The passing of time through a DVD collection

I've been utterly lost in the last few days. Not in bad, I need to pen a memoir about my terrible life kind of way, but certainly I've been suffering some end of the decade restlessness, to the point I finally upped and got rid of all my wrestling DVDs from their boxes. They didn't change - put the disc in and they'd still spark and crackle with the faux excitement only wrestling can claim to provide - but I did, and so out they went in a flurry of plastic and hard rubbish. Somewhere there was an invitation for me to go to a work farewell, and my lack of attendance meant that some cheese on a stick was eaten by some1ne else, but I'm sure they'll get over it. It's not like I'd be spinning some fascinating new anecdote for anyone. I've become so adverse to small talk that the thought of it breaks me out in hives, and even the cheesiest cheest on the stickiest stick can't make me get in my car and attend. Plus it's my day off - so much cleaning to do. Cheerfully, the clean up allowed me to find several photos of the sparkling eyed child I 1nce was, the 1ne who laughed at puppets endlessly and was happy with tomato soup for his birthday. Ah poignancy, why are you always brought on by the scent of Mr Sheen and the discovery that several of my childhood possessions can be exchanged for big cash prizes? To be honest, every time I clean up I just end up abundantly conscious of how much time I've accumulated on earth, but I don't do it from the accumulation of photographs, lost loves or signed photographs from lady wrestlers I 1nce upon a time knew, but from an accumulation of popular culture crap. Seriously - when did I like Blur enough to want to read a book on them? When did I get a poster of Chloe Sevigny - must have been before the Brown Bunny incident. When I did I like Friends enough to buy box sets? Who's Scott Miller and why did he sign a Westpac Olympics flag for me? I then usually completely lose my train of cleaning thought trying to piece together little bits of how I got to this point of my life. It's not the best system in the world, it's not a system that usually gets me to hard rubbish collection day with a perfectly organised and catalogued collection of treats for the binman, but it does waste an entire Saturday, it does kill time until lunch, so in it's way, it becomes the recurring memory of my unremembered weekends - nothing specific, they all feel the same, all that changes is the outfits...

It's Friday, it's the same flourescent lights I'm always under, same shops, same books, same time to kill. Panda Eyed Girl has flickering alive eyes, sitting as she does behind the layby counter of Big W where I work for 1nce up and about and alert, as if she's really swallowed a motivational lesson. She's explaining the refund policy in accurate detail to a single mother who's attention is instead taken on perving on 1ne of the stockboys. Panda Eyed Girl blithely ploughs on with her spiel, and begins to try and build some rapport with the single mother with an oddly heartwarming tale about bike and Xmas that you could probably read on her blog or her Twitter feed. I bet she's on Twitter. I might look her up. I'm surprised at her story though - it doesn't feel right considering she's normally slumped over the edge of a desk reading New Idea and passing less than well thought out opinions about Lleyton Hewitt. I guess I shouldn't judge. The stockboy has no idea he's become the object of a perv, and goes about his duties quickly and quietly. I don't know when people began looking so young. He's positively glowing with health where as I just look like a yawning coughing mess. I work with a Twittering girl - not that she's on Twitter, but she jibbers like she is, 140ty characters of inanity right in my ear every minute of the day. No wonder I look such a mess. Too much GBH of the ear-hole. Panda Eyed Girl for the first time looks reflective and mature as the customer pushes the bike away gently, almost pushing it into a standee in her gazing at the healthy youthful glow of the stock boy. It's definitely strange to think of Panda Eyed Girl being the mature 1ne of the situational moment, because I realise I've been flicking through a cheaply priced copy of a Yo Gabba Gabba book. I also realise the most poignant moment from my Xmas childhood was getting a trampoline when I was 6ix that ended up being an absolute nightmare because it would always give me an electric shock off the metal edges, and gave me a phobic tick which carries over to this day where I expect everything to fry my fingers. I don't think I was ever young enough to be perved on, although I was relatively clueless at that age as to whether people liked me, but I do remember the exact moment I went from torpor channelled through irony, from being young and disaffected and thinking my entire childhood was shit because I didn't get a video camera in 1990 to genuine affectionate memories being something I cherished. In that sense, I've suddenly had a connection with Panda Eyed Girl, and I would have told her that, if it wasn't weird, and she wasn't having to pick the eyes out of a ridiculous debate with a customer as to whether something was 18.99 or 19.99, a debate that for all I know is still going on, an ouroborous of debate unsettled even after the metal gates had clanged to the ground ending another Big W day under the Big W lights...

