Birds that sing for territory can learn to scream euphorically - unless impeded by tracksuits

Her face is a contorted mask of ugly rage, her cheeks blistered and minimum wage afflicated, her fists pounding in the air as she chases her prey, her 5.99 heels from Big W almost snapping as she stalks another girl down the road. Her victim - a skinny girl with badly dyed hair, who is hearing variations on the theme that she's sexually loose over and over again. They fight a meaningless and one sided battle with swinging arms and punches and terrible girly kicks, stumbling around outside the sandwich shop where I'm stuck in a one lane queue, and it's over the top, brief, one that features the throwing of a mobile phone, until a man with so much brylcreem on he's dripping the 50s all over the pavement steps in and intervenes - whether he's seeking to be the hero or just hoping to take advantage of a vulnerable young girl, there seems something unsavoury about his motives in solving the problems of the world, his arms spread like he's describing a fish he never caught as he holds the warring parties at bay just with his Perry Como cardigan and a few old person phrases and the word hoi. He's like a white knight if instead of a horse he rode in in a Mitsubishi Magna and his hands were too calloused to really hold a sword. Suitable for his surrounds, but no girls dream really - unless you dig the slick. He should go to the middle east. It all seems so pointless, the quarrels of two tracksuited scrags fighting over a nursed grievance I barely look up from the newspaper as I munch on my sandwich, barely even move the IPOD off Lily Allen to listen to their screaming complaints. I have my own concerns, my own mood is shrouding every aspect of today, making it feel like as thought I'm under pressure when in fact I'm completely safe and away from harm. Empathy is in as short supply as edible sausage rolls in this corporate franchised bakery, and by the time a plainly bored police woman with gym built shoulders uses all the training to try and re-assure a victim who must know by now she's not that far away from hearing the phrase let off with a caution, Lily has faded from my ears and the fight has faded from my memories. I don't think I have it in me to be a have a go hero anyway - maybe if I had more hair, maybe if I was coated in brylcreem and willing to play a role of over exaggerated interest to try and get to see poor white girl boobs. He's got an arm around her, and he's whispering consolation. The whole thing seems unbearingly sleazy and depressing, I suggest I'm not watching out of aching poignancy as much as distraction from Lilys newly toned down and less spiky 2nd album musings. I'm not the only one skirting the issue though - a Kris Kristoferson lookalike takes a look at the girl, goes to say something, something comforting, but decides against it, taking refuge in the sanctity of a raspberry housecake as he two steps his way into the day, without a backwards glance or a hair in his beard out of place...

I don't think I've been put in too many positions where my gallantry has been questioned. I think it was an accepted part of my one serious relationship that I was never really going to be laying any coats on puddles or fighting any black knights unless it was part of a level on ATARI. My girlfriend was a lot more gallant than me, she was interested in all these crazy ideas like, you know, helping people and being tolerant, like Ghandi in a netball skirt. We'd argue about it in the mornings sometimes, we'd pretend it was part of an intellectual argument instead of just another fight. Students - well, I'd failed, so ex students as well - will often do that. It put me off uni bars for life, stupifylingly awful arguments baseless and groundless turning in on themselves under the guise of open debate. Oddly, from such alleged intellectual beginnings, 1/2 the time you'd end up seeing the same end result as you got from discussions about sport or television at The Mayfair - badly thrown punches and some girl holding her shoes screaming at her boyfriend alternate phrases of encouragement and disgust. My girlfriend would grab herself a pop tart and rush out the door leaving me behind, and she'd throw in some alleged zinger that I would bat back with a crushing insult, and I thought that's just how people existed in relationships. I was never put in a position to defend her honour - never had to do that for anyone. There was a girl on her netball team who was festively plump, and she was sort of the team victim, the one the rest of the team blamed for all the ills of the world - and those ills sure piled up on windy days at Creek Road when the chill would be biting and a C Grade netball game was in the balance. One day, my girlfriend snapped, and had a go at her team for the constant piling into this girl, and as the team victim lifted up her chins proudly, I honestly never thought my girlfriend looked more beautiful, her ponytail billowing in the breeze, like some symbol of liberty and personal dignity an American could better articulate. I guess I should have told her how proud I was of her for sticking up for that girl, but it just wasn't that sort of relationship. I'm guessing we went home, and under the guise of pretending to discuss the nights television, we would have an argument, and then I'd go home after I'd gone to the shops and picked up some milk for her from the local shops. I guess that was about as gallant as it got for us. She bought me an ATARI and I'd pick up milk, and at certain points throughout the year, we be immensely proud of one and another, and the best our relationship ever got was when no one spoke and lights were dim and the television was flickering with some nonsensical trash that was in at the time, which if you know me in the non blog sense is probably the single most gallant thing I can ever do for someone...I gots stuff to say you know...

In the dying days of Grade 12 - hazy summers, crumbling personal relationships, too much bear, what do you mean I only got a B, it was probably the same for you - we went to the local school to play cricket. I seem to remember there was some tension about the trip, some sort of post modern angst as to exactly who was playing and who was fielding and that it was a ridiculously hot day. In Burnie? Does that sound right? Some days it was hot enough we got Melbourne TV - man those were good days. Anyway, for reasons I've never been able to explain, we decided to use a real cricket ball, and of course, as sure as that guy never got his food from Grover the waiter, the cricket ball as bowled to a girl hit her in the face and the game was abandoned after about two deliveries. The girl in question was the one I referenced before, the one who I fell in love with when she gave me a Beth Orton CD with the boyfriend who was a tool in retrospect who was trying to invent a perpetual motion machine - this was the year before, or else I might have brylcreemed up my hair and been medically helpful, fnar fnar fnar - if people still fnar in this day and age. Not really, I'm just that kind of person, I don't hit on the vulnerable or the concussed. She was basically OK after a few moments of concern, but her boyfriend seemed oblivious to the drama. He was on the boundary rope doing mathematical calculations, eventually wandering over to put a flimsy arm around her then go back to his own thoughts. She was always impressed by his intellectual side, a side I could have cultivated more, but he seemed less like a deep thinker at this moment than just a tosser. Interestingly, she didn't seem to mind - he had ambition I guess, which made up for his romantic shortcomings, a power couple in the makings as long as they didn't fuck it up with too much time spent worrying about Tazos (who would do such a thing?). It all seems quite strange in hindsight though - I don't think I ever saw them kiss. Their relationship had little time for gallantry as they both hit the books. I've lost touch with them of course and this has become my last memory of them. One of my friends that day wandered past and said thank fuck we weren't like them, but in some ways, I did, briefly, end up like that...unable to get my head out of the clouds, unable to articulate any kind of loving words, maybe I was as bad as him...well, not quite as bad, but things only become clear with the 3am stabs of realisation...as the 6th goal for Celtic bounces through Chris Smiths legs, your mind tends to need things to think about...is ATARI not just as bad as mathematical calculations in time of need...oh dear, another goal, they just aren't even trying now...quick brain...think of some other mistake it's ten years too late to fix, I'm sure there's one in there...

The victim is still there when I skip down the road much later as Lily Allen would prescribe - not that I can skip, my 3rd place behind Scott Matheson in a Grade 2 skip off would suggest that - now sitting on a pavement with desolation in every inch of her personal space while her personal protector begins a personal briefing to the ambulance man, a chunky man who has the physique of a stretcher bearer. If he pushed on a chest to try and get some breath he'd crush a brother. He has the bedside manner of a man deprived of a hot chip, and the girls exaggerated sobs are, well, exaggerated, agonised but devoid of real emotion, an act, and I know because when I was little I invented those sobs. Oh how many times I would sit behind a door with my green cotton sheets with the floral pattern - is it just me or was cotton a lot more comfortable in the 80s - in a huff sobbing but really hoping someone would open the door and ask how I was, and then I'd have to make the embarrassing shuffle into the living room because I was hungry or I wanted to see A Country Practice...her assailant has been rounded up by now, and had I been more on the ball perhaps I could have got a chorus of you're going home in the back of a divvy van going. I'm sure Kris Kristoferson would have joined in. She's really milking it now, driving that poor cow mental as she mouths the word why. I expect her to swoon sometime soon, but as compelling as this piece of street theatre is, the Advocate newspaper in the library won't read itself. I walk away - the brylcreemed man is back with his arm around the girl, who is still in the throes of Pia Zadora syndrome. I leave them to their moment - I guess having a mobile phone thrown at you is bad enough without the creepy intentions of an old man saving the day, unable to get the superhero custome over his head with all the grease. I move away, unsure of what the ending will be to the saga, and just as I get into the bus mall I see Kris Kristoferson again. He lifts an eyebrow in a masterful piece of non verbal communication, then shifts off to get his bus home, sitting down, burying his head in the paper, moving away and leaving everything behind as he heads home to write a simple country ballad with more depth in the lyrics than you first realise...

