Life is lived in the mind. You are where your head is at. If that means watching Bicentennial man, well...

It's a funny thing I realised today in the mental thinking gap between saying the words pasta salad and actually getting some pasta salad in the new chicken shop today. My home town in Scotland was largely designed to be a new town, as Mum would call it a "Glasgow Overspill", a developmental dream full of industry and excitement. And it was until the money ran out and it went to shit, now being full of men in Rangers tops wandering around chewing gum and looking disdainfully at anyone who might be too big for their boots. And now I live in Kingston, which has similar aspirations, which redevelops and changes the shops and has fancy things put in like underground car parks - if the money ran out, who knows, maybe it's liveability will descend to the same level and a chewing gum pathway will line the streets of ambition. Of course, the funny thing about Kingston is that there's piles of shops springing up all over the place, and yet at 10 in the morning when the world is working, there's no one at all, perfect for the solitary wanderer to potter around with Yelle on the IPOD, undisturbed by cars doing left turns in front of me or joggers getting on the front foot as they smugly pass me at 10ks an hour. On certain days, and this is perfect for me, you can walk for ages and not see a soul at this time of the day, maybe some people shuffling about the bus stop or the odd disinterested surly teen enjoying the dying days of summer, but largely, I live in a vastly disconnected singular and selfish world. These walks really don't ever inspire melancholy or discontent that I don't return home to a wife or kids or even someone to care for like my aunty did with my Gran - nor do I reflect on my life and plan to run into the welcoming arms of the first social group I could find just to have friends. Of course, any desire to become a parent and increase my responsibilities generally dies whenever I'm in a queue with a small loud child either in front or behind me, the child either over or underparented, struck with a firm hand or completely ignored, given no chocolate or all the chocolate in the world...I simply can't decide which of those parenting styles so oft on display I would take, so I take the third option, of just eating the chocolate myself...

The Video store, incidentally, is a Video City. This is significant for Tasmanians because when they moved into Tasmania, accompanied by a horrific ad campaign involving a Max Headroom a like in sunglasses, a girl dressed like Snow White and Amiga produced graphics, they produced the death of the Mom and Pop video store on the North West Coast. Intriguingly, with far more space and more video choice, a Video City always feels like the last word in loneliness to me for some reason. I know why this is, it's the car park. When my girlfriend playing netball player would, well, play netball - and it's only today I realised I was making that obituary error of reducing quite a complex person to a single characteristic - I would sometimes kick cans in the cold air of the Moonah Video City car Park, which was across the road from her venue, with other lost jobless bogans, talking in uncommunicative don't ask don't tell grunts, sometimes swapping cigarettes or stories of how the man didn't understand us. Sometimes I'd wander around the video shop, simply because it was a store where it never felt like anyone would ask any questions, you could be distinctly scruffy and poor looking and look at nothing but the back cover of an 80s wrestling movie all day long until the end of your life and the staff would still be too busy stocktaking the packets of Starburst to care. I'm sure that car park isn't so big, but in that particular unemployed nuclear winter it seemed vast and empty and the size of a football field, but it also could feel like the end of the world, so vast it swallowed up all prospects, and sometimes you would swear the cute girl returning a copy of a highly priced new movie would pity you as she exited Daddys car. I remember once, just as I waved to my girlfriend as she approached with an uncharacteristic post game smile, for she was a terrible loser just to expand her a little bit beyond a three sentence summation, a fight broke out next to my legs. I can't remember if it was security against a shoplifter, or just two Moonah bogans battling over a can of coke, but it was a pathetic fight, weak and inept, two guys rolling around slapping thin air and each other, bouncing off car park tyres, at which point someone, and it would have been funny if it was my girlfriend, made some kind of comment about not wanting those kind of people around here. To this day I don't know who said it, I didn't pick it up, and there's a very real chance it was my conscience, but I was very much, in quotes, those kind of people, aimless, disenfranchised, unemployable and self pitying. It didn't inspire a change in me at all though, the lesson didn't sink in for a while longer, but it was learned in time or else I could still be there for all I know. My girlfriend whenever she picked me up would sing the Video Citys theme slogan, Good Times, to me in some sort of ironic singing coded message style, but then in the latter days of our flickering out relationship, I would return the favour by singing I Will Always Love You, in what I hoped would be a similarly ironic code, but I suspect she believed it, which really was like rain on your wedding day....

