Stomach churning burgers, stomach churning bullying, and Regurgitator what was all that about

So my Dad isn't very happy with me at the moment - we were talking this morning about genealogy because my Mum is very into finding out stuff about the crazy Scottish relatives from yore who worked building ships or selling fruit or showing ankle based porn in dingy Glaswegian movie theatres. Dads family is intriguingly mental, and off hand, as a reasoning for this kind of madness I mentioned maybe at some point in his family history someone married a cat, and he's taken offense to this. Still, this is a family with a sister who claimed that her husbands brother was a doctor when in fact he was a clippie on a Glaswegian tram - a learned profession I'm sure, but punching a hole on a ticket requires less effort than doing it in my thorax - as was discovered when he had to make up a story on the run to one of Mums friends one day about part time work and a decline in the number of sick and infirm in Easterhouse being on the decline. Damn polio being cured, it knocked his stocks down. Mum and Dad were round, interrupting a particularly intense mid morning game of were Regurgitator any good or not, and some of my most wonderful self pity. I think they were just making sure I was going to work to be honest. They have this huge A Current Affair driven fear I might get sacked along with the rest of my generation and were laying quite a heavy trip on me in return for some flippant observational conversation about the decline of RC Cola. That's why I actively encouraged the discussion on Dads crazy family, just so I didn't feel imperilled or like I needed to pick up my hula hoop skills and move onto the professional circuit just to keep my house, and just to lift my morbid spirit. Like priests who used to visit peoples homes just to see a bit of Charlies Angels, Mum and Dad used to visit for these chats I suspect to catch a bit of AUSTAR but they have their own box now, so at least their motives are pure and nagging and nosey based, the way it should be. I've got this friend who lives in his own island within his own house, a basement flat, and he's not much younger than me, and he only talks to his parents like a flatmate would to a landlord. He's got Bananaphone as his ring tone, and he makes sure his punk music is on really loud all day when he's lying in the basement staring out the window, just as a big sign that no one should disturb him, least of all me. I used to wonder what he made of the world and the circumstances by which he spent every weekend grunting at his parents then essentially sleeping for two days, but he seems contented. My parents at least give me a sense of where I've come from, even if that is just telling me how crap people from Scotland who play sport are or just that they discovered Billy Connolly at about the same time they discovered The Zombies. If we hadn't all moved to Australia together, maybe I'd have adapted by now, and become fully Australian, I could understand why everyone goes mad about The Castle (I so don't get it, but you guys wouldn't get Absolutely where as I found Stoneybridges bid for the Olympics so amazing...ha, Maigret has a bicycle - class). And of course, they remind me, as Scottish parents do, of past failures. A 21 k an hour shot at the speed gun soccer tester at Hampden when my shoe fell off? Thanks Dad. Without them, I'd have no link to my past. I could make up my own past, one sexy and exciting with loads of chicks and drugs and less time being offered drugs by school kids in car parks...but I'm stuck with who I am, and 2wo permanent reminders. I cant even make anything up on here, the moral guilt would weigh on me far too much...

The bus stop where I used to get the bus to secondary school in Scotland - as you would obviously expect, if I was waiting at a bus stop for a train, that'd be a bit mental - was no place for the faint hearted. Opinions were a dangerous currency, a relatively simple expression of appreciation for the comedy stylings of Paramount City or a fondess for Jesus Jones could be a critical mis-step if the wrong people didn't like it or them. My opinions on Amy Grant were kept very much under wraps. We would stand quietly in snow, intermittent sunshine and what we hoped was rain, plastic bags billowing around our feet, the occasional suspiciously unsupervised child bouncing on the nearby swing, monobrow swinging in fierce moral judgement. The bus, on which, scandalous gossipy barrier crossing or hiding from bullies aside boys sat downstairs and girls sat upstairs, was an old converted tour bus, not for a band or anything, that would have been great, but for old dears to bus around places like Troon with their cameras learning about the fascinating local history of wee Willie MacPhee. Naturally as younger students, we had heard terrible stories about the bus pecking order, that we would be dragged up the back and have our pants removed by larger kids who were closer to the dole queue (this was early 90s Scotland, we still had poll tax and Thatcher and dem bastid English as convenient excuses to fail in life) than us. One had a massive pair of glasses and looked like someone the casting crew of Deliverance would reject for being a bit mental sat up the back, a big walloper in a multi coloured jumper with mad glasses and a conversely unthreatening squeaky teen voice, but just on reputation, he was pretty frightening. My next door neighbour, wary of these opinions, and not realising the threats were all implied and not backed up, got freaked and spent every day on the bus up the front standing next to the bus driver for protection, jumping up and down excitedly and asking the bus driver to go faster like a pure maddie (that's Scottish code for like someone a bit insane, not the missing child). He ended up quite picked on for this, some people threw straws at him in a hilarious implication that he was sucking up the bus drivers arse (I thought it was a Stevie Nicks reference, but that's libellous) and once someone, it would have been amusing if it was the multicoloured hypnomutant, tried to drag him physically away from the bus drivers side. As he was dragged away, against his will, he hit his head on the corner of one of the poles connecting the top of the bus to the bottom, and basically was knocked out. As the dragger distanced himself from the fray (not the band), someone up the back made some sort of MASH reference, like someone call Hawkeye, and was duly rounded on for his out of date reference, while my neighbour, by now ignored by the masses picking on the Klinger fan, stumbled around on the sparkly bus floor among the gum and the discarded tickets totally unaware of what was happening. Needless to say, ten seconds later, even with heavy concussion, he picked himself up, surveyed the situation of rampant taunting, and went straight back to talking to the bus driver as if nothing had happened. As a wise man would say, you have to admire his spirit...

My one and only problem on the bus - tedious minor bullying, once being driven past our stop by a Rangers supporter as a punishment for singing Celtic songs and dumped in Dreghorn, and once being thrown off for standing up in the bag rack aside - was a less than Frazier-Ali battle with a kid who sat in front of me called James. James was a nice enough kid - nice in that way were everyone thinks you are gay. All I can remember about him was that after a big wrestling show on Sky Sports, he would come into school with who won and who lost neatly written in his school book so he could remember who to talk about. He was about one year older than me, but he looked like someone in his 20s, he carried himself in that way, and I kind of think he was one of those people who ended up teaching drama. And he always wore a green jacket, even in summer. Like I say, really nice guy. One day he got into an argument with my best friend - lets say it was about wrestling - and they were about to start a quite girly slap fight. My best friend was a fellow doomed intellectual with far more personality and confidence than me, who my auntie just referred to as that wee fat smug hing. I didn't mean to get involved as we hurtled homeward through several poverty burdened Ayrshire towns, but I must have done something, maybe raised a hand or had a pop at Hulk Hogan or said green jackets were so 1988 - something happened. In what was surely the girliest move of the early 90s outside of Big Fun, he grabbed my finger, and my jabbing finger at that, and bent it backwards. I'd say he bent it like Beckham, but it was 1991, so I guess he bent it like, er, Dziekanowski? Taken aback by this sub nipple cripple disarming of my opinion, I slumped into my not sure what fabric it was seat, because it really did hurt, clutching my finger like an errant shoplifter in the Arabian justice system. To the surprise of anyone though, especially those who had expected my meek reaction would give them plenty of time to make a moral judgement, I got up swinging, landing punches so weak you could serve them at a Grade 8 social and giggle at how rebellious you were, but looking mighty impressive as I did. Especially because one connected. One out of 12eve isn't bad. Given I had a reputation as a Bananarama fan not a fighter, everyone was stunned, and had I followed it up with a knockout blow, I would have been marked as someone to mess with, but in the maelstrom of confusion, I let humanity settle in - or was I just shagged out, I can't remember - and when I looked, the primary look on James face wasn't hurt (my left cross has never recovered from such a slight) but confusion and dismay...

I think he spent about 3hree weeks getting slagged off for me beating him up, if landing one punch while he slap fended counts as a smackdown, until my lustre and moment faded when there was a cheating scandal in the girls card school and everyone had to take a side as to whethere 3hree Kings beat 2 Queens and 2 Jacks or something like that. I think proving my lack of killer instinct, I ended up apologizing to him, and he looked a bit wary, and since he never apologized for dipping into the pool of Grade 2wo tricks when he was on the attack, we never got back to the matey lets all talk about wrestling footing we were previously on. Bullying was never very me - I might not like a lot of people, but I can't bring myself to pick on them physically. Aw mooth and nae shell suit I am. When we did the tour of the Celtic Football Club stadium, Celtic Park, Dad and I wandering around through a big load of trophies and vaguely Catholic propaganda with, strangely, 2wo Port Adelaide fans. It was a belter of a day, pure dead brilliant as it says at Prestwick Airport. Two carers had brought along a Rainman like figure called Eddie. Eddie was a shuffing, shambling man who would loudly interject the tour guide not with references to his excellent driving but with the similarly repetitive drone that he wanted a cigarette. No matter what they showed Eddie, European trophies, old soccer jumpers, seats in the upper deck, it just wasn't as impressive to him as a Benson and Hedges cigarette next to a Bic lighter. Like the singing of Connie Talbot, what was cute at first rapidly became annoying after the 5ifth interruption, and his carers had to take him away. Eventually the tour ended with the exchanging of more vaguely Catholic propaganda, and Dad wandered off to get a dangerously undercooked hot dog from the British fat (it's different to American fat) lady in the van. As I looked around to try and hide from the Port Adelaide fans, I glanced over to a car to where, and this is speculative, it appeared as though one of the carers had just struck Eddie upside the head, and nobody had said oompala. Without absolute proof other than Eddie was holding his head and everyone staring like something major had just happened, I couldn't go and intervene, but his face, for whatever reason, reminded me of the look just after I'd hit James. Stunned bewilderment rather than pain, confusion, naivety and just a hint of embarrassment. I could have read this all wrong, it was hot, I was still recovering from the British fat lady calling me darling, Eddie might have been still looking for a cigarette, but he definitely looked upset. I appreciate it's why I can't be a bully - especially to the mentally infirm - the moral guilt gets to my stomach like an unwrapped Parkhead burger. They drove off in their little van, Eddie in the back, sadly not driving away given I suspect he's an excellent driver, to god knows where, leaving me to be tapped on the shoulder by my Dad who had a surprise for me - another hamburger...oh, terrific...