And time, as always, just continues to pass in ever decreasing circles...

The four ages of man - punch in the arm, prank to impress girls, all pubs are shit, what are you looking at

The Sundays - Wild Horses
Uploaded by djoik

It's early morning - I wonder what I'm doing up to be honest, and I share my space with several other muddled and confused workers of various businesses who are struggling with the problems of sliding doors, holding a coffee while they open a sliding door, or just drinking enough coffee to make sure that they have enough motivation to get through another day of dealing with the public and that damned sliding door. I can see on their faces years of disgruntlement, minor annoyances now cascading onto them like torrents, the every day death by a thousand cuts not soothed by javas. I'm on the down escalator, which I'm sure is a metaphor for something. One of my quirks is more all my intellect or perceived one, I always get escalators and elevators mixed up when I say the word and like the day I kept calling Jamie Shanahan Jamie Shanashanan and couldn't stop no matter how much I concentrated such a mental blind spot has ceased to be cute. On the up escalator, two schoolboys sit on the ground and go up seated and unmoving, their hair a shaggy mess, their grins broad. I realise at some point that they seem a bit upset there's no one around to impress with their zaniness - the only female anywhere near us is a lady who would have made a great bad girl wrestler in the 80s, sturdy of thigh with a good effort in the clean and shopping bag jerk. Too young to contemplate any port in a storm, they begin shifting uneasily as they wonder where the little blonde girl from Zamels is that they all fancy. Disappointed at the lack of audience for their alleged hilarious as usual cheek - I mean, who sits on an escalator, those mad kooks - they begin grinning at me. I'm expected to acknowledge their superior comedy skills by way of a mutual grin, although I expect it will follow with some sort of mocking coda, and to be honest, there's no one else around, so if they believe they can embarrass me with mockery, only the lady wrestler would hear it and she's got her own problems, a bulging bag causing her tracksuit trousers to be less than Rocky like in their defiance of the laws of gravity. So I move on, sipping my water, listening to my IPOD and knowing what they don't, that no one is as cool as their showing off no matter who much it is backed up by a third lingering friend guffawing at the outrageousness. As they get to the top of the escalator and have to get up, Panda Eyed girl walks by - whatever her faults, she walks with an outrageous sense of cool, a disdainful hundred yard stare backed up with a strut that comes entirely from the hips. As she walks past, the boys are suddenly stricken with nervous hormonal lust that no amount of hair gel or puffed up surf jumpers can mask. They shuffle off awkwardly into the distance, and I feel like telling them it wouldn't matter. Panda Eyed Girl wouldn't notice. She's punching numbers into her phone, probably Twittering, her self absorbtion so absolute, she barely notices she nearly collides with an only slightly opened shutter, limboing under it, not a blonde hair nor newly plaited pigtail out of place...

My car, just before this exchange, had puttered through Kingston at less than warp speed. Once in my car, a guy in a blue ute with Revving Bastard on the back of his car pulled up next to me in Sandy Bay, revved his revving bastard engine to try and drag me, and then stalled as I drove off with solid efficiency. Today, I am a driving model of solid efficiency, negotiating road works and the arrogant lollipop lady I fight with every day, in her silly oversized coat and Kato like ability to jump out in front of me and hold me up whenever a student might, just might, be somewhere in the region. There's two kids at the bus stop - one is a small, slightly geeky ginger kid with cokebottle glasses and a sinister smile, the other a smaller blonde boy who looks a bit like Michael Christian, and who is always wearing some kind of hat. Whenever I drive past, with a brief glimpse into their self created sitting around at the bus stop world, they are always fighting. At first, it seemed playful, but today at the morning moment when I passed the smaller child was fully, forgive the lapse into Penguinese here, cutting sick with his punches to the ginger kids arm. Maybe he was pushed too far, the hat to the back jokes just mounted up. Mum would probably have got out and stopped them - she's like that, although even she's been dissuaded from that action by too many Mercury horror stories. I drive on. A long time ago, in a draughty scout hall, as the KLF pulsated and a DJ pondered whether flirtacious conversation with a 13 year old girl would get him fired, there was a fight broke out in the corner although since the music was pulsating at an alarming rate of wicked beats over phat choruses not many people saw it - two friends fighting over a girl and where once their fighting had been playful, nay, phat, this was different. The girl in question I had always found quite vulgar - interestingly, she had a quite a posh elongated name but short snappy wee ned vocals that didn't seem to fit, like some strange composite character rebelling against her hyphen. She didn't seem especially phased by the fight, and copped off with the DJ at the back of the stage by the time the teachers had suspended both the brawlers. Obviously the ginger kid is too young to be fighting over girls - unless there's some memo I missed girls are suddenly into cokebottle glasses. I round the corner just in time to nearly hit some ambling kid who is taking his time crossing the road. He's in full on slouching pose, too cool for school but I suspect from my judgemntally clouded windscreen - no wait, it's just dirt - that he will be one day, sadly, not be too cool to be flipping burgers at a popular chain restaurant with a litigious bent. That's the restaurant that has a litigious bent, not his burger flipping style. He's so lazy and apathetic as he holds up my usually frantic mid morning drive, I want to go round the corner and get the hat kid to beat him in the arm just to wake him up. Whatever you could say about the kid in the hat, but he's certainly got spirit...

Laziness has crept into my Saturday - not old enough to give up, not old enough to be tired without it being commented on, but not young enough to be truly hip apparently, but then again not old enough to need a truly new hip - but so has a hangover, something I didn't used to get. On David Boon Day all those years ago - I've got to get to that - I sat on a couch drinking entire cartons of beer with no more than a casual shrug and still retained my ability to suggest that Regurgitator would be a musical force for years to come, just like The Sundays. There's a lack of pulsating music in this pub tonight - no atmosphere, a detached restraunteur in the far corner talking about his business being in decline, a television with Rihanna and the sound off on in the background. I go to come up with some sort of witty Observatory/observing that it's shit in Hobart line, but it'd be wasted on my friends. Besides, I'm drunk, curse it all, and I'm probably babbling on my default topics of sport and music. I know I at least brought up music - if I bring up sport, such is my surety my team will beat Dads team at AFL on Friday night he has taken to calling me smug and it's made me feel I'm jinxing the Pies in the Sky - because I mention the reformation of an allegedly trendy band. A cool girl in short shorts with blonde hair and overly orange make up - I'd say Tangello as a shade but such was my lack of knowledge about fruit at Coles was so poor it's almost certainly not - hears our conversation and asks excitedly if it is true. When I affirm that it is true, she asks if I am a fan of said allegedly trendy band. Now, had I been younger, and been in a desirous position to be amorous with said girl and wake up to a face that made me think of an amber traffic light once it had faded in slightly, and lets face it, we've all been there, I would have said yes, great band, their Led Zeppelin tribute act is truly a marvel of modern invention, I have tickets...alas, I cannot lie, and she skulks off once I say that I am not. I'm accutely aware that I am now too old for such one night stands and lies about music or what I do for a living - no one buys I'm a gad about Scottish playboy anymore, I've lived here too long and probably everyone has seen me at one point or another out and about doing the Tassie two step and word has got around. Besides which, I'm old enough to believe that these nights are fundamentally depressing. In my own hypocritical way, I still go and get drunk and such like things, but less than I used to. On my e-mail, the reasons why no one can go out tonight are getting more and more desperate. Who moves house at 8 at night? Truthfully, we're just at the age where the noisy thump of techno has given way to the quiet strains of Channel 7s football coverage, and instead of sleeping in someone elses bed and trying to sneak out the window, we're sleeping in our own in the afternoon cos we need a nap - or at least, some of us are, my friend of similar age was more than happy to declare himself a fan of said band, which is patently untrue, and if he was confronted in the morning with a face that neither indicates stop or go, I'm happy to leave it between him and his god, which last time I checked wasn't the least singer of that trendy band, and I'm happy to have a long boring talk with my taxi driver about the declining nature of Friday night entertainment...

