, they'd still be together...maybe without furniture though....

Jeebus comes to Georgetown - Adventures in Tasmanian 80s Religion

The Salamanca Asians appear to have left, at least for the time being, replaced by cheaper sockier vendors and a girl with the uphill task of selling big aqua containers of water to passers by. My work mate spent the entire day trying to tell me some gossip about why another girl we worked with never got married when she was supposed to, but I'm not into gossip at the moment. She looked a bit deflated that I didn't take on board the conversational path and try and join in with some trash talk. I ended up in the despairing pit of hopelessness that is Rosny library - there's not the mini soap opera around the Internet usage, or the flirtacious single mothers using slightly out of date words like "radical" and "dude" to roll back the years as they flirt with the terminally hopeless and unemployable (oh, 1999, where did the time go?) - instead there's a group of seemingly dis-satisfied and slightly irritable old men who seem to do nothing but print bits of papers and forever fail to work their e-mails. The library in my home town in Scotland, it was always partially shut down for seniors Thursday, with the old folks approaching a computer as cavemen must have once discovered fire. I must admit, it is greatly bewildering to me I've used computers my whole life - right from the glory days of being able to loan the BBC Micro from Penguin Primary (represent y'all) and once putting in as my high score on a game of Grannys Garden "Sick Bastard!" and getting told off by my Mum. She actually played the game until she had got enough high scores to wipe Sick Bastard from the record books, and suddenly computers seemed incredibly lame. Given the rivalry between me and the Aborigine in Kingston library back in the old days, the rivalry to get any spare computer, we would usually hover around the pensioners, knowing that any moment, they would give up trying to find the "C" key and go and do something productive involving a poker machine, and we would be free to pounce...such is the horrible state of mind you get into when you have nothing to do, so gripped with madness, that you think the 10 minutes you don't spend reading your e-mails might be when you miss something amazing...usually you just missed the Nigerian royal family asking for a bank account.

I found something really interesting in one of my old 1983 North West Coast football records. Something I really didn't expect to see - an invitation to go and learn and study the Ba'hai Faith...in Zeehan. Now, the reason I find this amazing is because it takes some pretty big stones to have thought in 1983 Tasmania that a completely different religious and philosophical lifestyle (to the only two religions I ever knew growing up in Penguin, "I believe in Jesus" and "who can be arsed") could be taught to the people of Zeehan. Without wanting to generalise, these are people who are still getting over the loss of Mello Yello, never mind attempting to find the answers to lifes big questions. This might just be a generalisation. When I was in primary school, we had this kid at school called Paul, nice kid, but definitely not the brightest. Religious studies on the NW Coast were all pretty basic - we didn't have to question too many of lifes major questions like where are we heading and why are we here, if you could pick Jesus out of a line up and spell Mary, you were pretty OK. One day in religion, we were doing something pretty different (I went to a pretty different school, they encouraged emotional connections and crying if you felt like it, which went over really well in Scotland) like, I don't know, carving an incense candle or something, when Paul tapped one of our classmates on the shoulder. He looked genuinely upset, and it wasn't just because his candle looked all wrong (I don't think candles are square and have a fifteen foot wick, that'd be a bomb surely?) - he looked at his text, looked at the candle then out the window. "I just found out something" - we feared the worst, Pauls mother had been poorly, or drunk, not quite sure, but as he clutched us to his confidence, he said softly..."Jesus...Jesus is dead?" - the solemnity in his voice was definite, and since I was 9 I hadn't even got to questioning the fundamental philosophical imperative in his question, and since Paul was a man to call a Jesus a Jesus, we dealt in the strictly literal. Yes, Jesus is dead, we said, and left him to his freaky ACME quality candle...until he tapped another classmate on the shoulder and said "...and the donkey too?"