Naturally, given our relationship, I didn't speak to Dad about this, he was too busy saying I was a twat in that special way...at least no one in my family married a cat..oh, no, wait...

Stress lessened by cordial, increased by sunburn, lessened by MGMT

I don't think it's an oversight to say a bottle of slightly mutated mango cordial is saving my life right now. It's proving an outlet at work when I feel lousy, due to my illness obviously, not due to emotional problems because sandwich white female hasn't been at work the last few days and I've had to eat, god help me, sausage rolls with extra burnt bits, an excuse to go out the back and say I need a cordial break. I'm far from superstitious, but I know this isn't the first time I've relied on an inanimate object to get me through tough times - although cordial isn't an inanimate object, since it's a liquid, but shut up, you don't know me, throw my hands up in blatant posturing etc - as my tonsil surgery when I was 5ive was entirely brightened up by having a Ju Jitsu Heman figure purchased for me to stop my whinging. His karate chopping hand and amusingly sculpted beard certainly kept me sane when the doctor was going to drain my ears in a hilarious operational mix up that's for sure. When Dad, having driven for 2wo hours after work to see me politely asked how I felt I'm rumoured to have pulled a face and screamed how do you think I feel, but I suspect that's my Dads mythology kicking in. After all, he loves a good moan, and if he's sick, all the better. He even has a favourite brand of grape for you to bring him. My friend, the one with the husband who uses her credit card to buy fat girl porn, is sending me e-mails making that my support of Britney Spears through the dark times is some sort of tremendously cool statement of individuality I should be proud of. Well, buying fat girl porn on a credit card is a statement of individuality. I hadn't thought about it - I certainly don't feel like any kind of radical free thinker, especially given my lunch routine is now so predictable a girl in a hat jumps out from the shadows to provide my daily rations like Jesus without the fish. Certainly dizzy from the heat, reliant on cordial to prop me up and in a job that requires the mental capacity of a promotions model to do, I can hardly claim to be charting my own course, but it's nice people think of me in that way from time to time. Certainly, in times of stress, simple thinking and taking a moment to enjoy the simple things in life like an appreciative if flawed e-mail or a glass of sparkling cordial can just about get me through the day as long as I don't end up sounding like some kind of hippy with a tattoo of the sun on my foot.

When I was 8eight, I got badly sunburned during an athletics carnival. I was in the genetically superior yellow house, whipped into a Soviet style frenzy of patriotism and devotion to my colour through the power of one coloured skivvy being handed out from a pile by a surly janitor at random as opposed to another coloured skivvy. We would sit on the hill all day and cheer nominally for our house, at least in theory, because after an hour it felt like it a grass based internment camp, although at least our interest lasted an hour, it was 10en minutes in secondary school before I was working the moves on the more lithe javelin throwers and then going to the shops to buy a chocolate milk. The fact I couldn't move and was essentially was engrossed in egg and spoon warfare meant that one of my rare salad days in athletics - alas I soon discovered cynicism and cake - when I could run properly without looking like a benny ended in skin reddening horror. Even though I won my race, and would later run in front of the Queen (the real one, not our camp PE teacher) that wasn't what everyone remembered about me from that day. I certainly think that the trauma of being turned into a lobster stymied my thoughts of athletic glory, as the visual representation of the phrase if you can't stand the heat get out of the internment camp marked off by ropes and strict teachers wanting to now where you are going. When I went home that night, my Mum immediately plunged me into a cold bath and said nothing, just shaking her head and saving her lectures on wearing a hat for another day. My girlfriend at the time, Sarah, my girlfriend in that you like pencil cases me too lets get married kind of way, wasn't so terribly stoic in the face of my burnt visage. She took one look at me and asked in a manner which bespoke over theatrical text speak if I was going to die. It probably seems a more relevant question now in the skin cancer era, all we knew back then was those birds telling us to slip slop slap sure could hold a tune. Although she was ahead of her time, I felt our relationship never really recovered from a superficial moment. If she couldn't love me in times of crisis when I had a big red bawface, then all the mutual pencil case appreciation in the world couldn't dig us out of the hole. Considering that in the space of roughly a week I had my first memorable experience with genuine pain, not to mention an outright question about my own mortality, been thrown physically into an ice bath and ended up with my first heartbreak (pretty apathetic as it was - we just stopped meeting in the pipe at recess), it was a pretty effective mental lesson that I should cover up in the sun lest bad things happen. Of course, it never sunk in, and to this day I still lumber home, burned to bits, my Mum still lectures me, and I'm still plunging into ice baths...form an orderly queue ladies...

Interestingly, this was my first brush with honest to goodness adult stress. Sure, I hadn't managed to find an egg on an Easter egg hunt, there was that whole debacle when Wide World Of Sports wasn't on one week because some junk called Live Aid was on, and I had probably thrown a hissy fit or two about football cards, but being plunged into singles life and being something of a playground outcast on account of my giant red face was a stressful week - I mean, even Peter Gilligans recap of local football getting the axe for the lead singer of Ultravox wouldn't compare. It was worse than comedy tennis. I couldn't help but feel it was my fault somehow. If only I had stayed pristine and faintly tanned, I'd still be in the pencil case relationship. I had a friend called Nick - somewhere in Risdon now if lore and reputation held up - who was a bit of a scammer, a wheeler dealer. He also told it like it was - and if you needed a man to parody a popular song with a reference to bogeys or snot, he was your go to guy, a Weird Al of the nose and nose related products. He was firm though as we queued for Bubble O Bills in the assembly hall that my social standing was fading and by the way what did I think of his new song, Snot In The First Degree? Amusing as the song parody was, I still wasn't convinced that simply being red made me the social equivalent of comedy tennis, but I took it on board. I shone as hard as I possibly could at Footy Maths - cop that Pilkington - and I tried to impress new ladies with some impressively hard tugs of their pigtails, but I still felt a frost, which while cooling towards my sunburn did little to warm my ill begotten socially adrift heart. As it happened, a girl who's name is lost to history, a Lauren or a Karen or some generic mid 80s Burnie name, fell over and showed most of the playground her knickers, and eventually an entire generation of people would say I was there on the fateful day as she stumbled for loose change and dignity on a bare patch of neatly mowed grass. As my woe passed and she became the story of the day, I was left realising that I didn't understand the game, couldn't play the game, and tried to affect an air that since I didn't understand social rules or playground lore, I would be above them. I wish I had stuck to that, but of course, for the rest of my school days I was always one bout of sunburn away from stress and nervousness...heh, Snot in the First Degree, that's killer material, the inmates must love him...

The stressful day continues - I have to have a nanna nap just to take the pain from my eyes, which I think was a Smiths B Side in the 80s. The trendy radio DJs are blethering empty sentences about tennis, while when I drive home a fight nearly breaks out when a motorbike rides in the same lane as a car, and they exchange jabbing fingers through the window until the motorbike rider has a Harley Davidson cliche seminar to attend and wheels away with his beard fluttering in the breeze. If I lived at home still, Dad would have made me a tasty cup of tea and Mum would have asked an abundance of gently probing but ultimately annoying questions until I could steer the conversation towards great comedy moments. Alas, I come home to an empty house, but there are outlets. Not least of which, the opportunity to make a delicious lime spider, rock in the hammock listening to now apparently acceptable music, the chance to yell at a football manager who doesn't know what a clown I think he is, and shoo a dog out of my front yard with comedy one sided intensity. That is, I'm intense, the dog couldn't give a shit, which is good for my lawn I guess. Most of all though, an advert comes on television - a radio station promo which flashes up the names of three allegedly trendy bands and then the station logo, as some sort of socially acceptable look at us we can name the same 3hree bands as everyone else banner hung over the rafters. Which is how I find myself holding a 1/2 drunk lime spider, doped up on Codril and whatever the hell that blue pill was in the basket (no, it wasn't that one) in my cupboard, screaming at the TV obscenities about MGMT, a band who's noodling I find inoffensive and meh at most stages, but for some reason, and it is my theories wars start because a dictator didn't have his juice in the morning, it has inspired a solitary hulk smash rampage against the machine that had it been recorded would have amused all and sundry with it's over use of the word noodlings (it's been twice in this blog post and it's amused me). For some reason though, it's a cathartic yelling, and I feel immediately better and am able to get some rest. My Mum, if she was here, apart from calling me a twat, would call me on a strange character trait - she always thinks any time I'm angry, it's an act, and soon I'll just get over whats bothering me and carry on with my day. She never really believed my huffs, even after a stint at acting class. Naturally, this comes into my head as I stand in my living room puffed but happy, having unloaded both barrels on an inoffensive advert. Is that all it takes for me to get over stress? A good yell and a lime drink? I'm quite happy if that's the case, I'm quite pleased with myself...

I'm just glad it wasn't the ESPN ad and a mention of Beyonce...I don't want to test the theory to it's outer limits...

The Codril Files (tales of self and only self)

My newsagent where I work is a very interesting man. He has slicked back hair, a weirdly trimmed little pirate moustache and is perpetually on the look out for naughty kids reading his magazines. He puts signs up to discourage the handling of the merchandise, backed up with intense and moody glances in the direction of anyone even looking at Tractor monthly without the skillz to pay the billz, and when his wife, a miserable looking woman who wears an 80s style tracksuit even on 40ty degree days, is in the shop staring blankly into the distance, the place for some reason fills up with naughty kids like it's recess. What's interesting about him though is his niceties are entirely based around how much money you spend in his store. Having spent a moment reading my paper and seeing how many discreet ways they could describe a female tennis player as fat without saying it - sturdy seems to get a work out - he goes to engage in basic social chat until he realises I've bought an import magazine at an expensive price at which point we're brothers in arms, and he's asking about my long weekend. Because I'm sick - a cold on top of hay fever on top of natural male pity - these minor annoyances pile up on me today. Not just the overfriendliness of the businessman who can put a 20enty in his till, but a girl at a different bakers who corrects what I call a ham and cheese square, holding her hand up and calling them a Danish with a self correcting tip of the hat. I should walk away, but every step today hurts, lacerated with the feeling that no one is suffering like I am, the problems of the world paling into comparison with mildly tingling sinuses. So meekly, I hold my own hands up and say, oh yeah, a Danish, silly me. How could I not know my pastries? And this is all it takes - after all, I had started the year with a feeling of maturation, a self reliance and assurance, dare I say, a new resolution. And all it's taken to unravel it today, to turn me into the petulant nervy kid who wouldn't look out of place on the Wiggles car in the centre is a cold and a dismissive going nowhere in her life baker. So caught up am I in lifes tiny quarrels, I nearly hip and shoulder a parent with a teething child on her shoulder who's gotten too close to me in a searching examination of the apple strudels. As I apologize, the kid shoots me a look - and far be it for me to assign emotions to small children - which seems to be the kind of look that I imagine one wounded soldier shoots another wounded soldier in a war hospital. The kind of look that says, I know your face is indicating you have troubles, but buddy, let me tell you, unless you are teething, you don't know that half of it. Either that or the kid had gas. I was loaded up on Codral, for all I know I was trying to order a jam donut...

