The zombie in my anecdote

So I've officially hit middle age - I bought this book yesterday, this football book by Martin Flanagan, and I had to put it down after about 6 pages. The reason was there was just hundreds and hundreds of spelling errors and mis-printed words (at one point the Bulldogs are said to be playing like "Men on a missing" - honestly!) but I figured that the fact that my enjoyment of a book was spoiled by spelling errors (I think I need a highlighter and his address) finally, surely, completely finishes my descent into middle age. However, I realise that I'm not exactly captain grammar and punctuation, but this isn't a book where hopefully a proof reader is emp...see, I can feel peoples eyes glazing over, but now I'm 30, I'm finally able to express my disgust at such things. I have a friend - I don't know if I've mentioned this before, he sent me a text message once when I was going to see Ross Noble and it said "come meet me for a drink!" - the presence of a ! and the word drink meant I thought he wanted a nice boozy lunch, and so instead of driving to see Ross, I got a lift into the centre of the city and was ready to go through my ritual of being kicked out of pubs nice and early. However, when I got there, he had a hot chocolate waiting for me, with a star made out of chocolate flakes floating on top. Back then, I was probably thinking gee, what's all that about, I wanted a beer but now I think, well, what's wrong with a nice cup of tea! I saw this girl yesterday being all moody in the middle of Kingston, being all young and discontented in her Grates T-shirt, goth eyeliner swamping her very soul, hands in her pockets, hair long and shaggy. She loitered zombie like against a red railing, no doubt thinking about words for her journal. Apart from wanting to swap MP3s with her (I finally got an MP3 of He's Kissing Christian by That Dog, at long last) my main thought was when I was moody (cept I was rocking a moody tracksuit - represent y'all) and young, an old woman came roaring up to me outside Roelf Vos and said "Cheer up! It might never happen!" and I said "It already has, I've got puliminory obstruction" (a disease I made up) and she backed right off. Now, I was the one to go over, and tell this total stranger to cheer up, if I was going to fully embrace my new found age rights...so I sidled up, smiled and said "See this book! You should see the spelling errors! Men on a missing! He's supposed to be a professional writer"...

Obviously I didn't do that. If I had, I might as well have said NOT at the end of an aggreable sentence or done an Austin Powers impression for the up to date cultural relevance and youth I was showing. Instead I kept on walking, down the hill, past the little van that tries to pretend it's not a speed camera. It's been sitting there for about three weeks with it's indicators on, so it's obviously a speed camera. Some kids run past shouting "Death to the speed camera" - two girls come up to me and ask about how I walk. This completely confuses me, and I resist the tempation to say "Well I put one foot in front of the other..." - however I'm struck by a completely awkward thought. I'm now in someones anecdote. I hadn't considered that if blogged about the girl in the Grates T-shirt, she might somewhere be blogging about me (although my self analysis of her suggests a green penned journal with a lock on it), the weird awkward looking Scottish guy in the St Mirren shirt (or worse "ZOMG some old dude!"). I was suddenly quite self conscious, and thought, I wonder if the time I fell on my arse in the cafe has been recounted with whimsy at a dinner party - I slipped on a wet floor and hit my head, but got up really quickly, embarrassed at people looking at me - I know the time I spilled my drink twice on the same IPOD (of a bouncer no less) is recounted in certain circles as if I had written Shakespeare. As this thought swirled through my head and I continued my self conscious walk around Kingston, past the ghost of Tracks Music where the really cute girl would smile at me as she put up Powderfinger posters (I like to think ironically) I see the same girl in the Grates T-shirt, and she clocks me, and looks instantly awkward. I suddenly realise I look like I'm following her, and I change direction. I'm definitely in a journal anecdote tonight, I think, as I drink my bottled water with a nervous intent. The Grates fan then goes to go in my direction, but stops, not because of me, but because her hair is in her eyes. She instantly stops moving, and retreats back into zombie mode, the only flicker of life a twitching left foot that won't stop flickering. I am on surer ground when I turn the corner, and an old woman in the health shop is arguing about vitamins. She sees me, and tilts her head back, smiles, and then continues her argument, something about price or stock...she looks like she has whiskers, but I can't imagine she will remember me ten seconds after I'm gone...her argument tails off into the sky, like skywriting, all the information scattered in the wind. She puts the vitamins down, and then walks off into the distance, head held high as if she'd accomplished something. She tilts her hat in the direction of Tracks Music, and gets smaller and smaller in every way as she heads out of my line of sight. The response of Grates girl is to say or do nothing, and in Cyber Hair, the futuristic hairdresser of the future, a child with big ears is getting a bowl cut. With nothing but concern for myself, I get my paper quickly and leave, by now sure someone, somewhere, in this bizarre instant opinion world, is using me to fill blog space...I'm onto you big ears...

Of course, my Dad, if he had a blog, would fill it with anecdotes about me - the time I came out of a swimming pool change room with both my tracksuit top and bottoms on back to front, and when he challenged me my response of "Nobodys perfect!" - I think he only had me to laugh at me sometimes. He's quite open about that. In fact I just asked him on the phone if he had me just to laugh at me, and he said "Well, you sure obliged!". My Mum prefers one liners, like the time her Mum said in response to one of her other daughters telling her that she bought a lovely looking roll that she should "go and enter it in a beauty contest!". My cousin died two years ago, and he was 39, and his family quite openly talk about him every single time you meet them, as if he's going to come through the door at any minute. We went to dinner with his family, and they just were hell bent on keeping him alive, any way they could, and when I ordered a Chicken Kiev they had a story on that as well. Whenever I tell a story about someone though, I do sometimes think about the context that I place them in - it's like when I see the grumpy woman from Banjos who I think hates me because I'm sort of vocal if anyone cuts in the line in front of me, and she's not working, she's holding a kid in her arms, and she's playful and tender. I think about the RACT driving instructor that I called a cunt because he basically told me I'd never pass my driving test while I couldn't keep up with traffic (said traffic was doing 90 in a 60). Does he use me as a cautionary tale to younger students? And what's he like at home? Nice? A horrible person who beats his kids? Dead on the couch? The values I ascribe this man might be totally out of place. Nah, he was a cunt - he was racist against Scottish people. Or Liverpool supporters. Never really sure. I can see him and his little withered old face, hunched over a projector, talking about "the student that never could"...snapping out of this thought bubble, I see the girl at the newsagents impatiently waiting for me to register that it's my time to be served. She's fidgeting with a pen, and pouting. "So," I say, sarcastically, "happy at your work?" - she doesn't respond, stating price, quantity and serial number, before happily serving a Richard Hawley lookalike behind me. To her, he is memorable, and I am a number in her day. Then she drops her pen as she try to look cool and tap it off her teeth seductively, and I smile, for I know from experience no one ever looks cool or seductive with a pen - nobody...kids, they'll learn...