I've mentioned before my commitment to my chosen religion, Catholicism, which is only now practiced by Celtic supporters in Scotland, waned one fateful day in about 1987 when a nun told me to shut up during a mass, and then went me outside Star of the Sea. Plus, when I was at Sunday school one day, a wasp stung me, so that's a plague like sign right there. However, I have taken communion. My first communion was a great event for me - I got a big giant kick arse medal, about a hundred backs, and all the Mello Yello a small boy with a poorly constructed spike could drink. However, that's only half the story. My Mum and Dad were really pumped that I was getting communion, and decided that I had to earn my little bit of plasticy tasting wafer and bitterly constructed (like the nun) red wine. So, my spike was scrubbed from history (no bad thing) and replaced by a sensible haircut. If you loved shiny shoes, I was the boy for you, as a small orphan boy was set to work shining them until you could see his withered face. And most of all, I was shoehorned into my first suit, a snappy black number with a red tie that probably spun or shot water or something. In fairness, I looked a treat - the problem was, this was Burnie, and while I wore my suit of few colours, everyone else turned up in tracksuit trousers, ripped jeans or sparkly pink tops. That is, everyone except this girl called Jenny, who's parents were like mine, and had dressed her up in a white gown with a veil and given her a bouquet of flowers to carry and a very fetching silver necklace. So yes, we looked like we were getting married - in fact, one of my friends said something akin to that, and yes, he was told to shut up by the same nun, further hardening my opposition to the rituals and protocol of the Catholic church. As we all gathered for a photo in the rain in the glamorous setting of the Star Of The Sea car park, I remember my Mother having a pop at the Nun and saying she had no class...I was dying to jump in with "your in a miserable habit" joke, but it would have been lost in the drizzle, and I moved on quietly, off with Jenny to our honeymoon in Georgetown...

I didn't have a defining break with the church or anything, just basic questioning of facts and that kind of thing. Aside from a brief prayer when my uncle was ill, the only time I've set foot in a church since that day was in 1993, into a Protestant church in Kilwinning in Scotland no less (dun dun dun) for a christening. I would have no recollection about this, except for THAT woman, as we call her in our family. A woman who got up and began, in the middle of the christening to talk about her charity work in Southern India, and only finished after 2 hours and 10 minutes of non stop talking. No one could shut her up - my auntie was desperate for a cigarette and when a kid started crying she said "throw the kid to me! I need out!". The woman took us through the west, east, south and north corner of her quarters in intimate detail, and then, just when the square was complete and we were as familiar with Ranjeet as his own rice provider, she began talking about how she got to work on the bus, and detailed every bump in the road. At which point the organ player fell asleep. When she stopped talking, the organ player woke up and played "For the Benefit of Mr Kite" in sheer joy. Even the hardcore regular protestants were getting the hump after about an hour, but for some reason, we didn't just leave. When we finally escaped, fleeing like kids let out of school, she was handing out leaflets for a more detailed talk she was giving that night, at which point a man said to her "whit mair can I learn about thae kids? Whits in their shites?" - a fair and succinct point. It's instilled a sort of rabid terror in me, that if I step into a church, I might never get to leave, that another guest speaker is ready to trap me with, I don't know, stories about Ecuador that never seem to end. Whenever I drive home, I go past a massive sign that says "Come and coffee with Jesus!" and as fond as I am of a sign with a ! in it, and coffee, and however tempted I am to go into that coffee session and ask "Is Jesus dead?", I can't bring myself to do it...she might be there, bewildering and confusing a poor hapless organist...

So I keep driving, driving home to my secret stash of Mello Yello...don't tell anyone from Zeehan...

The rules and regulations of Ayrshire society

Someones calling me darling - I'm listening to Ayria on my IPOD, and I'm drifting into a slightly hungover state, idly choosing between different brands of bottled water sprung from the same tap, settling on the familiarity of one I've tried before, hearing my Dad in my head going me for my stupidity. She's calling me darling like she knows me, smiling at me, telling me where the two dollar coin I dropped is, asking me what I want to order, I don't know, and she drops the pretence, she's tapping her pen and losing patience, and I still don't know, but I'm standing my ground. There's no one else in the queue, her queue, but she's still awkward, folded, impractically impatient, not even filling in the silence with some idle dusting. In the end, I order pancakes, and out the corner of my eye, I see her fade, tired, sick of everything, peering over glasses, sick of taking orders, tired of her job, the same expression I give every day. I take my order number and go, leaving her to pound on the desk as I probably do. I walk into the open air and take a seat, uncomfortable that the Jam Factory is a place that mixes such tired impatient grumpiness with Jordin Sparks music, poorly spaced tables and faintly undercooked pasta. The table waitress almost falls over trying to squeeze herself through tiny gaps between the tables, and all around me, people are discussing art, literature, pretencious holidays that take up entire seasons...we're talking about Dale Thomas and how much I hate him at the moment. I'm uncomfortable, and I leave quickly. On the way back, a woman is taking pictures of the seagulls. She smiles and tells me how wonderful Hobart is - I summon up the local pride to lie, to say it sure is, but I'm confused, I don't say it convincingly, and she stops our brief interaction to go back to adjusting her cheap brandless sunglasses. I get back into my car, turn up Robyn really loud, and run away, more comfortable in my house, more comfortable in my spa, waiting for the day to fade to black...