A long time ago, maybe 1994, like I say though a long time ago - after all 2009 is to 1994 as 94 was to 1979 - I was loaded with self pity, and worse, self absorption, the kind of teenager who blamed a failure to do maths homework on some anti me cosmic plan rather than, you know, the fact that I didn't lift it out of my sparkly Adidas bag and do it. In fact, Dad had a hernia that year, and I bemoaned having to go to hospital with him - although our relationship wasn't exactly a sparkling Adidas grab bag of delights that year anyway. Still, he deserved better than his only son and heir, having established that he wasn't going to die, going down two floors of Burnie hospital to watch golf with a nurse just because there was nothing else to say. The nurse, an Alisa Kleybanova lookalike in an ill fitting skirt called Cheryl with huge beefy arms bulging in her uniform, was probably assigned to do some counselling in these situations, to seek out the perpetually bewildered and talk to them in case they were nervous or upset - and at a distance, I did look concerned and as someone who needed a pep talk but none of that had to do with the patient, more my divorce from my AMIGA - but I don't think she truly believed in her spiel. In fact, I believe I ended up counselling her, for she seemed to not believe in her vocation, that what she said would make any kind of difference. Her eyes were deeply troubled, the kind of eyes you see on an aging stripper which suggest that life has an ultimate futility to it, and I believe at the end of our talk she disappeared into a cancer ward with a little bit of reluctance, and it didn't seem like good news. Of course, I wasn't listening, after all I was the only one with problems wasn't I, so I don't think I did her any good. About as supportive as I got with anyone during that whole period was making some kind of joke akin to my Dad was being hauled off the cruxification as we carried him down the corridor to his bed, his arms around Mum and Is shoulders. We laughed so much he nearly split his stitches, a very Scottish form of re-assurance. Of course, it was a rare joyless moment in an otherwise mirthless year - I mean, I know it was a joyless year, I was watching golf, how low can you sink? - and in the end was almost had a massive fist fight based entirely on my ownership of a Sports Illustrated Swimsuit issue and using it as evidence of an unfocused morally decaying and you didn't stick to picking up your bricks mind. It seemed as good a way as any I suppose for him to try and get through to me, picking up a possession at random and using it as some sort of metaphorical and emotional weapon. And all I could do in my tiny room that afternoon, as we stood cheek to jowl exchanging opinions on a newly varnished floor, was hysterically, manically laugh. If I had stitches, they would have well and truly burst and there wasn't a sacreligious joke in earshot. It was mostly because had he just reached to the left instead of the right - zigged instead of zagged - he'd have picked up and been waving a Garfield compendium and using it as reasoning as to why I was a bad son. I'm not sure he would have had the empirical evidence to back this up, although there were times I didn't eat all my Lasagne, and I know I didn't like Mondays...

I've got a friend who recently picked up on Facebook. Either that, or she just posted a lot of updates about it, and her concern that a stranger was wandering around her kitchen in the morning picking at her muesli (not a euphemism). My Mum - when she isn't referencing Myface as a social networking tool - calls the Internet a load of liars all talking to each other, so this is mere conjecture that she actually did, and certainly I have no issue with people picking up. I'm glad I haven't picked up in such a blatant Syrup way though since I got this house, mostly because I suspect the ardour that would last in the back of a taxi may be cooled by my giant Britney poster that plays a tune when you push a button. I also don't much fancy that sense of awkwardness the next morning, the oh you still here North West Coast charm that we weave so well. I got into a big debate about how strange it is that you can now broadcast such concerns on the Internet for a worldwide audience. Of course, I sat quietly, since I had abandoned Myface a long time ago simply because of a horrible picture, and also because I didn't want to be all, hey, I've got a blog, I'm quite 2004! I know there was a girl at school called Jennifer, the one who tried to save me, who in her attempts to save everyone would leave no story untold, with an especially strident tale of a hobo who turned up to their door, and how her family had let him in, dusted him off and let him start his life all over again. We largely suspected this was nonsense, especially when the story began getting more and more elaborate, until it was a leper and a serial killer that she had saved and not the original homeless man with a scruffy beard and a pocket full of miracles. The story obviously had nothing to do with the littlest leper, and everything to do with how wonderful she was, just as posting coy I picked up what do I do posts on Myface is telling people you got some without the need for explanation. I know in my experience, there aren't many people who genuinely keep themselves to themselves, their world is theirs to tell everyone about, unique and exciting entirely to them. I know that when I next see the girl who picked up on Myface, there will be an awkward and meaningless conversation until I ask her about it. It's what she wants, the chance to espouse all about it, the chance to be the most important person in the pub. All I will have in response is some tedious work stories and a recap of the evenings TV. Maybe I should take in a hobo, that would ensure all eyes, very much, on me...

At 3am, I'm up and marching down my hall, embitterred that I can't get to sleep. On television a perky American is marching up and down on a treadmill, as full of life as I am of cold and pain. When I check my e-mail - to make sure that I don't hurt anymore through the power of active movement and to drown out, hopefully, the drums pounding in my head (and they are real drums, there's a party next door). The world continues to move on. Dads sister for instance, is missing. This isn't unique for Dads family, they don't talk to each other after all, but we haven't heard from her for about 3hree years, when she ran off with Rangers reserve goalkeeper. She goes to nightclubs at 50ty and still has no sense of maturity, partying and picking up, which is fair enough. Out of boredom, I try and find her on Google, but can't, only finding that my old school in Kilwinning has been knocked down. I don't take it personally. I just wonder where all the drug dealers went. When I went to school there, there weren't many moments where I was alone, as it was always overcrowded and strangers could more or less walk through the canteen as they pleased. One of the few times I was on my own, I was sitting eating gruel through a straw, and a man I didn't recognise holding a large plank of wood asked me where Chris was. Maths I said, for such occurences, grudge wielding wood holders looking to inflict damage on passers by. When I look at the website, dedicated to remembering the school, they make it sound like a wonderland, a magical palace of learning. Of course, the website has nothing to do with the school, it's teachers broadcasting to the world how wonderful they are for making the website and for teaching their with such wonderful attitudes. They give themselves touching little quotes about how wonderful they are, and in the end, I switch the computer off. They have their own little world to construct and I have mine. Mines mostly involves at this point in time lying stock still on the carpet, complaining and whinging, waiting for the pills to kick in, feeling like the last person on earth, and fully aware that all of my senses are dimmed, including my ability to come up with a cogent sentence or two...

At least I didn't buy a treadmill though, I wasn't that bad...

The dumb shall inherit the beer pump (Dave Sears Vocal On Time Mix)

My friend sits quietly on his oak panelled stool, while I nurse my drink and a strangely passionate three drink grudge against the Murdoch newspaper that I didn't have before I started the process of inebriation. I'm not sure what the sport is flickering on the television in the corner, but there is an intense close up of someone almost in tears at the way the sport is going, a miserable figure attaching her lifes worth to men in shorts and athletic apparel going through the motions. Our barmaid is hairdresser pretty. She has a blonde fringe interfering with her vision, and white nails that aggressively long and pointy. I suspect if I said that they were white she would correct me and tell me they were a certain and particular shade with a fancy name and make white sound like the simplistic naive answer you would expect from a non nail expert. My friend out of unrequited casual afternoon lust begins a conversation with her, and she begins sketching out an unprompted monologue about passing time until the end of the year when she go to beauty school. There's no sparkle in her eyes though, no life, no intelligence to the conversation, it seems to come from a teleprompter - either this is rehearsed fend off patter, as friendly as possible without personal engagement or she's not that bright. I get distracted trying to find a light in her eyes, I'm sure that I myself look a bit dumb, I've already been somehow conned into entering a surfboard competition entirely based on a sales pitch and everything looking more amazing after a few drinks without pondering exactly why I would possibly want a surfboard. She swishes off with our glasses in hand, and my friend, a think from the hips man, is impressed. I can't say I agree, although it is a judgement call - there's every possibility that she could return acerbic comments towards me, if she listened in to what I'm talking about, jock sports, the decline of print journalism which makes me sound like someone who writes in green pen to newspapers, and long winded ideas for going to America with a knapsack on my back. However, I suspect things are a lot more prosaic. She's simply too dumb to be upset by things, and I've devoted any kind of vague intellectualism I have and turned it inwards on myself, restlessly analysing decisions. Even today, I'm upset at something I said when I was drunk, and castigated myself for it. My nails, for what it is worth, are chewed and not the greatest, but I wouldn't mind somedays swapping, say, a knowledge of literature for a day of happiness entirely based on my nails or hair being perfect...when I go to leave, she's cleaning a glass with a repetitive casual attitude, washing it over and over again, staring straight ahead, not even blinking. I wonder if it hides a wistful attitude, a melancholy, something, but as a character study, it's flawed, because I'm drunk, she's in a world of impenetrable self focus, and there's a kebab to chew on somewhere down the line...given that I'm amount to take a risk on a 1/2 cooked kebab at this time of night suggest our intellectual disparity is, sadly, not as wide as this musing would suggest...

