World: Interact

No one ever said Cash Converters was some kind of magical wonderland. In fact, and if you don't know it's basically an 18th century pawn shop with a corporate logo, there are days I feel profoundly depressed as I remember the humiliating encounter I had in there selling CDs on one of the more awful days in my life, looking at all the CDs and items on the shelves and hoping they are simply sold by people trying to get a few extra dollars for the weekend and not some darker tale involving a single mother trying to flee and selling up in the process. OK, so it's a dark way to look at a 6ix dollar copy of BMX Bandits - but my frames of references can be dark at moments like this. A smug young girl chomps into a burger on one of the many TV screens, a plastic image of perfection stuck on a flickering screen with lines across her face. The staff mill around like overprotective parents, at times never taking their eyes off you as you paw through old Vanessa Amorossi albums trying to find a gem. There was this kid in there today, a fairly bland kid because I couldn't get a handle on their personality, mostly because I came in right at the end of the conversation the kid was having with his Mother. His mother was a harried woman in track pants with a neatly trimmed blonde bob, and she was swatting away child problems as she casually flicked through a selection of chunky VHS cassettes in eighties style boxes. I have no right to know the full context of the conversation, stuck as I am in the middle of a Cohen - Miller-Heidke - Zetlitz IPOD triangle of shuffling interface and still weighing up my options, but the mother turns to the child and says, quite simply, you know what I've told you about dreaming. I suspect it wasn't keep doing it kid, but if, at 1pm in a Cash Converters with military security studying you, witless radio DJs with half baked patter piped in through the headsets, and the faint air of a million desperate stories cluttering up your surroundings, you can't manage at least one or two little dreams to keep yourself sane, I would suggest you might just go a little crazy. As I walk out, head down, a gust of wind nearly knocking over a frail and bewildered pensioner, I noticed that next to Cash Converters, two stores down on the same street, is a giant liquidator store, which hardly improves my mood. The kid slowly trails behind his bother when he leaves, staring brightly at cheesecake and Heath Ledger posters as he walks with a purpose, while his Mum gets further and further ahead of him, texting blindly at a million miles an hour, her bob weaving in time with her key punching, her own dreams seemingly long ago dashed. I hope she doesn't blame the child, but for some reason, I think she does. As for me, I never bought BMX Bandits...the liquidation place has reminded me times are tough, 6.95 not to be squandered on Kidman based whims...

Fat sweaty girl from Big W was back today, fat and sweaty as always, putting books on a shelf. I wonder about exhaustion based entirely on stacking books, but that's her way. I've got things on my mind anyway, not just work stress, although fully in context by a greater appreciation of the fickle nature of life, not just the strange melancholia of the sandwich white female at my bakery, who yesterday was like a gambolling lamb in her haste to tell me she'd kept me a sandwich, but today seems incredibly depressed as she struggles with either paperwork or a particularly difficult Sudoku puzzle. For what it's worth, the work stress melts, and I buy a cake to celebrate the very act of survival that my Dad usually thinks is my forte. When I buy some cake, I'm staring directly as a poster of a well known footballer, in the window of a shop I haven't seen before. One of the female girls at the cake store, blonde, promotions model, over officious with the coffeee pumps, thinks I'm staring at her, and she flashes me a smile as she pours the coffee, one of those smiles which, as denizens of Hobart nightclubs would know, is an invitation to speculate as to whether or not 3hree seconds more staring will invite you home or invite the police. As one of said denizens, I'm well aware of the correct response, which is to flash the knowing smile which means get over yourself sweetheart, blue eye shadow girl has you covered. It's such a wonderful piece of non verbal communication that happens between us, I wonder why people use words at all - oh right, it'd be much harder to get a brownie. As I walk away, my place in the queue is taken by a shuffling, befuddled and confused homeless man in a white cardigan using a walking stick to help himself get around. He begins a series of unrelated tangential conversational jumping points to the blonde girl, mostly about a film with Anthony Hopkins and the relative merits of popular culture. He entraps the blonde girl in a continuing web of Grandpa Simpson conversation, without a single one of his points likely to end in the ordering of snacks or coffee. This allows to me throw another one of my little non verbal smiles, the one that says sucked in, isn't retail just a blast. As I walk off, I walk past a girl wearing deely boppers, with an imploring smile and a pile of leaflets she seems far too keen to pass on. I decline, I've had enough of human interaction for one day. When I look over her shoulder, the blonde girl is still being polite as she possibly can, as the old man is up to 1963 in his one man monologue play...I sincerely hope I get that way when I'm older...I've got a robe and slippers already looked out. I think I'll start conversations entirely about The Divinyls...that'll stump the young folk...

