1nce, 2wce, 3hree, 4our, 5ive, 6ix, 7even times A September...

It's a hot afternoon in Melbourne. I've drank all the water the liberal bag checkers on Virgin blue have allowed me to carry on, I've worn the battery out of my IPOD and read my football clubs sanctioned account of their latest miserable failure - I've wandered and ambled around an airport terminal until a suitable time for me to leave has passed, and been faintly embarrassed as a minor celebrity has passed her own time in the airport by throwing a ridiculous hissy fit about Subway sandwiches. I briefly think about taking a picture, but there's no value on it, much like eating the sandwich. I'm now in a taxi with a portly Indian cab driver. I've shown him a grubby piece of paper with an address on it, and I've got nothing more to say other than short grunts and nods of direction. To compensate, he puts the acoustic version of Cry For You by September on 7even times in a row on CD repeat, and taps the steering wheel in tune each time with pudgy fingers it comes on as if it's a surprise to him. For all I know that's all he does all day, drive around, not finding where he's supposed to go, letting the sweat stains accumulate on his work shirt while he plays Cry For You for tourists in the hope of creating a convivial atmosphere. He certainly seems happy enough, but I'm relieved I never have to hear the song again by the time he dumps me seemingly miles away from my destination. I'm outside a hospital, forced to ask a scrunchy faced freckly intern for directions. She's helpful, then returns to her Sudoku, her face even more scrunched as she clicks her pen in a frantic motion. Later, I see her out and about free from such cubicle puzzle based restrictions, throwing such strangely odd shapes on the dancefloor her face unscrunches and she almost tears a hamstring. I try and tell my dancing companion about my interest in co-incidence, the strange way in a city of millions I've seen the same person 2wice in a matter of hours but she's not listening. She's not an intellectual, she's not bothered by the notions that I am, the random nature of the universe, just things that are shiny, things that are basic and simple - beats, rings, how some drinks are like so expensive. That's fine, it's not the night for universal discourse. I can't help feeling though she should meet the taxi driver, I could see them together some how, just never letting a thought enter their heads, just eternally listening to September over and over again until the end of time. She asks me what I'm thinking about, eyes gleaming between songs, but I can't articulate fully, and unless I could display it in interpretative dance, she'd get bored with it anyway. So, I simply queue up to get some more drinks, because truthfully, this is my thinking out loud outlet - the rest of the time, I'm as confused as the DJ was when The Vengaboys came on 3hree songs too early, and his entire night seems ruined by a moment of disappointment, his face never 1nce recovering it's early poise, bounce and hope...

I'm weighed down by the eternal notion I can tell when people I'm staying with have had enough of me I should say. I blame my mother. She used to load me up with so many things to worry about any time I stay with someone - from the time I was a kid -I can never really relax. I'm staying with my cousin, 1ne of those people who's link to me through routes of adoption, through quirks of fate and the fickle way someone in Asia picked a particular baby out of a particular cot because Mums sister was their on a particular day are not as thought about as often as they could. I think by day 3hree of my visit, she's had enough of me. I can't be certain about that, but I think so anyway. I at least get a toasted sandwich out of my visit, and am able to pass on several impressive nuggets of popular culture I've gleamed during my time on earth. I can't help but feel as though somehow I'm cramping her style. Maybe I'm being unfair. It's still best to move on though so she can do something more glamourous with her day. There's a bewildering tram junction outside her house, and a mysteriously glamorous but sad looking woman in the pool at her block of flats just swimming up and down all day as if she stops she'll cease to exist. I would ask my cousin, but I've probably exhausted my conversational stock. My cousins flat mate I never see due to poorly matched schedules. He seems to love photos of himself, they adorn the assigned spaces on the wall he owns, the kind of accumulated memories males like to assign themselves. Pubs, cricket, arms around minor celebrities with startled uncomfortable expressions. My cousin has no wall, no photos up, just a Gossip Girl DVD on the table in a sea of cricket books, and a mug on the balcony. Other than that, there's no real evidence she lives here. Maybe she is never here, and I've stuck her inside for a while, and if I had anything to say, I should say it now, should perhaps be a bit deeper in conversation, but I'm too tired. I came, I saw the thing I wanted to see, we had a drink, and it's as far as it can ever go. The lady in the swimming pool shakes all the water from herself and looks utterly morose as she ploughs back into the pool. I have so many questions, and somehow no inclination to ask them. I've mentally checked out, and I don't even realise it. Maybe somehow in 2010 I'll connect with all these dotted around cousins, ask them about their skating trophies, their sexy but depressed looking neighbours, their lack of personal effects inside their own house...maybe...or maybe it's just too late, and I should stick to Lady GaGa talk...it's too much for 1ne backpack lugging tired male in a BK Hacken top to work out on 1ne tram ride...