It's lunchtime, and I'm sitting in the food court restlessly picking at some wedges. At the table next to me is a very old man in need of a tan eating some scran as part of his calorie plan. He has a flip book on his table, precariously balanced on the edge of his tiny eating space, with bits of pages highlighted and crossed out, a manifesto for life that would be more impressive if he hadn't just dropped 1/2lf a pound of fried rice on it. Deftly he scoops it onto the floor where later a harried cleaner will pick it up, and only if she's having a good day will she forget to swear about it. I hope she blames the mess on no good punk teens - she could not have been more wrong. Personally, I can't entirely empathise with the old man - it's hard to empathise anyway listening to Josie and the Pussycats on an IPOD - because I'm more concerned about the state of the new book shop. 1nce a gleaming corporate paradise, it now has boxes piled up everywhere, in front of the music books, and the nice man who used to listen to pleasant classical music on his IPOD all day long seems drained of life by the incessant playing of Deep Forest and a thin old woman who appears every so often in the store to seemingly pore over profit projections. Poor guy - from Prokofiev to Profit Projections faster than you can say promotional book launch. Soon he'll be wearing bunny ears at Easter or be dressed as an elf at Xmas and the whole thing just won't feel right with me. I might have to buy my books at KMart and avoid that horrible woman with the grey curly hair just...just a horrible thought. The old man certainly couldn't care less, he's busy dumping a pile of rice on the floor the size of a small country, some of it landing on his shoes with a grumpy greasy thump on his brown shoes, which he doesn't even notice in his haste to highlight another passage of his flipchart. I consider him for a moment a sort of Ned Flanders figure, only much older and wrinklier and more sauce on his cardigan. Sort of sitting around, finding passages in flipcharts to censor and bring to everyones attention - but just as I'm able to subtly crane my neck over to see what he's doing, a woman gets her foot caught in the escalator, and a crowd of ambulance chasers trample over my dinner in a bit to get a front row seat to the carnage...

The hubbub subsides, but the 2wo girls next to me who rushed over to ambulance chase are still there as I take the last wedge and eat it's tepid goodness. The 1ne on the left is impossibly pretty and the 1ne on the right isn't, but makes up for it at random intervals by slapping the pretty girl on the back in a supportive way, but also with enough force to get rid of any anger she feels about having to spend time with this person and her inane stories. And also to suggest that whatever genetic gifts she missed out on in the looks department are balanced out by a genetic ability to mask low key hostility in a faux friendly manner. They both have the same T-shirt style on as well, black and sparkly, so I get caught up in whether their friendship is a continual game of 1ne-upmanship only 1ne person can ever win. The pretty girl though is depressed, since her boyfriend has just dumped her. She folds her arms and screws up her face when she begins her story as if she's dis-interested in her own words, but soon she's emoting as if she's just typed a combination of a semi colon and shift/0 on her computer. It's a completely over blown performance, worthy of an out-take from The Brown Bunny. As she raps up, she declares the problem with her ex boyfriend is that she loves him but she's not in love with him. Her friend is used to these McGrawesque nuggets of pondering, and barely stirs from her thickshake stirring, but I to this minute have no idea what that means, and the old man, a peripheral figure in my day until now, decides this is the moment to stare at the girls like Henry from Portrait Of A Serial Killer, and simply say to them loudly a 2wo word cursing phrase popular in Tarantino films. He then leaves, disgusted, and storms off into a chemist where he transacts as quickly as possible with the guy behind the counter, while the girls stand open mouthed, frozen in mutual horror at being dissed, and a small jockey like man 2wo tables over laughs so hard at Grandad swearing, he knocks over a coke and gives that poor unseen cleaner so much more to do later on in the day...

Isolated memorable incidents in another wise dull month...I appreciate them whenever they happen, I truly, truly do...still stuck on Scott Miller though...

Untitled

It wasn't meant to be like this of course - of all the ways a long alcohol fuelled night out could end, the last thing you want to be doing is babysitting the birthday boy while he mardily huffs his way through the dying moments of his own party, while you wonder exactly what you spilled on your retro Ghana soccer top to make the white fabric look such a stupid colour and pine for the sanctity of a warm shower. While you wonder exactly where the brunette you were talking to about Aimee Mann - hoping the knowledge of at least 1ne trendy singer song writer would hide that really you were going to see Britney Spears in 2wo weeks time, only to find out she preferred Britney all along - had gone, what cab she had got into. While you wonder if the denizens of the Republic Bar would have been a lot more impressed if you had worn a communist East Germany top. While you wonder exactly why the man in the grey shirt at Central was so horrifically rude to you, as if the patronage of an African Nation on a soccer top had personally offended him, while he didn't know his own staff were behind his back pulling faces at what a loser he was. While you wonder exactly why people get together when it just makes them miserable, why all the txt msgs are sent when you could just send 1ne to say it's all over. While you wonder why the guy throwing up in the dying remains of a puddle has been completely abandoned by all his friends, who are telling a frankly tedious anecdote about the last series of Heroes and how if you freeze a crowd scene at the 24:27 minute mark of episode blah blah and squint you can see someones girlfriend. While you wonder who Sharon was and why exactly the graffiti on the wall you walked past was so mean to her, and to her fondness for what the quality papers would call a sexual act. While you wonder why people bail you up in the corner and tell you nervously what their dogs favourite TV show is - like I would care! So many thoughts, all of them immediately distracting from the fact that you, yes you, have been officially chosen to guide this night through it's concluding stages, to sit with someone and wait for a taxi. I wanted to ask a lot of questions of course as to why exactly I had gone from such a Lambadaesque dance to sitting on the ground being the supportive friend that I always am in the space of about 10en minutes, but maybe it was 2wo hours had passed, maybe a whole day and night. I've lost my ability to judge anything, my night is now in the hands of the poor Indian cab driver who seems to always get me, the 1ne with the loud Bhangra music, and the weary sense of resignation that comes from being the only mean with a work ethic that means you pick up stray would be Ghanaians at 3hree in the morning...