My Dad right now is out on my deck. He's not in the hammock, but he's come to visit without really visiting. He takes a call on his mobile phone from one of his gossipy friends, a little mini cabal of power to the people teachers broken down by the man. I suspect to some it might be a little undignified a man of nearly 60ty sitting on a banana lounger having the same conversation for 3hree years about a job he never got, about a terrible interview experience that left him drained and questioned his very ability to hold some chalk. Do they still use chalk in schools? My Gran, one of my main memories of her was the venom she used to spit at the TV whenever I watched a childrens show called Charlie Chalk, her face contorted as she told the writers of the show to get a proper job like coal mining, as I balanced a white plastic tray with my dinner on it on my knee. Dad doesn't have many friends, because Mum won't be friends with his friends. One time in Burnie, we got in the car like homeless people who had just sold all their Shakira albums to Cash Converters just to hide from this weird science teacher Dad knew, all of which I remember about him was he had incredibly pulled up socks, always white, always pristine, always knee high. We stat their for hours, just talking about the world, until we presumed he had gone. I've turned up Shakira really loudly just to drown him out. It's not that I mind the conversation, I just think he loves the misery too much. He's using phrases like restorative justice and deputy principal just way too much, but like a man hypnotised on stage, he's always blinking bewildered wondering how his life turned out the way it did. I think he believes in the essential goodness of man, something I long ago disagreed with. Eventually he leaves, taking a pile of my books with him, a passing comment about the merits of Shakira or Andy Murray mentioned as he goes. I think he sometimes wishes we talked about more than sport, but neither of us make too much of an effort beyond that, and that's fine with us. I know at times he's tried or I've tried to get beyond what certain football teams should be doing 70ty minutes into a game, but it never works. At some unspecified point in the mid 90s, he decided my life would be infinitely better if I lifted bricks in some sort of body building fashion because my PE teacher told him it was a great idea. He said this would make girls like me, although he said it in far more cringingly uncool mid 90s sub Bruno Lucia tones. We had one incredibly hectoring session in the garage while he tried to make me into Lou Ferrigno, I said I wasn't a laborer from the 1920s, and the whole thing unfolded with a tedious sense of inevitability. Next morning, he came down to the breakfast table, sat down, and said did I see the Liverpool Coventry score...boundaries drawn, natural order back in place over jammy toast...maybe that's what restorative justice is...

My weekend is mapped out. Comedian tomorrow night with someone I like but who I hope doesn't talk too much, mean as that sounds. We've had entire conversations sometimes where my only words are yes and sure if I'm lucky. Lunch on Saturday with someone I hope talks for hours, so we know whats going on with his headspace. Maybe some flag waving on Monday. Some tennis player is on my TV, talking about what a miserable life she had, depression, some such gubbins. No one rings, no one talks to me, a television flickering in the corner with some early 90s videos. A glamorous granny is standing outside my window waiting for a lift, squeezed into some sort of Madonna like corset as she stands perfectly still in a howling gale. I'm not surprised at the effort she's made, she walks my window sometimes, and she truly suffers in her bid to stay young. Every interaction I have during the day at the moment makes me glad for the peace and quiet. I get one of my periodical spam e-mails from one of those companies that links you with your old school friends, and throw it straight in the virtual trash. I had an uneasy interaction with a particular comedian a few years ago, when I was dragged up on stage to do a bit of a turn. Got a laugh too. Afterwards, it became apparent that two people - having seen me on the stage with the comedian - that I went to school with wanted to talk to me, and they wanted a photo of not just me, but them with the comedian. Without seeing the joins, you would think we had just picked right up where we left off in Grade twelve, but there was a conversational sour point, something known only to us, I can't remember what, but it was enough to make me turn back and talk to the comedian about his other life in London, freezing them out until they left, a one night brief re-union that ended quickly. They never got their photo either. I try and learn something every day, take something out of every interaction, make a note, but I don't live up to that, some behaviours keep repeating. The glamorous granny is the last person I see for the day, as she bundles herself into a car pool, muttering loudly something about Karen, and how she's unreliable. It's the last interaction I see, tomorrow it begins again, the first day of the rest of my life, a blank canvas with people who will educate me, who will frustrate me, and in the end, vanish without a trace for the most part into blog anecdote and their own private space...

I suspect what I may take out of tomorrow is another sandwich, but we shall see...

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...

Pep talks, Panda Eyes, Pub Bores and Persson

Another windowless, airless office, another workplace pep talk, another day where words drift in and out of my head, replaced by a song from a long time ago that I can't quite place...Sneaker Pimps? MC Lee? Ann Lee? No, definitely the Sneaker Pimps, and yes, I definitely do promise to do better. There's no part of anyones life where they aren't accountable to someone - even the richest Sheik surely has someone relying on them at some point. Surely? Typical, I was born into the wrong family. I had to get the genetics of my Dad, one of lifes great sitcom characters. Thats unfair, and yes, I really should be nodding in appropriate places during this pep talk. I can't be bothered though, although my faux nodding is always conducive to the pep talkee thinking I've taken something on board. The pep talkee concludes with so much blokey colloquiliasm I suspect I've put on a football jumper and we're ten goals down kicking into the wind. Buzz. No thoughts. He's lapsed in full Ron Barassi coach speak. I leave not sure about work, but certainly ready to chase the loose ball. The radio, as always, is playing all the usual. DJs shuffle from station, a much hyped duo moving into Tasmania seem to my ears to be just like every other radio station except they have trendier haircuts. I've never had a trendy haircut, my one week experiment with a spike Burnies biggest disaster of 1985 by far. My e-mails are piling up, one line responses of no consequence, and I can scarcely make an effort to reply. An old man in a car doesn't indicate when I drive home, and I nearly crash into the back of him as he drives in his bewildered state. Liverpool lose a lead, in the time it takes the man at the BBC to type it on his computer. Nothing means anything and yet it all adds up to something, my day, pointless as it is, mine to live, mine to drift through, perspective given by those who aren't around to see today. I work with one of those - an older woman who is always active, always at clubs, always out with friends...sometimes you can tell all she wants is a day in a hammock listening to the Cardigans because you needed something to drown out Amy Grant on 9ine minutes of the 90s. The trendy DJs meanwhile are making great capital out of a joke involving picking up the secret recordings of a microphone at a big event. They laugh so hard at their own joke, it jars me as I pull into my house to cook sausages at a high temperature and watch that blonde girl on Setanta Sports who doesn't seem to like Liverpool very much. They ultimately laugh at their own joke for so long, I suspect that the pep talk they got must have been very very good. Maybe they are just more responsive to exhortations to get out there and get amongst it...