I have an ambition when I'm old - it's not a noble one - to find a local pub and essentially retire there, flirting with the barmaids, calling them darl, rolling out of bed in my slippers and going straight to the pub to have opinionated chats about sport and glare angrily at locals in my chair. My chair of course will arbitraliry change depending on who's sitting where and I will be truly annoying within the confines of my own narrow world, floating emphatic opinions with absolute certainty and then changing my mind when people agree. Mind you, there is a recession on, so there might be no pubs, we might all live like the Reagan era trolls Michael Stipe used to be obsessed about before he discovered Buddhism and Sesame Street. There's an old man who's taken my desires and acted them out for me as some sort of street theatre involving the returning of biscuits. Such is his unhappiness with some aspect of the exchanging of money for goods and services and a big chocolate cookie, he threatens to bring the alleged biscuit infraction up in parliament. The girl behind the counter looks weary, even older than him, as she grapples with page 82 of the customer service manual provided on induction day - what to do when you really want to say fuck off old man and take your bushy eyebrows with you. She smiles politely but her lips still somehow drip with acid, aware that the ravages of time and the eternal pull of the grave will take care of her grey haired foe. Eventually, she just gives him another cookie and he smiles directly at me with some undeserved triumph, I shuffle uneasily from foot to foot. I think for one moment he's going to demand an up top. There's really nothing to up top about. I know Tasmanian parliament doesn't much to discuss other than how not to give Hamish and Andy a key to the city or problems with chickens, but I can't see them sparing too much time to a biscuit crisis. The girl watches him go, never taking her eyes off him as he walks off to a shop called What's New (not the decor! Am I right folks? Am I...is this thing on?) to complain about something else. I know from her overly pursed lips that she's thinking she'll never be like that, doddering and old and completely pedantic as to worry and complain and harangue about a biscuit because she's young and cool and carefree and won't let things get her down - but of course she will be, and besides, the anxious look on her face when she can't find her tongs and the over exasperated concern on her visage when she forgets where the hedgehog slice is in the stall seems to indicate the process has already started. It happens to the best of us, I feel like saying, maybe putting an arm around her in consolation and pointing out that she's using the tongs to pick up an almond slice...it happened to me the day I began really finding myself hating people mis-using the word ironic...

So very much....

The boy who sat in a jail cell and thought you know I have this idea for something called Twitter

Sharon Jones & The Dap Kings - Taxes
Uploaded by Van_Lock

I had this acid style flashback last night while reclining in my hammock, although my perception of acid flashbacks would be different if I had ever taken acid - who takes acid these days? Is there a pile of Altern 8 fans out there dying for the days of Ayr Pavillion? And yet it's vivid, hypnotically calm. It goes like this. My first ever school outing was in kindergarten to the Penguin police station. Penguin wasn't a hotbed of crime - as I've said before, one time the Penguin police chief took an ad out in the local paper saying he was going on holiday and could all crime related enquiries be directed to Burnie. Sure, occassionally some surly know it all youth would be rude to a tourist or put chewing gum in the collection plate, but the law was respected, respected enough to make sure that quibbling Tom the quibbler wasn't complaining or quibbling for once and he quibbled a lot for a kindergartener - the crayola castle was a constant source of dispute. As the cooing children were shown the joys of a workplace that had less than athletic staff, some of those really impressive 80s phones that were all that kind of yellowy colour with the big finger holes, mugs that had ironic slogans that would be funny once we learned what irony was, and naked ladies since no one had invented sexual harassment yet, eventually some of us were put in one of the cells and in an amusing twist - we hadn't learned what amus...oh never mind - they, they being Chief Wiggum with worse knees and my teacher and her owl like tense faced self, shut the door to the jail cell, locked it, and left us in the cell for a moment. It was a special treat I guess, they hadn't invented SBS yet, they had to give us something. Some of the kids began to cry, some of them got a bit freaked out, some of them simply didn't work out what was happening and began discussing the future and the rise of Tiger economies - OK, they mostly discussed why aquamarine crayons were better than silver ones and anyone who didn't think so was just a quibbler. All around me was chaos and immaturity and kindergarten logic. And I distinctly see myself sitting calmly on one on the available benches, sitting down, shrugging my shoulders and waiting for the fuss to die down like a guy at an airport resigned to the imperative realisation that something will inevitably delay the Jetstar. There was one girl called Georgina who I always remember smelled like Kleenex who was hysterical, wailing on the bars like some overacting benny in the Shawshank Redemption, convinced no one was ever going to let us out of the cell we had been locked in for tour related purposes. I felt different to them - not better maybe, but definitely blessed with enough perspicacity to ensure that I felt no more in danger than I would be for suggesting the real crayon of choice was burnt sienna. That was one magical crayon. Of course, it was also the first moment of alienation I can remember, a seperation of myself from the herd that no amount of shared lego can ever bridge. And then there's the realisation that I may have imagined the whole thing in that way that TV repeats prove that, say, John Farnham didn't sing at a charity concert at the Diner in Home and Away even though you can see it. It may be an amalgam of emotions, of feelings...but then, you know what, I pick up a Kleenex, and the whole thing seems so re...

Sorry, I lost track, you are right, it's fascinating this occupational health and safety lecture, I think I answered that question right, I think I got away with it. It really is fascinating the way the world is now a potential death trap, I mean I slashed my leg open on an Ulverstone slide that someone had left a razor blade on in 1984 and it was brushed off as amusing but sobering anecdote by my Mother, where as now we'd sue their ass - it's a cell of another kind that they put me in today, windowless, lakcing in depth, but obviously very safe. The James O'Loughlin style moderator seems obsessed with the dangers of those wheels on the bottom of chairs - are they called carstairs? Or am I mental? When I drift outside the window, wishing I had the same abilities as my old Swiss nemesis Colin who allegedly could have mid air sex with fellow spirits, I see two underagers kissing in the car park. He's clearly lustful, she's clearly loving. The dichotomies of teenage life summed up in a moment. She thinks he's Clark Gable, he wants to get some. That I say Clark Gable marks me out as old obviously - does she think he's a Jonas Brother? Josh Lawson? Who do the kids like these days? Sorry, um, carstairs? Good guess. James O'Loughlin is trying for a lightness of touch now - he's clearly trying to pad his routine out with a few gags, a peppy step or two, but ironically and somewhat strangely for an OH&S guru, he's falling between two stools - comedy and seriousness. There's a crucial e-mail on my computer I can't get to. It's going to pretty much decide the kind of year I have, my football team on the brink of collapse, apparently because no one in the community, frankly, gives a shit. There's a video playing now - it's hissy and full of static and tracking noises. Who plays a video these days? The 80s fashions are hurting my eyes, a girl with kaleidoscope tights walking awkwardly through a series of minorly hazardous mid 80s dangers with a gallus swagger. The kissers are gone - I used to think comedy was based entirely in repetition, the shared knowledge of what a particular person was referencing, but in this car park, if my instincts and knowledge of barn dances from a million years ago are correct where Southern Sons blinked on the PA system and no one had the courage to pucker up, there's nothing funny about the misguided intentions of a teenage boy pulling that face as he kisses. It's going to be a hell of a bad week for her on Facebook if she puts out I think. Well, wishing her well is probably a form of health and safety. Eventually, the tape we are watching grinds to an ugly halt - the man at the end was once a powerful CEO laid low by economic problems. In the video, he proudly holds up a manual or a file, a document by which to live. He's so proud - that's why I hate video tapes, hate photographs...they capture the moment before you know what the next moment will bring. If only he'd put down the 600 foolscap document and spent more time crossing his ts and dotting his i's, maybe, just maybe, the smile on his face would still be there...

Someone e-mails me a picture - someone I knew in Burnie, someone who's now bald as a bat. He used to walk with suave intentions, but the suaveness has taken it's toll on his noggin. I study the picture for some sense that his lustre and self assuredness has dimmed, but it's not there, he still seems confident and smiling on the arm of a bewildered looking femme, discomforted from every angle. Out of sheer boredom, I rotate the picture on a series of amusing photoshopped angles, upside down and hexagonal, and then delete it. They were such a proud family, and then...well it's funny how we are as people, how we seek to demolish sound family structures one gossipy phone call at a time. God, was it that long ago that I was in his house, playing with Voltrons on the carpet while he offered me the kind of sage advice about girls only a ten year old can dispense to an 8 year old? Uncomfortable, my lunch break is spent with more trivial concerns, the way the girl behind the counter can suddenly look like Guy Smiley, the strange new recipe that's befallen on my sandwich, and the way the other girl behind the counter - not sandwich white female, another one, nose ring and eye shadow, no time for chit chat - is forced by corporate guidance to hand out free frequent sipper cards. I loathe loyalty cards, I can't explain why, they strike me the same way I felt when I was 8 and Mum threatened to cut my hair, like I had become some sort of decrepit hillbilly, punching holes in a card to get the ultimate hillbilly dream of free java, then lining up for my haircut before it was whittling wood hour. Social snobbery has clouded my life for too long. The girl hands it to a guy in a suit, who looks at it and hands it back. He doesn't do as I do, take it and throw it in the bin, he outright rejects it, with a dismissive wave of his meaty paw, as if Nemesis herself had brought retribution on the corporate industry through the returning of a free offer. Score mighty little man. The girl looks as bemused as her mother probably did when she first saw her nose ring, and for a moment looks genuinely crushed. The suited man walks off with purchase with such an undeserved swagger that I feel it would be entirely justified of me to stick my leg out and trip him up. The girl meanwhile returns the card to the deck, and seems to me to be biting her bottom lip - like of all us, she takes the rejection personally, and the acid flashback in my brain seems to take me back to Grade 8, reading a hand written note from a girl that simply said no on it. Either that, or her nose ring just really hurts, it's at a jaunty angle and it looks a bit red. She needs to take a moment just to key in the price of my sandwich. If I could, I'd take her back 10 seconds, when she was still confident about herself and her handouts, but it's a minor moment, she'll get over it. Maybe she'll Twitter about it tonight...I wish sometimes I was on Twitter...those short posts seem mighty tempting, much more tempting than this lousy recipe changed sandwich...I'd complain, but she's suffered enough...