If the cab had come 5ive minutes earlier I would have missed an argument. She was all in black and yelling about how she did all the work, all the housekeeping, she was restrained not just by her dominatrix style belt and girdle combination but by the moral high-ground, the right to wag a finger and quote financial receipts. He didn't care, he was about to fall over, face down and undignified outside a kebab shop. His leg was the giveaway. It was shaking all over like a fuzzy tree, but never in the same direction 2wice. All he has to offer in this drunken state are words that suggest his own girlfriend knows Sharon, or maybe is Sharon, maybe it was her castigated on that wall. She doesn't even flinch or deviate, she just stares right through him and walks off in a direction he can't work out, and there he stands comprehensively defeated, forced to drunkenly harangue strangers for pennies so he can get a kebab or a cab home. A million type of the same argument pass through the streets, but there we all sit, frozen for a moment together, before he falls over in a heap and curses his own legs, his own pair of shoes, the sky and the moon, anything but his own lack of coherence. I don't what he expected when he left the house in the afternoon - I don't know what I expected, I don't know what Sharon expected from her life, but it seems as though it should all have better than this. In a fitful moment of irony, just to blank out the grumpy companion and the rant about how his birthday party was ruined by poor catering, the Beatles In My Life comes on my IPOD - yeah, good 1ne John, places I'll never forget, good on you. Or did it come into my head? Or was it Miami by Will Smith? Who would know...damn licorice shots...confusing my memories. Had I really left a really tender hug for this...

If the cab had been 10en minutes earlier, I would have missed the man on the ground being arrested. I would have missed wondering exactly why the "huckling" - as we call it in my country - of the drunk for lewd conduct and drunken behaviour was left to tiny blonde women, 1ne of whom had the hairstyle of an 80tys lady wrestler, primped and crimped and god knows what else. It was lucky he went quietly, but then there were several impotently furious steroid addicted bouncers looking for someone to hit, frustrated everyone has well behaved. No wait, that's behaved well. I'm slurring my words, I better not say anything lest I get huckled into the back of the van. I've never seen a man dragged from his resting position into the back of a police van be quite so accomodating. He seems to have completely given up on all resistance, on any kind of life. I think for a moment he might be dead, until he lets out a short sharp burst of wind, and then disappears into the night to sleep it off. Up the road, a pixie pale girl with a pink streak in her hair is reaching for a discarded shoe that has fallen off her foot, but like a drunken Sisyphus, she's condemned to never quite co-ordinate her arm in the direction of the heel and loses her grip on the sparkle encrusted item every time she gets near it. It eventually ends up somewhere near The Quarry, or Irish, or some god forsaken pub with limited attraction to the sober. She gives up on the pursuit of the high heel, and folds her arms in frustration, while 2wo rampaging bulls on a footy trip push and shove each other in the middle of the rod, desperately macho but equally hopeful this will do, that they can sort out their aggression with chest bumps and fist shaking rather than anything meaningful. Sums it all up really - a night of bare minimum effort. Should have said this instead of done nothing, should have apologized more meaningfully instead of infusing it with sarcasm, should have demanded that the shop actually go to the trouble of cooking chips instead of just defrosting them for a minute...we all should have tried harder I guess, but we only had 12elve hours to get it all in, and there's nothing we can do about it now...taxis here...not quite on time, even the driver can't be botherd at this time, I mean his Bhangra music is suitably muted for a start...

It's 4our PM by the time I can even type this. I've been in bed all day, covers pulled over my head, sleeping through an argument outside my window that's left a glass bottle smashed all over the ground near Barry Tossers lawn. I hope it wasn't me that did it, although part of me wouldn't mind. Everything is still. My unfinished book about Dillinger is sitting near the fireplace, and I don't remember starting to read it. There's a txt on my phone from the brunette, but I'm too tired to get up and reply. It seems to be a reply to 1ne I've sent - I don't remember sending it. There's a Temper Trap song on Channel V. I don't remember turning Channel V on to be honest. It does remind me to pretend to like them next time I'm out in public though. The Republic Bar might just go to the top of my list of pubs that don't really care about the responsible serving of alcohol policy. Why do I taste licor...oh yeah, right. I can't even get off the floor to go and make toast or some basic single man lives alone staple, I don't even have SpaghettiOs to do the easiest meal in the world. When I finally get up from the floor, I look down the road and see a man in a GreenT-shirt from Greenpeace standing by the side of the road in faint drizzle tapping his foot, and I wonder what he's doing there, standing in splendid isolation near my house, not a soul near him. I can only presume he's waiting for a life given he's holding bundle upon bundle of leaflets and has no 1ne to hand them out to. An old woman is the only person remotely in sight, and when he approaches, she swears at him and pushes her trolley curtly past, leaving him looking a bit sad and grumpy and staring at his Doc Martens. Eventually his lift turns up, and he throws down the leaflets in a fit of pique, and there they sit to this moment, because no 1ne can be botherd to go and pick them up. I would go and do it myself, but there's a DVD I've been meaning to watch for ages now, and I really just can't see myself getting round to it...