The magic pen table is back. They aren't singing songs though with the words magic or pen in them, it's one girl in a blue top making the pens do their magic. The depressed blind seller has been shuffled on unless there's a table timeshare going on. The girl at the magic pen table seems to be demonstrating how the pens are magic simply by making them fly and harassing kids who don't seem very impressed. Kids today aren't impressed by anything. In 1991 we were impressed by Amy Grant, so I know we'd have gasped at a pen that could whizz about. The kid walks off, and the girl, who is possibly stoned, continues to shill her heart out for the sake of the pen company, marvelling at the sheer complex wonder of a world in which she has a pen that can also fly about a bit. She's kind of making me miss the depressed blind seller. Blue eye shadow girl is filling out a form, doing the grunt work for everyone as always, and a nerdy kid looking at tins of biscuits is directly in my way. I'm in the middle of quite a self determined maturity phase (ooh get you, it only took 30ty years, you want a cookie?) but I still find time to make a nice scene just to let him know he's in my way, but I lose the battle for his attention to a chocolate wafer in a tin. Panda eyed girl has been demoted to stacking shoes in a pile. Not much phases panda eyed girl, she's like a 10en year old, she just seems to swagger back no matter how they demote her. I don't suspect anyone likes stacking shoes into a triangle, especially one you just know some bogan is going to come along 5ive minutes after construction and deconstruct the pile quite literally, by knocking it over looking for the left sandal, and not in any kind of post modernist philosophical way. She's twirling her hair vapidly, around her finger, staring at the shoes with a strangely out of it grin. Dads on the mobile to me, telling about a woman at his school who got attacked by cheeky students but the school won't give her any cash for her distress. He's not telling the story well though, because he wants to get to sports. We have a long and animated discussion about sports, and when I get off the phone, Panda Eyed Girl has begun the arduous task of making shoes and sandals into an attractive look. With all the gimlet eyed determination of someone in a bar trying to convince me that the music I listen to isn't real music, and I should be listening to real bands like the pub band in the corner playing Train covers, she intently studies the problem before deciding on what would have been my solution, chucking them on the floor and hoping it looks passable and going to lunch, twirling a lock of her badly dyed hair around her index finger as she goes. Next to me, two bogans are giggling over the quality of an Eddie Murphy film, and I can't decide who I want to give a pep talk to first...

I don't respond that well to pep talks. When I was fifteen, I was given my most infamous pep talk by my parents. I was failing school, too nervous to make friends, too lazy to do anything but sit on the computer, too homesick to do homework, or at least that's how I felt. I thought in that bleak nuclear winter that the only person to understand me was someone famous, who I nearly wrote a letter to, but luckily pulled back, I mean you don't want to be the kind of person who starts thinking about living alone in a shack. I was failing maths, a patient, slightly dwarfy maths teacher patiently explaining this to me in a corridor where we sat like two outcasts on a park bench, and obviously I had to explain this to my parents. I admit my thoughts about this were jumbled, but I didn't tell them, and then they found out after some horrible duplicity involving trying to knock the phone line out of the wall...I got a hell of a pep talk, but the trouble is, it's all words, once I get the hug or the handshake at the end of it I tend to go back to what I was doing. I don't have a favourite quotation, I don't have anything to fall back on as a motto, maybe the odd song line that I relate to but that's about all. I went to school with a girl called Jennifer. She was the girl who had to follow me in giving a humourous speech once and died on her arse, exhorting the crowd to laugh so desperately she collapsed into a series of what is the deal with and what is quite literally up with that schtick lines that just went nowhere. For an hour. She sat me down once, and I should point out it was well known by this point I had no belief in God at all - I hadn't brought it up overtly, but it was still somehow well known. She took it upon herself with all her social worker stylings to tell me about God, and angels, and more worryingly fairies. Her pitch was flawed, it was too slick, and I suspect she wasn't buying it herself, but with a lost soul to save she wasn't about to let it go until she had got all the way through. Like those Mexican wrestlers you saw in the 80s with the pot belly they'd wheel out to wrestle Andre The Giant, it was a lost cause, and eventually she asked me if I had any questions. I resisted any kind of smart alec answer, murmured indifferently, and by the second syllable of my grunt, she was off down the corridor to save a girl of loose ethics. I've never saved anyone, not even from drowning, and that seems to happen to everyone I know - mind you, our holy roller was stymied in her attempt to save the girl of loose ethics. Whatever hearing she was given, it fell on deaf ears. Twins by the age of seventeen was a sign that she didn't really think of our lord, but to use an old music hall gag, she was keen to shout oh god...

I walk around Kingston a little bit later. I've never even taken inspiration from nature, although I appreciate the sheer stillness of the place at times, a lot more than I would ever admit. They've set up a little window at the petrol station, so the depressed woman in the shirt who just stares out of the window has to share an enclosed space with an Ugly Betty clone with thick black glasses and a much more personable tone. My friend, the one with the debt problem, sends me a text message, it seems to indicate we'll catch up soon, but it sounds like the kind of message someone gives you at the end of a family re-union or a one night stand. I delete it without too much thought or emotion. A woman sits in the hairdressers, which is still just about open and still called Cyber Hair, the hairdressers of the future. A fantastically unattractive woman in a blue coat that encases her massive frame like a body bag is getting her hair primped and preened, a pep talk of sorts, one for the soul that I don't suspect will work. I walk along a little concrete pathway, where the pizza shop used to be, now devoid of both pizza and slackers like it used to be, now replaced with a permanently shut and locked up accountancy firm and extended windows for the bottle shop to advertise. There's this little kid in blue T-shirt who's being ignored, and he's fidgeting with the trolley his Mum is pushing, grabbing at the ends of it and trying to shake it. His Mum, with a vintage 80s blonde mane slash mullet, snaps, and decides when it's time to go home he'll be straight to bed without any Wii. Ah, in my day, it was straight to bed without any A Country Practice. His face crumbles, he lets go of the trolley, and stares across the cavernous, empty car park, before breaking into three or four slow, funeral march steps, his little trainers undone at the lace, his head staring directly at the ground. I think for a moment about easy it is for kids sometimes, for a whole world to crash because they can't play Wii, and when they get the Wii back everything is alright, motivation not in words but in what they have. Of course I also realise at that moment I'm beaming because I've got some Aero chocolate mousse in the bag which doesn't do much for the maturity kick I'm on. Just at the moment I'm amount to take my chances walking across the dangerous old man won't indicate death trap car park, I catch the kids eye - I'm beaming, obviously because I have mousse, and he's shuffling, because he doesn't have Wii. He looks at me quite upset, because obviously I'm happy, and he isn't. Then, he sticks his tongue out at me and pulls a spazz face, which is well warranted because no one should beam as much as I am beaming at the moment unless they are chronically strange or trying to convert people to God. His stride lengthens, his head lifts, and just for a moment, having shown up a stranger, he's a new kid...