I remember when I was little I was considered something of a child prodigy, not a firestarter (stop doing that joke) but someone so adept of the 9ine times table that it appeared quite scary to lesser mortals. Before all the self consciousness, hormones and poor choices of jackets came in, I was quite the hip young thing around Penguin, a hot prospect heading to NASA, or at least a highly paid office job managing disinterested uni drop outs. Interesting, this has come up with my friend when he wasn't talking to hairdresser pretty. He's trying to motivate a 40ty year old public service worker who like a tempremental actor needs to know what his motivation is before he fills in a form. I used to sit in the library reading 2wo books over and over again, the first a Betsy Byars book about aliens and chocolate or some such nonsense, and the second a cricket book with a particularly vivid and articulate passage about a big riot in the West Indies, wonderfully written imagery on every page about crazy people with stumps attacking the police. I thought this was amazing and I used to show it to people and try and point it out as evidence of a much broader world than we were used to in our condensed world of catch and kiss and wooden forts, but most children at our school would return serve with evidence that they went to Devonport to see a market on the weekend as proof of ambitious and restless yearning within their own souls and an understanding of the world. They didn't understand my point. In fairness, this is a one dimenisional sketched out pattern of those days. I would no doubt have been a restless 6ix year old pining for a deeper meaning to life, and then put my jacket on back to front and inside out so when I put the hood up it went over my face. I was an expert on the complexities of the BBC Micro who couldn't tie his shoelaces. My brains were clearly all in my head. My Dads sister, a relentlessly strange woman who now has a locked up living room, tried to push her children to my intellectual level, which was even stranger. When I said I liked something, like a band, she was ask her kids if they liked them, the implication being only their opinions had validity. In moments of quite reflection or when Mum digs out those undeletable VHS tapes from my childhood I cringe and call myself a weird kid, but the world around me was stranger still. There was a woman in the milk bar who would always buy three jam donuts and a chocolate milk, never anything else, always in some kind of weird meshy silver jumper and who was always in a massive rush to get them. I was fascinated by her, but no one else seemed to be, everyone else just let her get her food and get out. When I told my friends about her, they would shrug and play marbles. There was evidence of a wider world mounting up for me, but before then, just one quick game of marbles, just before recess, to try and win that shiny glass one, I'm sure, would not be a sign of intellectual complacency...

When I moved to Scotland, the stupidest kid I went to school with was a 6"4 lump of granite and idiocy called Lee. He had a blonde bowl cut like Gareth from the Office, would wear a black leather jacket on hot days, and would finish every sentence with some kind of cliched over friendly statement like ma man or big pal. There was no second level to him - he was just thick. He came from a town called Beith, and such was his despairing lack of curiousity about anything that wasn't taking twos from your can or calling you over just to say hello, that really you just would have thought someone took his brain out and put in a tape recorder. One day I was watching my soccer team, St Mirren, play in the pouring rain, and he came and sat behind me, asking all these questions with ma man at the end, and after about an hour of this relentless questioning, our goalkeeper dropped the ball in his own net, and he laughed really loudly, genuine belly shaking hilarity, until I told him to fuck off and he was genuinely crushed, leaving the ground and never having any designs on my drink ever again. For some reason, the hairdresser pretty girl behind the bar reminds me of her. There's males at the bar, a Davo, a Stevo, a Wayno, patriotically displaying their o based nicknames on matching T-shirts, are talking to her, and I suspect taking the piss, and the look on her face suggests she knows this but can't work out why. My friend begins telling a long winded story about turning down a stripper on a bucks night who was angling for a lap dance - he says with typically blokey regret, but truthfully, it was probably the right thing to do. It's unlikely she'd respect you in the morning. However, the coda to the story is that it's two years old, time passing rapidly with every beer, us all getting as old as our stories. That said, I'm glad at how simple and unpressured this night is, appreciating that I have friends that I don't have to make a lot of effort with anymore. I briefly catch sight of a slightly desperate and erratically bobbing pensioner playing poker machines upstairs, shaking her plastic cup trying to find a few more coins to try and win her cigarette money back, teeth and mouth hissing together as she stares at the screen. My natural curiousity doesn't always extend to such desperate circumstances as the poker machine player at 1am, so I turn away from the poignancy, go back to my drink, and back into the safer realms of conversation about female tennis players, a world where you can't really go wrong...

There aren't enough people out tonight to make things interesting. The entire bar is filled up with sporting teams in matching tops, males having a warm up drink before they go and puff out their chests, solitary drinkers determined not to go home, men with bad news to deliver to harried spouses without the inclination to bring it up. In lucid moments I can be put off by pubs, by the way everyone thinks they are cooler than they are, or some old boy in the corner is warming up his opinionated vocal chords to become lord of the bar, but these feelings are only fleeting. I've mentioned before that I can't sit in a pub on my own, I feel a bit lonely and pathetic, so if no one is around, I have to leave and walk around the block. When I did this before entering the establishment, I had to walk through Salamanca. I haven't talked a lot about Salamanca, our market of many buskers, but as I walk through, I'm nearly brained by a busker who is throwing one of those little reels on a string and loses control for a second. I shoot him a look that is so theatrical I'm sure he can only relate to it as a performer, as it's hardly threatening, but he goes back to performing with a nervousness that I find suprising. Having run out of things to say much later, I consider bringing this up, but resist, thinking I'll get back to it one day, over another beer, watching another male sign up for the surfboard, hoodwinked by flirtacious banter. When everyone goes to the Observatory later, a cavernous school disco hyped up into a nightclub with video screens and the hint of over trendiness, I go home, unsure that Rihanna at 3hree in the morning larger than life in pixels will be good for my mental state. I leave my friends behind, leave them to come with their own ending to the evening as I pour myself into a taxi driven by a female taxi driver who I suspect spends each new engagement on edge at this time of night. Luckily, all I am is mildly drunk, although when I go to say my address, I say in an alien, drunken, slurred voice, one that catches me by complete surprise. Naturally, this precludes me from any further conversation, and probably her from initiating. It makes me think of her judgements of me, and my own intellect, given that remembering the name of my street seems to have been a struggle. I just about get home with pride intact, slump to sleep, and think if hairdresser pretty or Lee could see me now, slumped in my bed, they may be disposed to ponder whether I had any right to consider myself so much smarter than them...

Well, not really, one would be cleaning a glass and the other would be after my Coke...

The ups and downs of an emotionally questionable Friday

There are times Hobart, even as a veteran of living here, can feel like an elaborate parody of a Tasmanian stereotype - like people are putting on a show to deter mainlanders from moving here. After all, where else at a comedy gig would you have a woman with a Michael Jackson face clutching a dalmatian, a baby as part of the show, an hour devoted to defaming a restaurant that may or may not have served cockroach based rice, and heckles that don't seem to go anywhere all in one venue. Of course, this was all before me as I pulled into the last car park in town, just me and some sort of American Beauty style floating plastic bag together at the end of the world. When I drive I'm happy until I have to park, and when I park in Hobart, there's usually bewildered pedestrians with absolutely no desire to get out of my way, and trapped in my little hurricane of aggravation (thanks Sal) I'm held up by a chubby child in ill fitting clothes munching on an ice cream walking across the path of my car daring me to hit them or die trying. When I get the car, she's still there, still chubby, still licking the top of a Cornetto, now holding up a four wheel drive in her disdain for the laws of physical danger. In the cold night air, a love fest breaks out at the traffic lights, three or four couples gathering around the button. Inevitably, because it's traffic lights, each male in the couple must hit the button aggressively in a show of impatient take charge bravado, even though I've already hit the button. I've never thought I was attractive, the photographic evidence is too strong to fight, but I'm still male and I'm still on my own, and in a strange display of peacock feathering pride, a male runs up to his paramour who is three steps ahead of him at the lights, and puts his hands straight down her pants and gives her a sloppy kiss just so everyone knows she's taken, Hobarts very special form of branding. I would make some sort of caveman reference, but the moment passes as I lose them in a difficult AJC/low battery IPOD moment of tension. In my attempt to squeeze the final verse of Skywriting in on a limited time scale in regards to battery, distance to venue and the fact I'm so unfit I could be made to go to a health spa, I don't have time to notice that my own slow saunter has held up a car turning the corner and the driver is tapping impatiently. If I was only younger and licking the top of a Cornetto, I could probably get away with a disdainful dumb glance but for some reason I walk faster and get out of the way. I don't know why this, it causes me to think for some reason about how fantastic it was when you could just get away with things just because you were a dumb kid and some interesting questions on the maturation policy...although again, this passes as soon as I receive the incredibly mature Xmas gift from my friend of a Hannah Montana jigsaw...so I'm a dichotomy in a Cuba tracksuit, it's too late for me, save yourself...

I was probably in the wrong headspace for a night of Geordie based improvised but also suspiciously rehearsed comedy anyway. An old lady had a heart attack outside Sanity and as they treated her they fenced her off like they were doing roadworks, while pairs of middle aged women in tracksuits and low priced Millers tops nudged each other and stood and watched like there was a cost sale at Suzanne Grae or some kind of new tourist attraction. As they loaded her onto a stretcher even the promotions models as Boost Juice were in animated discussion about the incident. Hell of a way to go, clutching an Andre Rieu DVD while a blonde girl who plainly hates humanity, two harlots with a story for their bridge club and some idiot who's been weirded out by his latest encounter with sandwich white female - she was cleaning the fridge and actually got my sandwich for me yesterday, and then got upset she didn't remember the water - stand around in transfixed gawpery. Not to mention being fenced off with little yellow bits of plastic up around you. The moral implications of standing around watching a revival attempt seem a little too heavy to deal with in the remaining 18teen minutes of my lunch break, and so I move on. Still, it weighs on me a little bit. I've mentioned before when I was in kindergarten a kid died in suspicious circumstances on some train tracks and I put my hand up and asked if he'd be back for maths. Now, I'm a little more in tune with the passing of time and life. I wander through Big W and flick through the 8ight dollar DVDs, endless piles of DVDs from wrestlers celebrated through the medium of documentary footage from their glory days and the odd funny story. Normally such a collection of endless nostalgia would be appealing at such a low low price, but I don't buy any, moving on just as a man in a red T-shirt with a rebellious beard and his chunky thighed girlfriend push a pram in prime bargain position. He holds up a DVD from Jake the Snake Roberts, pointing at the price, but she puts her hand on his arm and says they can't afford it in the current climate. Well it has been windy late...oh, she means the economic climate. While I know what she means, burdened as I am with the debt of too many T-shirts bought on credit card from a London store called 2 Many T-shirts (damn you and your trendy catalogues), but it seems as though the purchase of an 8.99 DVD won't hurt the economy that much, although red T-shirt man is convinced by the argument, and the snake has to slither back into the display cabinet. I can't help but notice she seems to have bought an awful lot of delicious chocolate for herself, but she had a child, and could probably argue she's done more for the fate of the world and is entitled to Dairy Milk in oversized blocks. Maybe she's right, but she's never been on the front of a phone book, so I'd say we're even...