Confused by the nature of the world and my place in peoples storyline, with thoughts all over the place, I walk home, clutching a DVD of Tim and Eric. I'm convinced by now that somehow, somewhere, Ive influenced someones day, even just by walking around and buying things, that somewhere I'm recounted on someones blog. As I walk, again convinced I have a magical power to make cars come out of driveways just as I walk across them, a small Japanese girl in a "Be Yourself!" T-shirt is walking down the road. She looks around, and then leaps onto someones lawn and steals their newspaper, and then unwraps it. She doesn't see me, but she's really pleased with her theft, and the owner of the house will never know what happened to his paper. My pausing to watch her causes (of course) a car to back out of a driveway and nearly run me over, the kid in the back seat of the car looking up from his PSP and matching my grumpy stare with a return spazz face. In the midst of all this, my IPOD starts playing Intastella, an obscure Manchester band that a girl I was friends with got me onto to, or I got her onto, one of the two. I can see her sitting a blog, or in a pub somewhere, talking about me - talking about the party that was all going horribly wrong, someone caught cheating on someone, the person who was being cheated on taking it absolutely to heart and having to be talked down from the roof, someone who attempted to crash being forceably thrown out and locked in a car, me drunk on wine talking about how awful Friends was and why did no one see things from my point of view. I can see her, setting the story, like she used to do, getting more and more detailed, until she got to the point that to cheer herself up at the party, she told a fundamental Christian (who she wasn't kissing) that in fact, I had serious self doubts about the value of my own life. So he took it upon himself to tell me that Jeebus loved me, putting his hands on my shoulders and telling me the value of existence. And when I looked over his shoulders, I could see her, laughing and waving, looking beautiful in the party spotlight, the only person smiling in the chaos. She tells it better than me....and I hope she still does.

Meanwhile, somewhere in Kingston, a goth girl is putting the key in the lock of her journal and....

It's like a jungle sometimes I wonder how I keep from going under (my Mum usually helps)

I shouldn't have been surprised - this morning I woke up, turned on the TV, and the first thing I saw was my nemesis Erik Thompson grinning at me from a Packed to the (Pat) Rafters promo, while Jason Mraz played in the background, like all the evil in the world coming together in a swooping black cloud. All I needed was "with a special cameo from Bernard Fanning!" and that would have been the end of my day. As it was, I think it's made my virus a little worse, and so I'm still a little shaky. I'm so embarrassed the Statewide League Grand Final between Launceston and "The Norch" has been cancelled because North and South of Tassie can't work together, embarrassed like when that girl I played netball with made up her own swear words. We can eat all the BELIEVE! bars we want, but as long as we're still north vs south in this war, nothing is going to happen. Bet the AFL are just delighted. It hasn't been a good couple of weeks in Tassie, what with suicidal politicians, that horrible Loongana print ad, the man drought and now this disaster. Still, I think I'm doing OK at the moment personally - I've decided that in addition to my aim of getting on the board at Kermandie football club within two years (and my other aim to be reviewed in a fancy magazine as the "Tasmanian blog equivalent of Wisconsin Death Trip"...I've said too much), I'm now determined to be photographed at least once in the T section of the Mercury at some kind of really lame but somehow cool when the photos appear social function. OHA hockey club, I'm looking at you. Incidentally the bloke on the radio just said he heard the Faker gig was "fairly good" - that's commercial radio code for it was completely horrendous and people were jumping out of windows to get away from "Are you Magnetic?"...this from a radio station that seems to think Brian McFadden is a visionary poet, so we can conclude that when even Sea FM aren't pumping you up, it's time to pack it in...

So it turns out that there's a gang of handbag thieves in Hobart, intent on...er...stealing your handbags, the police are powerless to stop them and everyone is on a red alert (what it's got to do with an old Basement Jaxx album, who knows). Obviously, this is the latest attempt by our brilliant local paper the Mercury (which these days is more like a pamphlet) to terrify everyone into staying in their homes at the weekend. After all, a few weeks ago these gangs were said to be roaming around Syrup looking very Asian and daring each other to punch innocent strangers in the head for wads of Yen. My only really genuinely experience with a gang was back in Scotland when, for reasons beyond my control, the leader of a gang wanted to beat up a friend of mine, and thus we were all fair game apparently, so the playground equivalent of the Mercury said. Keep in mind we were 11 at the time, so the gang was probably on a par with the KISS army for fierceness, but I think we were all scared witless by my friend and the tales of what he had done, and how badly we were all going to be beaten up (incidentally, now I think about it, I think my friend actually quite liked the adventure...something doesn't quite add up). This gang thus remained pretty much sight unseen until one day we got off the school bus, and saw them in the distance. At which point, we rather bravely scattered in all kinds of directions, and which point I actually realised how ridiculous the whole situation was, and stopped running and had a lovely walk home, chatting to some nice girls who wanted "twos of my can of ginger". Naturally, this lack of danger was disappointing to my friend, who told me that in fact my casual gait had further enraged the gang and now they wanted to beat me up. At which point, I had had enough, and told him where to go, but his Mum had told my Mum about the horrific jets vs sharks Ayrshire warfare that had erupted. My mum put the dinner down, puts her hands on her hips and marched over to where this gang was playing soccer. "I'm looking for Muggsy" (it wasn't Muggsy, but I can't remember his name) she said, hands on Glaswegian hips. "Who's Muggsy?" said Muggsy, for a laugh, as if impressing everyone with his clever ability to confuse and befuddle. "Are you no him son? Cos I heard he was fucking ugly like you," said my Mum, who then proceeded to unleash a good old Glaswegian tirade of abuse about leaving her son alone. And, for what it's worth, he did, and the next time I saw him, he was selling coke from a van outside Celtic Park. We exchanged a glance, and he scuttled to the back of the van and hid. I somehow think my Mum bashed his head in with a bottle of ginger, and she's just never told me...maybe one day...

