The ups and downs of an emotionally questionable Friday

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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