I guess I'm good at pep talks after all...as long as they are non verbal...

The Day The Clown Blinked

So I've sat most of today, absolutely loathing this girl at work who, nominally, is my friend but at work we just don't get on because she asks a lot of open ended sarcastic questions that imply you are failing at your job. Actually what I've done today for large parts is just endlessly watch this video two guys made about Penguin. I didn't watch it for any other reason than it gave me a break from working on my epic 2001 Youtube playlist, but also because it's kind of interesting to see things as they really are, not as my tiny blonde permanent tanned 8ight year old mind would like them to be. For some reason no one seems to have made one about Kilwinning, the place I went to school, which is fair enough I suppose, but I wouldn't mind some sort of visual representation of the place for the sake of accuracy. This visual representation would explain something to me - why when I sketch mentally about the place, I'm always miserable, and it's grey, and I'm depressed and getting an Indian burn or talking to pimped out drug dealers, and yet when it came time to leave and move back to Penguin, where in my mind at least I was happier than at any time in my life, I cried like a baby. I don't think is a logical path to take - it may have had something to do with sophistication though. You see the thinking in Scotland was, and probably still is, somewhat dismissive of outsiders. I love Scotland, I should say that because I've made it sound otherwise, but certainly you wouldn't want to stand out. I went to school with a kid called Martin who looked a bit like AC Slater from Saved By The Bell is he had a flattop haircut. He was quietly spoken with a slight stammer that did nothing to knock his confidence. We were queuing for Yorkie bars in the grim countenance that passed for our recess snack hut, a cupboard from which harassed middle aged women would tell you exactly what they thought of your coupons. Since I was a nervous, slightly fidgety child I would often impart stories with exaggerated punchlines or over impressive social boasts, but in that case, I definitely had a story to tell, that I had been invited to a party, at night, in Kilwinning, with girls and probably a scary movie. Maybe even punch! Martin barely even took his eyes off his Peppermint Aero to tell me it sounded shit, and then walked off. I think that's the difference between Scotland and Penguin. If I had played the party down, he'd have said I was an idiot for not looking forward to it and then walked off. In Penguin, you never had to worry about the deeper meaning of anything, you never had to worry about being put in your place. At least that's how I remember it, although I'm sure it's nonsense, the innocent thoughts of a child - I mean, if you fell off the flying fox, I'm sure someone was discussing what an idiot you were at the bakery the next day...

I can't remember the exact circumstances surrounding the party. The girl who was hosting was sort of an Elizabeth Berkeley clone if Elizabeth Berkeley had more acne, more untameable hair and fainted in the library once a month. That's my main memory of our party hostess, she was always fainting in ever more dramatic swoony circumstances. I think, in fact I know, she wanted to winch my best friend, and I was sort of surplus to requirements in the whole situation. But hey, I'd brought punch, what was he bringing? There's a possibility it was a Halloween party, which would explain the movie, but if you think I'm going into details of my one and only halloween costume, we'll just move on right away. The punch is my most significant memory though, not just because it's a rare example of me mixing a drink that didn't have the word spider in it, as the implications were that at this party, we would all have our first drink of alcohol. Never happened of course - I didn't drink until I was 18teen, which should tell you the quality of my punch, for the most part if sat bobbing quietly in the corner acting as a conversational makeweight during awkward lustful one way glances. Anytime the conversation was muted, it was all hey, punch is in the corner. Her house was a vague collection of wicker furniture from that shop at the end of the Irvine mall that stank of cane seats and drunken staff, and family photos where she was always smiling with a suspicious nervous grin. Her best friend was called Sarah, and she had an upturned nose, which, had I been more musically cognescant, would have resulted in some sort of immature Billy Joel parody. She didn't like me because during one of our classes, taught by my Dad incidentally, we all had to on a pink card write something nice about everyone else in the room and I, and I swear this was innocent taking the piss out of the exercise move, said she had a nice nose. So she wasn't talking to me outside of university style lectures about respecting other people, I was in a cane chair probably being yelled at for continually mentioning the punch, Elizabeth Faint was no doubt fussing over ordives and trying to get my best friend to pash her, and my best friend was no doubt lapping up the attention with a pretty smug smirk and then whispering to me that the whole night was completely terrible and we should run away and leave. As far as parties went, it was hardly the Hooligan X rave at the Ayr Pavillion. Our host tried to get the party started with a tape of her favourite rave tunes, and it chewed up, crumbling in her hands. It would have been prudent to leave, but my Mum wasn't picking me up for another four hours so I had to sit back down, either that or get a pen and try and unpick the cassette. Did I mention I made punch?