In Penguin, we didn't have gangs - we had cool kids in bunches, but the idea that they would use their time to do anything but loiter with coolness is incredibly unlikely. For my part, I've said before my own little flirtation with coolness came at school, when I had a brief posse of followers hanging on my every cynical Burnie is crap the world is amazing poetic utterance. This particular gang of followers were particularly impressed with my descriptions of much better waterslides outside of Burnie the day we went to the Grade 8 end of year picnic. I sort of realise now that I wasn't really that impressive, but I did at least give people hope that they could escape the North West Coast, which I think helped some fragile psyches. Nah, they just thought Scottish accents were cool. Word of my incredible grasp of the world reached the cool kids in Penguin, and one day, in one of those things you always think you imagine, I was eating a hotdog in Alanah Hills Dads milk bar where everyone giggled at the world Golden Gaytime and sort of thinking about whether or not I liked Frente and whethere I should get up and play Pacman, the Penguin equivalent of Danny and Kenickie came bounding into the milk bar, nudged each other and (with their babes to match) wandered over to me. Having had experience with gangs before, I knew what to do, and tried to find my Mum, but it was too late for that. I thought, well, should I ask them if they like Ordinary Angels? Maybe it's a Girlfriend crowd? Danny stood about one foot away from me, and looked at my Joe Bloggs top and he smelled of a mix of hair care product and Creme Egg. His girls, delicious but ditzy, stood about a foot back, as if commanded to stand in place. He smoothed his jacket down and spoke deliberately. "I hear you are Scottish!" he said, to which I thought, well, I guess some casual racism is coming, it can't be any worse than my English teacher saying "Ach ye get an A!" when she gave back my work. Yes, I said, congratulations on noticing, was it the way I was sitting? Did you mistake this hotdog for a haggis? Actually, I gave quite a meek shrug, and said yes, and prepared to be told to go back to my own country. He looked at Kenickie, and broke into a broad smile. "That's fucking awesome!" he said, gave me a giant thumbs up and a pat on the back, and walked off, girls swaggering off with smirks. I have no idea what was going on, and it's confused me to this day. Maybe anyone who said no I'm Welsh was in trouble....

My infamous girlfriend by the way - of whom I've been listening to Suzanne Vegas 99.F, because when she was stoned, she would get really deep about it - used to tell me she was in a gang, but when questioned, she conceded the most gang related thing they ever did was steal apples from a farmers yard, which makes her less a Crip and more of a Little Rascal. My own experiences in a gang didn't quite make me a Blood now I think about it. When I was about 8 or 9, we used to play My Secret Valley, which if you don't remember was an amazingly camp 80s ABC kids show in which a member of the Spider gang would tie a member of the Secret Valley gang up and raise their fl...and how the hours until Alex Papps came on did fly. Anyway, out of that playing, we decided to form our own gang...which initially and I think rather sweet and innocently called the Sausage gang (because it was the only thing we all liked...is that a bit Ian Thorpe?) and which we later changed to the Gold gang because our school uniform had gold in it (and some really kick arse 80s tracksuits that were so flammable). The gold gang, for what it's worth, had a mission that we didn't like girls but they had a gang that didn't like boys and for some reason the only way to settle this was for the two gangs to...well, play catch and kiss really. See, just when it was sounding dodgy. Anyway, the girl I always liked was seemingly always kissing Christian and it was making me cry (what a song) and our gang related misadventures would probably have continued had it not been for a red headed kid in the gold gang called Darren, who decided that kiss chase was stupid, and he was sulking at the top of the caterpillar. Personally, his gang credentials were a little bit in tatters anyway, since he was spending all his time writing poetry about a girl called Casey and finding two hundred things that rhymed with "she's good at running". In what I can only describe as a proto Plath attempt, this particular tortured soul decided to announce his love for Casey and the stupidity of gang related warfare with a frankly insane head first plunge of the caterpillar into the bark. We were all...well, we were 8, relatively unconcerned doesn't quite cover it, but someone had to go and see how a fellow gang member was, and that someone wasn't me, but the person who did later said that as he lay in the bark whimpering in pain, Casey came up to him and called him a duh brain. Then she leaned in and gave him a kiss, then called him a duh brain again. Ah, the nature of relationships...1/3rd kissing...2/3rds duh brain...

I've just remembered by the way it wasn't Muggsy, it was Moggy, sort of like a cat...erm...terrifying?

Love and other Bruges (The lost birthday trilogy)

So I'm feeling good today - I've been able to fend off the worst of the Collingwood sledging simply by being upbeat and cheerful and positive. I think that's what I'll need to do more of - cheerful positive upbeat vibes. Interestingly, I say that, the first person I saw today was a Warrane quality whinger. Anyway, onwards and upwards. The new Miley Cyrus album is vaguely OK, although not as good as I hoped. There is consideration in the 90% of my brain I don't use (eh?) to turn this blog over to a Miley fansite, if for no other reason than it's a lot easier to do. Either that or "Lost Cities Of Gold - an appreciation". I like chronicling things though - even the boring days - because I kind of wish I'd done it before. I had a handwritten diary in 97, which I think was just too risky to leave lying around. I might have a look for it and see if I can find it, because if nothing else it would provide an interesting resource as far as my musical tastes of the time went. I'm sure that'd be gold, just page after page about Blur and Stereolab. I found some of my old novel in a basket, but not my diary, which was probably thrown out by my Mum (when she found it in the course of her daily rummaging). I've also been considering moving down to Kettering, to go and help out with the man drought. I'm quite prepared to learn to drive a ute, and learn to drink far more beer than I'm currently capable of, just to fit in. Actually, I really should go down there, I think it's the kind of place you can still get a sympathetic ear and a Golden Rough, and probably an Egg Flip Big M (or a home made equivalent). If nothing else, it'll make an interesting social experiment.