Time passed slowly in that jail cell. It was 5ive minutes tops, but a long 5ive minutes. I needed a book I think. No one had invented the IPOD yet, so I couldn't listen to music like I am now - here I am writing about the passage of time and how uncomfortable it makes me feel and I'm watching a clip where Sharon Jones is dissing George Bush, I mean that's SO 2005 - and the hubbub and the emotion and the fury is boiling. Eventually they let us out - Georgina had a stutter, or else she's be noisily furious - and gave us a talk about how if he committed a crime, we'd end up straight back in there. Seemed fine to me, it was the best rest I'd had in a long time. Of course, not only did officer Wiggum not have any conviction in his speech, but it was far too cute a trick to play on five year olds. Even Georgina one hour later was in the sandpit with lego up her nose. It sort of worked on me a bit - I took at least three hours to reflect before the lesson was dirt on my shoulder that I brushed off like some young Jay Z, and was freely playing with my Whiplash and Power Punch He-Men in the back garden. My Mum always says if I go to jail, she's sending Dad instead. I of course took a moment to put Whiplash down and think briefly about where my life may take me on that wintery Penguin evening - the possibilities were limitless when I was 5ive, a backyard with pampas grass (pampas grass!) a treasure chest of wonder in itself never mind the excitement that another street a block away like Hayward St could provide. I mean, that street was on a hill, imagine! My time in the jail cell had been well spent - it was good thinking time I feel, if the memory hasn't betrayed me. Knowing me, I probably brought up some profound point to someone like quibbling Tom and got called weird and then he would say aquamarine and another tangent would begin. I don't know the meaning of life anymore now than I did then though, and it frustrates me that I don't a little. I know it's not worrying about carstairs though, and I know it's not arguing loudly like the neighbours are about the price of an oven they are selling on their front lawn. Their shrieking is so loud, I have to turn the television up to drown them out, but the last thing I hear is the shreiking sheik of food preparation - the wife always makes immaculate lunches, trust me - telling her husband that wasting her time is a crime. Maybe, I feel like telling him, a night in the cells is in order, good for thinking...I smile as I put my feet up and watch some American comedian bounding around his set to Hanson...time is accelerating ever more rapidly, it's confusing my thoughts, the sky seems to be falling in, everyone seems to be obsessed with OH&S, I'm getting ever older and less ambitious and more sleepy, but just like the kid in that jail cell, in spite of all the hubbub, I just can't bring myself to care...

Oh, and quibbling Tom, it's ALWAYS Burnt Sienna my friend...always...the crayon of champions...

In Nile, no one can hear you scream

The sheep get to me in the middle of Tasmania - they always do. They are, rather conversely, a bunch of hams, gazing from their barren grassless fields and poorly constructed wooden fences with not a trace of concern, although if you beep the horn they scatter in formation. The town of Nile will now be where I go to, creatively, when I try and describe the end of the world, it's so desolate and cold it's biting at my skin, invoking images in my brain none of which are positive - I'm already rattled by a sweeping petrol station in the middle of nowhere which seems no expenses spared but which surely only has 3hree cars a day visit it. Our car drives through it, and through a million towns like it, stuck behind a green Getz that shows no signs of hurry, a meandering motor vehicle driven by a self important man beholden to no speed limit. In many ways though, his driving is perfect for the middle of Tasmania, which seems to stretch endlessly without ever changing with no regard for haste or progress, drought addled yellow field after yellow field, sign posts occasionally popping up to guide you to long forgotten towns ruled by one patriarchal family that everyone secretly hates. You can tell by the peeling paint that those towns aren't in the conscious of the public anymore. Neither the sheep nor the Getz seem especially concerned by social history, and only a long worn out tape in the car is disturbing the stillness. Nile has a sinister serial killer vibe to it - it's so still that under black skies you begin to imagine how long it would take anyone to find you. No one seems like they'd be jogging by in this neighbourhood. no neighbourhood watch existing when the neighbours are miles away. It's no surprise that in the stillness, car talk is about funerals and funeral songs, the only thing we see standing is a church, and one of the sheep stands absolutely undisturbed by the car when his friends all scatter. In fact, in the gloom, it looks like the sheep is corpsing, smiling, enjoying his day. I begin to muse about what happened to Nile - whether there are people here, whether it used to thrive, whether it was always this dark and gloomy - anything to make sure the gnawing Wisconsin Death Trip vibe goes away, just babble really to take my mind of the creep sheep. It's not a Starbucks kind of place Nile, in fact it doesn't seem to be an anything kind of place, unless you want to live in a shack by yourself penning memoirs and manifestos. Appropriately, the tape cuts out at this point, leaving staticy hissing and space to talk, but as soon as the rumination becomes verbal though, the Getz goes off road, disappearing down some long forgotten path following a possibly out of date green sign, slowly but surely disappearing into the distance. The creep sheep finds a patch of grass by some kind of miracle and loses interest in following our progress, and with the Getz getting out while the Getzing is good, we're able to pick up speed, conversationally and literally, rejoining the road and leaving the desoltate isolated towns behind, joining up with ones that are marginally ahead of Nile on points - if you count having a Subway with surly staff, of course, as means to rank one town ahead of another...

A few hours earlier, we had been at a football game - not my team, so my watching was passive, my mood relatively good, my clothes built entirely for comfort. There's a retarded kid on the boundary who has the crowds attention - it says something for the day and age that my first impression as he dances and grabs his groin whenever his teams kicks a goal, hi fiving everyone, is that it's Youtube friendly. He won't be stopped though - he's a mass of physical energy, and he's won the crowd over by the time he sits down exhausted. It sort of seems a trivial detail he really didn't know which team was which and was just joyously cheering everyone. Besides which, his good natured joy is in contrast to a man in a Mexican hat who's obviously looking for fights, shirt off in classic bogan fighting pose. Long limbed teenagers not dressed for the winter mill around the players tunnel - another sign I'm old, I'm noticing girls in danger of catching a chill. My companion takes social aim at the guy standing next to her, and I cringe a little, reading my paper nervously as she loudly proclaims his foibles. I wish I could read the paper normally - there's too many stories I just don't believe, too much cynicism in me to think anything is true. Two rows in front of us is a blonde girl with a specific player number painted on her face and a specific message for one of the players. I suspect she truly believes that if that player sees the message, he'll fall in love her and her life will be perfect. I can see in her expression she genuinely believes this, and whenever that player comes anywhere near our area of the field, she screams extra loud, like she's trying to win a fan in the crowd contest. She will not be deterred by any amount of disparaging looks - which seems to be a Launceston trait. The man on the PA system is a whirl of activity, a hyperactive dervish ensuring any spare moment of thought is taken up with adverts, proclamations and more adverts, each one more frantic than the last. The girl doesn't seem to notice though, her intent now fearsome as she launches into one last squeal of excitement for her man. It pierces through my brain worse than even the more hyperactively super mega important attention shoppers advert, and as the final siren sounds, she seems proud, swaggering, convinced of her own input into the game and that it had an effect. My leg has gone to sleep, so I'm certainly not swaggering - the losing teams merchandise stand has packed up already, and there's tepid chips on sale at 1/2 price. I push past it all in my attempt to escape the masses, despite my love of tepid chips, for I am desperate to get home, and complain to my television that there's nothing on, the true meaning of the weekend...