I have no such problems today, not with all the middle class home owning security ten years of drudgery can offer. I can stride into any video store I want, confident in the knowledge that my DVD rental card is all good. Of course, at this time of the morning, although the car park is far less spacious in Kingston as opposed to Moonah, the loneliness can come back as, if not an acid flashback, maybe a Starburst one. This is entirely because there are only two people in a giant overdeveloped corporate video shack, me and the video geek behind the counter. It may be a little bit the geek calling the nerd a dork (like pots and kettles but with more D&D) for me to call him a dork when I've barely woken up and am rocking a look you can only describe as flight cancelled, but we'll roll with it. He's intently watching that Robin Williams film where a robot becomes a human and I disturb him to get a new video card, which leads to several seconds of awkward shuffling where I suspect he's looking at me but really listening to the TV behind him. For all I know I've just woken him up from a nap. Certainly a Robin Williams film could do that for you. He laminates me a card, and luckily given our mutual looks at this time of the morning, he doesn't invite me to play chess. I hate to say this, but he could easily be robbed, since he seems perpetually vulnerable and distracted by the unfolding movie saga of the robot and the humanity. Luckily as a concession to modernity, you can no longer see into the video shop since they frosted up the windows, which means shifty men can get porn without people peering in judgementally. When I shut down my IPOD due to a flat battery, or maybe it's just the way Yelle sings, I notice there's one of the more obscure Radiohead albums playing, not even the hits but one of the more elongated indulgent album tracks which screams despair even more than picking up a copy of Dan Akroyds Loose Cannons, on DVD no less, by careless mistake. I realise this is now like stepping into the geeks own idiosyncratic personally set up bedroom. He's free to put on the movies he wants, eat the lollies he wants with a casual disdain when he wants, and put on the despairing atmospheric air sucking out the room music he wants, and in return, all he has to put up with is the odd visit from a just out of bed dork like me, in a pair of Aviator sunglasses that are fooling nobody, making him use the laminating machine for 5ive minutes a day and blowing all their cool by not getting something classy or thoughtful from the video store but Iron Man because, like my Dad, I need movies where things blow up. Or something. And when I leave, I'm sure he feels like I used to when my Mum, in her own loose cannons do your homework period, would finally leave my room after a ten minute disturbance slash rummage slash nose around, and I put my own headphones on and enjoy the peace and quiet. His world is restored when I finally leave. I leave him eating a chunk of a Diary Milk, and taking in one of Williams more impassioned speeches, something about mentality or what it means to be human...if it is watching Robin Williams films then I worry...

There's no such reflection time though for Ashleigh, my intermittently friendly checkout girl. She's stressed out, although I'm also stressed out, from walking three steps behind a mother daughter punch up. A girl who is likely to have a, quote, sexy picture on her Myspace in a desperate hope that someone finds her attractive, with a pair of thick glasses, a cotton tracksuit, and a pair of headphones the size of the ark, has just punched her mother instictively on the arm for something that I'm not sure about. Not unreasonably, her mother has just given her a dead arm, and that's the end of bogan theatre for the day. I'm taken for a moment by one of those rather sad conversations a balding single male will sometimes have with the Wendys girl as she mixes him a shake, one where how was your day somehow gets translated in his hairy ears as please have sex with me now and he gets a smirk on his face bigger than his...anyway, as with my own checkout experience, the sheer volume of people pouring in, relatively, is enough to drive even the best greeter insane. Ashleighs particular bugbear, for what it's worth, as she stands in a black chunky knit sweater, all ringlets and affected discontent, is people paying with an EFTPOS card, especially galling on the express aisle where you imagine people pay for 2wo dollar twenty five cans of Red Bull on Visa and have it declined. The worst thing of course is theres nothing you can do to personalise a checkout, no escape route, no Radiohead tapes or free Starburst lollies. Ashleigh, for that's what her badge says, has a worn out early 30something face, chunky hips and absolutely no time for anyone. There's something encapsulating and poetic about the way she says have a great day though. Later, when I get my ham and cheese squares (which aren't square) from Bakers Delight, the girl there, a peppy girl with attitude that gets her gratitude, wishes me a good day, I suspect she means it, like a girl in school who would blow into her hand and send good luck dust across the class (maybe that was just us). Ashleigh patently means nothing of the sort, her idea of courtesy is remembering that she scanned the Aero chocolate mousse twice, and having the good grace to fix it. When she says have a great day, the words are almost caustic, but that would credit her with the emotional powers to come up with caustic as a selected vibe. Instead, she's staring at a fixed point directly behind me, and she continues staring at that point by the time the next customer, an eager beaver Asian woman on the borderline of 15teen items if you include a clear over purchase of gum infraction clearing waving not just an Eftpos card, but gasp, a frequent shopper card, I suspect that Ashleigh is already counting down the minutes, maybe even the seconds, until she can flee, fix her ringlets, and crash into whatever space she can where there are no humans around, especially not ones listening to Yelle or yelling at her about the state of the cardswipe machine...

