Snagglepuss, Jesus and the rise and fall of the Easter prophet

It says a lot for my mindset that a man dressed as Jesus holding a big cross by the side of the road doesn't draw my morning attention away from anxiety and pre Easter stress. Yes, Hobart has this week accquired Jesus, probably on loan from a 3hree week stint at the Sands in Las Vegas, who has been booked to stand by the side of the road, usually across from VIP Driving school, to hold up a big sign about Easter penitence. I suspect it's not really Jesus of course - I don't think he had disciples who wore thongs nor had such a patchy beard - and it's best that I don't pay him any mind. Besides, Lily Allen is on my IPOD, and in this celebrity obsessed culture, well, Jesus hasn't released a new album for a while. I think though that the roadside Jesus - which is a great name for an album - on 2nd view is purporting some sort of John 3:16 message (which I can recite on request incidentally), and when I was growing up around Mexico 86 you would see people in the crowd holding up John 3:16 signs as Scifo scythed through the Iraqi defence. I fear for our Jesus though because it's bitterly cold, even by Hobart standards, and his religious powers of persuasion might be dimmed by sipping soup from a flask. When Joan Osborne said what if God was One of Us, I don't think she meant literally - literally a bloke taking a week of his annual leave from Officeworks to stand by the side of the road with a sign, literally an ordinary bloke. My priest at school incidentally one told me the story of his conversion at Easter, and it was such a simple story, well told, that I completely believed it but Roadside Jesus seems to be in it for the glory, for the notice, and to be honest he might as well have a honk if you give it up for Jesus sign. VIP Driving school, we always laugh and joke about that place, because I failed my driving test so many times, we think they built a special wing devoted to me. It is cold though, as my car winds and wanders through a mass of traffic. They are trialling some system where the buses have all the rights on the road and the poor plebs in the cars are stuck lingering while they take over. The car next to me is the gaudiest thing I've ever seen, lime green sports car with big wheels and a horrifically tacky personalised number plate devoted to a football team. As I finally drive off just as 22 fades out on my IPOD, I see Roadside Jesus catching a glance it, and I know he's probably thinking some pure thoughts about the commercialism of modern society in these troubled times, but surely even he is thinking, seriously, what colour paint is that...

I've never been big on Easter - I don't know why, obviously Good Friday can feel like the most boring day of the year. It's usually cold, and in Penguin there was nothing on but religious programming instead of Transformers - badly drawn cartoons and that whole in the jungle one day ad on ad naseum. I can't really talk too much about Roadside Jesus having played the role myself one Easter. It was in primary school, and I was given the role of Jesus in an Easter Parade through the school. Luckily it was the good bit, where people waved palms - well, weeds if I'm honest - as I rode through the school with regal purity. Incidentally, it bugs me to this day how I rode through the school, since obviously we didn't have access to a donkey. Was it skateboard, bike, trolley, or piggyback on a fat kid? It troubles me that I don't know. And since I had previously played Joseph in a Penguin church production - you won't recall the Joseph goes to sleep bit of the bible, that was pure Penguin, but when I woke up a woman in the front row either mouthed this is awesome or awful and I don't know which - it all feels a bit Springeresque in hindsight. My cousin - the one I don't like - has the distinction of playing Jesus more famously than me though. During his roughly 6ix week stint at my secondary school, he was cast as Jesus in a Grade 10en play, and decided to play him as a sort of Frankie Howard character camply accepting his fate as a martyr for the Catholic religion with swishes, swirls, interpretive dance and an accent that was pure Snagglepuss. My exit stage left joke would have been hilarious if anyone got it. Or I had friends that year. I love Snagglepuss a lot, but there's a time and a place. I like to think my reading of the role was a lot more subtle, but all I can remember about it was I loved the attention, especially given that it got me a free Violet Crumble from the tuck shop because I did such a bang up job. Obviously, and luckily, after lunch I wasn't crucified, but I was bowled for 2wo during after school cricket by a ball bowled by a little smart arse who's foot was clearly 2wo feet over the crease, a clear no ball. It would have continued the motif of the day had I been resurrected by an umpires decision and given a 2nd chance, but I wasn't, and the smart arse kid proceeded to hook my bouncers over the fence time and time again...lousy Easter, probably got an Easter bilby that day, stupid....