A few hours earlier, Launceston is a hive of pre game self expression, a strange mix of excitement, personal fashion statements and moral judgements from those who don't believe in either. There's a little tour train driven by a grumpy man in a tartan shirt, who's making no attempt to provide magic for the kids as they drive around the park, up past the herpes riddled monkeys, and then back again. A girl up the back is yelling in delight at everything - trees, people, people with lollipops, park benches, the monkeys, a statue of a botanist - everything elicits a joyous primal scream from the bottom of her little heart. Naturally, self expression is not encouraged, and a plump woman in pink pushing a pram shoots her a glance that suggests joy is not to be tolerated. I just about restrain myself from telling the woman off - a girl still impressed by, quote, a leany tree is to be applauded, not glared at like she beat the woman to the last cupcake. If I had the imagination to make Launceston a magical wonderland, I would, but I can't. I can't remember when my childhood sense of wonder and mystery died, but I'm sure it had something to do with Ayrshire. There are girls around who want to be footballer wives, although a young girl in black hotpants walks past and out of nowhere says she likes Scottish accents. If only I was younger and her hair wasn't so overdyed to the point it looks like she dunked it in grease...oh well. The football is in town, in full swing, although there's a pub with a lack of party atmosphere. A kid with a furrowed Noel Gallagher brow sits outside on his own, reading the form guide and defying anyone to illuminate the world with chirpy football based optimism. He nurses his stubbie like a child, and I think he'll be there again if I go to Launceston in 20ty years time - he doesn't look like a man who believes in progress, or that hair should be longer than 3hree inches. He's every inch a settled regular, the kind who gets served first in queues and for who every slight change in ambience is an ill wind. There's a small hand painted sign on the window that promises lively joker poker, and I imagine on that night, he sits outside, reading his newspaper, proclaiming his individuality by being defiantly unlively. When we come back later to get the car, he's still there in the same seat, although the Joker Poker advert has been postered over by Rebecca Gibney promoting something charitable in a Helvetica Font. I like to think that this has just ruined his whole day, twisting it inside out. It's then I reflect on the tiny insignificant things that have bugged me already today, and I cut him some slack...besides, poker isn't really my game...if I challenged him to a lively game of Uno...no, he's busy...best not to get involved...

A few hours earlier, I'm walking through Hobart, the day ahead of me, the only thing that has happened being a spirited debate on the merits of a Youtube clip and whether it was real or not. I walk past two Indian restaurant owners, putting up signs, who won't get out of the way. I go to over-react, then I remember that whole don't be a jerk thing, and walk around them. I'm trying to pack in a little bit of shopping, although in Hobart, that's relative, we aren't talking Carnaby St. Inside Fullers bookshop, there's books scattered all over the floor, a chalk board thrown at a jaunty angle outside offering lucky patrons the chance to join their readers book group. I pass, stepping over several unsold Peter Costello tomes as I leave, leaving behind several people who wouldn't be seen dead in a chain bookstore, and a man desperately trying to keep his Sanity as he sorts out the messy unsold books on the floor. Eventually, I get my book - a sports book - from a chain bookstore, and since I'm dressed for comfort not style, I'm sure the woman is looking down on me, which makes me think her true calling is working in Fullers, judging anyone buying anything less literary than Gabriel Garcia Marquez. Outside in the mall, there's two people sitting with chocolate milkshakes who are either fighting or breaking up or fighting about breaking up. They stare anywhere but at each other, sipping their milk tersely. The male has over gelled his hair, but even his fringe looks depressed as he purses his lips in an attempt to look unaffected. The girl is more emotional - her self expression is found in her T-shirt, a gold painted slogan which should indicate cheek and sass, but which just confuses and baffles when she looks so sad. She's staring at the specials board of another restaurant, just to have something to look at, their malaise poignantly soundtracked by early morning TV and the clatter as a cleaner pushes a mop. I leave them behind in my haste to be picked up on time from outside the Mercury building, just as she takes one last loud slurp of her milkshake for want of anything better to do. I look back at the chain book store, and the judgemental seller is judging someone else, someone with the temerity to buy the Dawn French book. I leave all this mini world behind, almost dropping my bottle of water in the hurry to escape it, and see what the day will bring...

A few hours before, I'm asleep, and totally unaware that any of this will happen...

Boy paints terrible cat, world keeps on spinning

She sits on her chair all day, on her phone, barely registering the people around her, on her own cloud in her own world. She speaks in exaggerated tones of self importance - every e-mail dissected into a million fragments, every utterance so important it's frightening. She used to be Miss North West Coast I think, but she'll never request that somebody kills her. What she doesn't realise is that her looks are fading, her glory days long behind her, the indulgences of her youth now gathering like clouds on her face. Instead of acceptance though, you'll find her in nightclubs or the football club fundraiser or standing at the taxi rank in the rain with Mr right now, on the way home, hoping the kids don't hear her coming in. I know this, because she's telling another one of her overblown twisting sentences down the phone line, about her latest pick up, some guy officially his name, a story I've heard many times before. I might be mistaken, but as she sips her trendy water bottle, I sense unhappiness for the first time. The story isn't told with it's usual relish. The grind gets everyone in the end - everyone has that moment of realisation that no matter how much they talk up their social situation, it just isn't enough. By the end of the day she's lost all trace of joy, describing human beings as cockroaches because if you stamp on one another one just gets right in your face. Apart from pondering the kind of home she lives in where cockroaches are attacking her once beautiful nose, maybe flying out of cupboards at weird angles, I find it sad no matter my opinion of someone when they sit shorn of self confidence and are stabbed through with regret. However, my mood of empathy is short lived, for tonight she will be the fabulous karaoke queen that she always is - out on the dancefloor on the prowl, Midori in hand, pulling shapes to a thunderous disco beat, and maybe making some lucky amateur footballer from the country feel incredibly special while the kids sit in the living room watching a DVD with the sound up. Then in the morning, she'll get on the phone and tell everyone about it, and while they can hear her voice and the inflections that sound as upbeat as a Presets album, they won't see the lack of light in her eyes as she talks, they won't see her sigh deeply as she forces the smile onto her face, and most of all they won't see her put the phone down and stare blankly out the window, another day passing bay in the midst of devastating last days of hedonism regret...

When we used to visit the old folks homes, under the guidance of Renee the girl who felt honour bound one day to criticise me for spending all my time playing pool while she polished her halo on the minibus, I always got really uncomfortable, not just on the cramped seats of the minibus that felt like they were ripping my excellent posture to shreds, but at how depressing it was having to go and talk to people who looked haunted and resigned to their fates and regrets. Oh sure, you'd come across the odd sparky old person who would make a dirty comment about the nurses arse or who attacked arts and crafts with gusto, but mostly what I remember was the complete stillness of the room, the lack of energy that permeated throughout the place was quite scary to me. The air conditioner would grind it's gears and no one would speak except for the nurse on 20ty cups of coffee who would try and spark dialogue and tell the old folks that what they had drawn didn't look like three lines and a cross but really was a cat. Sometimes the old folks would begin a story with some Grandpa Simpson like exaggeration to it and then in the middle there would be some devastating overly personal twist to it that they would immediately backtrack from or not even realise what they had said and by the time they had gone back onto why you couldn't trust gammon steak as a food source because it was invented by Goebbels, you would shift quite uncomfortably in your chair and focus really intently on your blue poster paint project. I really hated it when they would talk about lost loves or people left behind - that was when I had to break out the green poster paint and really try and paint a decent cat. And I would ultimately out into the mid July Burnie winter a little sad that not only did my cat look rather more like a rocketship, but that time has already passed for those left inside, and all they had to look forward was bingo at 7 and custard at 8. Then I'd cop a mouthful from Renee about how I didn't understand the nature of old people and had spent too much time in silence and obsessing about the relative merits of Clagg glue. Alas and alack, I was just a nervous sulky teenager with a 6ix word vocabulary and an inarticulate heart with which to express my feelings. I really regret that I didn't say shut up Renee nearly enough, so here goes...shut up Renee! There that feels better. The mini bus would then pull away at a slow deliberate speed, and as it did, you would sadly leave behind what you learned in the car park, and go and make exactly the same mistakes the old folks did. By the time I got home and logged onto to the AMIGA to play a game of Sensible Soccer, life lessons had already drifted out the window just as soon as Ferencvaros went one down to Galatasary and I had to fight really hard on the joystick for an equaliser...