Time moved slowly. Conversation picked up slightly, although in my case any incremental increase in attention was noticable only because I had a theory that Altern 8 were the greatest band in the world shot down, and because really I didn't need to be there in that living room, they could have managed quite happily without me. Except they did need me, because I was the only one making conversation. Which is how the Lorna incident happened. Someone finally cued some sort of ravey dancey hands in the air like you just don't care track up without the tape dying, and things were going a little better. Still no one drank the punch though. The upturned nose girl still wasn't having any - she preferred Marti Pellow. I was in the middle of some sort of early 90s discourse on the nature of music when all the girls went into the kitchen while I was in mid sentence. I was used to this, I didn't even miss a syllable, but then the hostess was back out into the living room asking me if I would go out with Lorna. Lorna? Who was Lorna? I hadn't even noticed Lorna, and this was a party of five (not that party of five) people. Was she the girl with the Halloween silver face paint on? What does she look like? Why is she hiding in the kitchen? Am I still going out with Debbie? Why is no one drinking the punch? Of course, this was a complex question asked at a strange and awkward time, so I had to respectfully decline the blind date, or my friend did it for me because that was his manner, and then there was just chaos and pandemonium as a silver swish ran out of the kitchen, into the street and burst into tears on the front lawn. I've never made a girl cry since, or had before, and I hadn't done much to provoke the situation, but the party ground entirely to a halt as the girls ran down the road to try and soothe her hurt feelings. My friend, in his infinite wisdom, didn't counsel me to go and be nice to Lorna and score a sympathy pash, but raided through the collection of blank tapes round the base of the TV to try and find embarrassing home movies of the girl who was hosting the party. We found a lot of episodes of Alias Smith and Jones, but dirt, no dice. When the girls returned, without Lorna, I was subjected to a lot of long boring relationship talk, even though I effectively had done nothing wrong and was, I think, spoken for. I tried valiantly to escape with a few pointed remarks about the decline of Stock Aitken and Waterman, but it always came back to my flippant cruelty. Mum was three hours away, my friend was smirking, and there was I, pinned with my back to the rattan, knees pressed up against my chin, listening to a well rehearsed talk that I would become incredibly familiar with over the years. It felt very much like growing up, or it would have, if it wasn't for how I was dressed...

Naturally, the Lorna incident was, as is the nature of early teenage parties, a big deal for an hour of fraught tension and variations of what a bastard I was until the next round of ordives came out. Everything eventually calmed down, and upturned nose girl began a controversial discourse on her first experience with cocaine. With that nose? Anyway, in the midst of our conversation, we had forgotten that the Steven King film IT had been put on the TV. IT of course has nothing to do with computers, it was a film about a killer clown or some such gubbins that I was too cool to think was scary. In fact we took intermittent breaks from our little mini kievs and discussions about the future (I stole most of my ideas from Debbie) that included the words massive a lot. If you've seen IT, the movie not the industry (yes you've done that joke get on with it) you will know that at a certain point, something happens where a photo in a book winks and then begins to bleed. I say something happens, because whatever happened, we weren't really paying attention or expecting it and I'm not ashamed to say it scared the crap out of us. Four people who had spent a tedious amount of time having psuedo intellectual conversations about rave music and inter personal relationships to the soundtrack of a ticking clock had just been reduced to the same scared kids who had hid behind the couch a few years earlier during Gremlins (or was that just me?)...at which point, we had to face the uncomfortable realisation that the girl with the upturned nose had, for whatever reason, jumped into my lap at the moment of film fright impact. We looked at each other, then at her, then at me, then at the punch bowl, and then back at each other, and then she had to slowly unpeel herself with as much dignity as she could, and go back to her wicker chair. No one spoke for a long time - we were embarrassed about the leaping and the screaming and the unpeeling and the shifting and the scary clowning...in fact it felt like no one spoke for hours, everyone staring at family photos and the ceiling and the ground...as far me, I had made a girl cry and had another girl jump into my lap and I had a vague realisation that this was the peak of my attractiveness. My friend had even lost his smirk, so upset was he that he had lost his cool. The Elizabeth Berkeley was just glad she didn't faint, and upturned nose girl was mortified that her righteous proto feminist demeanour had faded under pressure. Someone though eventually had to say something, I mean, Mum wasn't coming for another hour...

...and you can probably guess what I said, and how it went...still, it's their fault, they could at least have tried it...

If it wasn't for two songs you'd get no writing, if it wasn't for wrong judgements you'd be seeing me on Twitter

Somewhat inevitably, there are very few pop cultural artefacts in my home that are in not in some way directly influenced by the thoughts and feelings of someone else. For instance, I got into Beth Orton as a direct consequence of trying to impress a girl and went off her when she went out of fashion. However, recently I have found this to be of awkward consequence - not thinking about Beth Orton, god knows what she's doing, although Alive Alone is the single most played track I use when I want to write. Without Alive Alone and My Beautiful by Lennon, you'd probably be mostly looking a blog of Youtube clips. I'm become a far more independent thinker as I progress through life, as I hope the Cascada clip may prove, and am less likely to be impressed by the recommendations of others. Next to my laptop, which as laptops do is current away from it's normal resting place surrounded by bits of paper and external hard drives, is a book that my uncle has given me. Without going into a lot of detail it's a book from the 1970s which, it has been indicated to me, I will find hilarious. I am now quite sure that I will not as a result of this not being my decision to read this book, but as a result of the implication that this book will be an extension of my sense of humour. My Dad, for what its worth, often says naebody is putting him a box - he doesn't mean this literally, although it will be a hilarious family memory at his funeral - he means that whenever someone applies a label or a personality trait to him, he will rebel against it. No one who wears the safe as houses golf jumpers he wears can truly be an independent spirit, but he did spend a week in London stalking the Rolling Stones and sleeping on Hyde Park benches. In that context, it hardly seems right to talk myself up as some sort of No Logo down with corporations free thinker, especially considering I bought No Logo because someone told me to, when even my own father has bigger credentials than me when it comes to personal freedom. In fact, everything I do is in some way influenced - why do I keep a blog? Someone else had one. Why do I support Liverpool? Craig Johnston told me to. Why do I love Britney Spears? Someone told me not to and I rebelled. And why am I completely incapable of forming an intimate personal relationship and converting all my hopes, dreams and fears into audible conversation? Well, that comes from my Dads side of the family...if only because if it is something I can take personal responsibility for, it's something I have the capability to do something about it. And, to be honest, such difficult questions, well, they aren't really Sunday afternoon questions. Not when there's A League on TV, movies on demand, a million other modern day distractions entirely set up just so you can blame someone else for the choices you made and for not getting off the couch. Especially Robert Downey Jr...