I'm not sure what the point of going out is, when the entertainment is so rich just from staying in...and txt msgs really are the new talking to people...

Post 300ed - Perpetual Bliss, or at least, the fleeting kind

I've been pretty caught up lately in a personal drama - oh look, there's another e-mail about it - that I've neglected to simply step outside and wander around and just enjoy my day. Sure, it's been impossible to do that lately because it's incessently rained in Hobart, which is good if like me you never want to mow your lawns but bad if you want to do something. I've felt like I used to in Grade 2wo PE when I was trapped against the music room window with my little face pressed against the glass, praying that the music teacher wouldn't dig out the triangles for an atonal crack at a Peter Combe song, and that sun would appear allowing us to settle that long and disputed teeball game that had gone to extra swings. I had plans to blow some of my money on DVDs, which isn't good for a writing career, but hey, it's probably too late for that anyway with all the time I've taken up doing nothing lately, unless someone wants a short sardonic review of Twisties sent in on Twitter - that's all the time I have right now, 140ty characters of time. As I was wandering through the shopping mall clutching my meagre collection of pennies and comedy DVDs, blue eye shadow girl was finding the going tough. She was walking past when a girl she worked with grabbed her arm and began an elaborate and deliberate apology for some unseen slight. The girl apologizing was pale, nervous and slightly edgy, as she tried to point out some tempery tantrum was directed at Blue Eye Shadow Girl, but some customer who had pushed all the wrong buttons. As the Veronicas faded out over a crackly PA system, and a bikie guy strung out on medication lay himself down on the ground for a little rest, blue eye shadow girl put 1ne hand of her hip, said it was fine in a manner of cold indifference, then walked off with slow, deliberate steps, bowling back to her place of work with efficiency and speed, before asking her co-worker very gently and softly if she could remember the last time she was happy. Then she stared up at the lights for an age, while the biker curled up in a defiant ball, the girl who apologized stood looking down at her shoes and shuffled 2wo step style on the balls of her heels, I stood inanely, about to get bowled over by a large woman with a pram, and the Veronicas were quite unphased by the whole situation, gamely starting exactly the same song, from the same place, on the same crackly PA like the slightly worse version of The Blakeney Twins that they are...

There's a little part of Penguin which is probably nothing like I remember it at all. During my homesickness phase, when I used to crawl out the window in the early hours of the morning, I would get fit by just wandering around until morning, making accquaintances with cheerful milkmen and being a general loiterer. There was 1ne particular morning though, it was sometime around September. I had spent most of my birthday being a horrendous brat, but something was different. My anger wasn't real for the first time, it was a self conscious show, an act that belonged in vaudeville. After all, I had a large amount of cash, a sort of girlfriend, a secret codeword to get free milkshakes from Alannah Hills Milk Bar, and everyone was being so gosh darn nice and friendly, I did fleetingly wonder what exactly it was about Ayshire I missed. After all, on my last day at school the nurse had to break up a fight between two girls who were using ping pong bats as weapons, and a local drug dealer had given me a pep talk. Were such thoughts that this, this new life, this existence was somehow better, were they wrong? I sat on a beach 1ne morning trying to summon up the anger to continue this persona I'd created for myself, while damning the beautiful sunset that was spreading out before me. My blank expression, confused mind and less than impressive pencilled in moustache somehow convinced a neanderthal with a shaved head that I was staring at him and his oddly camp dog. Although it was the size of a truck it looked too much like Frankie Howard to be frightening. The owner was in the middle of some kind of rant about how it was his beach, his sand, his water, and it wasn't the place for moody jacketed Scots to be sitting and staring...of course, he would probably only realise long after he had delivered his mid morning sermon that while he was delivering it, he was standing directly in the middle of 1ne of his dogs dedications to the new morning...I laughed for hours, then felt guilty that I was laughing in this new place, and then thought, what the hell, and laughed for hours again...

The bikie guy lay on the ground for pretty much my whole lunch time. He was quite happy to kick his legs like a baby on the ground while people just stepped over him. His girlfriend gave up on trying to stir him from his position on the ground, a plain girl with a mouth that could eat an apple through a letterbox, with a tattoo blue and mis-spelt, and walked off and left him in a flurry of cheap pink heels clicking on the ground and loud exotic swear words. He rolls his eyes in my direction, but I know better than to get involved and wander off for my daily battle with Subway. The girls in there are white and pale, as if they are perpetually locked in the back room with the awkward clumsy benny with the curly hair who always drops the sandwich, and he's drained them of all their lifeforce and enthusiasm, as if the sheer repetitive act of putting meat on bread until the end of eternity means they can never smile 1nce. Outside Subway there's a group of mardy teenagers slumped in the sun, all long hair and uncrushed dreams, all hopeful smiles that mask impending evil and cruelty to those they deem unsocially suitable. At the next table, there's 2wo efficiently dressed middle aged black and baggy eyed men in matching business suits, who look absolutely desolate and miserable and slumped over in wicker chairs as if the world is ending. As a kicked school bag flies over 1ne of their heads, they sit and discuss a jail sentence for 1ne of their associates over a rapidly cooling piece of bread and filling, while the kids sit around giggling and laughing except for 1ne kid sat up the back, with a fringe over his eyes and tuna melt dripping on his jeans who never takes his eyes off the miserable table, making that same silent vow everyone makes but never lives up to...I'll never be like them...you couldn't pay me enough to get that old...