Where I come from, Ayrshire in Scotland, it's a place I genuinely fear for - it's slipping into a Wisconsin Death Trip style madness that is hard to recover from. The paths are littered with a million pieces of chewing gum, covering the road like a pattern or design. My home town has given up, a once prosperous new town, a place for Glaswegians to live and work and get out of the city now decaying, Thatcherite neglect lasting and neverending. Half finished buildings linger in the distance, a proud and prosperous shopping mall surrounded by derelict charity shops and travel agents where the girls are hot from a distance. The people are genuinely going insane, clinging to a bizarre and cult like series of rules and regulations that outsiders could never understand. My Mum is there at the moment, and she just suffered from the eternal struggle of outsider vs system - she didn't have her exact one pound fifteen for the bus, because the system dictates everyone must have the exact change, and got into a massive fight with the bus driver. She couldn't tell what was a five p piece, and what wasn't, but she still has a Scottish accent, so she just looked mental trying to work it out. My auntie, her sister, then forgot her pensioner pass, and she copped a mouthful as well, turning from the defender of the system . On the bus, there's a special seat for pensioners, and you have to have a pass to sit in it, and without the pass, the system cracks and bubbles, and random strangers will bicker as to who is a pensioner who gets the magic seat and who doesn't. My Mum pointed out that actually the seat was for disabled passengers, but she received blank stares. If you don't know any of this incredibly convoluted system, you are likely to get on the bus, sit in the special pensioner seat, and try and pay with a ten pound note, and be hissed and jeered by the insane masses. And by the time the system breaks you, by the time you know all of this, they cancel a service, as they did with the number 26A to Kilmarnock when I was there, or worse, change a driver, and the madness begins anew...

The cancellation of the 26A to Kilmarnock, it caused absolute carnage. It made the bus into town more crowded, and changed the route to go outside more pubs, picking up more drunks - a Rangers supporter got on, and talked about how he was going to walk to Manchester for charity only to be told he was usually so drunk he couldn't walk across the road. And that was before I saw the man in the wedding dress. There are good people in my home town, but defeat is definitely in the air. As we hurtled along the bus route, I watched the single mother flirting with the bus driver for the umpteenth time, and I looked out the sticker covered window and saw a girl, no older than fifteen, strung out of her mind on drugs, sitting on the pavement being absolutely berated by her boyfriend, who was about twice her age and twice the width. We made brief, meaningless eye contact, and then the bus moved on, leaving her to continue to deal with her fate. Outside the once prosperous shopping bit where I used to walk with my Dad, there's now just one shop, one shop holding up the inevitable demolition of the whole centre, as it crumbles into condemnation. The one shop is owned by a Pakistani man, he had a petition on the counter, one that said he'd always been there for the local community, and now we had to save him. He has his Kit Kats under the counter, sick of them being stolen by the wasteful hands of the smack addicts. Good people go about their day there, his harassed staff, the friendly cleaner, but they are broken down by the hopelessness. I went up there to get the Sunday Post, and was almost bowled over by a giant black dog, a real one not some sort of poetic metaphor about despair. The staff there said that was Mickie, and he had the run of the place. Mickie looked like he was about to bite a kid on a bike, but they were laughing. "Oh that Mickie," they said as one, "such a good dog!" - a girl in a TATU T-shirt rolled out of the bushes, looked at the dog, and had a panic attack, and hid behind a pole. I did much the same, at least without the TATU T, until the dog had passed. The dog was a local, and I no longer was, so he had the right of way...

In the bakery in the mall in my home town, a small and bizarre windowless place that tests your very limits of patience and sheer desire to eat a tasty cake with a syrupy strawberry on top, there's two queues, one that snakes longingly and endlessly towards the hot food, the sausage rolls, the bridies and the pasties, and then, midway through your jaunt towards the pastries, a second queue forms, snaking off to the right towards the cakes. There is absolutely no way on Gods earth that the cake people and the sausage roll people could ever, I don't know, maybe go 10 metres to the side and get something off a different shelf. No way in hell. They operate in different worlds. Now, when I went in there to get myself a fudgy donut, I didn't know this, and it caused genuine anarchy. An old woman in a grey coat tapped me on the shoulder and said "whit queue ye in son?", as if dealing with an escaped mental patient. What queue was I in? The queue for the bakery I thought? I said I didn't understand, and she showed me pity, and pointed out the system, one queue for cakes, one for pastries. I understood, and luckily was just in time to make my corner turn and head for the cake department. The old woman beamed at me paternally, as if she just taught me to ride a bike. However, I still wondered, what would possibly happen if someone wanted a sausage roll and a cake, in some of sort of bakery attempt to balance ying with yang (I didn't say that to her, she was probably racist, and mentioning Chinese names would make her uncomfortable). As I took a bite into my fudge filled treat, I saw her lingering with her shopping, and I asked her. "Naebody ever gets the two things on the same dae!" she said, decisively. But what if..."Naebody!" she said, and that was that. The system dictated that no one would do that, and I regret that I didn't have time to try it before I flew back to Tasmania. I shivered awkwardly at her mad, decisively crazy eyes, and moved on, as she watched me disappear slowly from her view...