I'm in some pub by now anyway, by the time my brain works again, some strangely lit pub that uses it's big screens to advertise chicken parmas that look about 8eight foot tall and a strange mix of weird colours on a TV that should be showing rock bands or what the other TV screen in showing, a sporting star on the other side of the world looking disconsolate on the sidelines, having long ago given up on his own team. I'm between friends, 1ne having had to go back to work, the other held up by inefficient hotel standards. The sports star never recovers, looking on the sidelines like he's just been seduced by the giant chicken parma ad and been sorely disappointed. Time is moving very slowly between sparsely sipped drinks, the price prohibitive, the heat discouraging further exploration of other spaces. Most of the conversation is, like my first friends, faux ambitious, dreams, unclosed business deals, secretaries hot for their bosses, men in suits who turn playing on the same course as Tiger Woods 6ix weeks apart into some kind of personal meeting and endorsement from the apparently great man. Women, I suspect, are tolerated in this place, perhaps a table accoutrement stuck up the end, rarely prodded into conversational action while the men break bread. At the next table over from me sits 1ne such girl - she's got a stripey green top on and says nothing for almost an hour while the 2wo guys she is with talk endlessly about their work and their colleagues, and even when she leaves her farewell acknowledgement is clipped and cold, an irritant to the conversational flow. It only dawns on me later that the first guy, a sort of Robson Green a like with a flimsy November moustache, seems to be downplaying all of the office staff and over emphasising their personal flaws if the 2nd guy, a metrosexual in jarringly bright denim, talks them up as a potential girlfriend, and begins telling the 2nd guy without fail how he can do a lot better. It begins to dawn on me after a while the 1st guy is really into the 2nd guy, and is keen to just sit and talk and gaze into his eyes. I wonder if the 2nd guy will ever realise, maybe he likes the attention. Their world is only on show for a moment though - they leave discussing Glee, and their replacement family are as bland and boring as the 10en dollar pizza deal, and never for a second speak, but chew silently and quietly as a parade of Finn brothers replace the Chicken Parma on the big screen, while the sports star sits with his unchanged expression, only moving when the aggressively blonde barmaid decides it's time for the suits to see golf...

A day passes, a night passes, an entire Xmas parade passes before my eyes. I lock eyes with a man in a historical recreation outfit who looks like he's about to die in the heat, a man clearly uncomfortable his passion to dress like a gold miner has been hijacked by corporate stores who employ large men with big megaphones. He disappears from view when a Tweenie leaps in front of him to steal the spotlight and wave frantically to the crowd, while a Japanese man behind me tramples over small children to take a picture. He has a T-shirt which just says AWESOME DAD on it in large black letters, in an eye wateringly large fault. He doesn't seem to have kids with him though, if he did it would probably be bitterly ironic anyway because I think he'd stand of their heads just to get up close and personal with a Tweenie. I immediately become like him though, since I'm in big city mode, pushing grandmas out of the way because if I don't, I'll be trampled, I'll be swallowed up and that book that I've ordered will sit in some1nes pigeon hole forever. I don't feel especially fit, and I'm feeling sorry for myself, damned hay fever, and why did no-1ne appreciate my new Sierra Leone top? I mean I bought it specially. Philistines. There's people all around me, bumping into me, or I'm bumping into them, I can't quite tell. A Myer spruiker heads directly for me with a microphone, I think to ask me for the crowds amusement what I think of the parade, but I sidestep him with a deft swerve, and he's left fumbling in dead air. I think he had to ask the Japanese guy a series of stilted and awkward questions instead, I didn't really have time to work it all out. Meanwhile, outside an abandoned looking cafe, a homeless woman with grey straggly hair in a filthy blue and black tracksuit can't get up in the heat - she just lies in the doorway while a series of corporate messages and floats walk or drift straight past her. I know I feel completely uncomfortable when 1ne of the Tweenies casually waves in her direction, but I don't really have time to register how I feel. It's been that kind of weekend. Things happen, then apace it all changes, and thoughts only register much later, it's too hot, it's not my city, she wasn't that interested, she was too interested, the story was too long, too short, not punchy enough. And now it's all over, and I've ended up nose to jaw with a Tweenie, hand extended for a hi-5. What the hell, come here tiger. There's kids watching, and I'm part of some kind of experience, but I don't know what. I can't make sense of it all. The homeless woman slumps back in her alleyway, the Japanese man has moved on, and Melbourne won't mind if I quietly and subtly move on, back to Hobart, where what I do counts for something, if only because there's people registering my movements. Carefree time is over. Back to work. Maybe 1ne odd regret, but nothing to write home about...txt msgs can always be deleted, can't they?