We've got visitors over from Dads home town of Paisley right now - the town where Dads Dad lurks around bowls clubs with his pint and his well nursed grudge, or so we think - and they hold court on my deck about the credit crunch. I think the credit crunch is just an excuse for companies to sack people they don't like, but that's just me. Back home, the visitors cousin has just lost his job, and aghast they tell us tales about how no one in Britain can afford to buy a fitted kitchen anymore. Nothing says hard times like wee Wullie no getting his kitchen fitted. Paisley is where my football team St Mirren plays. It's one of those places where newspaper based fear means no one goes out at night, and it's full of little fish and chip shops where there's one fat woman with albino skin bossing around like 7even little blonde girls who could be hot if they weren't smelling of chip fat - sort of Snow Cellulite and the Seven Blondes. It's also where I saw someone through a major tantrum because the newsagent ran out of copies of The Sun, an entire day ruined simply through an overstimulated brain making up problems. St Mirren are fun to go and watch, if you like moaning that is - after about 10 seconds, an embittered air settles on the ground. One time, I stood outside Love Street our ground for ages waiting to get in ahead of a Challenge cup tie against Forfar - which in soccer terms is the equivalent of waiting to go and see Tiffany support Marilyn - and apparently there was a bomb scare, and across the road from me was we in Scotland call a Jakie, an alcoholic if you will, in a grey camel coat shambolically sitting on a white girder eating chips and revelling in the way the crumbs settled onto his muzzly beard. Naturally, my middle class superiority instincts kicked in. Oh my god, I swooned, the deprivation of this place. I had fallen for the newspapers spiel I must admit - and from the fact everyone who lives in Paisley seems to tell you how bloody awful it is. I had already composed some sort of decaying urban society monologue in my head, and had decided that this man, who was in his 40s was a ship builder who had lost his job. I even toyed with the idea of throwing 20p in his cup, but thought better of it because he had wild eyes and the paper taught me that was a bad sign for my own safety. Just as this patronising drivel came to an end, the prettiest of the blonde chip shop army - very much the Happy - came running out and gave him a kiss which came straight out of the opening bit of a porn film. As he kissed her, I'm sure he shot me a look of abject pity - after all, I was about to pay 15 pounds to go and see St Mirren, and he was pashing a girl who had a thing for the abjectly drunk...who had more to regret...I should have written a letter to the Paisley Daily Express really...

The visitors leave, Mum has to show them the Eastlands shopping centre. You come all the way from Scotland and all you get is Panda Eyed Girl selling you a lousy T-shirt. Apparently they've been moaning a bit about things, so I don't see how Big W is going to improve their mood. We're an honest people, don't ask us a question. I know of at least one waitress in Burnie who was told the reason a meal wasn't finished was because her face had put the diner off his dinner. I'm trying not to be a jerk at the moment. I'm trying not to throw my hands up in despair when someone cuts me off by walking across me, that kind of thing, the kind of thing that makes you wonder why the hell you did that, does it really matter in the grand scheme of things? The visitors leave behind copies of newspapers and some sweets from home, the newspapers suitably hysterical that the world is ending, particularly in Paisley. Maybe it is, and all I have to worry about is that my pillow is really lousy. It is lousy though. Tonight I'll mostly be stuck in a car driving back from Launceston, my recurring nightmare write large in big day glo letters, but even that doesn't seem so bad. Somewhere out there on the dance floor a rapidly middle aging woman will throw desperate shapes to the sounds of MGMT - I wouldn't judge, but it's killing her. Down at the end of my street, there's a guy in a green shirt with a charity tin that he shakes with vim and vigour. The fact is though that he only shakes the tin to pick up girls. He's not fussy, and has no moral dilemmas about doing this - I'm not even sure he is a charity collector, and I know this because if a Male tries to give money he looks in the other direction but a middle aged housewive in sweat pants is more than encouraged. I should introduce the two of them to each other. All over Hobart tonight, people will do things they regret, but other people will act questionably and never feel bad about it in the slightest. And I will go to sleep fully aware that the tiniest, the most miniscule little thing will probably strike me at about 3hree in the morning, some stupid inappropriate piece of gossip from 1996 I can't take back. I'm just like that - I'm on the moral clock all the time, damn being Catholic. Maybe one day I'll be sitting in an old folks home discussing Clagg Glue and suddenly blurt out something, and be aware that I've turned into an old age Simba. Until that day comes though, I'm at least going to give that whole don't be a jerk thing a try. Who knows, maybe someone will pick me while the Presets play...

No, I'd really regret that...the Presets are already soooooo last year...

Heather Small, Mike Pickering, Paul Heard, DJ Shovell...

Morning is not my friend - a meandering muddled mind struggling for meaning midway between sleep and the reality of a new day facing mothers with prams aggressively seeking to mar my shins with marks from the prams tyres as they cut diagonally across my walkway. Morning motivation is limited - with blurry eyes, survival is the only mantra. If only I had a motto - a motto that wasn't what kind of wanker has a motto, and I just nicked that off Tony Martin anyway. I've flirted with the teachings of a guru from time to time and always been mired in my own cynicism. When I had a job that involved selling knifes, the man leading the group was majestic in his belief that he was the man with not just a plan but a map, a map that would lead us to inner fulfilment if we could just get in the door to convince Martha at Mangrove Street to part with some moolah and buy some of our knifes, sharp as machetes they were, cut through anything according to the spiel. He thought he could move mountains just through flicking on the switch on a tape recorded and filling our heads with mood music, but he was mistaken and in the end he must have realised that as he failed to crack the moody countenance of the back row. There's no muesli in the house - I don't think I've had muesli since my paramour told me that I looked a little flabby around the middle and decided that I had to get fit - muscular in fact. Muesli didn't agree with my system, and it became another failed motivational trick, one that went into my mental to do list, a list that's so long it's positively massive. I need ten more minutes to sleep, ten more minutes to continue the beautiful dream I'm having about Martina Hingis. It's nothing like THAT - I save that for Jennifer Adams. It's more a magic realism kind of dream. Magpies burst into flames and to quote Homer Simpson - although I prefer Millhouse - nothing is what it seems. Waking up with a bash of the alarm clocks mad chiming, I mutter something under my breath that may or may not be a curse word. I don't know whether I said it in the real world or the dream world though. Martina doesn't seem to mind though. She's good like that, placid in her moods. When I get up, there's nothing in the fridge. The milk isn't off, but there's not much of it. Maybe I could go to the shops in my bleary eyed state and get more, but I can't be bothered. Maybe, it seems to be my favourite word at the moment. Soft, non committal, gentle enough to mention in the hope that it will cause the conversation to move in a different direction. Melbourne? Maybe. You never know, maybe you can come. Sounds positively soothing, mellow really. For some reason my fridge has more Mars Bars in it that breakfast material. I used to eat a lot of sugary cereals, but there is at least the joys of Mango juice or some kind of mocha coffee treat. My Mug, for what its worth, has no kind of zany motto on it - no you don't have to be crazy to work here but it helps - it just MUG in a sort of communist Maoist font, gritty and somehow perfect for someone Scottish. We don't have time to muck around you now - we've got moaning to do, and god help us if you hinder us from it...

Maybe music will make me feel more motivated. I have a radio in my shower - one of those gifts people who don't know you that well will give you when you move house, and in those moments when you are sitting mired on the mat in your living room and you can't be bothered unpacking your couch you can maybe put it on the mantelpiece so at least it vaguely feels like home - shaped like a tuna fish. When you move the fins to the left it changes radio station but most mornings it just plays static through the speakers, the transmitter in Hobart is up a mountain anyway. I've never climbed a mountain. I said I did, but then I told a girl in a nightclub I ran a marathon once which was such a flimsy mistruth that I almost apologized midway through the story just to make amends with my God. Not that I believe in a supreme deity or any kind of dogmatic master of the universe, so I would have had to apologize for that as well. What actually happened was we climbed three hills in the less than Himalayic mountainous region of, like, Berwick or something in the Scottish borders on a school trip. My mate was supposed to put a flag at the summit, but he mislaid it, so our march on the mountain was less than glorious, and not even a certificate printed in a Mangal font could really soothe the embarrassment. Miley Cyrus is on the radio, through the static and the mess. There's a misapprehension among my friends that I'm a massive Miley maniac, but it's not true - I like, well, love one song and that's because it makes me think about some other piece of music. My invitation to my soiree though had her mug on it, and it's stuck. I have considered fighting my corner by promoting a more independent band with more musical cred and perhaps a myth busting melody that smashed musical genres and conventional thinking, but who am I kidding, I'm too middle aged to change now, and I still prefer a song that has a mid song instrumental dance bit anyway. I forget sometimes that if I have the dishwasher motoring in the background the water in my shower is only of a moderate temperature which just makes me mad when I have to skip down the hallway cursing like a mariner to turn it off. This luckily doesn't happen this morning. The radio is playing all the usual - the DJs are musing on the merits of a particular idea, one laughs and cut the other one off mid stream to throw to a song. It's a messy segue. I wonder why so many people like Pink - she's meant to be some sort of rabble rousing mixed up outsider, but I don't get it. Every break she comes on, mentioning again that her Mother didn't love her or something like that. I turn off the radio - my own Mother does love me, so a connection or meeting of minds is unlikely between me and Pink. I did have a dream we went out once though and then had a big fight in the middle of Burnie. Right outside McDonalds. I should stop thinking about food though - with nothing more meaty to eat than toast, thinking about food just makes me feel malnourished. Of course, on my fridge like some sort of meter of perspective is my sponsor child, embacked on a glossy leaflet which shows some kids in Mali milling around a maize field trying to get through their day. My sponsor child is from Uganda, and every Xmas I have to send her some stickers just to show I'm maybe possibly thinking about her. I'd love to say I use this fridgey magnet type display to remind myself of how lucky I am to live in a Western world where a frozen up or mislaid IPOD is cause for mayhem and upset compared to months of starvation and malaise, but of course it doesn't. The fact I have to get a petrol cap from the mechanics is enough to turn into some sort of whirling dervish, a mardy soul lost in the universe, all perspective lost in the fleeting moments of mild inconvenience...