The trendy radio DJs are exhorting everyone to celebrate the weekend by taking their pants off, impractical for me since I'm driving and since their trendy blather has inspired me only to put the IPOD on in breach of several road rules as I drive home. It seems another lifetime ago I used to sit in the back of Dads little brown Torana car - so inept as a motor vehicle the gearstick came off in his hand once and we had to push it into school - and bombard him with stupid questions like if we drove at 60ks an hour how far would we get in an hour and what colour would the sky be when we got there. Once I had my arm out the window and was holding a short story I'd got an A for and the wind took it from my grip and it blew over the railing and floated down over the cliff on the road to Penguin, where perhaps it was read by environmentalists. I do remember feeling a sense of loss though, and somehow playing with my Whiplash He-Man figure didn't feel quite right that night. OK, so I was a dark child. Even my He-Man figures were telling me to cheer up at times. Every day I go up and down the same road in and out of town, weaving in and out of traffic like an obstacle course, but always yelling at someone for being too slow. My Mum always tells me this is stupid, that life is too precious to worry about the mere slow witted response time of a Nissan Micra driver, but it's my grievance and I'll nurse it as I see fit. I rush into my house when I get home, doing a quick turn around as I go, reading several e-mails as I go. Most of them are about dream team AFL football, grown men concerned about games where footballers kicking a ball gets you points. I feel re-assured that after a day of what a sombre voiced movie voice over guy would describe as adult themes, you know, death, economy, stalking...there's some room in the day for absolute silliness as a fight has broken out about a simple game that seems so immature if Pippa the girl I really liked in Primary School was here she'd tut about stupid boy games and then I'd pull her pigtails. I'm so happy with something so silly breaking out across my e-mail box, I celebrate it with the drinking of chocolate milk and the playing of over elaborately constructed pop songs from the late 1990s. Ah, S Club Seven, where are you now...

Ross Noble seems grumpy on stage. Even though his localised references are on target, he seems tired. He seems distracted. He's constantly interrupted from his stories by witless hecklers, and for some reason, while it's still funny, I feel I've seen it all before - but to blame this on Ross would not be fair. Well the grumpiness is his fault. It's me, I'm tired, I'm distracted by a girl in brown chords determined to knee my knee out of her alleged personal space, by being lap danced by an imprisoned large denim posterior shuffling to it's seat, by the aforementioned lady with the Michael Jackson face and the dalmatian, by the baby, by the heat strangling me into sleep, by a particularly strange game of is that belly or T-shirt that we play with a girl in the stalls, and obviously to complete everything full circle, Ross's own apparent grumpiness. I don't the defamed restaurant will be too pleased either to be associated with cockroaches in their rice being brought up in comedic conversation. Down two rows from me a conversation begins about debt, an anxious friend bringing up their woes to a disinclined and going through the motions female in a black T-shirt who is offering only basic empathy, the words scattering with empty meaning across the theatre. A heckler tries to make an elongated joke about tobacco companies and Ross, and that seems to finally break his spirit. I make it home just in time to miss a text message and see an advert for some witless TV show with Justin Melvey, an ad for a ringtone that always make me sad, and get upset with how messy my house is. Just before I pulled into my house, I saw a girl sitting by the side of the road, with a thousand yard death stare, obviously drugged, her pale skin lit up by the dimly pathetic lights my car allegedly lights up the night with. She rolls over onto her back just as I pass, then gets up and runs away, real life illuminated in the middle of surbubia. When I get inside the first thing I see is my giant poster from the TV show Charmed, which doesn't seem the appropriate image on a day of silliness and seriousness. It's such an up and down day, so much maturity, so many adult situations, and yet, so many things there were childish...I'm sure there's some sort of implication to it all, some sort of message in there, something to work through...

Then I forget it all, yell at Jelena Dokic for beating a prettier girl at tennis, and go to sleep, ready to do it all again tomorrow...

World: Interact

No one ever said Cash Converters was some kind of magical wonderland. In fact, and if you don't know it's basically an 18th century pawn shop with a corporate logo, there are days I feel profoundly depressed as I remember the humiliating encounter I had in there selling CDs on one of the more awful days in my life, looking at all the CDs and items on the shelves and hoping they are simply sold by people trying to get a few extra dollars for the weekend and not some darker tale involving a single mother trying to flee and selling up in the process. OK, so it's a dark way to look at a 6ix dollar copy of BMX Bandits - but my frames of references can be dark at moments like this. A smug young girl chomps into a burger on one of the many TV screens, a plastic image of perfection stuck on a flickering screen with lines across her face. The staff mill around like overprotective parents, at times never taking their eyes off you as you paw through old Vanessa Amorossi albums trying to find a gem. There was this kid in there today, a fairly bland kid because I couldn't get a handle on their personality, mostly because I came in right at the end of the conversation the kid was having with his Mother. His mother was a harried woman in track pants with a neatly trimmed blonde bob, and she was swatting away child problems as she casually flicked through a selection of chunky VHS cassettes in eighties style boxes. I have no right to know the full context of the conversation, stuck as I am in the middle of a Cohen - Miller-Heidke - Zetlitz IPOD triangle of shuffling interface and still weighing up my options, but the mother turns to the child and says, quite simply, you know what I've told you about dreaming. I suspect it wasn't keep doing it kid, but if, at 1pm in a Cash Converters with military security studying you, witless radio DJs with half baked patter piped in through the headsets, and the faint air of a million desperate stories cluttering up your surroundings, you can't manage at least one or two little dreams to keep yourself sane, I would suggest you might just go a little crazy. As I walk out, head down, a gust of wind nearly knocking over a frail and bewildered pensioner, I noticed that next to Cash Converters, two stores down on the same street, is a giant liquidator store, which hardly improves my mood. The kid slowly trails behind his bother when he leaves, staring brightly at cheesecake and Heath Ledger posters as he walks with a purpose, while his Mum gets further and further ahead of him, texting blindly at a million miles an hour, her bob weaving in time with her key punching, her own dreams seemingly long ago dashed. I hope she doesn't blame the child, but for some reason, I think she does. As for me, I never bought BMX Bandits...the liquidation place has reminded me times are tough, 6.95 not to be squandered on Kidman based whims...

Fat sweaty girl from Big W was back today, fat and sweaty as always, putting books on a shelf. I wonder about exhaustion based entirely on stacking books, but that's her way. I've got things on my mind anyway, not just work stress, although fully in context by a greater appreciation of the fickle nature of life, not just the strange melancholia of the sandwich white female at my bakery, who yesterday was like a gambolling lamb in her haste to tell me she'd kept me a sandwich, but today seems incredibly depressed as she struggles with either paperwork or a particularly difficult Sudoku puzzle. For what it's worth, the work stress melts, and I buy a cake to celebrate the very act of survival that my Dad usually thinks is my forte. When I buy some cake, I'm staring directly as a poster of a well known footballer, in the window of a shop I haven't seen before. One of the female girls at the cake store, blonde, promotions model, over officious with the coffeee pumps, thinks I'm staring at her, and she flashes me a smile as she pours the coffee, one of those smiles which, as denizens of Hobart nightclubs would know, is an invitation to speculate as to whether or not 3hree seconds more staring will invite you home or invite the police. As one of said denizens, I'm well aware of the correct response, which is to flash the knowing smile which means get over yourself sweetheart, blue eye shadow girl has you covered. It's such a wonderful piece of non verbal communication that happens between us, I wonder why people use words at all - oh right, it'd be much harder to get a brownie. As I walk away, my place in the queue is taken by a shuffling, befuddled and confused homeless man in a white cardigan using a walking stick to help himself get around. He begins a series of unrelated tangential conversational jumping points to the blonde girl, mostly about a film with Anthony Hopkins and the relative merits of popular culture. He entraps the blonde girl in a continuing web of Grandpa Simpson conversation, without a single one of his points likely to end in the ordering of snacks or coffee. This allows to me throw another one of my little non verbal smiles, the one that says sucked in, isn't retail just a blast. As I walk off, I walk past a girl wearing deely boppers, with an imploring smile and a pile of leaflets she seems far too keen to pass on. I decline, I've had enough of human interaction for one day. When I look over her shoulder, the blonde girl is still being polite as she possibly can, as the old man is up to 1963 in his one man monologue play...I sincerely hope I get that way when I'm older...I've got a robe and slippers already looked out. I think I'll start conversations entirely about The Divinyls...that'll stump the young folk...

My Dad right now is out on my deck. He's not in the hammock, but he's come to visit without really visiting. He takes a call on his mobile phone from one of his gossipy friends, a little mini cabal of power to the people teachers broken down by the man. I suspect to some it might be a little undignified a man of nearly 60ty sitting on a banana lounger having the same conversation for 3hree years about a job he never got, about a terrible interview experience that left him drained and questioned his very ability to hold some chalk. Do they still use chalk in schools? My Gran, one of my main memories of her was the venom she used to spit at the TV whenever I watched a childrens show called Charlie Chalk, her face contorted as she told the writers of the show to get a proper job like coal mining, as I balanced a white plastic tray with my dinner on it on my knee. Dad doesn't have many friends, because Mum won't be friends with his friends. One time in Burnie, we got in the car like homeless people who had just sold all their Shakira albums to Cash Converters just to hide from this weird science teacher Dad knew, all of which I remember about him was he had incredibly pulled up socks, always white, always pristine, always knee high. We stat their for hours, just talking about the world, until we presumed he had gone. I've turned up Shakira really loudly just to drown him out. It's not that I mind the conversation, I just think he loves the misery too much. He's using phrases like restorative justice and deputy principal just way too much, but like a man hypnotised on stage, he's always blinking bewildered wondering how his life turned out the way it did. I think he believes in the essential goodness of man, something I long ago disagreed with. Eventually he leaves, taking a pile of my books with him, a passing comment about the merits of Shakira or Andy Murray mentioned as he goes. I think he sometimes wishes we talked about more than sport, but neither of us make too much of an effort beyond that, and that's fine with us. I know at times he's tried or I've tried to get beyond what certain football teams should be doing 70ty minutes into a game, but it never works. At some unspecified point in the mid 90s, he decided my life would be infinitely better if I lifted bricks in some sort of body building fashion because my PE teacher told him it was a great idea. He said this would make girls like me, although he said it in far more cringingly uncool mid 90s sub Bruno Lucia tones. We had one incredibly hectoring session in the garage while he tried to make me into Lou Ferrigno, I said I wasn't a laborer from the 1920s, and the whole thing unfolded with a tedious sense of inevitability. Next morning, he came down to the breakfast table, sat down, and said did I see the Liverpool Coventry score...boundaries drawn, natural order back in place over jammy toast...maybe that's what restorative justice is...