So I've mentioned before that the years 1999-2001 when I was 21-23 (according to my friend Sarah, a mans sexual peak, to which I said, what, even when the Olympics were on, and she said no, when you are that age, not slapped her head and wandered off) weren't my finest moments. From the deceptively messy netball girl through to my half arsed approach to work, it's not a real surprise that things were off course wildly. In fact, I have no less than a trilogy of broken, horrible birthdays that I think back on often (not least of which when I think I should ring a publisher and pitch a story of hope and courage and self determination - the day I lost at Bootball isn't likely to win me an award). In 99, I turned 21. Already, I had pretty much given up on life, but I wasn't cool enough to turn this anti societal feeling into anything profitable like an album or a poem (or maybe I just wasn't selling out). I could, however, stump up an interesting theory on why Glen McGrath was a great bowler. My girlfriend (in the same way Ashlee Simpson is a singer) just completely forgot about my birthday, and since I could have got all my friends and gone away for the weekend on a tandem, it wasn't a memorable day. My Mum gave me a card with a big fat child crying and saying "But I don't want to grow up!" and wrote "Trust me, you haven't!" on it. Touching. I can't remember what I got for my 21st, apart from when my girlfriend remembered and bought me a KitKat and some chocolate milk. The only highlight of the entire day was sneaking out of the house at night to go and have a swing in the cold September midnight Kingston air. I remember everything about that moment - including what I had on, trackpants and pyjama top and slippers, mostly because a tramp about 15 feet away from me was vomiting profusely, and swaying near death. He curled up under some leaves and went to sleep, his bottle of whisky rolling quickly down the path and coming to a stop next the side wall of the child care centre that adjoined the park. I tend to think that for whatever reason, call it cosmic forces, whenever I'm really down, I tend to notice or pay attention to someone worse off than me - it's really weird how many times I've been moping about the price of a DVD and someone in a wheelchair has appeared in my line of vision. Anyway, when I went to leave, some kids came round the corner, and headed in the direction of the tramp, and one of them was sort of poking them with a stick. When I told them to fuck off (which was unusually brave for me - now I think about it, it doesn't sound like me at all) they just ignored me, and told me to fuck off right back, specifically "fuck off Grandpa" - this was devastating an insult to a tortured mind as when Paul McCartney told Brian Wilson Pet Sounds could never be bettered. Grandpa? Did I sound old? Could they see I looked old? Was it the pyjamas? Was the insult random or deliberate? I was 21, and this was it, life was over...the insult twisted in my mind for ages, and really tormented me. You never forget your first age related insult. The tramp, for what it's worth, woke up with a start from the pool of his own vomit and blood, and told the teenagers where to go, throwing something on the ground at them, a clump of dirt or something much worse, that made them sprint off, and I went to bed, upset, confused, awkward, and of course, old and finished...

By the following year, I was a little better, at least I was working, but not to my full mental capacity - my birthday that year quite neatly co-incided with the AFL Grand Final, so I went to a Grand Final party, which I think the people there pretended was my birthday party (which was quite sweet). I was in a pretty good mood, although I had sort of cheered myself up by pretending all week to support Melbourne, and then quite abruptly changing my mind when Essendon caned them. I had even had taxi drivers waving 10 bucks off the fare to Kingston just for me being a Melbourne supporter, which doesn't reflect well on me (or them and their bad business practices). Of course, being a Grand Final party, I ended up massively drunk and talking a load of rubbish about the film script I was writing (erm...) and pouring my heart out to virtual strangers about my ambitions in life. I'm sure this would have made for a fascinating evening in for them all, me seizing the talking stick, but I wasn't as bad as a theatrical actor friend of theirs, a guy who had probably been the tree in the Kettering players version of Pirates of Penzance, and who's real life persona was obviously stolen from Oliver Reed. He was definitely a nice guy, but a bit of a one pot screamer, never mind when he smoked that one pot. He took me aside before the end of the party and told me I shouldn't be telling people about my film script. Naturally, I just presumed he was telling me to stop boring everyone, and shrugged. "Nah, nah, nah" he said, nahing. "They are listening, they'll nick the idea!" he said, although who they were was lost to me - the girl with the lampshade on her head (could have been a disguise), the man sitting on the couch eating Twisties? Didn't see any motive riddled movie moguls likely to steal the 2000 plot equivalent of Razorback as I looked around, but he pulled me in closer, until I was the only thing holding him upright. "They do nothing but screw you...so...shush...don't give the plot away...". He looked really, really scary at this point, and I thought he was going to start talking about aliens or backwards messages in Powderfinger albums. He looked me dead in the eye and said "Now...you can't trust them...but you can trust me...so if you want to cast me...", and yes, I think he genuinely thought in his drug addled state I was some kind of genuine George Lucas mover and shaker. The only thing that saved me from his showreel and a selection of his character acting was that he fell over a footstool and landed face down on the ground, while around him two girls danced pogo stick style to Blurs Song 2...although once again I had seen someone fall face down on the ground, things were looking up....

One year later, and I turned 23. This time, there was no one face down on the ground. In fact, I spent my last lost birthday in Bruges in Belgium. If I could explain the thought process that saw me sitting around going "I know, I'll go to Belgium", I'd probably take another seven paragraphs to explain it, but I was so struggling for logic, I barely noticed that I was going that I was going to be there on my birthday. I spent a fair part of the day listening to Stereolab on my walkman, and sitting eating a quite delicious hamburger in a disgusting garage. A man filling his truck up with LPG gas was quite openly smoking in defiance of the large angry signs that told him not to. Unquestionably, this garage was at the arse end of the world - that's not a slur on the entire city of Bruges by the way, just this bit - and it also had one of the openly disgusting explicit (but, luckily for everyone, completely within the reach of children) pornographic magazine racks in the history of the printed word - it made Campbelltown look like Toytown. As far as I'm aware, I was completely shut down on this particular day, hunched over and unwell, and was sort of floating around looking at toy shops and old buildings and not doing very much, but I did have a muffin that the kind people in the porn garage put a candle in for my birthday (see, filthy and caring). Anyway, my main memory of this day, apart from the seriously cool Ian Curtis jacket I was wearing, was that as I walked down the street, on the way to the Gruuthuse Museum listening to Ping Pong, thinking I really hope someone invents something better than a walkman you know, I heard an unmistakably bogan Tassie voice say "Hey! You nerfucking moufin!" - at first, I thought someone was talking to me, and I looked around. A young but paunchy man in a Smithton football jumper was yelling at his girlfriend in the middle of the street for her tone, and she's sitting there with sunglasses on a chain round her neck and a woolly beanie, and her quaint response was "Nerwasn'tfarckingmoufinyoufarckingwanker!" at which point Smithon man has just, and I would say only just, restrained himself from rearing back and giving her a backhander fair in the chops. And I'm in the middle of Bruges, trying to better myself with an interest in historical sculpture, and there's two Tasmanians fighting...and I remember distinctly thinking, why did you come all this way, you know, you could have seen this on a tank of petrol and car ride to Penguin you know...