The radio DJs on my inept car stereo system certainly sound happy, babbling away at a fantastic rate of knots about absolutely nothing before throwing to Cascada for the 8th time that day. There's a pile of bills in my letterbox, and a collection of hapless unsmiling bra models in a Target catalogue scrunched up the back, face up in the rain, trying to look respectable. My next door neighbour is telling a tedious anecdote to his friend about soccer, some vague point hidden in the middle about how his satellite dish is set up and how massive his plasma TV is - I hope he's not compensating for something - and how everyone will gape in wonder at the sheer clarity of Mark Bosnichs head tonight. Since we don't get on, he watches me walk up the path slowly before resuming, as if I'm going to steal his satellite secrets. There's about 12elve answering machine messages on my phone, all similar themed, all repetitive gossip without any new information. I'm tired of the bad news, and slump on the couch to watch some DVDs, while my neighbour fires up his satellite system as loud as it can go, until some blameless creature on the moon is wondering what the noise is that's keeping him awake when he's got nightshift in the morning. It's a bomb of sound and fury that I can imagine he's suitably proud of. He's probably showing it off in front of assorted acolytes, hangers on and people seeking free BBQ shapes, at least, until it fails, which I know because I can hear him yelling at it, the power goes off or he loses the feed, and in a blaze of curse words, social failure and cheezels flying across the room, I feel much happier to sit with a glass of Fanta, an individual fruit cup, and the self satisfying notion that comes when a hard day at work is rewarded with the failure of my hated neighbour...

Blue Eye Shadow Girl, when was I last happy? Oh, about 5ive minutes ago...

Post 299ine - The Cheese Sandwich Epic Part 3hree

"Have you ever punched anyone?"

His name was Tad and he didn't like me. When we first met, I had gently asked if he was named after the band Tad, in what I thought was a simple, easy gesture of musical knowledge from 1ne edgy loner to another. He looked at me as if I had sent his 1stborn down the river in a basket of reeds. Tad was the same age as me, but looked much older, to the point where I wondered if he was just bluffing, if he failed Grade 1ne or something due to emotional problems or an inability to colour in isometric shapes. If I'd said isometric shapes, he'd have presumed I was gay, and I felt through all the time I knew him, he really wanted to punch me. He didn't like foreigners, and he definitely didn't like being a foreigner. He probably didn't even like the band Foreigner, and thought they should have stayed in their own country. Even a simple question during an otherwise unremarkable game of Truth or Dare, petering out of the dying embers of a midnight bonfire would give him an opportunity to chide and jibe. Of course, I didn't realise he had designs on my missus, and those designs didn't mean he created Vicki's style of flannel shirt. Give him an inch, and he'd take an isometric triangle...cos he wasn't good at maths...or making lists really...

"Broke someones nose last week," I said, shrugging and sipping the remainder dregs of my Coca-Cola, relieved that unlike in Scotland, buying a Coke wasn't an excuse for strangers to jump out of bushes and demands "2wos on yer can man..."

"He did," said Vicki, nodding and putting her arm around my shoulder. "Broke someones nose!"

Tad eyed me coolly and evenly and then shrugged. I think for a moment I had his respect, but it was fleeting, and he stormed off, kicking some bark while he took up this new information, only returning after realising his Mum wasn't around to pick him up. What it was with Penguin and bark I have no idea, but it was everywhere, as prevalent as the sea breeze, the old fashioned sense of community, and the way every couple in the shop would smile amiably at strangers, but not at each other, part of an interconnected maze of terraced houses with men pushing lawn mowers on the weekend, so they never had to have a conversation about feelings...

Her name was some lost to time old fashioned name like Doris or Edith or something. All I knew about her was she was really good at sewing. I knew this because my happy pants, or my alleged happy pants, never even cracked a smile compared to hers, which ended up in the Advocate, our local paper. There she was, smiling an awkward smile in a space filling article on page 12elve next to a story about Paul Keating being vain. That was really I knew until the fateful October day when I was standing in the library reading an overlong and overly detailed war history which my history teacher scathingly referred to as "male", when Doredith came bowling up to me nervously, said she liked me, and then ran away before the "ked" syllable had even had chance to form...

"Did she...did she just swoon?" - the only swoon verifier around was a kid who was about to be expelled for blowing up a science block who didn't know was swooning was, so he shrugged and walked off looking at me strangely. I had never made anyone swoon before, let alone someone with the ability to the knock up a cardigan in an afternoon. Still I had a girlfriend, and the girl at school that I actually liked told me Doredith had lumpy arms, and shook her blonde mane sadly as she told me that. I tried to ask if that was some weird Australian term, but apparently it was literal, she just had big lumpy arms. Maybe from all the sewing. And that would have been that, I would just have let her down gently and simply and accepted it was the only time in my life anyone would swoon in my direction that wasn't suffering heatstroke, if it wasn't for her fired up, medium sized but very angry boyfriend, demanding that since his lumpy arms cardigan knitting local celebrity what the hell was her name again girlfriend had just dumped him for...well me as it turned out. Given that all this happened in the space of about 2wo minutes, I might not be giving the chaotic nature of the day the verbal clarity it deserved, but suffice to say I had gone from quite blamelessly reading about Churchill to being in my own battle. My fists were unaccustomed to the spirit of the Blitz, but fight I had to, for 1ne simple reason...