Jesus is a difficult role to play, but so was an 80tys Easter Bunny at North West Coast schools. It was a tough gig, less glamorous and more difficult to pull off than a Fitzgeralds Santa Claus, requiring a greater leap of faith from a child than Santa as well, and a far worse costume. I mean, Santa was plausible, you could basically tell that one of your teachers had just put some bunny ears on even at 5ive. Pippa - ah, Pippa - was always ahead of her time when it came to telling us all such home truths around the monkey bars, and I lost my Bunnyfaith when the designated bunny failed to give me an egg one year in a mad scramble, and I saw him driving away in a 1974 Ford Mercury Cougar Coupe with his bunny ears still on, and a Winfield Red in hand. It was the talk of the fort for weeks to come. Easter is an awkward one at the best of times, I never know whether to buy everyone an egg or not, and unless I get a Cadburys Creme Egg, I'm never happy with my lot. Big W had eggs in February, and they've still got lots left. I'm pretty sure Panda Eyed Girl has been flicked, and they still haven't fixed the light near the DVDs that keeps flicking, which makes my head hurt every time I walk under it. No one today seemed in any kind of cheerful Easter spirit, let alone me because I was snowed under with work and couldn't really get my motivation up at all. Everyone is just hanging out for their free government cash, and until then all commerce seems to have ceased. Blue Eye Shadow Girl had a weird haircut today, I'm sure it was her Easter treat to herself, but I'm not sure about it. My Easter treat to myself is probably just going to be my usual packet of football cards, and maybe a Creme Egg. As I walk through the shopping mall, a stern faced security guard pouts from behind a mask of toughness and leathery craggy lines. Someone got stabbed here the other day, a good samaritan - sadly we haven't had a roadside version yet - tried to intervene in a shoplifting situation and got a knife in the ribs for their trouble. It doesn't put me in the spirit of the season, whatever that is, as I walk past as quickly as I can, away from the cragg, away from the weird hairstyles, and out back into the car park, where no religious figures, fictional or real, are waiting on me, and there's no prospect of a virgin birth around these parts, because, well, you know the punchline...

Ah, Easter, what a web it has weaved. From the horrible despair of the 3hree days at Eddie McGuires house in Melbourne looking at my bicentennial medal and wishing I could do anything to live in Burnie again to the cash splurge of 97 when I recklessly spent all my uni book money on a Gold Coast Chargers rugby league top and got depressed that Brashs was closing - a post in and of itself by the way - to all those wasted fitful Good Fridays sitting around the house staring out the window at grey skies. I'm sure there's memories of egg chasing - literal egg chasing , not playing rugby - in there somewhere, memories of painting up and egg and then throwing it down a hill and some other bugger finding it, supressed by the cold weather and the lack of ingredients to make a lime spider. I'm unlikely to use the holiday season to be born again as a new person, since I'm set in my ways, and there will be no twists in the next few days to make me bold and positive. In fact, I suspect I will wile away at least one of these precious days wasting my hard earned free government cash at Syrup in a I thought this would be a good idea moments at 3am. Such is the flesh on display whether you want to see it or not around that big stripper pole, Roadside Jesus could have a field day encouraging people to repent. I think though my Mum would quite like me to have a kid, I think she's beginning to try and nag me into it. There's just enough time obviously for a Syrup pick up and time to...no, I'm not going to have kids. Given the hissy fit I've had trying to get lime spider ingredients, I don't think I could handle a child. Instead, I decide to head out on a possibly fruitless search for Halls Lemonade, and just enjoy my day, my time off, my own moods and my own sense of independence. I'm sure Roadside Jesus would appreciate the individuality of thought I'm displaying, after all, if you are out in the cold of a Hobart morning holding a cross, what are you but an individual....maybe we'd get on...mind you, the religious people want to ban Lily Allen from the radio...so maybe not...

I'm not sure he'd like Snagglepuss either...too fruity...

