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...