I suspect you know, in another world, we could have been blissfully happy together...

Kingstons Melancholy Wall Of Nothing

My petrol station with the cheerful local mechanics closed down last year in the name of progress. They dug up the road outside it to put in a roundabout and you couldn't get in unless you negotiated a complicated twisting series of roads upon which bewildered and harassed school age kids mothers would suddenly veer dramatically to the left without indicating because while little junior was telling an interesting story about the dream they had last night about a cake monster, they had completely missed their stop. So it went out of business due to lack of funds, and now I have to get my petrol from a more corporate source and the charm has subsided. Behind the counter works a middle aged woman, with a wistful stare and a slightly fierce black cardigan, encased in her world, unsupervised and reading the local paper until the time comes to face a paying customer, at which point she switches to the second of her two emotions, rigid disciplined friendly charm. An old man in front of me has mistaken emotion B for flirtation, and is telling her a story about his garden, which he plans to mow with his two stroke Victa lawnmower. I resist tapping him on the shoulder to ask where he got it from since it sounds amazing compared to my own lawnmower, which some days I'm sure is actually just a Fisher Price one I bought by mistake (I swear I've seen it blow bubbles) but I don't, I patiently wait until he's finished his story, and paid for his petrol and his swathe of chocolate products which he's bought in a dramatic fit of if I buy more I can talk for longer chat up daring, like a male who hasn't pulled a girl into his bed yet on a second date who orders a dessert he can't possibly eat in the hope at least one of his stories amuses the paramour. Eventually, he leaves, she wasn't listening at all, and I step up to the counter. She asks me without looking at me how my day has been. I've only just taken my IPOD off Icarus by Santogold, so I'm trying to work out the chorus and I'm not really listening, but something about her question strikes me as odd - it is after all only 8 in the morning, so I mutter something about it being far too early to judge whether I'm having a good day. It's a wasted thought though, because she's talking through me, and says thats super. She hasn't listened to a word I've said, and soon it's back to wistful out of the window staring just as I get back to Santogold. I used to think she was watchful and attentive, maybe paying attention to see if a car nicked off without paying for petrol, but she's chronically and unbearably sad about something, and passes her time in my company with the barest of attention and the maximum of efficiency, one customer at a time until knock off hour when her day ends, another unfilling moment surrounded by cheap chocolate and interesting stories from taxi drivers she doesn't have the heart to interrupt at a time...

I go for a walk later - not out of any motivation, just because the cricket is over and I want to wear my St Mirren top outside, which I guess actually is motivation. As I walk to my local shop, there's a family walking past me - in their fine Sunday best, clearly on the way to church. Since my involvement with Kingston religion involves our old Kiwi neighbours trying to save my soul and pimp me out to some girl at their church, I'm wary, but they seem fine, they aren't going to pamphlet my soul to hell for disrespecting the Sabbath with the drinking of chocolate milk and a blatant plug for the Braehead Shopping Centre on my top. As they walk past me, they almost smile some sort of friendly recognition, but they don't, and keep on walking. Most of all though, they don't notice their third child clearly pulling uncomfortably at his collar. He has a look on his face that he'd rather be anywhere in the world than out in his little mini tuxedo and he's eyeing my chocolate milk as if it's some sort of forbidden item, the way I used to look at video cameras in the early 90s. He looks old enough to have come to his own conclusions about the merits of singing from a hymn book, and they aren't favourable. His Dad sees a flock member across the street, a slender hipped Maori woman who he embraces with tenderness, his booming voice confirming they are indeed religious and not just dressed up for some time with Nana on a Sunday. I think briefly for a moment that as the only person in this mini street theatre not attired like a member of The Rat Pack that his booming accusatory tone about the strictness of Sunday is some sort of minor chastisement, but he's talking directly to the Maori, and it's a positive conversation. His wife, a woman as tense of mood as of pony tail, is shifting uncomfortably from foot to foot - whoever the Maori woman is, she doesn't want to see or talk to her, and eventually she steps into the conversation with a platitude or a joke, and pulls the family away, leaving the Maori woman looking confused and a little hurt. The kid in the tuxedo sight unseen spits directly on the ground as the family walk off, his own little protest at his temporary divorce from the television, but no one can see him through the family frost, as Mother and Father and the two younger kids walk off about three steps ahead of him and his now hopefully dry mouth, aware that something is terribly wrong with their world, but no one is keen to articulate on it on the day of our lord and they walk off in strict dutiful steps...