I still love the place though...it just scares me...and don't question the bus timetables...for gods sake...

The Blawhard (or how I learned to stop worrying and enjoy Shameless)

So it was another disappointing night - I did everything right, I stayed relatively sober, I drank sensibly, I stuck to spirits because beer made me sick - and I was still refused entry to Irish Murphys because I had an Adidas tracksuit top on. It wasn't even a team, just a top. Amazing. I don't think Irish Murphys actually wants customers these days. In fairness, the passage of time and the weary ennui (I'm so naming my own pub that) of our repetitive Hobart circumstances have left us in a bind, and even the hardiest drinkers we know are pretty much done by 1 in the morning, leaving us scrambling for taxis just as the 12 year olds make it out of their parents window. There was at least some amusement in the fact that the bogans in the souped up car who called my friend a dumb slut were instantly and comprehensively pulled over by an unmarked police car. I haven't really written about the Telegraph Hotel (I don't think) which is our new haunt, but it was a fascinating case study in human movement and behaviour. A girl burst into tears when she was refused entry, two men simulated sodomy up against the window, a drunk girl in a silver metallic top danced and flirted with two men at the same time trying to provoke jealousy in one of them, a guy in a flannel shirt on and end of season footy trip tried to break a stool and was clearly going to either spew or punch someone a little later, and when I went to the toilet I had to get past someone doing the running man. I still fail to understand why businesses in Hobart are so absolutely hell bent on refusing people entry though, it's bewildering. It's surely not a good business model? Incidentally, the girl in the silvery metallic dress as she was dancing with the bald guy in the suit and the aggro boyfriend in the grey suit, she was clearly looking at us and winking, but I didn't much feel like playing along. Nothing says trouble like a Hobart harlot, drunk on her own sense of inflated beauty, who likes Sneaky Sound System a little too much...it can only end badly.

One of my major problems in life, and one I quite openly discussed in the last post, is my lack of interest in other peoples stories. In Scotland, a "blawhard" is someone who toots their own trumpet, someone who spins their accomplishments into something far more impressive than they actually are. Early in the day, I had gone to a lunch for someones 75th birthday, at the Kingston pub. A quite bogan waitress girl got really flustered about the scallops and whether they were crumbed or battered, and it was one of those obligation attendance functions you stumble to in the course of your life, the ones that you go to, turn up, say hello and because you are not immediate family you pretty much end up, like, at the kids table or something up the back talking to the family black sheep. I was really stoked though, because I found something out that really made me feel like I was with my people. One of the attendees is a girl I quite like (as a person, not in "that" way, whatever that way is, perhaps the magical feeling you get when you meet that (that word again) special someone who likes Space Jam as much as you) and she told me that in Penguin, the high school prom (this came up because one of the 16 year olds is shelling out 450 bucks to go in a stretch limo to her prom - and incidentally, her life goal is to work for the AFL and possibly sleep with Lance Franklin, which I'm sure will upset Kasia Z) or leavers dinner, if you want something less American, in 1984 was held in the Penguin high school library, which I just absolutely love. Nothing says hot leaving fun like pashing in the reference section. As I ate my garlic pub loaf, I tried to remember my own leavers dinner, and the fact I couldn't remember it is probably not a good sign. I obviously didn't pash anyone, and I certainly didn't have a stretch hummer since I could walk to the school. In fact, my main memory of the Grade 10 one is that I didn't go to the end of dinner party at this girls house, because I didn't drink and was uncomfortable with the prospect of "let's spike the non drinkers coke" hilarity at my expense. I think it was a wise decision to be honest. One of the kids who went they got really drunk and pushed him off a deck into the mud. That could have been me I think had I gone. I instead had a safe night in bed, oblivious to the fact that somewhere in Penguin, people were doing waltzes and tangos around copies of David Boons "Boon In The Firing Line"...