All of which is a slightly intellectual way of saying someone told me to go to a chicken shop and try out the chicken there and I did. A new store is usually a hotbed of excellent customer service and patent gimmickery, and this one is no exception. A middle aged Italian woman is huskily trying to persuade a man in jeans that are slipping floorward due to gravity and not the throes of passion that he should take the time to complete the survey on how effectively he has received his moderately priced chicken. Oddly, they don't give me the survey to complete, which is good by me. One hairdresser in Melbourne, after I filled in a survey, took to sending me a birthday card every year for three years. My waitress is an elphin teenager with porcelain skin shoehorned into a uniform and baseball cap, her sole concession to modernity a nose ring that sparkles under the flourescent light. I don't know what to make of her, the sample size is too small. Certainly the problems in her life appear very similar to mine, too much supervision, too many bodies keeping an eye on her, making sure that the pasta salad she loads into a plastic tub is evenly spread out. She doesn't enjoy this supervision and shoots her employers several filthy looks. A fight breaks out in the store, there's a chicken under the heater in public display, and no one is willing to take personal responsibility for it being there. I know if I had been her age, the miniature doll, I'd have said maybe it flew there and been bollocked for it. I know from her expression she couldn't care less about the chicken, and in my head I construct a mutual back story for her and me - working to live, trapped in a dead end job, care factor about her environment and work regulations zero as rapidly aging teachers used to say to me in the mid 90s. Out the back, a balding Italian man, all sweat and aged wrinkles from grim determination, is making chips and cursing just loudly enough for everyone on the left hand side of the shop to hear. When he comes out, he's suddenly a jolly Italian waiter of stereotypical renown, all jokes and smiles and an overexaggerated accent. The porcelain doll looks tired as she hands over my chicken, as if she's about to impart some terrible secret to me about what's in the chicken, but a woman with a Helen Lovejoy haircut stands directly on her shadow, repressing her individuality through the medium of corporate approved standards, and whatever conversational nugget was about to be imparted between employee and better than usual dressed customer. I step blinking into the faded late afternoon sunset, as two men in suspiciously matching polo shirts have a long and involved argument about the merits of Ricky Ponting. Ultimately, they make several offensive comments about another cricketer, and draw disapproving looks from the porcelain doll, who they've assigned the crucial spirit breaking duty of transporting garbage from shop to skip, with a time limit no doubt imposed...

Her twin works in my local pizza shop. She's the same height, same dimensions, same colour hair, same skin, probably same dipshit boyfriend everyone who looks like that at that age has, a no hoper called Darren or Dave who drives a Datsun and thinks the world would be better if we called all Muslims, although she's sans a nose ring and not shoe horned into a baseball cap. I think her name is Teighan or some such corrupted fancy spelling. The difference is Teighan, I believe, owns the pizza shop or has personal responsibility for all the toppings or something, because she's usually in there on her own. So she does whatever she wants. There's a flickering of recognition whenever you go in there, but she serves you when she wants, and if that means she has to finish reading an article about some celebrity with shinier hair and an ever changing body shape before you can get a small garlic bread, then that's what she will do. I know a friend of mine who swears this is unbearably cool, and would do anything to be with her. Of course, his free spirit isn't strong to enough to take personal rejection so he'll never say anything, but he's attracted to the fact that she's always upbeat and impeccably cool, even going so far as to say that she must have the coolest taste in music, which in his case would be Metallica and other such bands what rock. I think this is one of the reasons I don't ask people out myself, like blue eye shadow girl, since the slightest imperfection can bring the pedestal crashing down. I don't really have the heart to tell him that when I went back into the pizza shop the other day to get my pizza that she was free spiriting her little heart out to Smashmouth, dancing so badly she put my late evening drunken wedding Zulu stylings into the shade. I admire her lack of self consciousness, but I can't find it cool now I've seen such bad dancing. Of course, there's a presumption in my wanderings that the girl in the chicken shop is miserable, that Teighan dancing freely is happy, just as they no doubt take my lack of conversation and nervous darting eyes to mean that I'm miserable when as soon as I get in my car I'm singing along to Shakira, not a care in the world, which in fairness if she saw my bad singing would lead to a long ponderance on human nature in her own blog, although she seems like a Twitter chick. The trick is, she's unsupervised of course, where she supervised after every move, there would be no pizza based self expression. I still remember once ringing a close friend of mine, the girl who inspired my love of Beth Orton, and her being ice cold on the phone. It was the last time we ever spoke, and it's taken me many years to realise, it was really her Mum who didn't like me, and she was in the background. Should I have tried ringing again? Not really - I'd probably spent far too much time constructing the citadel of her perfection, and we'd start dating and there she'd be doing the watuzi to Smashmouth some years down the track or telling me that Big Ms were the devils drink. And we'd argue and mutually realise we were horribly unsuited, and I'd end up writing poetry in a journal and sitting in my base...oh right, you are completely correct Teighan, I should pick up my pizza...it has been sitting there a long time while I've been musing...