"Wait," said Tad, round the bonfire. "I'm confused, were her arms really lumpy?"
"Shush Tad," I said, wagging a finger in his direction. "You are distracting me from my story..."

I had managed to somehow convince at least some of the school population that, rather than being a street where the most heated battles were fought over "Mock Wimbledon", we were a hardcore Ayrshire palace of violence. Dreghornesque in fact. Well I did know a drug dealer at school, and I had a knife pulled on me in Kilwinning, so ya know, I had some street cred. And a hat from Urban Hype that made me look a bit eccentric. My problem was, during a playfight that I got dragged into, someone had said I punched "like a rainbow" - as I found out, this didn't mean I punched like Bungle, but punched in a strange camp arc, arms swinging blindly. It wasn't the most cogent metaphor in the world, but it definitely hurt. And to be honest, I couldn't punch at all. My previous attempts had been horrific, from the time I was 10en where I put my fist on someone jaw and just sort of lamely pushed, right up to the apparent rainbow room efforts of 2wo weeks ago. So I had to fight, but it was just going to be embarrassing. All the hard work, the trip to Zeehan where I won everyone over with stolen Steven Wright jokes and sardonic quips, all the banter, all the social climbing, all the standing around on the tennis court looking moody, even having not only a girlfriend, but a stalker and a girl who swooned over me with lumpy arms....

"Then I broke his nose," I said, shrugging. I took a sip of my can of Coke, threw it on the bonfire, and let all the goodness that comes from an act of violence at that age wash over me. Oh yes, Scotland represent, who's the man? I carefully omitted that I was actually terrified, he had charged, tried to put me in a headlock, I had blindly put out a benny fist in panic and somehow managed to subdue the charging nerd - dangerous bouncer sized Maori if anyone asks - with a reckless knock to the schnoz that left him needing attention from the school nurse. All in front of about 7even people who really hated him and liked me and who instantly turned it into a vicious boxing triumph. What did it matter - see that edgy climbs out the window loner over there? He's a bit tasty...stay away from him. Tad bristled visibly from underneath a floppy mess of hair and tried to look indifferent...but he couldn't help himself...

"And then what happened?" he said. Damn it, he's hooked on every word. Look at him listening intently...

"Got suspended," I said, puffing out my pigeon chest. "And then I had a cheese sandwich..."

The peak of my social life, as they, was coming...

Post 298eight - The Cheese Sandwich Epic Part 2w0 - the buttering the bread interlude

It's 3hree am on a cold Sunday Morning, some lost and damned point of late 1992wo. I'm standing outside a phone box, because boffins are still tinkering with the Internet and the only way I could find out whether Liverpool beat Sheffield Wednesday or Coventry or some other rival group of men in matching coloured shirts in a game that had epic importance some long ago time. It's raining, but I couldn't sleep anyway. I'd been laying awake listening to the rain thump down hard on the ground, looked out at my bare and empty room which was only adorned by a horrendous spongy and sparky carpet, and a Troll Doll I'd been given for luck, and been bitterly homesick. To this day I can't see a solitary troll doll on a garage sale table without feeling strangely alienated and miles from home, even if the table is just around the corner from my house. Unable to speak I had sprung from my bed, taken a regulation supply of Monte Carlo biscuits from the fridge, and walked around until I knew from the maths in my head that enough time had passed for a final score. Except it hadn't. Daylight savings. Damn it. So I sat on the fort for a while kicking bark from the top of the fort to the bottom while pools of water formed on the ground. I didn't really care about the football, I just need something to do to take my mind off things. There's a milkman across the way as the rain falls and I pull a coat over my shoulders, he's making slow deliberate steps through deep puddles on the ground, and he sees me sitting on the fort throwing bark on the ground in a thunderstorm. I don't like a bit poetic, just sad and depressed.

"Want some Milk?" he says, possibly the only thing you can say at a time like this. He certainly wasn't going to give me a hug and a backrub. Too weird.

I was kind of torn between accepting the milk and telling him where to go, since I had an image to maintain as a surly edgy Scottish loner who spent his time wandering from milk bar to post office. Then again, he was lucky he wasn't on the wrong end of an outpouring of conversational confession about how sad and depressed and homesick I was. I think I just took the milk and said nothing, which was the best of all worlds. Edgy loner be damned, I needed my calcium.