You'll never see me again...and now who's gonna cry for you...over and over and over again...until the end of time...

Reflections on Melbourne and 3am conversational dogs

So I'm back home, and all is well - I went to Melbourne, no one stabbed me, I didn't roll around drunk and make a fool of myself (well, I did break a toilet door, but that was an accident) and to the delight of everyone I am now home safe and sound. I am annoyed at the nature of time as it seems to be allocated unfairly. Six hours in a hotel room, shut away from the world in a spa listening to Blondie, that goes in about three seconds, but six hours at work, that seems to take twice as long...not fair is it? Melbourne is now getting London like not in the awesomeness of it's shopping but in the veracity and intimidation of it's sales pressure. In the airport, some guy said to me "hey mate, I've got a question for ya!" and then when I didn't respond to his amusing sales pitch was kind of bagging me out to his semi attractive cohort for being rude. I was pursued many times by leaflet givers, who by Melbourne law can't speak to you so they just thrust bits of paper at chin level, and a Big Issue seller with tourettes who after mentioning the publication he was shilling would mutter "ferkcunferk" under his breath, obviously against his will, but it was hardly the warm embrace of K-Tel. By the time a man in Virgin had disrupted my idle flicking through the Hannah Montana back catalogue to try and pressurize me into buying something, I had had enough and just walked off. It's terrible that no one can just walk through a shop without goons hassling them, but there was one person I felt sorry for - no, not the artist/busker with his "I can't afford paintbrushes, give generously" sign, but the guy who was badly dressed as a badly dressed hamburger outside the hamburger store, with one eye to look out of, who was getting kicked up the arse time and time again...I know everybodys gots to make a living, but even with my aversion to sales pressure, I'd have taken his leaflet...then kicked him up the arse...what, it's fun...

I stayed at my friends house in St Kilda - I really like my friend, he's a good guy, but him and his wife are pretty high fliers - they are Qantas and I am Kendall so to speak - and they put this enormous pressure on themselves, like she works about 60 hours a week and for fun is doing a big fancy degree. Sometimes if you go there she's all stressed and you can mistake it for pure frost, but I'm oblivious, I just watch my Disney films (the one this morning was awesome, it was about two twins who played bask...um...I'll shut up now) and don't worry about her. It's a form of understanding. However, since I last went over there, and I haven't been there since the wedding with Daniel Giansiracusa and so on, they now have a dog, and after about five minutes, I kind of worked out why they have a dog. It's to fill in awkward gaps in their conversation. I really believe that they struggle for things to talk about - it's not that they don't get on, it's just they are funny in their ways, in the middle of an argument they call each other honey and sweetheart. I imagine their conversations are quite intense and edgy, so to break the ice, they go "Oh, look, the dogs eating my shoes! Awwww!" - so the dog, like Maddox Jolie, has to stay cute, or they will replace it with another dog that breaks the ice in times of stress. My family has a strict policy against dogs being taken in as part of the family and spoken to as if they are human - Mums friends Dad has a dog who apparently likes to eat it's dinner at one house and it's breakfast at the other, as if it's a restaurant critic - and my friends wife was having a go at my friend for not cooking the dogs chicken "as the dog likes". As I looked over at the dog, the dog was making mincemeat out of a coathanger, so I'm guessing the dog isn't that fussy there kiddo. However, I realised in the morning that, in fairness, I had begun filling in little gaps in the conversation by referencing the dog...oh did I mention the dog was so funny, he bit my finger, oh how amusing...and it was actually a lot better than having to talk to her about her DVD she had on, The Hills (Adam Hills wasn't in it) or her listening to my thoughts on Britney. Incidentally, the dog jumped on my bed at 3 in the morning, not the first time I've slept with a dog...am I right folks! Am I...is this thing on?