I find such brief, miniature interactions fascinating, an entire world, an entire personality assigned rightly or wrongly in an entirely singular interaction. I've seen Teighan before, but not doing enough to form any further judgements, although she did buy Ralph magazine once, hence my dipshit boyfriend theory. I love peoples attempt to spin an image for you as well, in my case my flippant casual joking is a terrible mask for conversational anxiety. With certainty, the care free dancing of Teighan isn't replicated at all parts of life. And then there was Spud - I say Spud for fear of Kilwinning mob based retribution, the most vicious kind of mob retribution, death by exagerrated story telling. Spud used to be our school drug dealer, he'd stand with his back to the wall at all times, tightly lipped, dressed in the sharpest suit Oxfam could provide him with. Largely he was harmless, although harmless was a relative term for a middle aged man in a pimp suit from a charity shop dispensing drugs to school children. By 2009 standards I think thats harmless, bit dodgy for 1991 though. I often wonder if he was driven out by less permissive times later in the decade. Anyway, Spud would tell all the first years about a particularly bloody knife fight at railway station - I was initially impressed, but in my head I still wondered about the Vanilla Ice stab wound/cat scratch theory of bigging oneself up to outsiders. He was also one of the first people I ever knew who tried to apply the logic of Star Wars to every day life. Considering I couldn't stand up to bullies, I was surprised how sassy I was to Spud, but there was just something not quite right about him that I would often feel the need to call him on. One fateful day, as snow fell on ashphalt and weakly mashed potatoes fell on plastic trays, I asked him, straight out, mano a mano, if he really stabbed someone at Ayr train station. There was just the tiniest flicker of self recognition, just the tiniest moment of doubt, and since it was just me and him around and he knew I certainly wasn't going to be buying crack at a reasonable price, he looked for a moment as though he was about to impart that he'd made the whole thing up, but luckily he composed himself through two sharp tugs on his collar - not a euphemism - and said of course he did what kind of question was that. And who knows, maybe he did, and maybe I really did get off with the girl I took to the pictures to see Home Alone when I told him I did...truthfully, our interactions were so brief, limited to no I don't want any crack and that one conversation, that our knowledge of each other was limited, and a mutual complete character study never really came to pass. I think about that a lot, as people pass me by, just for brief moments, that I really might have it all wrong...

Mind you, she really danced badly though...no one should dance from the arms and have such limited hip movements...I'm getting my pizza from more corporate sources...

Don't judge a man by his love of Euro Trance or the hotel bed he chooses

One of the major plus points Mum and I have in our familial relationship is that if she buys an item of clothing, I will give her an honest opinion. My Dad will just say anything looks great, where as I will step up to the mark and say whether something is good or not. I've done this since I saved her from buying a hideous Monkey style kimono in Fitzgeralds in 1995. As it turned out, Mum bought me a hideous pair of tracksuit trousers from Melbourne market as my gift, a gift given with so much build up I thought she'd lashed out the 129.99 and got me a Melbourne Victory top. Of course, it's Kingston, so the hideous tracksuit trousers are actually great, and will help me fit in more. I realise not everyone wants to think about what their parents do when they go away, but I know Mum spent at least part of her time thoughtfully outfitting her son in the latest Kingston fashions. There's such a strange undercurrent to Kingston at the moment, every time I walk around the place beautiful girls sparkle in the sun and then make the most depressingly racist or stupid comments just as I walk away. Mum hasn't noticed, although she did sign a petition for something while she was in Melbourne, which isn't like her. She's normally sharp enough to realise those things are just con jobs to get your information. She also describes the Internet as a load of liars all talking to each other, so you know, swings and roundabouts with her. As they came over last night to engage in conversation and the sharing of store bought chicken, and the neighbours endlessly played Cascada (yes...the neighbours...) Dad was moved to say that the hotel they stayed at wasn't up to, quote, my standards. Now he said this at a moment where I was kinda sorta choking on a rogue piece of pasta salad, sitting in my pyjamas and those pesky neighbours had moved onto Tina Cousins, so standards seemed to be quite a strange phrase to turn, but of course, I knew what they meant. I suspect the one thing they are truly proud of me about sometimes is my survival instinct. I can care for myself, and I think they like that about me. They know I devote my time to making sure that I am comfortable, and Dad once said son, you'd make it out of the desert without a problem. I think this might just be the best thing he ever said to me, as mostly it's childish insults for supporting Liverpool or me deflecting questions about my personal affairs (lucky he doesn't read this thing huh?) with grunts...it was, thus, as good as we could get...

On the notion of personal survival, when I go to Melbourne, I stay at a particularly posh hotel. Not that I can afford it of course, it's all credit card debt, but it's enough to make me feel above my station in life as I wander around the halls past the posh art works and the odd Big Brother winner or a sunken eyed Sudanese cleaner pushing a cart full of slop with deference on display to all guests, no matter how tracksuitted. I'm not one for chat, but there is definitely one case where I actually make an attempt to be nice, and thats to the cleaners at this particular hotel. Maybe I just feel uncomfortable being called Sir just because I don't mind wasting a few dollars on credit card. Besides which, even though you get yourself a comfortable bed and you don't get electric shocks off the nylon sheets, there's not a particular grandiosity to the hotel anyway, not at night anyway when you get into the lift with chinless yahoos in rugby shirts or tuxedos making inappropriate comments in loud booming voices and augmented girls spilling out of cocktail dresses with eyes rolling back in their head as they try and work out the complex key card slot interface. Not even listening to various Euro trance classics on the IPOD can shut out their excited cries. One morning, I went to negotiate my own complicated key swipe handle pull are the lights on experiment, stepping deftly over my moutainous copy of the Herald Sun, and just as I turned around, one of the cleaners was staring directly at a ripped up copy of one of the complimentary papers. There were bits of paper all over the hallway, scattered like little snowflakes, and the cleaner was staring at them with a sort of wistful minimum wage melancholy, and certainly she needed a dustbuster far more than any implied social commentary from me staring at the mess too long. What rendered the scene even more uncomfortable though was that as I battled with me key, she looked directly at me with all her trained in friendliness and said good morning Sir...I didn't feel especially good about this circumstance, so I nodded in a slightly embarrassed fashion and went back to kicking in my door, and just as I was about to sit down and write a long novel about haves and have nots, a fat bloke squeezing his way through life in a tight suit stormed out to confront the nearest staff member, that was obviously our friend trying to gather pieces of Andrew Bolts column from all ends of the corridor, about how the taps on his spa didn't work. The look she shot him, as powerful a look as a minimum wage cleaner has ever shot a fat bloke in a tuxedo, was enough to send him scurrying, and of course, for me to have to write a different ending to my novel...lousy cleaners, never conforming to type, now I need to go back to glamorous heroin addicts...again...