My girlfriend Vicki was in the queue for the phone with me. She knew where I was when the knock on the window failed to rouse me, either out the back of Mitre 10 sitting on a crate, loitering around the edges of the football ground huddled in the grandstand, or in the park. Luckily she lived near the park, so if it was the 3hrd option, it was a real time saver. Her parents were scholarly and concerned about their daughter. They both wore glasses and talked about Male oppression while their daughter smoked and ran out her window every night to hang out with kids in abandoned shops. Still, I wouldn't imagine the brochure involved hanging outside a phone box in the rain listening to tales about how Paul Stewart wasn't fit to wear a Liverpool shirt. She was understandably surly, and was openly argumentative about being forced to idle away her beauty sleep on some stupid game. And it was stupid. Very stupid, especially frittering away 5ive dollars in gold coins just to get a soccer score. I should have kno...

"You never take me anywhere!" she said, hand on denimed hips, while I fiddled with my Joe Bloggs hat, since I hadn't entirely committed to edgy lonerness, and was still at least partially wearing a hat that made me look like a member of Urban Hype.

I didn't know to be honest we were at the take each other places stage. "I take you to the Dial Arcade!" I said - and I did. I knew I shouldn't have introduced her to Tad. That's the band, but Tad the far more genuinely edgy loner who could grow a moustache wasn't helping either. He smashed windows, I just looked at them askance or took a wry sideways glance at them. I didn't help myself either by 1ne day, on a heady mix of cigar smoke, cheap cider and urban alienation in the middle of the park, I had the temerity to express, of all things, an enthusiasm. And not just for anything, for laser tag. I was quick to pass it off as irony, but it wasn't a good move. A few years later I could have steered the conversation back to Portishead, but we didn't have Kurt Cobain in Scotland, we had to make up our angst. Hard to be angst ridden watching Wogan 5ive times a night...endless "is there a little bit of you in the character"...it's a deep question, but not 5ive times a week...

There was a man in the phone box holding in our perpetual argumentative state. A man named Nigel from memory. He had big teeth, big illuminated teeth, and he was telling someone how much he loved them. He looked desperately out of breath and he had a cut on his hand that he was fiddling with in agitation. He looked at us standing in the rain and held his non bleeding hand up to the air. An apology of sorts, a stigmatic apology of other sorts. I was still drinking my milk and fiddling with my hat 1/2lf an hour later, by which point Vicki had flounced off to discuss the notions of patriarchy with her parents. She left in a burst of relatively foul flouncy language, most notably insulting my hat. That really hurt. The hat had done nothing to deserve that. I could tell that things were going wrong when she wasn't even interested anymore in my stories about fringe work at Atlantic 252, our supposed edgy radio in Scotland, and when tales of prank calling a member of Texas aren't winning friends...

Nigel apologized for his lady trouble. I said it comes when you cheat on your wife. He smoothed the edges of his tuxedo, having 1nce again made up some fake business awards night in Devonport as an excuse to see his paramour, a woman named Evie who sliced meat like a princess at the Cut Price Sams deli. He wasn't offended by my chiding, after all it's what edgy loners do. Chide. He offered me a smoke and explained patiently that the sex was great and he always left with the best off cuts of bacon. I didn't know if it was a Bottle Boys style entendre so I just quietly shared a smoke with him in the rain before putting my coins into the slot, and letting the magic of the camp bloke who read out the soccer scores on the Premium phone line hopefully deliver me some good news. Whatever the Arsenal score was though was obscured by Nigels plaintive parting greeting...

"It's alright for you though, being part of Penguins glamour couple!"

What was to come of this confused and distracted young boy was unclear, locked into so many different emotions even the writer of the Sons and Daughters theme was exhausted, but at least he knew where he had come from, and that, as they say, was somehow even more troubling...

We won by the way. 3-0. Cop that, idiotically shirted away team...

Post 297even - The Day Off, and the people who don't matter

My days off from work are generally dream like and unproductive. My floor in my house somewhat of an end of decade paeon to indecision and sloth, my start of decade dreams of marrying a gymnast and hosting a wacky radio show slowed down by inactivity and fret. In the middle of my fret though, I've woken up 1/2lf way through the day, inside a lift, with only the vaguest idea of what I'm doing wandering around Kingston at midday with just a single mans tub of ice-cream and a Patrick Swayze book for company. It won't be long before I'm in Subway being patronised by a 16teen year old for not knowing specific types of bread - a real Coles flashback if ever there was 1ne - but for now, I'm lost in my own thoughts. My fret is broken by a small wrinkly woman in glasses and a Millers pink pullover who decides to engage me and the bald and beardy man next to me in a bit of Kingston used to be all fields conversation. She doesn't take a pause for breath, illuminating the dim glow of the lift with a steady stream of local facts that seem to suggest Kingston was 1nce comprised of 3hree sticks and a hut until about 1989until I'm pretty sure I should have taken the escalator. The bald beardy man cops the brunt of the education, since he made the rookie mistake of nodding and seeming vaguely interested. I'm only option B in the lift, and by the time I realise that the lady is omitting certain odours that you should only associate with porky canines and new born babies, I'm glad of the respite the air conditioning of an alien Big W not set out to my usual specifications brings me. I often wonder about these lost rambling people seeking the daily lift based companionship of strangers just to survive, accumulating enough interesting facts to pass the time of day without ever having to converse on anything with depth or meaning. So says a boy wandering around Kingston pointlessly with a book waiting for the guy smoking outside Balls N Bumpers to get off his cell phone and open up so I can pick through cheap tat with damaged stains...frankly mucking around in a lift sounds like a ball of laughs...