I tend to find with my friends, as long as I can stick to non controversial topics and kind of steer the conversation onto general matters, I'm OK - I'm very good at ignoring fights and flare ups - however, what I do find is that when my friends start relationships, I do more talking to their partners than they do, and it's kind of odd. None of my friends have been in super healthy relationships - at least, so says the guy who's main relationship with someone involved me playing ATARI a lot more than talking about feelings. The friend I stayed with, when I stayed there during their wedding week, was packing his suitcase for the honeymoon and she was taking clothes out and throwing them on the floor, and sort of passive-aggressively saying "Come on now sweetie, don't take that" - I couldn't live like that, and this morning they were arguing about whether a shirt was washed. Luckily, at this point, the dog, as if trained, began cutely chewing a hairbrush and diffused any kind of tension - that dog needs it's own sitcom. What I should mention at this point though is that my friend, he kinda sorta maybe had a girlfriend when he was engaged and maybe kinda sorta got busted and now he rots in purgatorial hell for the rest of his life, engaged in arguments about trivialities knowing that the subtext to every argument is still you cheated on me and I took you book so I have the moral high ground - it might be a conversation about the washing, but there's definitely a moral high ground that has been established. I just don't know why you'd want to live like that, spending every single day on edge and communicating through a pet - maybe it's just me, I mean, they look happy away on holiday together, but they put themselves under so much pressure I just worry about the quality of their lives at times. And to be honest, especially with her, I don't think having a visitor sitting on the couch loudly bagging out the state of todays popular music scene helps (although if the dog chews my fingers, maybe that helps?)...

Anyway, they don't know I gave the dog a big boot up the arse for it's cheek, so keep it to yourself. Now, to get back to the subject of sales pressure, there was a kind of sadness to one aspect of Melbourne sales pressure - the hookers are out on the streets at about 10 in the morning. It's the kid of urban nightmare we don't have in Tasmania, big urban developments left to decay and rot, big unfilled shopping centres full of broken down hopes and piles of rubble, with bong shops that sell hardcore heroin and hookers on the corner, large women pulling their underpants out of their skirts as you get the tram into town, or skinny bewildered women being watched by up to five pimps as she stands on the corner. Maybe we do, and I haven't noticed. In fact, the only obvious hooker I ever saw in Hobart was the one handing out leaflets to the soldiers off the boat. I still wish I'd got one of those leaflets. Anyway, the whole thing was incredibly and quite desperately sad and sleazy, at any time, never mind at ten in the morning. However, what was interesting was that at night when we walked back from the pub, after a man, a man who looked suspiciously like Brett Climo, not that it was, but just saying, had rather timidly and somewhat awkwardly picked up a hooker in his 1974 Honda Civic and drove off, the car was tailed by an imposing and dangerous black Lincoln style car, which obviously and clearly was the pimp making sure his prized asset wasn't in any danger. Or maybe he was off to steal Brett Climos wallet. I don't really have any moralising to do about people who pick up hookers, I mean I never have, but it does some awfully sad and heartbreaking when you see it at that basic level with hookers standing outside day care centres with people pushing prams past them. So while I don't pretend to fully understand the motivations of Brett Climo, the whole scene did make me homesick for Kingston, where our major danger isn't pimps and hos, but the price of a big of Werthers Originals at Coles going up and up and up...

Me? I was inside the pub unable to chat someone up I fancied because they were part of a hens party, and it's a fundamental rule you can't crack a hens party, but that's a story for another day...