My weekend is mapped out. Comedian tomorrow night with someone I like but who I hope doesn't talk too much, mean as that sounds. We've had entire conversations sometimes where my only words are yes and sure if I'm lucky. Lunch on Saturday with someone I hope talks for hours, so we know whats going on with his headspace. Maybe some flag waving on Monday. Some tennis player is on my TV, talking about what a miserable life she had, depression, some such gubbins. No one rings, no one talks to me, a television flickering in the corner with some early 90s videos. A glamorous granny is standing outside my window waiting for a lift, squeezed into some sort of Madonna like corset as she stands perfectly still in a howling gale. I'm not surprised at the effort she's made, she walks my window sometimes, and she truly suffers in her bid to stay young. Every interaction I have during the day at the moment makes me glad for the peace and quiet. I get one of my periodical spam e-mails from one of those companies that links you with your old school friends, and throw it straight in the virtual trash. I had an uneasy interaction with a particular comedian a few years ago, when I was dragged up on stage to do a bit of a turn. Got a laugh too. Afterwards, it became apparent that two people - having seen me on the stage with the comedian - that I went to school with wanted to talk to me, and they wanted a photo of not just me, but them with the comedian. Without seeing the joins, you would think we had just picked right up where we left off in Grade twelve, but there was a conversational sour point, something known only to us, I can't remember what, but it was enough to make me turn back and talk to the comedian about his other life in London, freezing them out until they left, a one night brief re-union that ended quickly. They never got their photo either. I try and learn something every day, take something out of every interaction, make a note, but I don't live up to that, some behaviours keep repeating. The glamorous granny is the last person I see for the day, as she bundles herself into a car pool, muttering loudly something about Karen, and how she's unreliable. It's the last interaction I see, tomorrow it begins again, the first day of the rest of my life, a blank canvas with people who will educate me, who will frustrate me, and in the end, vanish without a trace for the most part into blog anecdote and their own private space...

I suspect what I may take out of tomorrow is another sandwich, but we shall see...

I didn't know what I would write about in this one, but you need to know it took 12 minutes and 47 seconds to go from A to C-

There's a small, slightly camp man walking past me as I go for my daily walk today. I've already come close to smashing my car because a woman in a range rover can't work out how to reverse, and hip and shouldered a nosey child who's sister, oddly, had a surgical mask on and was muttering something like seized by some fevered dream. She reminded me of this weird family that used to walk around Hobart in Amish clothing, always a strictly ordered group, in clothes the Amish would reject and little paper hats that you could take off and sail down the Derwent. The one at the back, she was kind of cute, but you don't want to be hanging out at a house that resents electricity. My newspaper is horribly judgemental today, once again dividing the world into easily caricatured heroes and villains. There's a tennis player with the temerity to have chunky legs, and she's copping a pasting. As i read the article a little bit, the camp man presses in my general direction, and we do the awkward you no no you go sidestep. He eventually walks off, which is when I notice he has a shopping assortment of a grey bag with butter and nothing else in it, another bag with jam and under his left arm a massive Guitar Hero set up pack. Butter, Jam and Jamming, the perfect night in. He walks off camply into the distance, while in my old home my Mum and Dad are arguing about the configuration of a treadmill. They play their roles with limitless but utterly rehearsed perfection. My Mum bossy, strident and concerned about treadmill hitting vase like a crazy peron, my Dad with little Spanish Flea going off in his head as he does exactly and vacantly what he is told and puts the treadmill in exactly the right position. It's just my luck the way the day has gone that I walk in just at the right moment to give them a hand. I consider chasing the Guitar Hero guy down the road, he seems fun, if a little light on for snacks. I'm definitely not a lifter or carrier. My fragile little arms aren't cut out for the business of removal or renovation. I had to help lift a piano onto a truck once, and that nearly killed me. Not lifting the piano, but that fact that I was lifting it, a book amusingly tumbled from the little book holder bit (I'm sure Delta Goodrem knows the science bit) and hit me in the face. Everyone no doubt had a good laugh, but not me, not when I saw that it was a how to play the piano like Coldplay book. In the corner of Mum and Dads living room is the wrestling, a rather strange thing for them to have on. I suspect it's a nice gesture to me, sit down son, have a cup of tea, feel good about yourself, why not have a nut? Oh, and by the way, lug this treadmill down the hall and cop a mouthful of gentle abuse while you are at it...theres a noisette swirl in it for you...

My Mum is really good, as indicated above, at organising everyone when they move. She was from a family of 13teen, and once an earnest hairdresser in penguin with blonde tips and magic fingers asked her if her brothers and sisters came into her room and touched her stuff. She didn't really have the heart to say they all stayed in the same room, and if they wanted to touch her stuff, they could just reach over and grab it. One of her brothers used to physically grab their head and push it upwards when they walked so they would always walk with their head held high. This is a woman that got onto her own stretcher after she smashed her ankle to bits. Tough. Didn't give any of it me mind you. My abiding memory of my mother is an argument she had with one of our friends over a tow rope. That is to say, the woman did all the arguing until my Mum grabbed the tow rope in her hand and simply said the word enough. We've moved across the road and across the world, and it's always terrible. When we moved across the road, I had become a social recluse. This wasn't entirely my fault, I didn't realise that the custom of chapping your door to see if you wanted to come out was something you were meant to, you know, re-ciprocate, so eventually everyone just stopped chapping. I went a bit funny, spending most of my time playing soccer with my toys (luckily I was 10en) in my Grans hall, until eventually I got to be weird and odd in my own house. My Dad called this soccer playing clacking, as it clack go the figures, and I think everyone was a bit concerned about me. When we took our stuff out of Grans house and moved across the road, I had all my toys in a box and was singing some SAW song, Kylie or Jason but not Stefan Dennis, and there was this kid, all in black, called Brian who didn't smoke but you'd imagine his future life would involve this passage, just him standing on street corners smoking and passing comments on lovely ladies. He had a wonderful Leslie Phillips vibe to him. Anyway, he looked at me strangely, and quite rightly too, I hadn't left the house in at least 5ive weeks, and was singing quite loudly. For whatever reason, and he was quite capable of bashing my head in, I turned around and said in quite a menacing Ayrshire accent that I had somehow accquired, maybe at a garage sale, that if he wasn't going to help us move he should probably get fucked. I was taken aback not only at my raw aggression, but how incredibly strange and trashy I sound. This only happened to me one other time, when I said to the guy manning the flumes at the Magnum haw mister is the slide open in such an Ayrshire thicko accent, I immediately had to sound like Sir Ian McKellen and make this ridiculously posh accented apology. Brian, taken aback, sloped off to go and find some birds to admire in a perverted way, and I looked at my Mum. I'm not sure to this day if she was genuinely afraid her only child was some sort of nutcase, or she was proud of me - maybe a bit of both. Needless to say, self reflection on this particular personality trait ensured that the next day, I surrounded myself with friends, fake friends, faux friends, real friends, female friends with chubby cheeks, the lead singer of Fairground Attractions Mum (she lived round the corner)...I mean, at that age, you really shouldn't be in the attic writing a manifesto about your grudges...Brian did deserve to be told though...just for his joke about three pigs in the brothel...

I've been in this house for two years now, or is it 3hree? I can't quite remember, it's all a blur. I moved in before the furniture did. It was a strange night, I basically curled up in a ball on the floor to sleep, except obviously I didn't do much sleeping. It felt like an eerie parallel to all my other moves, except there was no one to talk to because I now lived entirely alone. When I moved back to Penguin in 1992, there were two channels on the television, one of them shut down at 10 at night and the only thing in my room for two or three days was a troll doll someone gave me for luck and a bed. And a horrible, astroturf like carpet with grey fibrous hairs just waiting to curl up between your toes and spark and crackle. It was pretty horrible, and sleep was reasonably impossible the first night because of jet lag, homesickness, and the occasional drunk that would throw up on the railway tracks. It was a horrible night for everyone, I think we all went to bed at about 7even at night just so we didn't have to look at each other and burst into homesick tears. Luckily when I moved into this house, I didn't burst into any kind of tears, but it was strange how empty and devoid of life I felt just curled up in a ball in an empty house with a thumpingly loud clock counting down the seconds until I could responsibly do my own recycling. I even sat on the lawn for a while, which was like when I ran away from Penguin, and lay down in the middle of the football oval convinced that I had the gumption to escape and somehow make it back to Scotland with 2wo dollars in my pocket, a jumper and a Violet Crumble to keep my energy levels up. If the first thing I'd found in the morning was a troll doll, that would have really made the story a lot better, but they unpacked my TV first. Damn un-romantic removalists. Still, the fact that I was able to go onto my lawn and just sit quietly without disturbing my flatmates (or my parents I as I call them in my stand up routine) was a lovely moment of independence. It felt very different from that night under the stars in Penguin. Then the world felt crushingly small, crushingly lonely. I remember just walking around the ground for ages, and eventually finding an old discarded football record and reading it in the back of the grandstand, reading about football players and their glamourous (for Penguin) girlfriends...and quite caught up in the spirit of moving out, after a moments reflection on the lawn I went into my house, took a football record from by the door where I left it when I got the keys, and read it. It seemed appropriate to replicate the moment. This time, there was no crushing inferiority, no feeling that those in the muscle shirts with steady girlfriends called Karen or Sharon were doing anything exotic or interesting. Just a sense that my own world could be whatever I wanted it to be...obviously, this just meant putting up my framed St Mirren jumper on the wall and getting the hammock up, but sometimes, that's all it really takes...