Interestingly, since I'm Scottish with the parents I have, theres a great emphasis on moral guilt when I stay at this hotel, and while it's mostly directed at the cleaning staff, I'm pleased to say that life has given me several reminders of my own station in life even in the midst of finery. The mini bus to the posh hotel has a particular swinging cadence, it drops a lot of people off at different hotels, people you will never see again, a jumpered and shirted Italian usually in charge of making sure everyone gets on the right bus, and I hope sometimes he isn't rabidly anti Collingwood, because sometimes when I wear my football jacket he stares right through me in a fit of football choice discrimination and I have to stand three inches from his sweat stain just to get noticed. This particular time, I had to get on the bus to the left, which for some reason seemed to contain nothing but backpackers, and me, heading off somewhere posh. Of course, I looked a lot scruffier than the backpackers, but I at least was more self aware than the backpackers up the front, who were on loan from Tasmania and harassing the bus driver with these exaggerated stories about how they stayed nowhere but six star hotels...one of them had thick green feral hair and a T-shirt which seemed to suggest the country should be run by Bob Brown, but of course, who was I to judge? Well, I was exactly the person to judge, since I was staying at a posh hotel con sarn it...knock me down a peg for saying corn sarn it I guess...and no one else on this bus was. As we pulled up outside it, I even allowed myself a moment of social superiority, as the hotel shimmered in the sun and a bevvy of porters lined up to assist me but luckily, I'm Scottish, and such moments are always accompanied by reality checks. For as I was basking, I didn't realise one of the zips in my bag was undone, and the bag was upside down and scattering bits of magazine and pair of socks into the bus aisle...any kind of superiority was lost in that moment, as I scrambled to pick up a pair of Pacman socks as quickly as I could and rush off the bus. Eventually after what felt like an hour, I had picked up all my belongings, and of course everyone not listening to Deep Forest on their IPOD was staring at me. All except the two girls up the front of the bus, who's conversation hadn't even trailed off in the interim of my embarrassment. The girl with the green hair was constructing for the bus driver an elongated narrative about Croatia, and was espousing how the trains never seemed to run on time. The bus driver, of course, with no frame of reference on Croatian trains, was more interested in staring out the window into a nearby pub, with all the longing and needing of a particularly bored alcoholic, and that is where I left them, driving off into the city, trapped in a traffic jam and a perpetually boring conversation, while I took a moment to watch them go, and distract myself from the possibility I might have left a pair of socks rolling on that bus forever more...

The restaurant at this particular hotel has what you can only describe as a ironic policy. My cousin, the Korean who thinks Melbourne is full of Asians, wasn't allowed into their restaurant with me for reasons my cousin believes were to do with suspecting she was Asian prostitute, and yet outside some of the denizens of the taxi rank pimp out far more outrageously attired hookers quite openly without anyone seemingly saying a word. I know this from a night out where I ended up walking back to the hotel eating pizza out of a box and telling myself it was pointless checking my e-mails at 3ree in the morning, because there wouldn't be any. Well maybe from that Russian lady who seems awfully keen. As I was chomping down on the last slice of ham and pineapple, one of the taxi drivers, an Arab fellow with an unshaven square head and jeans, who was a master in non verbal communication, made a non verbal gesture. It's wasn't so masterful, because at first I thought he was seeing if I wanted a taxi. It took a second gesture for him to, well, gesture, towards an emaciated middle aged woman in the distance, standing on the corner without much hope for her future or a coat to protect her from the cold. And there's that moment where you can be that guy - you know, that guy, I mean, who would ever know, you are on your own in the big city, no one need know...but of course, you'd know, you'd know you had more problems in your life than over use of the words you and know in a sentence. Maybe that's just me, but I don't want to be that guy. So I turned down the offer, and walked off with my IPOD turned up loudly, so as to shut out his suddenly quite verbal offer, and just as I got to the hotel entrance, where I believe a sympathetic porter gave me a look which either suggested he was pretty disgusted with the whole enterprise or cramp in his leg, a quite prominent former politician in a smart but overly tight suit (I guess that's hotel uniform) wandered up to the taxi driver, nodded his head, and was escorted in the direction of the distant corner. I left him to it while the porter kept his hands on his outraged hips. Some people can be that guy, but I couldn't, didn't want to be. Later the next morning, he was striding down the lobby, berating an underling. I was left only with the most basic summations of course, the nature of the people we admire being left bare as against those who work minimum wage, who are faceless and probably better peo...well, I'd like to say I had those thoughts, they were shut out in a blizzard of Eurotrance Fragma records, and the fact that I had a massive argument later that day about the quality of my coffee...

Eurotrance is easy, moral judgements and human nature, now that, that is difficult...

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...