Let alone that I was really due a change of luck on my birthday...

Miles McClagan - 7 Things

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

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

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

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

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

CSI (=Continuing Self Improvement) Hobart

So it's been quite a strange morning (not just because you should see the disturbing photo file of someone who added my Alicia Sacramone picture to their Flickr favourites...) - I'm obviously massively tense beyond words about Collingwood, and I'm still pretty ill. Do you think The Bangles could release Walk Like an Egyptian in 2008 (there's a Gadaffi spoof in the clip? Hoffs goes political?) without being branded horrible racists? Anyway, I went to JB Hifi - my favourite employee wasn't working, the woman who works on the door with Hobarts strangest smell, but her place was taken by a New Zealand front rower, who at one point thought I was going to steal a Bill Bailey DVD and moved to block my exit. Silly man - I don't steal anything less than a box set. However, it did once again prove my theory that I can't go anywhere in that store without 12 people suddenly taking a fascination in what I'm looking at and boxing me in. As an experiment, I stood in front of the M.A.S.H DVDs (who's going to be buying M.A.S.H in 2008? Who? Maybe if the spin offs AfterMash or W.A.L.T.E.R came out...) and after 5 seconds, the number of people in the aisle went from 2 to 12. I was completely boxed in, two people in front of me boxing me in starting pashing (tell me now something weird isn't going on?) and I was forced to listen to Metallica through my entire time in the store. Incidentally, Metallicas new album is a heavy metal album, you'll be shocked to know they haven't gone German folk. It was an interesting experiment in social dynamics to be flicking through the back catalogue of Miley Cyrus as Metallica was playing. I'm not happy by the way with the woman on VH1 having a chip at Yazz now I think of it. However, this virus I have is sort of getting better, and I'm starting to regain my natural cheery demeanour. I even managed a little cheerful flirty banter with the woman in the car park booth (isn't that the worst job in the world?) - she said no charge, and I said thanks...see...it's conversational gold like that that keeps me at the top of my chat up game...

However, I do accept one of the things that I really need to do in the next year (apart from not buy the new Metallica album) is undergo some self improvement. Since the only books published these days involve either a miserable childhood ("My missed penalty against Riana hell" isn't going to sell millions), the insprirational battle against a disease ("The inspiring story of one mans fight against verruccas" anyone?), or a zany quest towards self improvement (that Mark Watson book is so bad, Merv Hughes was stunned), it's only through the third that I will ever see my name in literary lights. Either that or I write the Indecent Obsession story. Anyway, my record in self improvement is terrible. Every single time I try to better myself through education it ends in disaster, or with me running away from a goth fairy reading poetry. This begun from an early age. One day we were taken to the wild moors of Kilbirnie to take a first aid course. I was really pumped up for the course, as one of the big UK shows of the time was a show called Rescue 911 with Michael Bourke about inspirational people doing inspirational things to save less inspirational people (ie. the injured) from dying. I thought well I'd rather be the inspirational resourceful MacGyver type than the benny lying on the ground with the broken leg. So I took the course really seriously, and studied all kinds of splints and complicated knots, and impressed everyone on the minibus with my knowledge of where various bones in the leg were. I was certain to be king of the (injured) kids, providing them with Powerade and a comforting manner wherever they lay (injured). This was all fine, until it came to our first exercise, CPR on a faceless store bought dummy hooked up to an effectiveness monitor that registered how well we doing. How confidently I strode to the front of the line, telling everyone that I was practically a doctor...and how I slunk back to the line a few seconds later when the monitor registered that I had pressed too hard on the wrong bone and actually the dummy was now legally dead. Even the girl I was trying to impress with my knowledge of New Kids On The Block gossip just shuffled away in embarrassment. She never did get my Bananarama tape off me, which is good...my interest in first aid really died after that, although I did have to punch a chicken bone out of Dads throat once...didn't make it on Michael Burke though....

My experience with killing the dummy did upset me though and took away my confidence, and I was reluctant to take up any other classes or self improvement (luckily this meant that I didn't go to the advertised breakdancing class - the last thing I needed was thin white Scottish kids trying to be Hammer) lest I hurt another blameless mannequin family. It took many years before I discovered that I could improve myself and my confidence through a mild talent for acting. I say mild because I was quite good at improvising things but when I was handed a script I turned into a Nicole Kidman (not a compliment). My interest in acting ground to a pretty sad halt one day when I was asked (I say asked, I basically said someone elses script was shit, that person said "I'd like to see you do better!" and I said "Easily!" then went, wait...damn it) to write a comedy script on the theme of "history made comic!" in Grade 8 (come on, you have to admit the concept is awful), and completely forgot about it, spending most of my time hanging out with the bad girls in Penguin outside Mitre 10...OK, would you believe playing Shinobi on the Game Gear? Naturally, I had to come up with some kind of excuse as to why I had promised a masterwork and delivered Fat Actress...so I came up with something that really seemed smart in my head...I said that I had been sick on the script. Yes, they'll certainly believe that, that you sat down and wrote a masterwork so hilarious it made you vomit. Surprisingly, no one believed it, and I had to come with something on the spot, that was so laborious, clunky and god awful, it was the second best thing in the class - which says a lot about Burnie drama. Still, from what I can remember of my script, it certainly had some devastating political points...did you know some politicians don't tell the truth? And the Indians got a bad deal? And maybe, just maybe, the Comedy Company was pretty rubbish? It left the class bleeding from the satirical mindfreak I inflicted on them, but it was a lot better than the fat kids script, which seemed very anti aborigine and had a lot of references to petrol....mind you, don't know if he was being satirical....