As much as I took something positive out of the library conversation, ten minutes before, my brain hadn't really had to kick out of neutral. This woman for some reason had locked into our conversation path, I still have no idea who she was, and decided to blawhard up a treat about her son, Daniel. Daniel, for what it's worth, is apparently quite the ladies man, humble with it and would never tell you about his many awards, runs several mines in Queenstown, won a state Premiers award and didn't tell any...and so on. As she was talking, I was considering faking a heart attack just to get out of there - it was one of those conversations that just seems like it will go forever, and you start to question the motives of it. I started to think she was perhaps quite insecure about her parenting abilities or something, given the vehemence of her protestations that Daniel was a great son. After all, we didn't ask how Daniel was or anything. My Dad is way better than me at coping with these kinds of conversations, and while I was in my head planning to do a runner with the girl at the TOTE (she totally gets me, given how she fills in my betting forms, I know it's love) Dad gently asked (having previously tried to change tack by remembering the day Daniel saved a penalty at soccer) if Daniel was an engineer. I visibly saw the woman deflate, her eyes darting around the room. "Well," she blustered, trying to deflect this blawhard deflating question, "if he passes two more tests, and if he works for one more year..." - she trailed off, beaten and bowed, and clearly went off to ring Daniel to question why he hadn't attained the rank of engineer and was still a lowly technician. My Dad is subversive and he doesn't even know it sometimes. He was completely oblivious to what he had done, just like he's completely oblivious to most things, and went back to his fractured sly sideways glance at the difference between medium rare and rare steaks...

I'm absolutely sure though that despite my limited life accomplishments (unless owning a framed signed St Mirren shirt counts as an accomplishments) I do realise that in social situations I am quite capable of being a blawhard. Everyone is, especially when cornered with the small talk questions about work, life, love and so on. The worst blawhard I know is my cousin in Scotland, the one with the saxophone playing daughter and the one who told me when he beat me at ten pin bowling that when you play him at a game that he's never beaten (at which point I demanded a DNA recount). He's always telling us about his connections in New York, how he goes to the same gym as Eva Longoria, and how much he enjoys playing tennis with Jelena Jankovics coach. He's not a cousin I see often, but whenever I do see him, he's pretty keen to tell us how well he's doing. Or he was, until I went home the last time - it wasn't like he was making less money or anything, and there's still a hint of the old swagger, but he looked...tired. Really tired, as if he'd had a realisation that all the time he'd spent sitting in airports and airport lounges, all the time filling in those little immigration cards, all the time swigging champagne with celebrities and making small talk, all the time he'd spent in meetings or training people to do their job, all that wasted, wasted time, maybe, just maybe, it should have been spent at home, with his kids...I wonder if everyone ends up like this, the hard working successes questioning the quality of life, the less successful questioning whether they should have done more with their life. I hadn't seen this humanity in him before, it was quite strange and a little sad. He didn't even mention his usual assortment of sycophants and minor celebrities that he knew in his apartment block. This might sound really weird, but the most beaten down he sounded was about the TV show Shameless, my Auntie was talking about it, and he said in this quiet childlike voice "I've heard it's amazing...I wish I had time to see it..." - it was desperately sad, and perhaps I'm not quite articulating it right, but he looked like a man questioning the values in his life, and doing it while sitting eating an iced biscuit on an Ayrshire coach in Gucci loafters...

Me? I don't envy anyone, except for the girl in the silvery dress - I mean, she's so hot and amazing, she can have two drunk accountants fighting over her. From limited victories though, comes confidence...or at least, ten minutes of fumbling...

My beautiful silence broken by horrific conversation (and my lollipop lady feud)