The girl in the bakery near where I work is making this huge dramatic show about the fact that she is keeping a sandwich for me. I mean, she's sprinting over to tell me. She interrupts both my mental narrative flow, and a particuarly enjoyable second verse of a Pipettes song. It's quite strange obviously, and it makes it hard to get back on track. It was only when I went to tag this post I thought of calling Sandwich White Female, but god I'm proud of myself. Some people in front of me in the queue are talking loudly about Jelena Dokic, in far more strong terms than she probably warrants. My friend sends me a link to her blog, but I hope no one I know ever finds this blog, oddly. I think I'm quite a quiet person, although some may disagree. I don't think anyone knows me that well if I'm honest. I mean, sandwich girl thinks she does - hence her beaming smile that a concoction of bread and filler is mine to enjoy. I thank her for her trouble, and shuffle out quite awkwardly. Someone buys me tickets for something without asking me, someone else sends me an e-mail that indicates they don't want to do lunch, entire conversations buzz through my head without a single meaningful word other than Obama or Wozniacki. Across the world, my family is asleep, my real family, not the Penguin family where you just call people auntie until it sticks. My proper family, the ones I see for 6ix weeks every two years, have dinner with at the Braehead Shopping Centre, and then fly home after exchanging e-mail addresses with absolutely no follow up. Sandwich freakage or not, I can't go back now. This is where I live. Some people ask me would I go back, and I laugh and say, ho ho ho, if I had the money, but now, I probably wouldn't, even if. This has nothing to do with the quality of service in the Ayrshire sandwich shops, although the coffee shop at Glasgow airport, that has some rude hos in there (so Snoop Dogg told me). I know the ebb and flow off life is difficult, but the person asleep on Penguin Oval waiting for the morning to run away, I don't know him anymore. Maybe he kind of vanished when I first pashed Vicki. Vicki always thought I was never happy anywhere, she'd say I kissed restlessly. Mostly because she had a death hug, but don't tell her. She used to say I'd get old and question how I got to that point, because she felt I would wake up one day and suddenly get it but not have enjoyed the journey. She was deep when she wasn't baking delicious pastries. I go home, and it's a mess, there's an uneaten bag of peanuts on my bookcase. Instinctively, I wonder what Mum is doing with her ti...oh wait, it's all down to me. And there's a message on my phone from someone from Scotland, a distant person, but I don't return it. Weirdly, the peanuts and the hammock seem a lot more important than the call...

I didn't just move house, I kind of moved on as a person, and that requires an entirely longer story, and no one was holding the back end of the treadmill on that one...

Pep talks, Panda Eyes, Pub Bores and Persson

Another windowless, airless office, another workplace pep talk, another day where words drift in and out of my head, replaced by a song from a long time ago that I can't quite place...Sneaker Pimps? MC Lee? Ann Lee? No, definitely the Sneaker Pimps, and yes, I definitely do promise to do better. There's no part of anyones life where they aren't accountable to someone - even the richest Sheik surely has someone relying on them at some point. Surely? Typical, I was born into the wrong family. I had to get the genetics of my Dad, one of lifes great sitcom characters. Thats unfair, and yes, I really should be nodding in appropriate places during this pep talk. I can't be bothered though, although my faux nodding is always conducive to the pep talkee thinking I've taken something on board. The pep talkee concludes with so much blokey colloquiliasm I suspect I've put on a football jumper and we're ten goals down kicking into the wind. Buzz. No thoughts. He's lapsed in full Ron Barassi coach speak. I leave not sure about work, but certainly ready to chase the loose ball. The radio, as always, is playing all the usual. DJs shuffle from station, a much hyped duo moving into Tasmania seem to my ears to be just like every other radio station except they have trendier haircuts. I've never had a trendy haircut, my one week experiment with a spike Burnies biggest disaster of 1985 by far. My e-mails are piling up, one line responses of no consequence, and I can scarcely make an effort to reply. An old man in a car doesn't indicate when I drive home, and I nearly crash into the back of him as he drives in his bewildered state. Liverpool lose a lead, in the time it takes the man at the BBC to type it on his computer. Nothing means anything and yet it all adds up to something, my day, pointless as it is, mine to live, mine to drift through, perspective given by those who aren't around to see today. I work with one of those - an older woman who is always active, always at clubs, always out with friends...sometimes you can tell all she wants is a day in a hammock listening to the Cardigans because you needed something to drown out Amy Grant on 9ine minutes of the 90s. The trendy DJs meanwhile are making great capital out of a joke involving picking up the secret recordings of a microphone at a big event. They laugh so hard at their own joke, it jars me as I pull into my house to cook sausages at a high temperature and watch that blonde girl on Setanta Sports who doesn't seem to like Liverpool very much. They ultimately laugh at their own joke for so long, I suspect that the pep talk they got must have been very very good. Maybe they are just more responsive to exhortations to get out there and get amongst it...

The magic pen table is back. They aren't singing songs though with the words magic or pen in them, it's one girl in a blue top making the pens do their magic. The depressed blind seller has been shuffled on unless there's a table timeshare going on. The girl at the magic pen table seems to be demonstrating how the pens are magic simply by making them fly and harassing kids who don't seem very impressed. Kids today aren't impressed by anything. In 1991 we were impressed by Amy Grant, so I know we'd have gasped at a pen that could whizz about. The kid walks off, and the girl, who is possibly stoned, continues to shill her heart out for the sake of the pen company, marvelling at the sheer complex wonder of a world in which she has a pen that can also fly about a bit. She's kind of making me miss the depressed blind seller. Blue eye shadow girl is filling out a form, doing the grunt work for everyone as always, and a nerdy kid looking at tins of biscuits is directly in my way. I'm in the middle of quite a self determined maturity phase (ooh get you, it only took 30ty years, you want a cookie?) but I still find time to make a nice scene just to let him know he's in my way, but I lose the battle for his attention to a chocolate wafer in a tin. Panda eyed girl has been demoted to stacking shoes in a pile. Not much phases panda eyed girl, she's like a 10en year old, she just seems to swagger back no matter how they demote her. I don't suspect anyone likes stacking shoes into a triangle, especially one you just know some bogan is going to come along 5ive minutes after construction and deconstruct the pile quite literally, by knocking it over looking for the left sandal, and not in any kind of post modernist philosophical way. She's twirling her hair vapidly, around her finger, staring at the shoes with a strangely out of it grin. Dads on the mobile to me, telling about a woman at his school who got attacked by cheeky students but the school won't give her any cash for her distress. He's not telling the story well though, because he wants to get to sports. We have a long and animated discussion about sports, and when I get off the phone, Panda Eyed Girl has begun the arduous task of making shoes and sandals into an attractive look. With all the gimlet eyed determination of someone in a bar trying to convince me that the music I listen to isn't real music, and I should be listening to real bands like the pub band in the corner playing Train covers, she intently studies the problem before deciding on what would have been my solution, chucking them on the floor and hoping it looks passable and going to lunch, twirling a lock of her badly dyed hair around her index finger as she goes. Next to me, two bogans are giggling over the quality of an Eddie Murphy film, and I can't decide who I want to give a pep talk to first...

I don't respond that well to pep talks. When I was fifteen, I was given my most infamous pep talk by my parents. I was failing school, too nervous to make friends, too lazy to do anything but sit on the computer, too homesick to do homework, or at least that's how I felt. I thought in that bleak nuclear winter that the only person to understand me was someone famous, who I nearly wrote a letter to, but luckily pulled back, I mean you don't want to be the kind of person who starts thinking about living alone in a shack. I was failing maths, a patient, slightly dwarfy maths teacher patiently explaining this to me in a corridor where we sat like two outcasts on a park bench, and obviously I had to explain this to my parents. I admit my thoughts about this were jumbled, but I didn't tell them, and then they found out after some horrible duplicity involving trying to knock the phone line out of the wall...I got a hell of a pep talk, but the trouble is, it's all words, once I get the hug or the handshake at the end of it I tend to go back to what I was doing. I don't have a favourite quotation, I don't have anything to fall back on as a motto, maybe the odd song line that I relate to but that's about all. I went to school with a girl called Jennifer. She was the girl who had to follow me in giving a humourous speech once and died on her arse, exhorting the crowd to laugh so desperately she collapsed into a series of what is the deal with and what is quite literally up with that schtick lines that just went nowhere. For an hour. She sat me down once, and I should point out it was well known by this point I had no belief in God at all - I hadn't brought it up overtly, but it was still somehow well known. She took it upon herself with all her social worker stylings to tell me about God, and angels, and more worryingly fairies. Her pitch was flawed, it was too slick, and I suspect she wasn't buying it herself, but with a lost soul to save she wasn't about to let it go until she had got all the way through. Like those Mexican wrestlers you saw in the 80s with the pot belly they'd wheel out to wrestle Andre The Giant, it was a lost cause, and eventually she asked me if I had any questions. I resisted any kind of smart alec answer, murmured indifferently, and by the second syllable of my grunt, she was off down the corridor to save a girl of loose ethics. I've never saved anyone, not even from drowning, and that seems to happen to everyone I know - mind you, our holy roller was stymied in her attempt to save the girl of loose ethics. Whatever hearing she was given, it fell on deaf ears. Twins by the age of seventeen was a sign that she didn't really think of our lord, but to use an old music hall gag, she was keen to shout oh god...