Since acting and first aid had proved to have poor potential to improve myself and my circumstance, I figured that I would improve myself by taking up playing soccer again as a way of getting fit - an ill advised decision, since the indoor league I joined was filled with combative Mexicans, Italians and Greeks with sharp elbows and a fair fondness for kicking people in the arse (instead of getting fit, I got a "fit" up the arse, a funny joke in Scotland). It was a hotbed of fouls and brawls, and one day one of these brawls led to a bandido style throwdown hot soccer challenge in a park in North Hobart, our team against their team, you got served style (but with goalkeepers). Strangely, after talking up for ages the big game between our team and their team, they seemed incredibly intimidated, and we beat them about 212-1, and I was feeling quite proud of myself. At which point, this little Spanish speaking kid rocking out on the swings has gone "Hey you!" and pointed to me, and he's drawn me in the dirt under the swings, drawn me with a big ruddy face, puffing as I ran, steam coming out of my ears. It was some incredibly good artwork, I must admit he had a good talent with the stick, but I don't know why he picked on me and not the bloke on our team called "Barrel", especially as I felt quite hit and looking (by my standards) quite the fox. I was a bit annoyed by his cheek, and went over to have a good look, and I was going to say something, but took it in good humour - I said to the kid, wow, that's very funny, tousled his hair, and called him a cheeky scamp. Actually, when his dad wasn't looking, I pushed him off the swing with a subtle hip and shoulder, and he landed with a big splat. "Mister hurt me!" (OK, he didn't really say that, but I had an image of Speedy Gonzalez that made me laugh) he began shouting, but I was already long gone, sprinting down the wing with grace and elan (two girls I'd met at Syrup the night before). Some critics have suggested that self-help books and programs offer "easy answers" to difficult personal problems. Me, I think, if you get the chance to get some revenge on some smart arsed kid, you should take it...I think that's self improvement point #1 in the Alisa Camplin book come to think of it...

And that was before I tried to learn how to bake...but that's quite the other story...

My "bit" - when recycling isn't just taking jokes from Rodney Dangerfield

So I'm still sick, and still grumpy - although I am now suspecting that Channel 7 will be round really soon to start filming my grumpiness with the extreme slow mo camera (boy they love that thing). Despite my aches, my desire to storm out of my job citing chronic fatigue and run away with either Alicia Sacramone or the bush pig girl from the Tamar Cats, I was able to stick it out, despite no fewer than three plays of Jason Mraz. When I was out walking today I saw this woman with her kid and they had obviously just watched a movie, and the woman was saying to her kid something about "now I hope that movie taught you how to care for the environment" and she was saying it like a threat or something and wagging her finger. Her tone just really annoyed me - she was all pompous in her big blue bomber jacket, and her concern for the environment didn't extend to, I don't know, not throwing a Gloria Jeans cup blindly over her shoulder onto the footpath. When I was a kid, the first film I saw was Katy Caterpillar, and the first film with a message I ever saw was My Girl with Anna Chlumsky and the message in that film was don't stuff around with beehives. I saw that film in an Ayrshire cinema, where it was playing I believe as a belated double feature with Robin Hood, Prince Of Thieves, and was ruined by a wailer in the front row who bawled her eyes out when Mac Cs glasses hit the ground...so this woman has obviously dragged this poor kid, who was hoping probably to see, like, Elmer Fudd, along to see a PETA documentary or Bob Browns Fist Of Fun. I wanted to say, look, I know a great film that will help you learn about the environment...it's Wile E Coyote vs Road Runner, and you'll learn that cliffs are really bad and bits of them are likely to fall on your head. Of course, I said nothing, and kept on walking, and all day I've had that Standing Outside a Phone Box song in my head, which I can't download anywhere, and I was trying to remember the name of the band that sang it (just remembered, Primitive Radio Gods - Mother Theresas joined the mob, unhappy with her full time job - what a lyric), I almost got caught by the spruiker outside Millers who was trying to drag me into her act, and who's microphone I wanted to steal and do a tight ten of stand up, but I kept on walking...I kept on walking....

Still, I have been thinking today about my own environment - which is messy, cluttered and a little stagnant. By Male standards, I keep the house pretty clean. I owe my sense of cleanliness to my Dad. One day we were walking back from the local Spar in Scotland (which all and sundry referred to, apologies for this, as "The Pakis", in some kind of sub Love Thy Neighbour unironic way, because it was owned by two Pakistanis, who suffer much racial abuse, and who constantly had their Black Jack jar stolen from) talking about nothing in particular, that nothing as always being sport. I had a can of coke in my hand - incidentally, much later I would start drinking Caffeine free Diet Coke, or as my cousin called it, fucking tap water with flavouring - which was certainly not anything fancy, but as we talked, I kicked the empty can into some bushes. with a beautiful Saverio Rocca style torpedo punt. Obviously, this was littering, but what did that matter to someone who was so full of attitude as me - I mean, I had orange Fila boots! I was a rebel, the man. My Dad has out of nowhere turned furious and purple. "Whit ye deain!" he screamed, shaking an angry fist. I shrugged, confused that perhaps I had made a disagreeable point about the standard of Scottish football, until I noticed he was pointing directly at the bushes. "Yer can, get it oot the ferkin bushes! Ye manky wee toerag!" he said, much to the amusement of a wee old biddy at the bus stop. "You tell him, wee shite!" she said, chuckling, this beginning my life long love affair with the elderly. And so, he sent me right into the middle of the prickly bushes to fish out my can, jagging my top on some nettles as I fetched it. It really stung my hand badly, but of course, he was my Dad, and he had to be obeyed, lest I get a dull and tedious lecture on the couch (without Robert Walls) about morality and not littering. So, I fished the can out, and put it in the bin. "There ye go, you don't want to be clatty!" he said, and I've never once littered since then - although he doesn't know to this day that in the bushes, when I went in to get the can, I found a wallet on the ground with 100 pounds, which I used to purchase cheap bourbon at the Local Spar, and a new triangle for my pool table. When I told this story much later to my lost netball playing girlfriend, she was most indignant...she said she'd have used to money to hire her first male hooker. No wonder we split up...