2001 - a self help journey as long as you don't have a bus to catch (I am a Miley little man)

I mentioned a few steps ago that I'm having a recurring nightmare, which is fine when I'm asleep and thoughts can formulate and weird things can happen and no one can explain where I'm dreaming about an orange seagull or strange relationships with Megan Corkrey, but I have the 3am guilts as well. These can be partial fragments of regretted conversations, lost loves and friends drifting off down my driveway in their car never to be seen again, or something as simple as not taping episode of Paramount City so I could sit and watch it. I am a terrible sleeper - which is fitting since the band Sleeper are terrible - and I was a lot worse when I was going out with my girlfriend, because the pressure that sleeping in a double bed brought on was just horrible, and I really didn't want to disturb her, not with her nasty year long headache. Anyway, back to when I'm not being Rodney Dangerfield, I had this one panic attack on the floor of someones house once, when I was a sleeping bag. We were crowded into this room because we were staying over after a party, and I suddenly at about 4our in the morning realised I had no idea where the door out was. Under normal non, er, substances I would have been fine with this and gone back to sleep, but it became paramount priority #1A call the FBI that I woke everyone up to work out the configuration of the room and where the door was. As it turned out, the door was right next to my left shoulder, and as the party goers wearily went back to sleep, one of them thinking I was back asleep muttered that it wasn't a good idea to let me drink. So I regret that, that I actually had a panic attack like I was Rebekah Emaloglou on the set of Home and Away. Although Dad has a kid at school who is a selective mute, which is awesome, as she can do her speech in class but then can't answer questions about the speech. There aren't many people stirring at 3am, the funky drummer that used to live next door to me a notable exception, and moments of regrets, and lets be honest here, fleeting fractions of blog ideas, strange insane thoughts, they all stir briefly through my subconscious making me just as likely to wish I was nicer to the fat kid at school I used to pick on as remembering the name of the third Chantoozie. I have an alarm clock with glaring angry angular numbers that mock me as they hang in the air, the three of three 3am curling around my brain and making sure I'm painfully aware that I'm hanging between sleep and having to get up, and my brain never switches off anyway. It's always on, it's always working, a perma conscience that never goes out. If it wasn't like this, I think a lot of things would be easier, and my writings would be Youtube clips a go go. If these fractured thoughts become fractured sentences, then I have to get up, go and make a cup of tea and try and work out just what it all those words mean. Music helps, Steve Burns here, Liz Phair there, but some things are just too strange to make sense even now...

So it's 2001 - a year briefly lit up by a trip home to good old Ayrshire, but mostly dull and boring, although a lot better than my previous year. The year 2000 to me was like John Howards dystopian vision for Australia being like the 1950s - nothing happened, I was perfectly safe, comfortable and relaxed, I lived in a sealed off gated community where I knew all my neighbours and said hello but secretly hated them and thought they there communists, I wore a lot of bad jumpers and I had absolutely no sex at all. As a rough guide, 2001 was the final of my lost triangle years, which started in 1999 when a friend from school never turned up to take me to the Hobart Show the same month my girlfriend and I had what you who love air quotes might call problems, and ended in the New Sydney Hotel in 2002 with drinks, Irish bands singing songs about hating The Yenglish, new friends and oddly me holding a steam cleaner I'd bought Mum for Mothers day. My trip to Scotland had been the first one that felt like a holiday rather than a homecoming, the only baggage I brought on the trip a nice green suitcase rather than anything emotional. It was the last time I saw Dads Sisters Kids, on a nice night out in Paisley, and there was the Geri Halliwell story to enjoy, but as a holiday it was nice, rather than over dramatic like the other couple. Above all though, there was a strange moment of zen when I skipped on a date with my family, which would have been rubbish, tense and involved the sharing of tepidly cooked chips, to take my independent self - and no, I didn't throw my hands up at me, though I thought about it - off to Manchester. As I skipped down the streets with my own credit card and my own ambitions, it felt oddly liberating and quite fantastic. Naturally the natural ambience of the Mancunian shopkeeper found the broad smile on my face utterly disconcerting and I had the swagger back in the pocket quickly, but it couldn't be suppressed for ever. I made one of those self promises people always make that when I returned to Tasmania I would be a different person and do more things and get involved in the community...luckily an old lady in the street had the presence of mind to yell at me for hogging the road as I stood stock still, which was sweet of her. There was no place after all for dreamers or those have moments of self realisation on this particular street, and certainly not for her. In her world, there was only the bus home and things that were impediments to the bus home. I was clearly the latter, and she walked off muttering something about another dose of national service as she took her shopping onto a rickety looking double decker. I find it rather sweet that today I would be that woman, after all, there are impediments to me every day - if I try and look at a Weeds DVD there's always some bogan in a white T-shirt directly in front of it...I'd love to tell the old woman my world view has changed, but she probably has a bus to catch, and I'd just be in the way...