Now, today the Salamanca Asians were back on the cheap jewellery, which suggests to me they are operating on some kind of rota system. My local card and gift shop are selling a lovely Hawthorn Premiership pistol and bullets, which I'm sure counts as unofficial merch. And I was trapped in the CD aisle at Kmart, prams to the left of me, bogans to the right, and here I am, stuck in the middle with U2, well, it was the best of Nina Simone, but U2 sort of works as a Steelers wheel joke? Ah, the kids don't much care. Anyway, none of that was anywhere near as interesting as the fact that I seem to have engaged my local lollipop lady in some sort of death feud. Now, let me explain. I'm a shockingly grumpy driver. Whenever someone cuts me off, I throw my hands up in the air in disgust, and while I'm not as bad as my Dad who's grumpy reaction saw him chased home one day, I'm am openly dismissive of anyone encroaching on my road. My local lollipop lady, queen of the coat that's six times too small for her, is quite self important, and frankly camp with her lollipop thrusting, the stop sign put in front of the car with what could only be called a flourish. Anyway, one day, I presume that the two things have come together, she's camply put the lollipop in front of Pepper my car, I've smacked the steering wheel, she's seen me, and grumped up. I know this sounds a bit mental, but lately, she's almost behaved like she's seen me coming, and today, she stepped in front of the car and I swear there were no kids anywhere around. There was one of Kingstons many Sudanese refugees about 3 kmhs away running along a footpath, so maybe I had to wait for him, but I'm sure she was loving the power - even if it wasn't personal, she just loves the power the stop sign on a stick gives her. Kingston residents would be aware of the self importance of our road surfacers, acting as traffic police and saying it's safe to go down the road when that's self evident due to the lack of traffic, roadworkers or cobblestones, but she takes the gold Chupa Chup. What's interesting though is that one day as she did her three times round the fountain wrist flourish and prepared to march out and stop traffic, her posturing almost meant a small kid got mauled by a gold 4Wd in the interim. Still, the kid did have a Juno school bag, so he probably would have deserved it...

One thing I have realised in the last few days though is that working in a job involving the general public has killed my love of the human race. I think anyone who deals with the general public will realise that intellect isn't the strong point of most people. There aren't too many people lining up to discuss Gabriel Garcia Marquez. There was a fantastic example today in Big W where several plump white girls and their wonderful boyfriends (slurping on cokes) were happily wandering through singing loudly a rap song that contained the N word a lot, possibly that one where Fiddy Cent thinks many men wish death upon him (can I be included?). And of course, as the Curb Your Enthusiasm music played in my head, a black guy wandered past them, and they froze in horror, their little faces curled in politically correct horror. I don't think he heard them, but they were this close to saying Morgan Freeman was their favourite actor. It's probably why I love being alone so much at the moment, or sitting in the spa, it's my respite. I enjoy any minutes of silence I can get. I think if you want to have a job where you are largely undisturbed, you should work in Video City in Kingston, unless it's tight arse Tuesday obviously. or the day a major sporting event is on (then you have to rent out a million copies of Made of Honor with Patrick Dempsey). There's a Sarah Palin a like who used to work in there, and one day on one of my day off sojourns, I went in there, as the only customer, and she was the only staff member. I took up my video, probably wrestling, possibly an episode of Red Dwarf, and she was engrossed in watching ET on the TV monitor, so engrossed it was like I'd disturbed her in her own living room. After about a minute, I politely enquired if I might get some service, and she said "take it" and waved me and my video cassette through into clean air, no card scan, no check, and even when the alarms went mad she just pushed a button to make it stop and then rather impatiently waved me through so she could watch the end of the movie. I never found out what happened to the family who were pulling into the car park just as I went to Cash Converters, but I sincerely hope they didn't have a question about DVD formats...she didn't look like a girl who liked being disturbed, or who knew how to use a pause button...

I just don't think I'm good with people any more - I need a nice office job where I can take a break from the living. It's affecting my relationships. People tell me stories, and I'm just functionally unable to take an interest in them. Today I had to work with this really nice girl, and she had been on holiday in America, and she was telling me all about it, but I think she lost me with her fandom of Ne-Yo (the brother of Yo-Yo of course). Now, she had also been to London, as had I, which should have been furtive grounds for conversation, as she probably went to 2 Many T-shirts (guess what they sell) like I did and had a vague knowledge of who Noel Fielding is, but my heart isn't in this small talk anymore - I feel bad, but all I was thinking was this - last time I saw you, you were smashed out of your mind, telling people at a concert that because your boyfriend was a pig you were becoming a lesbian, and then you had a bad acid trip on a merry go round. So while her tales of archery teaching were fascinating, I was still thinking I hope you didn't drink and then fire arrows...anyway, the major difference between Scotland and Tasmania anyway is that random strangers in Tasmania come up to you and tell you their medical ailments, where as in Scotland your leg has to be hanging on by a thread before anyone will go to the doctor. I still haven't quite got the answer to what to do when an old lady tells you about her impacted bowel (say "hmm...impactful"?) at a bus stop, but maybe one day, I will know what to say. In Scotland, the distance that is kept between strangers and other strangers is far more circumspect, with one notable exception - bus timetables. Where I lived in Scotland, you could be guaranteed that strangers would leap out of the bushes to discuss the shocking state of bus timetables. It might be the first chance I get to use the word "atizz", but you should have seen them when one of the replacement bus drivers when the timetable was changed was, gasp, Polish. The number of people tapping me on the shoulder and vox popping me on this outrage was quite amazing. All of which culminated in a girl one day making some kind of inappropriate joke about Polands continual habit of being invaded, and everyone clamming up on the subject for fear of being branded a racist. By the time I finished my holiday, all talk of Poland had ceded, and everyone was back to awkward silence and shoe gazing, just the way we like it ach...