I've had lapses though in keeping my own environment tidy. The worst I've ever been was when I lived in Mt Stuart, in my big share house, and my room was just awful and dirty and had junk everywhere - piles of neatly marked handwritten cassette tapes made from the radio, unfinished letters to friends (and Edie Brickell), unfinished bits of novels and clothes everywhere. Pretty soon into the year, it became clear that our much vaunted cleaning roster wasn't going to be adhered to. When I grew up in Burnie, we didn't have much of a recycling program, unless you took things to the tip, but this house had a compost heap (which smelt just lovely), and about 12 recycling bins. We stayed with this kid called James, who wanted to be a lawyer, but who had already had one nervous breakdown by the age of 20, and was constantly shaking. His job on the Marge Simpson rota wheel was to do the recycling of all the cardboard (my pizza boxes to be honest) and for whatever reason, he didn't do it - probably because he had this crazy idea of staying at uni and doing work (whats all that about) instead of having go kart races down the hill. Anyway, as a prank, one of the house "leaders" put the boxes in his bed, in his room, on his bookshelf...naturally, not really thinking through, oh I don't know, his nervous irrational disposition? Suffice to say, he went absolutely mental in a kind of diffident, nervous way. At our house meeting, he worked himself up to the kind of argument that I think all lawyers should adopt if trying a case (Room vs Pizza). "But...but...but...but..." he stammered, jabbing his finger in the air (or paying a tribute to Manchester Uniteds Nicky Butt, don't know)..."But...but...yep...but...um....", which to be fair wasn't quite "I want the truth" as far as a great court room moment. Drained of all his confidence, and broken down by the whole affair, he simply slumped back in his chair, and said "ah get fucked" - I so want him representing me I think if ever I'm up for the murder of Bernard Fanning. We all apologized and tried to move on, but nothing was ever the same for him after that, and he moved out not long after, taking his collection of vinyl records and debating trophies (what?) with him...I like to think he's somewhere out there now, saying "My Lord...but..er...what...um...ah get fucked...the defence rests..."

My Mum, who I haven't much talked about, is a shocking person for big tidy ups when you least expect it. Manys the time I've got up to read the paper and it's already in the bin. So moving countries the number of times we did was just manna from heaven for her, as it meant she could clear out piles of old junk like, oh I don't know, her original Beatles albums worth an absolute fortune (it still hurts). Our move back to Penguin from Scotland was a boon for the environment, since it meant she could throw more stuff out, and say things like "Ye'll no be wanting that!" when patently, I did want that, and would continue wanting that in the future. She organised all into a fantastically drilled trip to the Kilmarnock tip, to get rid of accumulated rubbish in socially acceptable colour coded piles, with everything drilled into the appropriate recycling bins with military precision. I remember feeling sick to my stomach at the pace that my environment had changed, desperately against my will, and I remember the sheer desolation that engulfed me that chilly Kilmarnock evening as the clouds rolled in, standing there feeling sorry for myself, not sure what moving back to Tasmania would bring. As I stood there bitterly watching things like the couch in my room and my triangle stacked on top of my memories inside a metal skip, two small kids, one in a blue tracksuit, one in a pink set of pyjamas, tiny children with blank expressionless faces, climbed into the skip and began clawing at the rubbish inside it, tearing open garbage bags to try and find something to take home. There were no adults anywhere near them, but they were clearly in massive trouble in this early stage of their lives. The girl stared at me staring at her, and bowed her head, as if she was ashamed of herself scavenging through the trash. My mate who was helping us move was laughing at the kids, because that's what we did, we laughed at everyone, but I couldn't bring myself to...at least I think I didn't, maybe I did, maybe I've ascribed myself morality in the story at a later age. The boy in the blue tracksuit then fell and plunged into the skip, losing his balance and almost impaling himself on the leg of a chair, and the girl had to hold him steady and pull him back up. Then it started raining, but they kept going, ploughing on through the black garbage bags, getting rubbish and trash all over them as they dug. I don't know what became of those kids, but I always remember it, how desperate they were, how hopeless their situation, how sad their faces...

I hope they made it, but somehow, I don't think they did...as for me, I'm really quite lucky I suppose...after all, I just bought My Girl on DVD...

Death by Mraz (Yellow Ray Parka Junior Remix)

Alicia Sacramone Strikes a Pose
Originally uploaded by JungsPN

So I'm sick today (and yet still blogging, give that boy a medallion) but also apathetic. I'd put it down to a mid life crisis if I wasn't ill. I don't know what it's like where other people work, but for me, I often feel trapped and suffocated. If the girl from a shop I won't mention comes in, I do a little flirtacious banter, but that's only once a day. Some days are a pure version of hell, my head explodes and my body aches, and the noise that keeps me awake is the plinky white boy reggae of Jason Mraz and his song "I'm Yours" - the radio programmers seem to spin the Mraz disc and the line about scooching over dear just whenever I'm at my lowest point, it's like a horrible aching paper cut when it comes on. It's like weak tea, a night stuck looking at slides, an old woman telling you about her grandaughter - it's just so tepid, it's just apalling. In fact, as I was driving home, it was no surprise Mraz came on just as I drove past a bad car accident that left a car on an embankment. He's more dangerous than the collider. I think there's a forced jollity to workplaces at times. I saw it today as I was out for my daily walk and stalk (I'm convinced blue eye shadow girl has quit), there was some kind of team building thing going at Boost Juice, they seemed very animated and pumped up to hate the customers. As a team. I know that the entire reason I'm grumpy though is that when I'm walking about, there's all these kids running around crashing into my knees and getting in my way. I think I need to just go and find someone who is appreciative of the solo album of Melissa Auf Der Maur, and who hates kids, and just live in their attic. Again. Either that, or the next kid who runs into my kneecaps after changing direction suddenly, I'm going to get old school on them, and tell them Santa Claus doesn't exist. Maybe I'll do it while sucking on a Push Pop, just to really re-create that old school Grade 8 vibe. Incidentally, speaking of old school, what's a man got to do to get a decent lime spider in Hobart? It's a struggle I tell ya. So today wasn't quite as pointless as it seems to be being Gabriella Cilmis drummer, but it wasn't exactly a raging success...speaking of which....