Real upset comes when you lose a loved one. My cousin dying, that was not easy to get through. He supported a football team called Motherwell, and we drove around for miles and miles trying to find their ground last May just so we could see a brick with his name on it in tribute, a massively overweight security guard left to break the news that they had put the padlocks on the metal gates and we had to move away solemnly. That gave me perspective. For a moment anyway, for at this very moment traffic is annoying me - middle aged mothers driving Mitsubishi Magnas with erratic disdain moving into my lane without indicating with their middle child offspring frantically indicating (oh the irony) the paucity of their mothers driving skills. I throw my hands up in impotent fury, but the moment is past anyway. I'd love to be somewhere else - Milan maybe, swanning around in my Mexico top, the one with the big tongued Aztec on it that I wear all the time but which now has a big hole in it I'm too lazy to mend - but I'm ground in traffic that's come to a complete halt. I wonder sometimes if there's a market for some sort of genuinely priced Fantasy Island, but without the midget or Ricardo Montalban talking in that made up language. Mind you, where to begin - there's so many things I've never managed to get around to. I've never had a muse, someone to inspire me to make something of significant artistic merit. Well, I had a girlfriend who taught me how to make marshmallow squares, a muse of sorts since she thought the trick was not to go mental with the marshmallows and focus on the square. I've never been on a murder mystery weekend - that's my mothers fault, she'd have a real go at me if I traipsed off into the mountains dressed like a millionaire to try and unravel who was knifing the butler before we all retreated to the pantry for mugs of tea and mildly theatrical chit chat. The traffic moves about a metre a minute. A flashing sign by the side of the road tells me there will be delays next week, stretching to most of March, due to road works, as mauve faced council workers argue over the best way to make a road marginally better than it was before. Some days the tension is so palpable you expect some sort of road based mutiny - maybe in more hot blooded regions of Middle America I guess, not in Tasmania, the most we get is the impatient beep of the horn and the occasional moron flashing his lights at you like he's in charge of dance and movement at the local disco. Sometimes I wonder about the faces inside their motor vehicles as the meander down the highway in strict military formation. Do they think like me if only I had been more motivated, if only I had had more manacling parents who shackled me to the books and had the right connections at the Melbourne Club, if they had marched me out of bed every morning just to make sure that I was motivated to do my Maths homework, if only I had made decisions that were more uplifting, then maybe I wouldn't be in this gridlock at this time, I could be driving to see my model girlfriend with my millionaire swagger...and then you realise those people are just as miserable as you, they just get to make pouty faces in more magnificent surrounds. A money report comes on the radio - mentioning many times over and over again that times are tough and every penny needs to be squeezed until it's made its way into your bloodstream. It's immediately interrupted by an over the top media advertorial for David Campbell singing at the DEC - he likes to call his music blue eyed soul, and I have a different word for it, but this website is rated M at worst so I'll move on. It seems a mixed message to me - save your money, but then go and blow it all and go and see David Campbell mangling the classics with his shoddy microphone technique...luckily, Moses parts the red sea of Micras, and there's a gap in the road which I seize with my blue eyed driving. I wish I wasn't so impatient, but there's a muffin in the fridge at work, that I can't possibly miss out on...

I talk to my mate about possibly joining Myspace. I'd do it secretly, so no one could tag me with photos of my ugly mug grinning like a mad man and I could stalk minor television personalities with the minimum of legal risk. My local library hums with the activity of the terminally nerdy - they hunch over their mouse clicking and pointing madly at pixels that whirr and click at the speed of megabytes. Sometimes they'll make sure that their mates are mined to the same in joke grid that they are, nudging and bumping them in violent mating rituals any time a boob appears on a screen for a microsecond. In this milieu of enjoyment, I cut a morose figure almost by default, sitting reading the Mercury at a quiet moment around midday on a table varnished to look like maple. If I can, I like to find the bit in the paper where really minor celebrities gather to, quote, ham it up - that's my favourite ever Murdoch media empire catchphrase, it's a lot better than murdering Labors chances at elections. The middle class intellectuals are most upset by the milling of noise that masses around them, a particularly robust male making withering faces at the nerds, as he struggles to read his tome about cricket and the more Corinthian days of test matches. I would give my left arm for a Choc Pine Big M at this minute. As I struggle with the complexities of a story that seems to go nowhere, an opinion piece in a magazine which tries to muster up a majestic fury on an issue only to lose itself in a series of in jokes and millennium old references, one of the nerds is marched from the library. His crime was to get too excited over the pixellated boobs, and a librarian in thrall in the Millers winter catalogue with the faintest tint of a mullet from the Ailsa collection decided that she had to defend the model on the monitors honour, and made her own little stand. I think she could tell when the mouse clicks became a little too frantic that it was time for a movement away from her own monitor, her movements so swift and deadly it was like a Marxist guerrilla in San Salvador swooping on her liberal enemies. So the nerd was thrown out before adding masturbation to the list of things banned from the library, and the rest of his mates mainly stayed motionless, and pretended to suddenly be massively excited about Twitter. The commotion was too much for my cricketing friend - remembering the good old days of Matthews and Moxon, he got up and stormed out in a huff, a paragraph about the MCG forever undigested by his judgemental mind, his patience well and truly bowled middle and leg. Outside the library, some plump girls who are retaining mallows are discussing motherhood, mostly the positives though some of the moans come through in the moment I pass. I've been thrown off a bus, thrown out of a movie theatre after getting into fisticuffs, but never marched from a library. The mothers club meeting seems to involve using the massive plumpness to block to the footpath, middle managers struggling to step over their meaty thighs on the way back to their own meeting where they'll mete out minimum expectations to the room with a puffed out chest. They'll be oblivious to the fact that the room isn't listening, and couldn't really care less, their minds wandering into mazes of random thought to keep themselves sane. In my case these thoughts will loop back around on themselves and become little sections of ideas that could in a more focused mind become something more - the middle part of an unfinished magnum opus I'll never get around to writing. Alas, I'll get distracted by another idea, and end up staring at the masses of gamblers huddled outside the TOTE, and I'll begin to construct a story about them, an ideal, a description that could accurately mention their main characteristics in the merest possible way, with slight details and a reference to a chocolate you've never...sorry, my focus needs to return to looking vaguely attentive...yes, meetings are fascinating, I really take them seriously...please, please do go on...

Aren't you glad you didn't give me the letter X...