Two old women are sitting at the bus stop. I almost don't have the heart to tell them that there is absolutely no chance of a bus coming to Kingston on a Sunday. In my amazingly miserable second year at uni, I used to try and get a bus into town under the pretence of going to study but if I made it into Hobart I would generally head to the casino or some other happening place and try and look arty in the hope that somehow that would make me pass my studies, or at least I would if I got one of the three buses a day that came past, and I would generally just sit there with my heart not in my own life. The first old woman says something about someone called Todd, and how ridiculous he would find something. Instantly I recognise from the tone that Todd is no longer with her, in one way or another. She says it to her friend with just enough jocularity that whatever happened to Todd is OK to talk about, but the pain of it hasn't gone away. I move quickly on, just as her friend, a very old woman in a spectacularly funky orange coat, with darting eyes and tenderness in her voice simply confirms that yes Todd would. Across the road, three Sudanese migrants are trying to fix a car in the middle of a front garden, hitting it with a spanner. They are suspicious and defensive of people who walk past the mini garage sprawled out on the road, particularly the wife, a huge woman in a pink dress with more corn rows than I have hairs. She stops what she is doing, pouring juice or telling an anecdote or offering her expert knowledge of the intricacies of the 1984 Holden Ute, just to watch anyone who walks past with a wary eye. As soon as the man walking his dog has passed, she resumes as if nothing has happened, picking up her anecdote as if someone had pushed her pause button. The old women catch her eye at the same time she catches theirs, and they stare at each other with just one road, but an unfathomable amount of cultural difference and life experience between them. The staring contest continues until a bus, a mirage in the desert around here, pulls up, and the old women get on quietly, leaving the two Sudanese home boys in the Chicago Bulls gear to continue their hammering, and me relieved they didn't ask me for any kind of mechanical advice...I fixed a Tonka truck once, that was about it...

Just to confirm my suspicions, I casually glance in the direction of the petrol station, and sure enough the lady in the black is still there, with a barely flickered expression of bemusement, starting out the window. I walk towards the supermarket, past the health store that's always closed for stocktake, past the peg frenzy that is Chickenfeed, past the bakery where the purchase of more than a bread roll is cause for considerable staff elation, and past the bottle shop where manly men will fetch you your beer out of the fridge for nothing more than the public slight on your own manhood that always seems to register on the face of the blonde girl who doesn't have to wear a work uniform. I continue to my corporate local supermarket, where everyone wears green, and the staff mingle and mix with a yet to evaporate hostility, those who are casual and yet to escape failing to properly mix with those trapped and older and without hope of getting off register four. There's a particularly weary young girl without make up or an ability to blink, stacking canned fruit as I pass, her shirt too big for her, her expression blank and focused on the repetitive task in front of her. As she goes through the motions, a clumsy and awkward ginger kid in a flannel shirt reaches for a tin of peaches with his big farmer hands, and he fumbles it and it falls poetically and surprisingly softly to the laminate floor, at which point he steps over her again, gets another tin, and walks off telling his mates about the party he went to without missing a beat. It might just be me, but as the girl scrabbles under the bottom shelf she looks amazingly sad and depressed, a sort of Lily Bart of the fruit stacking world lit up by the poor quality flickering light of aisle 12. She reaches down to get it, despondent and tired, and eventually leaves it rolling on the floor, shaking her head and disappearing down the aisle with slow, agonized steps, her body slumped and sad. It's never a big blow up that makes you snap, it's the simplicity of a tin falling at your feet that normally finishes you off mentally, something which to the outside world seems utterly trivial. Eventually, I move on, aware that just as quickly as these mini dramas blow up, they pass, and just as Yelle comes on my IPOD and I pack enough fruit to feed a small army of one into my standard issue red basket, she comes back, gets down on the floor, and fishes out the tin. It would be a triumphant moment, but for the fact that if you looked really closely, she'd clearly been crying...