I walk around Kingston a little bit later. I've never even taken inspiration from nature, although I appreciate the sheer stillness of the place at times, a lot more than I would ever admit. They've set up a little window at the petrol station, so the depressed woman in the shirt who just stares out of the window has to share an enclosed space with an Ugly Betty clone with thick black glasses and a much more personable tone. My friend, the one with the debt problem, sends me a text message, it seems to indicate we'll catch up soon, but it sounds like the kind of message someone gives you at the end of a family re-union or a one night stand. I delete it without too much thought or emotion. A woman sits in the hairdressers, which is still just about open and still called Cyber Hair, the hairdressers of the future. A fantastically unattractive woman in a blue coat that encases her massive frame like a body bag is getting her hair primped and preened, a pep talk of sorts, one for the soul that I don't suspect will work. I walk along a little concrete pathway, where the pizza shop used to be, now devoid of both pizza and slackers like it used to be, now replaced with a permanently shut and locked up accountancy firm and extended windows for the bottle shop to advertise. There's this little kid in blue T-shirt who's being ignored, and he's fidgeting with the trolley his Mum is pushing, grabbing at the ends of it and trying to shake it. His Mum, with a vintage 80s blonde mane slash mullet, snaps, and decides when it's time to go home he'll be straight to bed without any Wii. Ah, in my day, it was straight to bed without any A Country Practice. His face crumbles, he lets go of the trolley, and stares across the cavernous, empty car park, before breaking into three or four slow, funeral march steps, his little trainers undone at the lace, his head staring directly at the ground. I think for a moment about easy it is for kids sometimes, for a whole world to crash because they can't play Wii, and when they get the Wii back everything is alright, motivation not in words but in what they have. Of course I also realise at that moment I'm beaming because I've got some Aero chocolate mousse in the bag which doesn't do much for the maturity kick I'm on. Just at the moment I'm amount to take my chances walking across the dangerous old man won't indicate death trap car park, I catch the kids eye - I'm beaming, obviously because I have mousse, and he's shuffling, because he doesn't have Wii. He looks at me quite upset, because obviously I'm happy, and he isn't. Then, he sticks his tongue out at me and pulls a spazz face, which is well warranted because no one should beam as much as I am beaming at the moment unless they are chronically strange or trying to convert people to God. His stride lengthens, his head lifts, and just for a moment, having shown up a stranger, he's a new kid...

I guess I'm good at pep talks after all...as long as they are non verbal...

The Day The Clown Blinked

So I've sat most of today, absolutely loathing this girl at work who, nominally, is my friend but at work we just don't get on because she asks a lot of open ended sarcastic questions that imply you are failing at your job. Actually what I've done today for large parts is just endlessly watch this video two guys made about Penguin. I didn't watch it for any other reason than it gave me a break from working on my epic 2001 Youtube playlist, but also because it's kind of interesting to see things as they really are, not as my tiny blonde permanent tanned 8ight year old mind would like them to be. For some reason no one seems to have made one about Kilwinning, the place I went to school, which is fair enough I suppose, but I wouldn't mind some sort of visual representation of the place for the sake of accuracy. This visual representation would explain something to me - why when I sketch mentally about the place, I'm always miserable, and it's grey, and I'm depressed and getting an Indian burn or talking to pimped out drug dealers, and yet when it came time to leave and move back to Penguin, where in my mind at least I was happier than at any time in my life, I cried like a baby. I don't think is a logical path to take - it may have had something to do with sophistication though. You see the thinking in Scotland was, and probably still is, somewhat dismissive of outsiders. I love Scotland, I should say that because I've made it sound otherwise, but certainly you wouldn't want to stand out. I went to school with a kid called Martin who looked a bit like AC Slater from Saved By The Bell is he had a flattop haircut. He was quietly spoken with a slight stammer that did nothing to knock his confidence. We were queuing for Yorkie bars in the grim countenance that passed for our recess snack hut, a cupboard from which harassed middle aged women would tell you exactly what they thought of your coupons. Since I was a nervous, slightly fidgety child I would often impart stories with exaggerated punchlines or over impressive social boasts, but in that case, I definitely had a story to tell, that I had been invited to a party, at night, in Kilwinning, with girls and probably a scary movie. Maybe even punch! Martin barely even took his eyes off his Peppermint Aero to tell me it sounded shit, and then walked off. I think that's the difference between Scotland and Penguin. If I had played the party down, he'd have said I was an idiot for not looking forward to it and then walked off. In Penguin, you never had to worry about the deeper meaning of anything, you never had to worry about being put in your place. At least that's how I remember it, although I'm sure it's nonsense, the innocent thoughts of a child - I mean, if you fell off the flying fox, I'm sure someone was discussing what an idiot you were at the bakery the next day...

I can't remember the exact circumstances surrounding the party. The girl who was hosting was sort of an Elizabeth Berkeley clone if Elizabeth Berkeley had more acne, more untameable hair and fainted in the library once a month. That's my main memory of our party hostess, she was always fainting in ever more dramatic swoony circumstances. I think, in fact I know, she wanted to winch my best friend, and I was sort of surplus to requirements in the whole situation. But hey, I'd brought punch, what was he bringing? There's a possibility it was a Halloween party, which would explain the movie, but if you think I'm going into details of my one and only halloween costume, we'll just move on right away. The punch is my most significant memory though, not just because it's a rare example of me mixing a drink that didn't have the word spider in it, as the implications were that at this party, we would all have our first drink of alcohol. Never happened of course - I didn't drink until I was 18teen, which should tell you the quality of my punch, for the most part if sat bobbing quietly in the corner acting as a conversational makeweight during awkward lustful one way glances. Anytime the conversation was muted, it was all hey, punch is in the corner. Her house was a vague collection of wicker furniture from that shop at the end of the Irvine mall that stank of cane seats and drunken staff, and family photos where she was always smiling with a suspicious nervous grin. Her best friend was called Sarah, and she had an upturned nose, which, had I been more musically cognescant, would have resulted in some sort of immature Billy Joel parody. She didn't like me because during one of our classes, taught by my Dad incidentally, we all had to on a pink card write something nice about everyone else in the room and I, and I swear this was innocent taking the piss out of the exercise move, said she had a nice nose. So she wasn't talking to me outside of university style lectures about respecting other people, I was in a cane chair probably being yelled at for continually mentioning the punch, Elizabeth Faint was no doubt fussing over ordives and trying to get my best friend to pash her, and my best friend was no doubt lapping up the attention with a pretty smug smirk and then whispering to me that the whole night was completely terrible and we should run away and leave. As far as parties went, it was hardly the Hooligan X rave at the Ayr Pavillion. Our host tried to get the party started with a tape of her favourite rave tunes, and it chewed up, crumbling in her hands. It would have been prudent to leave, but my Mum wasn't picking me up for another four hours so I had to sit back down, either that or get a pen and try and unpick the cassette. Did I mention I made punch?

Time moved slowly. Conversation picked up slightly, although in my case any incremental increase in attention was noticable only because I had a theory that Altern 8 were the greatest band in the world shot down, and because really I didn't need to be there in that living room, they could have managed quite happily without me. Except they did need me, because I was the only one making conversation. Which is how the Lorna incident happened. Someone finally cued some sort of ravey dancey hands in the air like you just don't care track up without the tape dying, and things were going a little better. Still no one drank the punch though. The upturned nose girl still wasn't having any - she preferred Marti Pellow. I was in the middle of some sort of early 90s discourse on the nature of music when all the girls went into the kitchen while I was in mid sentence. I was used to this, I didn't even miss a syllable, but then the hostess was back out into the living room asking me if I would go out with Lorna. Lorna? Who was Lorna? I hadn't even noticed Lorna, and this was a party of five (not that party of five) people. Was she the girl with the Halloween silver face paint on? What does she look like? Why is she hiding in the kitchen? Am I still going out with Debbie? Why is no one drinking the punch? Of course, this was a complex question asked at a strange and awkward time, so I had to respectfully decline the blind date, or my friend did it for me because that was his manner, and then there was just chaos and pandemonium as a silver swish ran out of the kitchen, into the street and burst into tears on the front lawn. I've never made a girl cry since, or had before, and I hadn't done much to provoke the situation, but the party ground entirely to a halt as the girls ran down the road to try and soothe her hurt feelings. My friend, in his infinite wisdom, didn't counsel me to go and be nice to Lorna and score a sympathy pash, but raided through the collection of blank tapes round the base of the TV to try and find embarrassing home movies of the girl who was hosting the party. We found a lot of episodes of Alias Smith and Jones, but dirt, no dice. When the girls returned, without Lorna, I was subjected to a lot of long boring relationship talk, even though I effectively had done nothing wrong and was, I think, spoken for. I tried valiantly to escape with a few pointed remarks about the decline of Stock Aitken and Waterman, but it always came back to my flippant cruelty. Mum was three hours away, my friend was smirking, and there was I, pinned with my back to the rattan, knees pressed up against my chin, listening to a well rehearsed talk that I would become incredibly familiar with over the years. It felt very much like growing up, or it would have, if it wasn't for how I was dressed...

Naturally, the Lorna incident was, as is the nature of early teenage parties, a big deal for an hour of fraught tension and variations of what a bastard I was until the next round of ordives came out. Everything eventually calmed down, and upturned nose girl began a controversial discourse on her first experience with cocaine. With that nose? Anyway, in the midst of our conversation, we had forgotten that the Steven King film IT had been put on the TV. IT of course has nothing to do with computers, it was a film about a killer clown or some such gubbins that I was too cool to think was scary. In fact we took intermittent breaks from our little mini kievs and discussions about the future (I stole most of my ideas from Debbie) that included the words massive a lot. If you've seen IT, the movie not the industry (yes you've done that joke get on with it) you will know that at a certain point, something happens where a photo in a book winks and then begins to bleed. I say something happens, because whatever happened, we weren't really paying attention or expecting it and I'm not ashamed to say it scared the crap out of us. Four people who had spent a tedious amount of time having psuedo intellectual conversations about rave music and inter personal relationships to the soundtrack of a ticking clock had just been reduced to the same scared kids who had hid behind the couch a few years earlier during Gremlins (or was that just me?)...at which point, we had to face the uncomfortable realisation that the girl with the upturned nose had, for whatever reason, jumped into my lap at the moment of film fright impact. We looked at each other, then at her, then at me, then at the punch bowl, and then back at each other, and then she had to slowly unpeel herself with as much dignity as she could, and go back to her wicker chair. No one spoke for a long time - we were embarrassed about the leaping and the screaming and the unpeeling and the shifting and the scary clowning...in fact it felt like no one spoke for hours, everyone staring at family photos and the ceiling and the ground...as far me, I had made a girl cry and had another girl jump into my lap and I had a vague realisation that this was the peak of my attractiveness. My friend had even lost his smirk, so upset was he that he had lost his cool. The Elizabeth Berkeley was just glad she didn't faint, and upturned nose girl was mortified that her righteous proto feminist demeanour had faded under pressure. Someone though eventually had to say something, I mean, Mum wasn't coming for another hour...

...and you can probably guess what I said, and how it went...still, it's their fault, they could at least have tried it...