Staying at Eddie McGuires house

So I've woken up this morning and been pretty grumpy because I'm sore and tired and I'm not sure what day of the week it is. I get disgruntled in the mornings if I get woken up with a start, and at no stage do I seem to recover and become gruntled again. In fact, as I write this, I'm sore all over, and only the quality of the Banjos (them again) sausage roll I've eaten for morning tea has perked me up. I was really annoyed to hear about the disco in New Zealand that was pumping out a bit of Bob The Builder for the kids and got shut down by neighbours complaining about the noise - I don't mind cranking up a bit of Can We Fix It when I'm feeling festive and ironic (I like my mums Scottish inspired creation, Shug The Shoveller, who's response to "Can We Fix It!" was a dis-interested "Nup"). I love the girl who lined up for ages to go and get Stephanie Rice and E-Sulls autographs only to be told they were only signing sponsors underpants. I love the fact she'd skipped dole day to go and draw E-Sull on her arm and got rejected. I'm all for this kind of devotion - I still feel the sting of rejection when my Dad wouldn't let me cross the road to go and get Chris Reynolds autograph after the 1987 NTFL Premiership win by Penguin, and can still remember looking over at the football ground and seeing the massive bonfire lighting up the night sky and feeling a little piqued that I couldn't just go and have a schooner or two. Mind you, I hadn't drawn Chris Reynolds on my arm, that would have got me in the paper. And the way I draw, it would either have been a stick figure or something that looked like a pig - I painted a spaceship in art class when I was little and turned it into a hippo, it was the only A I ever got until a hippy Grade 8 art teacher said one of my paintings was a violent explosion of colour, which it was cos I cracked it and threw all the paint at the canvas, Angry Homer style. And I'm completely sure that my parents are planning something really terrible for my 30th. I hope it's not a Veronica pretending to be a lesbian, that's the worst gift I could get...

So my Mum, she has this little joke she's started telling me where she goes "Remember when we were in Melbourne and we stayed with Eddie McGuire?" - furreners, if you don't know, Eddie McGuire is an Australian television personality, and the president of my football club, and let's just say opinions on him are mixed and leave it politely at that - and she's absolutely right, when I was 10, we stayed at Eddie McGuires house, the joke of course being the Eddie McGuire we stayed was a nonogenerian Scottish gentlemen with a wife called Bessie who in that true kids fashion, I have no idea how we knew them, and I certainly don't think I ever saw them again. However, for three days in 1988 (the year before the release of Cop and A Half with Burt Reynolds), I did indeed stay with Eddie McGuire...um...that's it...that's posted...goodnight everybody. Well, not really, because there was more to it than that. You see, this was our stop over in Melbourne before I left Penguin to go back and live in Scotland, and it had not been a good week. I had a terrific farewell, beating this school we really hated 2-1 in soccer, and I kicked this red headed kid I hated fair in the guts, but I still had to leave Penguin behind, especially when we sat in our empty house and I had the time to look at my signed Bicentennial medal. And my friends. And my (admittedly now a lot more corporate) swimming pool. And Swanny, my hairdresser who slashed my ear...OK, I wasn't sad to miss him. Well, I kinda was, he had some awesome musk sticks. Anyway, I was in this wooden strangers room in some suburb of Melbourne where everything was my favourite kind of pine (who doesn't love treated pine, anyone?) and I always remember he came in and gave this little yellow book about soccer, and it was really nice of him to do that, and he'd written this lovely inscription in it about Scotland and stuff...my parents meanwhile did the bulk of the heavy lifting when it came to being sociable, sitting through a four hour VHS tape of their ballroom dancing which had it involved some Paul Licuria Dancing With The Stars style funkadelia might have been impressive, but which in fact was a room full of dancers shuffing awkwardly to the Pride Of Erin Brockovich or whatever they do in those situations. Well, it was four hours now I think about it start to finish, if you take out the times Eddie paused it to show Big Willie and his incredible much talked about shuffling, only to start the tape again and commentate on a seemingly indistinguishable old man clomping around the scout hall - I guess we just didn't have a trained eye. We also went to dinner at someones house and someone let a cockatoo out that clamped onto everyones head (I'm sure it was trained) in a seemingly pre-determined order. Again, I found something else to do while my parents did the Haworth style lifting in the social world - I found an ATARI in one of the kids rooms and sat down and played Super Slalom until hometime. I think that's always been my state of mind, it seems quite solitary and abstract at times, the classic mindset of the only child, and not even a flying cockatoo trained to peck at crusty bread and say "beer" can lure me into social situations with strangers at times.