I move on, through the queue, through the people, through the rain, and go home, where my only contact with any kind of melancholy world is a sad reminisce with my friend about old bands, and collapse back into the hammock, everything shut down, everything finally relaxed...

A short walk around Kingston

So I felt guilty today about the prospect of another four hour afternoon nap, and actually went out and got my hair cut and did some ironing. I've mentioned before Kingston isn't the most riveting place to go for a walk, unless you have a particular love or fancy for slightly overweight people jogging or walking the dog. Sometimes round my way, someone will be having a garage sale, piling up their old Garbage or Radiohead CDs in cheap to buy bundles, or there'll a religious event on to pack the cars along the side of the road, but otherwise it's a fairly sleepy suburb and you can walk along the road pretty much unbothered by wee weans on bikes, skateboarders or gawping gangs of hooded teenagers questioning your parentage. Actually, the only hoon I've ever seen in Kingston drove past me in a souped up Nissan Micra, doof doof speakers proudly blaring...The Gambler by Kenny Rogers. Even the football club here is pretty genteel, reasonably priced and accepting of it's mediocrity, more a place to visit and take the kids for a counter meal than any kind of rabid force of sporting excellence. Apart from the occassional smashed phone box, there's just nothing happening that would imperil any kind of tourist or worry those who write the Mercury in fearful green pen. As such, there's no question that like all respectable quiet neighbourhoods with the facade of a retirement village, there will be incredible sexual perversion and scandal behind every second door, I have no question of that, but the only evidence I have of that is that we used to live next door a highly religious couple (of whom more later) who I always believed to be swingers. They just seemed a little bit too keen to be friends with my Mum and Dad. Luckily, the only thing that's ever happened to me since I've lived here is that someone came onto my deck and took a chair - they returned in the morning...nothing says Kingston to me like polite thieves...

I usually get my hair cut in a place recently renamed Cyber Hair, some of futuristic wonderland where all the trainee hairdressers and promotions models have been replaced by efficient hair cutting robots. Actually, the weirdest thing about my hairdressers is that they completely trust you to pay, since the customer bit where you stand and give them the money is actually in the mall, and you could easily do a runner while they swept up. That would never happen in Scotland, hairdressers there have sealed doors you can't escape out of until you've paid. In fact it was in the paper the other week this Irish hairdresser chased a non payer and bashed him. I used to have this incredible discomfort going in there, because the first question the promotions model always asks is "So what are you doing for the weekend" - a loaded question of course, because if you are some sort of sad sack with nothing going on, you don't really want to say it out loud. With the exception of my hairdresser in Burnie that I had a crush on, I've always been OK with this question though because I am genetically resistant to small talk, but there was this old boy in there day when I was getting my bonce shaved, getting his hair cut by a girl who's name I think was Sofia, a blank eyed impressionable young girl with disdain in her eyes but a desire to wield scissors that was palpably touching. I know this because instead of starting with "So what you are doing for the weekend" one time, she David Brent style showed me her trophy (not an innuendo) and sort of rolled her eyes and went "Oh...god...embarrassing...trophy" - so anyway, she'd cutting this old boys hair, and he's full on answering the static question with all his vim and vigour. He's got tons on, he's got a party and a yacht and a watch and a car and a dog and a party and a dog and...you get the general idea, he's a man on the move, a man with a plan, a man comically unable to register that his flirtacious charms are not working on Sofia, who's putting tramlines in his hair in case he's a judge. So the haircut ends just as the butch lesbian one (one in every hairdresser) finished doing my hair and we're all standing at the pay desk waiting to hand over the cash. Our old boy is still living it large like an older Liam Gallagher, and I'm sure he was referencing the drugs he was taking (please god not Viagra) when his wife came up, tapped him on the shoulder, and asked him if he'd got the gloves he needed to do the guttering that was "all clogged up like shit"...his eyes slumped, his shoulders fell below his knees, and all his work was undone like a cheap shoelace...he looked at Sofia, struggling for the words to repair their fledgling relationship, but she didn't even pay attention. Instead, she blankly and straight forwardedly recited the price, but at the last moment, her cyber facade cracked, she smiled the wicked smile of the bored woman relieved of burden, and said "do you have gutters on your yacht" - it was perfectly evil, and reinforced my teenage belief that hairdressers, you just can't trust them with your heart...or your crap chat up lines...