Discomforting Greenock Bus Stops bleeding into Discomforting KMart arguments

Family trails lead to strange places - like Greenock at 2 in the afternoon, a blistering sunshine shining on a world that is asking itself serious moral questions, a blinking world crawling into a new weekend immediately after 9/11, everyone making sure they read the newspaper at the right bits. In the new 2001 seriousness, no one wants to be reading the Striker comic strip in the super soaraway Sun, or debating celebrity flippancy. I'm doing my bit, reading with the correct moral imperatives and proper tones of judgement infused into every movement of my eyebrows. A girl in a short skirt peers at my eyebrow movement and correctly guesses that I'm all about the issues, and says isn't it terrible. Her in depth assumption that a significant attack that claimed many lives is, indeed, terrible seems to lack a certain emphasis, but I let it go. Over her shoulder appears a drunk in a Rangers top - he has no moral questions to ask himself, as his football team are playing, damn the world and all. With hissing affirmations of his own self assurance, and drunken breath that could stop a poker game in Claremont, he leers at both of us to ask us essentially if we're for his team or against his team. Sure, he extends some of the syllables to really make sure we taste the McEwans from the back of his throat, and I'm able to fend off his more offensive religious comparisons with a nod and a slightly patronising smile. The girl meanwhile has a look on her face like she's been confronted by Matthew Newtons New Zealand accent. I hope I'm looking cool, or at least masking the terror that I'm about to battered and need medical help in the less than salubrious surrounds of Greenock General Hospital by reading my paper even more intently. Eventually, satisifed that he has made his point that he is indeed in a position of moral superiority based on selecting one cotton based football shirt over another, he slopes off into the sunset apparently oblivious to any impending threat to the Western world, and the girl for some reason follows him, apparently charmed at the extra ks he tacked onto the end of his swear words. By the time I realise she's a prostitute - damn it all if that last little curl at the end of the fringe isn't always a giveaway in Scotland - my attention is taken by a mutant wean, sitting on a park bench across from me just staring beneath a mountain of ignorance and a furrowed brow that betrays the public education system as something that doesn't satiate the curiousity of the terminally bewildered. As the rugged off road bus picks me up and I shuffle through the aisle past old women clutching overstretched Co-Op bags, he never takes his eyes off me, and since I suspect he's picked up on the vaguest hint of a foreign accent and gone into full we don't take kindly to mode, I'm compelled by law to watch him all the way for research purposes, and he refuses to blink as I make my way out of Greenock, the whites of his eyes seeming to be all that remains as my focus eventually drifts from the town towards battered fish and conversation in a Glasgow pub that will, somewhat inevitably, drift towards proving anything anyone holds dear is in fact shite...

This is my standard mid morning, post cheesecake thoughts, dispatches of life leaping around my brain before I have to focus. Funny thing is, strange as it was being verbally berated at a bus stop miles from home and stared out by the idiot offspring of three generations of cousins, I was still more comfortable there than I am right now, trying to seperate friendship groups so I don't have to deal with both sides of the emotional coin at once. I have a friend who's pushing into another group, and like when I dealt with the drunk I'm nodding and smiling - well, in an e-mail sense, although I have the dignity to at least avoid putting together a combination of shift colon and shift 0 - and trying to change the subject, maybe directing the conversation towards that cheeky monkey that went on the rampage. I've never been socially exclusionist, except in extreme circumstances. In fact, there was a party in Burnie where a would be gate crasher was turned away at the door - such innocent times in the mid 90s, one gate crasher not 50ty people who found out about the party on Myspace - and had to sit in the car for four hours on his own listening to 7BU until the person who brought him was ready to go home. When I brought him cake in a mission so sneaky I should have had a codename, his gratitude was so touching, it was pretty scary. So I do have a heart - but really, it's not the time and place for one friend to join another group in Melbourne matrimony. I try and let the situation down gently, but there's a pressing to the responses. I think this friend thinks they've missed out on something. Last time I went to Melbourne I got impossibly drunk and ended up by the side of the Nepean Highway on my own totally lost, ready to vomit and completely unaware of how to tell my host family exactly which netball centre I was outside. I told this to my friend who reacted with the same rapt awe the boy who got the cake did. Which makes my non committal oh you know maybe you can come look a shiny penny response even harder to maintain. I think it's why I like sports - sports and music are easy to talk about, at any juncture in time if anyone brings up a personal problem we can steer the ship back onto safe ground through knowing what coaches should be doing at any one time. As the e-mails continue to fly, I eventually just stop replying. I push the problem aside, dislocate it from my conscience in the rush to cut the first slice of cheesecake from the herd. Maybe a bit Golden Girls, sure, but I suspect clinging to my e-mail box is a demand for dates, times and places when I'm going to Melbourne, and in the face of such demands, casual flippancy about what happened to Gnarls Barkley might not cut it...

My mind goes further back, an uncomfortable end of year hay bale - was it the night Dad got chased by the school fat girl trying to get him to dance, oblivious to law suits and the possibility she might cripple his poorly knees? Or was it the party where the wounded girls all sang Alanis at 3 in the morning and I just loathed everyone? One of them anyway, the dying lights of youth twinkling in the night sky - so much alcohol, so many misdirected conversations trailing off in the discomfort of our fracturing friendships, so much ambition yet to be thwarted by lack of application and lack of motivation. The Kylie saga - she being the girl I loved in Grade 12 who didn't even make the effort to say no - failed to resolve itself, mostly because whenever I talked to her it was just nonsense about nothing that meant anything. In fact, such was the flimsiness of our friendship at the end and the lack of substance to anything we said, I suspect that the jug band in the corner was discussing more serious issues about the human condition than we were, and they mostly rhymed things with jug. Or beer. But mostly jug. At all of those parties someone broke up in a flood of tears and thrown drinks. It was for the best, after all post Grade 12 life takes you in scattered directions, and no one had invented Facebook to maintain the we'll keep in touch eventually thing going on. A kid called Nick sat on the hay bale next to me, looked out onto the courtyard/flaming drums of oil, and said how uncomfortable he was with everything, proving it by being hunched up in an aggressively coiled spring. He was somewhat sceptical of the whole jug band/country interface, and since he was the kid that scientifcally disproved personal jinx as a game, we all listened to him. He was a child borne of wisdom. I think he wanted to have a goodbye conversation with me - he was a good friend of mine - but since I was fixated on woe is me overacting, and I was watching Kylie dance, I think I blew two chats with one moan. Luckily, I had a back up plan, which was different to my normal back up plan of awkward self deprecation. The back up plan was simply to convince myself that jug band music was brilliant, and that I would dance up a storm to every single musical syllable. 212 songs about jugs? Fantastic! Such was my funk on the dance floor, I know Kylie was jealous of the rug I was cutting. Oh yes, it was definitely Persian...at least that's how I remember it. There's every chance that I just got drunk and did the Tassie Two Step, but the most important thing was liberating myself off that hay bale. I wish I could do it more often, but I suspect Boags was just more potent in 1996. Those parties were like strange one night stands, where you can remember the details and you felt good but they were ultimately inconsequential. When you sat on that hay bale, you felt like you were the dead centre of the universe, and no one could tell you one town down a kid just like you was sitting on a hay bale thinking the same things. Still, no one could do the Tassie Two Step quite like me...take that kid just like me in Devonport...

My Dad is on the phone - he's upset with Underbelly, and Mums gots a whole bunch of baby pictures she wants to bring round. I'd love to be more positive, I really would. Discomfort hugs me too easily though. I'd quite like to be the kid who would sit for hours on the school fort when friends needed him too, but I'm just not like that anymore. That said, I am still capable of surprising myself. For when the pictures come, I look and appreciate every single photo, even asking questions about them. Strange, I think as Mum leaves with her mainland tan. I actually did quite well there. I reward myself with a chocolate royal and some pointless music video watching. I try and teach myself every day that ultimately stresses in the world melt away, a discomforting evening is only a temporary setback, but maybe I'm still letting it sink in. The book store continues to fade into oblivion, that's affecting my mood anyway - now they've got huge signs all over the place announcing they are closing, just rubbing it in. In Kmart, theres a fight broken out - two women have gone to grab the same DVD, and one of them has gone ballistic. Absolutely radge. She's spitting and cursing and hissing and blaming everything from the decline of the Tiger economies to Matthew Newtons accent on Underbelly for the accursed wretched fortune she's been destined to suffer. I can't see what the DVD is, but the other woman has her mouth in the classic cartoon agape position, taking the tirade not with fear or apprehension but with complete surprise such a minor inconvenience could be such a horrific nightmare to anyone. Uncomfortable, I move on, just as the swearing reaches Greenock proportions, and a poor short blonde staff member has to step in the adjudicating maelstrom. The last thing I hear as I sweep past the staff member on door bitch duty is some kind of accusation about the innocent womans parentage which makes door bitch visibly wince. The only problem is, she still has a huge grin on her smiley face, thus making the wince a sort of cor blimey people what are they like gesture. It's obviously me - my brain is working on assumptions that the world is concerned about the threat of terrorism while people are looking at sports, I've got a whole thing in my head about how people are ruder and door bitch is acting like her kid has said doo doo head. No wonder I spend my days uncomfortable, I just have too many mental paradoxes competing in my head for air. It's also probably why an empty K-Mart can feel like Greenock eight years ago, everything ultimately feels like a repetitive circle, and why just for the sake of respite I dumb everything down into easily digestible points about actors and their accents...

Just wait until I get to the letter M though, then you'll see some thought patterns...