The centrepiece of our trip was an outing to a VFL game between my team, the Pies In The Sky and the North Melbourne Bob Ansett owned Kangaroos. I've exaggerated so many aspects of this day in my own mind - we didn't win by 132 points, but by about 50, it wasn't bucketing with rain, just a bit muddy, and it wasn't at the MCG or a final, it was Waverley Park and no one was there, or anything else I associate with this day. I do remember being completely struck by the sheer size of Melbourne though, as we walked along the streets in variable weather. Mostly, I remember it was the first place I ever saw a caramel Milky Way, just sitting in the shop in a brown wrapper like a long lost girlfriend with a fantastic new hairstyle. Caramel? In a Milky Way? What is going on...and at the ground there wasn't just brassy old Di saying lewd things to kids like "I'll give him a lesson when he's older" and selling Violet Crumbles at marked up prices like in Penguin, there were vans selling kebabs and salad sandwiches and Halls Lemonade that wasn't even out of date...less impressively, it was also the first place I ever saw Home and Away, the episode where Nico turns the hose on Frank because he's not in the wedding party, and I was totally hooked, in a way I wouldn't be with Home and Away again until the Thomsen/Godbold era. So we're walking along to the game and Eddie suddenly realises he's left his banana at home. That's banana, single, not even a packed lunch with a Rice Bubbles bar in it, just one banana, and he decides we have to go and get it, because it's his banana, and one from the shops just wouldn't be prepared right. What can you do? Turn the hose on him? So we walked all the way home just to get Eddies banana, then all the way back, and missed a good chunk of the first 1/4 (in my version we missed most of the game and arrived with 5 minutes to go and got in for free). My Dad is still pretty annoyed at this, and brings it up whenever we're stuck in traffic mentioning someone must have gone back for a banana. I can never exaggerate that my first ever VFL game involved just a lot of angry emotions - I was angry because we didn't have time to look at merch, Eddie was angry he didn't have his banana, Dad was angry because he didn't get to see the start of the game, Nico was angry he wasn't in the wedding party, and the woman in the row in front of me was the angriest person of all - she was head of a family of 6 North Melbourne supporters sitting in a row with one kid sitting in the middle of the family in a Collingwood beanie, smiling all day long. At the end of the game, the Mum just turned to the kid and said "If you say one word you are fucking dead", to which the kid simply froze in fear. If only he'd gone home for his banana...

I don't really remember Bessie, I don't know what she did - obviously apart from the ball room dancing, we got a fair idea of her abilities in that regard. Maybe she was the brains of the outfit, or maybe she just hated us. When it comes to Eddie, well, my favourite ever line of rap music (is that a correctly constructed opening?) is on Jay Zs the Black Tape where he raps on the subject of what happens when a rapper tries to deliver a message and fails to connect that he's, quote, "Just talkin to ya...(sigh)...just talking through ya"...I really love that line because Jay Z has been talking through me for years, and I can't remember the last time anything Jay Z said connected with me ("stack chips in anticipation of precipitation on a rainy day" indeed), but it always makes me think of Eddie. I always felt I was talking through him in our brief conversations, that whatever I was showing him wasn't really registering, that he was of an age and from a time of strict train timetable like routines, only eating bananas after 12 and never drinking juice before 2, before a bit of Willisee at night and some toast with crusts cut off at 6:42 and ball room dancing at 7:31. Whatever I was saying to him (and most of it was nonsense, about the decline of Transformers or Empty Nest or...actually, I just realised I'm still the same) just bounced off him and struggled to get through a fog of routine and muddling. Look Eddie, it's time for Lost Cities Of Gold, want to...no, it's 4:37, you've got gardening to do, cheers bud. Everything was set up, there was no spontaniety or deviation at all, just treated pine and elevenses, ballroom dancing and routine. But it made him happy, and I wasn't going to argue with that, he'd earned the right to live the way he chose, and he chose to live his life in set order. For all that though, he gave me something really kind and heartfelt, and I did keep the soccer book for ages, referring to it whenever I wanted to check out something soccer related on the history of the European Championships or just wanted to remember someone doing something really decent for a kid he didn't know. I'll always really appreciate that.