That's not to say I haven't tried. We worked with this girl who nobody liked. She was a really, really big girl who wore see through mesh tops, she smelled like Barkers Piggery, she had a boyfriend who used to beat her up and when she rang and said "love you" he never said it back, and she was always swearing. She once turned up to work with a black eye, and everyone knew what had happened, and if we didn't, she got on the phone in front of the customers and told whoever was on the other end what happened. With several uses of the word that rhymes with punt. Anyway, after about six weeks, she was an incredibly isolated figure. She had been told off by quite high up management about her continual disclosure of personal information to customers, the other two girls at work had officially ganged up on her, and while all I wanted to do was the crossword in the Age, I eventually had the responsibility to talk to her and stand the smell fall on me by default. I did feel bad for her on account of her quite horrific boyfriend, but she was fundamentally unlikeable. I drew on my previous experience of subtle workplace "befriend the nutter" learnings, when I tried to befriend a genuine nutcase who, again, you had to feel sorry for because clearly she was in deep trouble (when someone shows you the scars on their wrists...) but who had then had a huge pop at me for "staring at her", and tried a much slower and gentler approach the second time around. I thought this was going well, until one day, since it was near Xmas, I mentioned to the girl that soon Santa Claus would be appearing, and how can anyone not like Santa Claus. I never forget she stopped, looked at me and said "I hate Santa Claus - Santa Claus is an old man, and when I was a kid an old man molested me"...now, when someone says this to you, I don't have any advice to you at all, I don't know what you can say, I don't know how you react, I don't know where you look or what you say, but maybe, just maybe, you can try saying what I said to break the most uncomfortable, awkward, and downright awful silence of my then relatively young life. "You know," I said, stumbling badly, "Coca Cola invented Santa Claus"...

Moments like that really killed my befriend a stranger spirit...maybe one day I'll get it back...maybe there's someone out there interested in my Lolo Jones story...you never know...

The rebranding of Dismal Swamp

There wasn't much to write home about today 0ther than the Asians with the table gave up on cheap socks after one day, returning with cheap jewellery. I can't wait to see if they rock up tomorrow with second hand books - maybe they'll be like that guy in Burnie who had a closing down carpet sale advertised on TV...for three years. Blue eye shadow girl looked sad, perhaps concerned about the random nature of violence in contemporary society (I think she's a deep thinker concerned with the fading nature of humanity when she's probably ruminating on the plot of Beverly Hills Chihuahua), and a body turned up in the water, but it's best not to think about it. No one appears to have been stabbed today, but my Mum, being the worrier that she is, is already planning to lock me in the basement rather than have me queue for a taxi at night. I'm more concerned with being exposed to the musical stylings of Lady GaGa (please god don't let her sing live!) in some Hobart nightspot or the punch happy bouncers than I am random stabbings (although that doesn't apply to Canadian buses). I don't know whether it's my age or my in built cynical fatigue, but out of going out to Hobart nightspots or sitting in a pub at a 75th birthday party (my two social obligations on Saturday) I'm actually more looking forward to the 75th. At least I'll be allowed in and there won't be bouncers. There'll just be stimulating conversation from a man who once nearly drove us into a tree because he thought he saw his brother in another car and veered off the road. Since it's in a Kingston pub, there will inevitably be men in jeans not quite pulled up right, some slightly shady gambling bets and debts, and best of all, a jukebox that no one ever uses that hasn't been updated since the glory days of Magic Dirt, covered in a firm film of dust and grime. Kingston really is crying out for a pub, but of course, with the NIMBYs in the area, that's more of a dream than a reality.