My hair cut, which if I'm honest doesn't take very long anymore, I proceed on, past some Sudanese refugees animatedly discussing in an Australian accent copied from Kingswood Country just how souped up their Valiant is. I admire them for fitting in, I still know nothing about cars. Or how to do a proper Australian accent. I walk past the local church on the way home, the one the massive "Come and coffee with Jesus!" sign, the one that exhorts everyone to discover Jeebus in a fun and funky way. I know that's where the swingers go - we used to live next door to them, a couple from New Zealand who just seemed impossibly happy and disturbingly peppy. I'm from a country with an inherent suspicion of happy, so I was surprised at my Mothers willingness to befriend them. As it turned out, some serious backpedalling was required in the friendship when they invited one Saturday to come to their church and watch an inspirational video. I can't remember where I fitted into the invitation, but I don't think it was Weekend at Bernies we were being invited to watch. Given I think they are swingers, it might have been a very different kind of inspiration - particularly as about two years later, they tried to get me to their church by telling me there was a single girl there, Katie Holmes picked off a list style. I politely declined fearing that I was going to be shown a six hour video about "the leader" - and especially since we'd just had dealings with a couple at work who's real names were Ms Pleasure Me Please and Mr Crystals De Milo, cult nut jobs from a long way from Kingston. My religious suspicions are high, but I am a little warmed by the sight of kids putting in for the community, washing some cars. At least they are until I see one of the kids, nominally called "Anga", rather creepily getting her fourteen year old flirt on with a middle aged man to get him to wash his car when he isa little reluctant. Disturbed, I keep walking, knowing that my car will be never be that dirty that I succumb to the flirtacious charms of a fourteen year old as a way of determining who sponges my car (steady) - my car or my morals for that matter...

I make it home, past the store with the ever changing owners, the store that seems to be some kind of immigration scam. Two girls, not nearly flirtacious enough to be working the car wash but of the same age of Anga, are discussing a text message at the bus stop, one of the girls is crying because someone has let her down. As I walk past them, she spits "fuckwit!" with such sudden vengenance, I think for a split second she's talking to me, and as I look around, she apologizes and says it's not me she's talking to. I keep walking, I turn up Robyn even louder on my IPOD to shut out the noise, not of the girl crying, but of the world in general, turning it up until if deafens me. I walk past the fire station and ambulance centre where kids are playing basketball idly, the ambulance and fire station we had to get my cousin (the one I don't like) to hospital late one night, because he didn't have his proper inhaler - I realise whenever I walk around that I might not like small talk, might not be the kind of wonderful person who buzzes around fascinated by peoples lives, but I am fascinated to think that a million lives even in this quaint, tired suburb are falling apart or coming together and I'll just never know about it, I'll just assume in my ignorance that everything is OK. As I almost make it to my house, an early 30s  couple are pulled over outside my house in their car, a horrifically bright green colour, and they are arguing, because they are lost, clearly because they are referring angrily to a map. I'm not sure if they ask for me directions, because I've got Cobrastyle on really loud, but I can read their emotions, and they aren't good. In the back of a car, there's a small child strapped in, already looking world weary, as if this is her life, trips that end in a belligerent argument. As I look back over the arguing couple, the kid visibly sighs, and I smile in her direction, hopeful that I haven't misread her already broken and defeated emotions, and she's just tired. As I go to walk away, the girl locks eyes with mine, sighs again, and gives her parents the finger. Nope, I think, she's not broken....yet....

I make it home, slump on the couch, and shout at Peter Siddle for being useless...a small victory I have earned, my own world once again sealed off and in order...