Oh yeah, Bessie had a thing for antique pigs...never did find out what that was about...

Community Pride vs Business Pride

I've had a lot of time to think about things this weekend, and not just because I've done very little but sleep since Saturday. Not just about community pride, not just about the indignity of being lost in Melbourne, not just the indignity of being stranded by the Napean Highway at 6 in the morning, not just the mysteries of Melbourne nightlife, and not just seeing someone thoroughly sick outside Bunnings Warehouse and thinking "there but for the grace of God go I", not just working on jokes about Fiddlers nightclub, and not just the mysteries of "is that girl hot, or am I just really drunk..."

No, what I mostly had time to think about was my hatred of my own team, Collingwood, in the AFL football. I went over to see them play the Kangaroos at Telstra Dome on Friday Night. I don't like Telstra Dome stadium, it's got absolutely no soul. Bottled water is 4 dollars a bottle, and I don't think you are allowed to swear. I'm always uncomfortable in the place - it's like going out with a really attractive girl who doesn't say much. I think that's what they always say about Maria Sharapova, she doesn't do good conversation. No matter how many times they say it's structurally sound or built to world class specifications, ot how many times they say your girlfriend is hot, something just isn't right. I always feel tense watching Collingwood play there, and I always end up surrounded by children. Kids at football games always really irritate me, they either cheer when they win a bit too loud, or fall asleep. Mind you, that sounds a lot like me, especially the fall asleep part, I could barely keep myself awake at the side of the highway at 5am...

Naturally, feeling this uncomfortable, we lost. I don't know if footballers care, or some nights even try. I'm sure they do, at least for a while, then they chalk it up to a bad day and stop running. I'm sure though someone like, say, Dale Thomas, listening to an entire ground paying out on him for not trying is thinking that he is doing his best, and what do they know? However, your football team is an extension of yourself, you don't want to turn up embarrassed in front of everyone supporting a lemon of a team. I realised on Friday night that no matter how much I hate the coach Mick Malthouse, and it's getting embarrassing, almost pathological, nothing changes. We think that people care who represent our football teams, but in reality, only a few of them do. Most of the players simply regard it as a bad day at work, and then go home unpeturbed. The main question now is, if I hate sitting their so much, why do I watch? It's the eternal war - disgusted, enraged fans miserable at the disrespect the team representing them and letting them down vs players who regard the game as a job, and believe they have the right to a life. If I have a bad day at the bank, I don't brood about it all week - why should they? They owe me nothing. On the other hand, if they don't try their hardest, there is no punishment - they play next week and still pick up with a greater ease than me. I really struggle with the idea that the Kangaroos wanted to win more just because they had to wear an away jumper in a home game. THAT is all it takes to make a team want to win more?

That's not my real point though. I realised I don't know anything about the suburb Collingwood are supposed to represent. Don't know a shop, don't know a street, don't know a person. Couldn't tell you the mayor, the MP or any history of the place. For a blog about community pride, I was really disappointed about this when I realised it. That said, Collingwood really aren't anything to do with Collingwood (the suburb) now. They are a multi national business, they don't play in Collingwood anymore, they don't live in Collingwood and they probably don't even need to visit there more than twice a year. If we ever won a Premiership, we'd go to a flash hotel, not parade through Collingwood. It's an era of big business, and if Tasmania got a team, it would probably be the same - we'd have kids drafted from all over Australia and represent another big business or brand. Someone like Dale Thomas could just as easily have ended up on the Gold Coast or Geelong as Collingwood. He represents a set of colours and a business, not a suburb or a set of community ideals anymore. This isn't a bad thing, it's just a little saddening. Expecting someone to care personally about their team these days is asking too much. It's an illusion, like an act of kindness in a crumbling marriage or a good day in a terrible job, or picking up a hot girl while you are drunk. It's a mirage, they care about their teammates, and themselves, but not us, not the community, and not the club. Expecting that they would is like pretending the charts still matter.

Community pride doesn't exist in the AFL anymore, we try our best to pretend otherwise, but it doesn't. It exists in a man helping another man get home after being sick outside Bunnings though - we all need to do our bit...