At some point around the start of this decade, Dad used to pick up by the side of the road this teacher friend of his and give him a lift into town. Not unlike my Dad, he was a bearded man with a briefcase and he was really greatful every time my Dad would pick him up. He did have to contend with a malcontented where is my life going passenger in the back - that would of course be me - who would hate picking this particular stranger up because it meant the radio went off, and I would sit sulking with my arms folded, the very definition of tension just because I was denied listening to the latest Something For Kate song. I had just started working in what was ominously known as the real world, I had lost my girlfriend, I was living at home and the last thing I needed in my life was a transient every 3hrd week stranger depriving me of music knowledge while talking about the trouble with supply teaching. Oh was that a bane of his existence. I don't he ever noticed that I was projecting my best and most wicked hate vibes his way though, because he usually talking about teacher stuff to my Dad, until melancholic and windy Wednesday morning when he seemed unusually agitated and strung out. His tie was the 1ne side like Gourock, his eyes were big and black, even his beard seemed sad and unkempt, and he sat quietly in the front, until he launched a Rainmanesque style dissertation on the numerology of just what the numbers of letterboxes meant and how their styles had changed over the years. This went on for 5ive minutes, at which point my Dad decided to do the only thing a true born in the UK man could do in times of uncomfortable mutual male anxiety...he put on the radio and sat in silence for the rest of the journey. I've never been so relieved in all my life to hear Stereophonics, and I suspect I never will be...

We only picked him up 1nce after that. To be honest, we only ever saw him 1nce after that. His son was with him, a typically Aryan teenage surfer boy with focused non blinking eyes you see loping up and down the streets of unfulfilled potential in later life. While the physical distance between the 2wo as they stood together at the bus stop was significant, it wasn't anything different to how my Dad and I would non verbally communicate if we didn't have sport to talk about, I couldn't help but notice how disgusted the boy was to have to accept the generous offer of transportation. I was in the middle of my triangle years where I had no friends so I remember thinking Dad was going to buddy me up with this surly kid in the spirit of mutual father hatred - I was already perilously close to having to go to a cult like church to watch an inspirational video and pick up an arranged wife if my neighbour had anything to do with it - but luckily I had a walkman on hand to block out the family tension. Rainman tried a couple of times to break the silence with his 1ne man show on why staff rooms don't have good kettles - it really needed a Reiseresque what's the deal with that at the end - and by the time he got to the end of his little sermon, we pulled up neatly and accurately in Harrington Street to set them kerbside. As far as I know, they are both still there. Forever. Having a massive argument like they did on that day, the boy abusive and loud, the Dad slumped and hunched and nervously picking at his tie. my Dad trying to pretend everything was fine and nothing was happening and that he'd taken in some interesting facts about letterboxes from his friend, and me, newly moved to the front seat, and me happily fiddling with the radio to try and find some amusing slightly left wing quips on Triple J. If I was disturbed at the camp flouncy way the boy went off into traffic to try and get a Chiko Roll and left his Dad to seemingly be talking to himself or a passing cloud, well, it was nothing some Lemon Jelly over the radio wouldn't fix...

If I wonder about the fate of those left behind and condemned to wander the streets muttering or talking to strangers, it's only a fleeting thought. The smoking man finally opens up Balls N Bumpers and lets me peruse his mediocre goods, a Melbourne Victory top ripped apart here or a fading James Hird poster there, and soon I've spilled out into the fading sunshine and am on my way home. I couldn't handle the triple threat sales pressure in Sportsco no matter how blonde the girls hair was or how white her teeth. I've got Intastella on my IPOD to pass some time, the remnants of a bought under sufferance Subway sandwich in my bag and a million stories around me blocked out by music and general fretting. There's a dark brown police car hovering off to the side in the bushes, a kid bouncing a ball off the path and pointing it out to his friends, and an old war vet pushing himself along in a red cart type vehicle, legless in the bad sense of the word but suited and hatted and smiling as best he can. He stops his wagon to talk to the large orange clad lollipop lady that I hate, the self important 1ne who waves her stop sign regally in my cars face every morning. They exchange greetings that instantly humanise her, and exchange jokes and laughs that I will never fully understand, until a Red Mazda comes along and she leaps out to block his path, the Red Mazda driver angrily and impatiently tooting his horn and shaking his gold ring covered fist in her direction as a pale and wan ginger child strides blamelessly and apologetically across the road. Within an instant, all 4our of them who share this moment are gone. The ginger child sprints off to his surprisingly hot girlfriend, the lollipop lady vanishes for a smoke, the car screeches off round the bend and the cart is gone mysteriously to some unknown location. I know nothing about these people, but there they all were, joined with me for an instant in a frozen meaningless moment of time, and then gone again without any fuss, leaving me to walk home, selfishly cursing the fact that I don't have a nice cart to take myself home in, but with an entire day to fill, on the road to the new decade...

I promptly waste that day writing endlessly and watching Youtube clips...but that's another story...