What has upset me today though is the fact that one of the North West Coasts main (and I think Smithtons only) tourist attractions has had a, sigh, "rebranding". There's nothing lamer in this world than a rebranding, and I should know since my company has had one, and someone gets paid a lot of money to redo the logo and nothing changes about the company at all. Anyway, there's a tourist attraction called "Dismal Swamp" - there's a slide, that's all you really need to know. When I went there, some old woman hilariously pretended to have lost her teeth on the slide, which is an awesome prank you must admit if you have false teeth. Some Japanese people took pictures and offered to go down the slide and find her teeth for insurance purposes. The reason it was called Dismal Swamp is because some explorers had a terrible night there and then found a much better swamp and that's Welcome Swamp. A little bit like getting tickets to a Powderfinger gig and then finding out Miley Cyrus is performing instead (erm, maybe not for everyone). However, because some people found the name "offputting", Dismal Swamp has now been rebranded "Tarkine Forest Adventures" - I was absolutely shattered when I found this out. Some kids didn't want to go to a place called "Dismal Swamp?" - I'd have killed when I was a kid to be packed into the car and taken there, it would have made a great change from buying yellow T-shirts at Ulverstone K-Mart being called "an outing". I instantly rang up Dad and said it wasn't right and he said "What are you talking about? What swamp? Who lost their teeth?" which I took as a sign that he was outraged like me. I guess I'm a traditionalist - there's a hairdressers in Penguin called Swannies that just doesn't feel the same now Swanny is dead and they probably don't give out musk sticks to kids after they have their hair cut or their ear slashed in half (depending on Swannies mood)...how can I go into that hairdressers without that 50/50 chance or a musk stick at the end? It's just not the same...

When I moved away from Burnie and came back - I can't quite remember the exact year, but the KMart mall, where I once worked at the magical Coles Supermarkets, they decided to give the front of the mall a bit of a repaint and a facelift and a good old rebranding. This was in response to a massive and evergrowing queue of bogans who stood outside it looking bogany and cool as they wiled away their days until death. One of these bogans incidentally my was my school principal, a fat bloke who always seemed to be outside licking a lollipop. And yes, one of these bogans sometimes was me, although it was usually I was waiting for Mum and got involved by proxy, trying to chat up bogan girls with lines about popular musical acts of the day. From memory, the front of the mall was grey, and pretty faceless, the colour of a Sting solo album really. By the time I came back to Burnie in a terrible attempt to rekindle old dying friendships, the mall had been rebranded a plaza and painted a magical shade of tropical wonder - orange, blue, a different shade of orange, some sort of weird arse pink, then a bit more orange. It was a brilliantly stupid idea, as befits a town that's officially a city but has the population of a town which should disqualify it as a city but since no one in the town can be bothered filling in the paperwork to disqualify it as a city it's not a town but a city (thankyou Dr Seuss). I always remember seeing it painted in those colours and standing looking at it and an old bloke in a pork pie hat and some giant coke bottle glasses sauntered up to me. My natural suspicion of strangers kicked in and I tried to get away, but he was staring at it, and I guess so was I, and he wasn't leaving. He stroked his stubbled chin, nodded and said "Well, they fucked that up then" and wandered off. I was going to chase after him and try and get him to apply for a position on the town planning commission, but he had wandered off to Toyworld, I guess to just have a pop at the big Purple bear...

I guess I have a natural suspicion of rebranding, I think it's just a way of spending money on something that never works. I'm suspicious of people who rebrand and reposition themselves as well - my cousin, one time when I went back to Scotland, he was completely different. When we had known him, he was, in the best sense of the word, a character, by which I don't mean he's been made up for the purposes of narrative construct, because he was real, but let's just say he taught us all how wearing a Scotland soccer tracksuit can be used to pick up, and how not to run into the young Conservatives conference drunk and yell "Up the Unions!", among other stories. When I went back, he had a steady girlfriend called Kathryn (a hairdresser who hated the song "Stayin Alive" by N-Trance, which was quite bad for her that we all knew it, because my cousin just played it louder), was committed to his career, and was trying to get fit by playing five a side soccer on a Friday night. His Mum was really proud of him, telling us how much he had changed and how well he was doing. I felt good for him, especially when I found out he was saving for a boat, although as with most of the holiday 95, I was disappointed that everyone had changed so much in the intervening three years (including me I guess). I went round to his house on Champions League night to watch a game on television, and he was chatting about amicable things - work, pension plans, my job at Coles (got to get to that soon). One of this friends came round, and they talked about much the same things, work, pension plans, the merits of Roy Evans playing Fowler on his own up front. As I hung out in the kitchen pondering my own life and wondering if I should grow up and abandon childish plans for my own late night talk show, his friend casually mentioned that Kathryn wasn't around. "Nah," said my cousin, leaning back in his recliner, "she's no happy wi me - she caught me shaggin the neighbour..." - and with that, a whole year of rebranding collapsed to the ground, and I had my old cousin back. Later, he went looking for hookers outside the train station, and all was right with the world...

Incidentally, despite the paint job, the air of despair, alienation and hopelessness continued to permeate...in Brashs. Man, those people, they hated selling CDs...