I've mentioned before I've spent the last decade in a horrible Caspar the Ghost spin when it comes to friends (if you don't know, Norm from Cheers once wondered why Caspar The Friendly Ghost had tons of friends at the end of one episode and none at the start of the next) - from the "I'm incredibly cool" peak of 92 through the horrible awkward teens of 94, the epic 18th in 96, the farewell to friendship, and the horrible year of 00 when I had to go clubbing on my own through to the multi faceted interesting modelled on Shane McGowan (maybe) witty pub sage avoiding a punch in the face man about town of today, it was probably no surprise that I ended up looking pale and spooky through the ups and downs. In 2000, things were definitely grim, although I didn't quite have an Internet girlfriend, everyone I went to school with was lost in time and space, and there I was in Hobart, sitting around playing Kick Off on a vintage Amiga. The nadir of the blank faceless debacle that was 00 (a few more 0s and it's the noise a ghost makes - weird) that was my life was undoubtedly, out of sheer need to get out of the house, accepting an invitation to go to a work party at this girls house where everyone would play Trivial Pursuit and drink martinis. To show you what we were dealing with in this situation, the girl who was hosting the party (with her obsession with mock tudor - I used to think she drove a mock tudor car) once did a psychological evaluation on the staff at work, and submitted it to uni, without telling anyone she was doing it, based entirely on their penmanship (I must have been a right Veronica). Her main male supporter, a homosexualist with a Daniel Johns obsession, once gave one of his best friends a Xmas present of a box of chocolates - which was the same box of chocolates that friend had given him the year before, turning brown chocolate white through the ravages of time - and he apparently told someone he didn't fancy me because he didn't like my thighs (thank god for Kit Kats I say). Needless to say, the chance to get everyone under one roof, ply them with drink, make them play Triv, and then pick on their sobriety and dumbness was very appealing to them. They were both very ordinary people, and real middle managers. Needless to say when I think of both of them I just want to spray Mr Sheen in their eyes and get all Bing Crosby on them, but desperate times call for desperate measures, and as a result, I went, in a bright yellow parka with a copy of The Advocate under my arm no less, to the land of mock tudor, to play Trivial Pursuit.

Needless to say, the night wasn't really a roaring success. The turn out was good, but the vibe was tense, and strained, even without adding the pressure of knowing general knowledge facts about monkeys to win a wedge. She had gone to a lot of trouble, and was clearly buttering us up in that kind of "I read about this in a team building manual" kind of way. There was white wine and wood fired pizza...and a big hat with all our names in it so we could totally like pick our names out and totally get onto a team...and of course, I ended up on the same two person team as Daniel Johns biggest fan. God bless his heard for trying, he tried to strike some some conversation about The Living End, but within seconds our mutual dislike of each other was apparent. I don't expect much out of life, I'm not Robbie Williams, my weekends aren't going to be spent in a hot tub with Alicia Sacramone discussing Wittgenstein, but really, I was hoping for more than this with my life. An older woman who was there got drunk in about 20 seconds on white wine and spewed in the mock tudor toilet. I spent most of the evening trying out my new pose, world weary cynicism, but the night was just dying, as I find most games of Trivial pursuit do, even without my jokes about the Red wedge (come on? Mid 80s UK politics? Style Council? No? Nothing?). Sensing the mood, our hostess with the mostess (wood fired pizza) decided that just to make things even more fascinating, she would begin a house wide scavenger hunt for chocolate liquers. At this point, someone sang a song about a honky tonk and it was time to leave. I ended up standing on the (mock tudor) balcony, munching a canape, and talking to this really bitter woman who was telling me exactly where she wanted to shove the chocolate liquers and then went on this horrifically awful rant about how awful her kids were and how they were plotting against her, mock (wait for it) pearl (ha) earrings glistening in the night sky. And then she ran to the toilet and spewed. Meanwhile, back in the living room, the homosexualist was arguing with a temp typist as to the capital of Albania...I casually walked past, said it was Tirana, and he called me a troublemaker. Ah, that honky tonk, how loudly thee sings...

Still, I was determined, at least in my own mind, to try and show these people that I was still cool and hip. So, to leave with at least some dignity, I announced to the stragglers who hadn't jumped off the balcony that I was going clubbing. I thought that this would be a good way to leave the party, announcing so loudly that I had better things to do, at which point, not unreasonably, the homosexualist pointed out that I should probably take off the yellow parka if I wanted to go clubbing. I hadn't realised I had left the stupid thing on all night. Everyone just stared at me, but it was too late to turn back. "It's the in thing" I said, sounding like Jane Gazzo, and marched off into the night, slamming the mock tudor door behind me. For some reason, as I was walking down the street picking olives out of my teeth, my brain went a bit weird, and in my own head, I thought, yeah, why not go clubbing...on my own, what could possibly go wrong? Chicks love yellow parkas! To this day, I don't know where I went, but I remember going into this club where the bouncers had "Underground" on their T-shirts, and it was probably the first place I ever had to pay to get in, and also get a stamp on my wrist. Naturally, my yellow parka, I talked up to the girl in the pay booth as a fashion statement and she said it was rad, but I bet she said that to all the kids. I distinctly remember stepping into the club and landing on the set of the Mickey Mouse club. There was just wall to wall 14 year olds drinking mocktails, a giant video wall playing (You Drive Me) Crazy by Britney Spears, a bewildered and irritated Maori manning the cloak room trying to find a black jacket (he'd have no problem finding mine in a pile), and a Bicardi girl on the floor who seemed to be pushing a Windex flavoured Bicardi onto unsuspecting kids. I felt so incredibly old and washed up at 22, with the full stunned mullet gaze, and I didn't know what to do. At which point, the Maori from the cloak room has said to me "Hey! Nice jacket!" and given me a massive thumbs up. The Bicardi Girl has then swished past and given me an equal thumbs up for my apparel, like my own little private cheer squad. I can't remember much of that evening after that (candy hearts in a bag again? Picked up the Bicardi girl? Got mugged and dumped in the cloak room? Fled the club in panic? Who knows?)) but at least I, for once, had come through on my word and gone outside my comfort zone...it was a minor triumph in a year of mediocrity...

I don't really care about the quality of the post, I just hope someone somewhere got the Ray Parka Junior joke in the title...if you did, you get a wedge...