Memoirs of an Unproven Placeholder

My Mum 1nce asked me what my first memory was. This was during 1ne of this interminable Foxtel ad-breaks, as I sipped tea and tried to pretend I wasn't disturbing her with my visit. My Mum watches a lot of crime shows, primarily to see the ending when, in her words, the bastards get caught. Slightly vindictive, but there you are. My Mum and Dad’s counter to any criticism of their TV watching is to say (for instance when I slagged them off for watching a 33 year old episode of Open All Hours) is to say "Yeah but you watch the Simpsons all day!", which isn't true.

Well, it is, but only on weekends....

I don’t watch much of the Crime Investigation Channel. I don’t watch much of anything anymore. I took a long break from the Internet simply to find thinking space again. Living alone is, by definition, supposed to be lonely, but I really enjoy it. I’ve never truly felt lonely. Even in, say, Dubai airport at 3hree in the morning with just me and 2wo cleaners and a mile of overlaid carpet within miles of each other, I felt more at peace than I do in a crowd. Actually I have felt lonely 1nce in my life. It was on Montello soccer pitches at roughly 11:47am sometime in 1988. It was the last game I played for my school team before I moved back to Scotland. My friends had said their goodbyes, and for some reason I had to go down to the far corner to go and get something – a cone (a witches hat, we didn’t do drugs that early in those days) or a sandwich or something. When I turned around, my friends, they were all at the other end of the pitch preparing for next week’s game. A game of course I would never see because I would be in another country. I swear to this day something ran up my spine. It lasted all the way back to Penguin, it stayed with me as I bit into my Monaco bar on the way home, and maybe it’s still with me. It suddenly hit me that they had already moved on and there I was, holding a witches hat and preparing to drive off. I never told anyone this of course because who can you tell? I wish that I had a more open relationship with my Mum and Dad. Hell, I had a girlfriend for a whole year they never knew about. They think I never got a job because of poor interview technique. Truthfully, after that day, I never trusted them because they had taken me away from my life. And I was, oh, 9ine at the time. I told my Dad 1ne day I was going to invent “suitcase syndrome” as a disease, and all the people who had to move around the world or from town to town would gather and complain about how messed up their lives were. Dad wasn’t listening I don’t think. He was eating a Monaco Bar at the time...if that’s not a sign from above...

"So, first memory, whit was it!" she said again, impatiently. Sadly I am no Cameron Adams when it comes to television criticism, and with her interest in my opinions about the Crime Investigation Network waning. I was forced to answer. I was 4our. I was in my room alone with my toys, and I had a holographic Indian toy. On his chest, you could sort of make an Eagle appear if the sun was aligned with the 6th Quadrant of Venus. Picking up at the Miss Universe backstage party was easier than making this thing appear. But, it was all worth the effort in the end. I know I got it from K-Mart, because the receipt sat solemnly on my cupboard for years as a warning that life wasn't always going to be fair. For reasons lost to time, I put this toy deep inside 1ne of my giant orange beanbags. I presume I was playing some sort of Cowboys and Indians game. I don't think this is right; we didn't have any Indians in Penguin. In fact, we, the Scottish family, were about as ethnically diverse as early 80tys Penguin ever got, so I doubt I had the complexities of divisive land warfare down pat, even in playtime. Maybe I was playing Penguinites vs Ulverstonians. Whatever the case, the Indian was placed deep inside in the orange beanbag to hide, and I never found the toy again. I put my hand inside the beanbag many times over the following year, and it never came out. Sure I could have tipped all the beans all over the floor, but given the beanbag was a hearty, pre health and safety era bean filled monstrosity the size of a small steam train, I'd have been picking beans out of the carpet until at least 2012...

Hairdressers. It's always hairdressers with me. I have another crush on a hairdresser. When I say crush, I'm 32wo, I'm too old for crushes. Its just some1ne I think is pretty. Blue eye shadow girl I had a definite crush on, but work has parted us now. In the window of their business it says "Hair is a religion!" with the ! underlined on a homemade sign. This is also the hairdresser’s mind you that screamed at me last week Pink is BACK! IN GHD FORM! - I think it was GHD, but I thought that was an illegal drug. I might have got it wrong - pink might have come back in some other form. Who would know. I didn't even know pink went away to be honest. Sadly if hair is a religion you could count my sadly inept barnet as an atheist. Long ago it developed an apathy to organisation and dammit that’s how it likes it. It's freezing today. If I was a kid in Penguin I'd extend my jacket out and let the breeze drive me dangerously close to cars as I flew down Mission Hill. There's a girl with a fringe that would make it impossible to drive walking past me in a school tracksuit. Her gaze is on a pamphlet handed out by an Indian man with a bored expression on his face. He never gave me a pamphlet because I had my don't give me a pamphlet face on.

I was eating a Subway sandwich because my work place was evacuated and I got stroll around pointlessly for a while dealing with the bewildered sandwich making fraternity of Subway

"Cheddar Cheese!" she said.
"Yes! For the love of God yes!" I said, for I had been asked if I wanted Cheddar Cheese several times already.
Tick. Tick. Tick. Give it a minute. Let the oxygen marinate in your tiny brain...
"Cheddar Cheese?"
I notice that her hair has a pink stripe in it. Got the memo on hair, but not on the cheese....

They were supposed to ring me to tell me to come back, but I don't think they did. I don't know that I'm strictly necessary at my workplace. I provide Vita wheats and sympathetic understanding, but not a lot else. I can't even get a pamphlet. I saw a prostitute give out pamphlets to sailors in the more liberal time of 1997even. She wasn't working hard for the money, just sort of leaning on a bench and handing out leaflets. I don't think I got 1ne of them either...I think it was the fault of my hair. It was the wrong religion. Someo1ne I know is in the local paper - their Dad died on the weekend. They then still went to the football because it's what Dad would have wanted. I don't ever make the joke anymore that what Dad really wanted was not to die - funeral experience will do that to you. I'm terrified to death. It's scarier to me than anything, a date with Yuliya Dovhal anything...I hate the idea of an accumulated lifetime of personal wisdom and anecdotes reduced quite simply to "what I would have wanted" and "remember that time with the pen" - the complexities of people, I don't think, are ever truly reflected in elegiac flowery poetry. It's what I do every day though - it shouldn't take death to make me reflect on the reality I see every day. The hairdresser is cute, the girl with the fringe is fringey, the guy giving out the pamphlets looks bored out of his mind, and the Subway girl is an idiot. Such short interactions every moment of every day, people reduced to frippery, to exaggerated qualities that take away every decision that lead to them standing there, in that job, in that moment, with those kids....I shut the paper. It nearly blows out of my hand. It turns to a story about a cat and a chicken that are friends...the girl with the fringe laughs in a high pitched way at a txt msg...maybe some1ne sent her the article...

"You don't see it do you Mum!" I say. My Mums house for what's it worth is warm, they installed a fire place a few months ago. They know have heat at the flick of a switch. That's why I go round there. Not for the conversational bon mots...

"It was the first thing in my life I ever lost!"

It's a weak point. It was just a toy. And she is Glaswegian. They are flint hard. Get on with it is in their DNA. The life lesson about the toy and the beanbag and how soon you can lose something, well, it wasn't really falling on the right ears...let alone getting out of conversational first gear to talk about...well...other things...

She sits in her chair and rocks forward.

"Do ye know remember whin ye were dressed up as the King Of Hearts in the Irvine Herald! That whis a cute photie...!"

I leave shortly after, warm house be damned. Some conversational barriers are just too hard to break down...

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 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...