Inspired by this holiday and some self help books read at the airport, I briefly flirted with a get up and go Sanitarium inspired motivational phase. I ate Weetbix, I started jogging, I only watched sensible ABC programs and I worked a bit harder. I also decided that self enlightenment would be achieved through joining things, and not just one piece of a jigsaw to another. This lead to an insane 6ix weeks trying to play soccer with Kingborough which was a complete disaster and lead to a game where I was knackered after 5ive minutes and had to come off again, and me watching a carpark fight between our star striker and his WAG about how she had spent her Yeltour voucher. This didn't stop me from living my own self help manual, and within days of this out of puff setback I had signed up for a drama class in North Hobart and was puttering my car into the deserted car park after work for no real reason at all other than I thought this was what normal people did, go off on whims, have adventures, maybe put on a character voice or two. It's so unlike me normally, I can only conclude I was swept up in some sort of post holiday madness. I am a reasonable thespian at a local level - I mean I've played Jesus convincingly twice despite being a pasty white Scot, so give me something. The second time I was on a skateboard going through palms. Or was I piggy backed by a fat kid? I can't remember. The improvisational exercises were like shooting fish in a barrel to me, after all I had studied at least 3hree episodes of Who's Line, and suddenly I was the star of the community hall, the prize student, although I think the teacher wished I had more movie star looks - I told him Sick Boy from Trainspotting was a movie character, but he didn't look impressed. The teacher was restrained camp rather than flamboyantly rich as a character, but the sad thing for him was the number of people who turned up when the class was free compared to the number who turned up when it was 5 bucks. He looked genuinely upset to see all his prettiest students leave (or not see them I guess) because they would rather buy a skinny latte. I can still see him looking a bit dejected as her stared around the room getting a class that more looked like Rob Brough than Rob Lowe. He took it on the chin though in the end. However, by the time he had foisted on us a terrible 1960s script that was supposed to be witty and urbane but which felt like a Comedy Company sketch, I figured it was time to quit the class myself. I still went through the motions of putting on a play in front of a paying audience though before I quit, and they were kind enough to laugh tepidly at the jokes. Sadly for my future aspirations, there were no agents in the audience, and if there were, they'd just be real estate agents anyway, without the power to cast anyone in a major Hollywood picture...even if they were looking for someone to play Jesus...

However, the most significant part of this 11 week course in the hall was that I made a friend - I can't remember his name, but lets call him Neil. He looked like a Neil. And when I first saw him, he was kneeling because he had just fallen over. Neil was a nice guy, and I was happy with the prospect of having at least one friend again. We talked a bit about his girlfriend and mix tapes, and it was all good. At least it was until I gave him a lift home one night. Caught up in the exuberant mood of the truly self empowered who have watched too many episodes of Ricki Lake, I began a quite nonsensical conversation about my goals and ambitions - it was far too much to lay on someone who was just being essentially pleasant, and I was embarrassed to bring it up when I realised what I had started, but I still jumped in boots and all. It was a feature of me in this triangle, mouthy ambitions and really weird interactions with people where I would just talk nonsense like I was in a therapy session, and as I tailed off, Neil said something incredibly profound...that I was driving in the wrong lane. I thought he was really onto something, what a deep thing to say about my life...until I realised he meant it literally, that I was on the wrong side of the road and had to fix it before I ploughed into a truck. Obviously we aren't friends now, and I certainly don't blame him for that. In fact, the only person from that drama class I ever saw was a girl called Anne Maree or something, who I hugged for an hour in a pub one night. Yes, an hour. In the end, the whole get up and go phase fizzled out with minimal damage, coming to a spluttering end before I did something really crazy and starting having a motto or something. In fact, at work the other week during a moment of acute poignancy and attempt to motivate me, I quoted the lyrics to S Club 7s Bring It All Back and people took it as gravitas. My only ambition these days is to find a local to grow old in, and worse, on my fridge circled in red pen is a series of dates that I'm expected to be a happy little Vegemite and get out of bed, and I can't be bothered getting faster faster on my feet...one of the things I'm supposed to go to though is some play, somewhere in the sticks, and I wonder if there's someone there, some awkward friendless kiddie just struggling to fit in hopeful it can bring him someone to talk to...it's too painful to think of, and thankfully, all of that need to try and self improve is behind me...I'm happy with who I am...

Unless you know someone who needs a Jesus...my speech against the tax agents is particularly impressive...mighty even...