Don't cry, it just ricochets, into another day, another decade, another piece of paper stuck to the wall

My cousin - the one I don't get on with - and I had this fight when I was 5ive, I was watching an imaginary TV and he turned it off. The fight was pretty intense for 5ive year olds and as a result, we began a lifetime of mutual anipathy and distrust. Or so people tell me anyway, since I don't remember this intoxicating argument and usually yawn when it's trotted out over a cask of Coolabah wine late in the evening when the older relatives have gone to bed. He, on the other hand, takes it personally when it is brought up, as a sore point so sore no cream could salve it, not even the big grey jar that sat in our family bathroom cupboard for years which ended up being so mythologised I was going to take it to show and tell and say it could cure alzheimers. They are flying down in 2wo weeks for a family re-union I'm expected to go to, and I'm not sure I can be bothered. It's one of those occasions I'm certain I'll dread - and late in the evening, someone, maybe his wife, will poke the issue of why we don't get on with a stick. I think not getting on with people though is perfectly fine. Once, in a Troon bowling alley, one of my other cousins gloated so triumphantly about knocking down a set of pins with a black ball that I temporarily felt like fleeing to another family. He's not himself these days though my cousin, rattled by being in a relationship that doesn't seem to be all that fantastic so the moral responsibility falls on me not to cause trouble - his wife, a princess on a throne, depriving the relationship of fun in an OCD like drive to the top, the child they have already burdened with being a burden. He used to do nothing but grin and stroll around in an intoxicated mix of superiority and confidence, but the grin is long gone, or so they tell me. And over a beer in the back garden in 2wo weeks, I'll be sure not to acknowledge it, because what is the point of a family re-union but to pretend everything is fine. Actually, I'm quite looking forward to it. Turn off my imaginary TV will you. And at some point, we'll look at each other and make a vague kind of see you later no really motion, and it won't mean anything, it will be as unmemorable as the coleslaw on offer. I wonder sometimes where I fit into my own family - but I won't mention it. I'll leave the message behind, be good, and talk about sports...like always, if I mention obscure cricketers and keep my head down, I'll be OK...

The reason I bring this is up is because I'm really wary of easy nostalgia, so at least in this case with my cousin I don't need to look back on some sort of magical golden age where we were bestest buds. It's staggering to me to look at photos of, say, my first real love Sarah or that girl I never asked out Pippa that I really liked, and see that they were just kids and I had no teeth and a big gummy innocent smile, or that the fort I used to jump off was tiny and low to the ground. In my mind, there's this stridently wonderful memory of jumping around Kilwinning discos to thumping rave music like Altern 8, off my head on what was probably Tic Tacs, but I suspect it was nothing like that. In fact, I'm pretty sure that I didn't dance because I can't, and that the music was actually tinny and unfathomable. I've got this friend who just sends me e-mails all day with 80s celebrities in them, and that's how we communicate. She sends me the words Darryl and Braithwaite and 6ix e-mails later that's that subject covered. In the case of my cousin, there's no golden summer where we magically bonded. What I do have though is a home movie where at least we both look happy. It's a grainy tape where I've got this bad haircut and am cutting a message for my Grandma and everything looks fantastically 80s like it's been recreated for a TV show. He was the closest thing I had to a friend, as much from location as anything else, since he was the only relation I had that lived with me in Penguin and yet I can't remember a positive thing about our time together. There must be something, I said today to my friend, attempting a bit of a pour my heart out e-mail. She e-mailed back whatever happened to Tony Barber. Thanks. There must be something though, I even flicked through the pages of 4our4our2wo at lunch not really reading the glossy article about Robinho, just letting time slip through my mind as I tried to come up with something, anything, and believe me, I'm normally an ace when it comes to conjuring up a positive memory or 2wo. I mean, I've convinced myself the world would be a better place of Kim Wilde was still hot, and the Egg Flip Big M was still the nations favourite drink. It was a bit sad that I had absolutely nothing from our relationship to fall back on - then I got distracted by Holly Valance on my IPOD, and I had to let the moment fall to the floor, fully aware that I'd get back to thinking about it one day. Or maybe not. Certainly Egg Flip Big Ms, now that's a subject I'm passionate about, you are probably lucky I don't blog about it every day...

The book shop, by the way, closed today, a little printed out note stuck to the shutter doors. It was apparently open for 20nine years, which is my whole lifetime, some little ambitious thriving turn of the 80s business man with raw powerful corporate plans set up shop one day and now they've been driven out by something as basic and crappy as high rent. It's just a little piece of social history in an otherwise unremarkable setting, although in the dash for powdered milk, muffins and hockey sticks, I think I'm the only person to notice. There's a screaming kid in a blue Kangaroos beanie who definitely doesn't notice, he's screaming his head off about football over and over again. What I find interesting is when he says to his Mum something about something that happened on Saturday - I can't decode hyperbole at this decibel with an IPOD on at this background - and realise that he's basically indulging in nostalgia at a young age. OK, it's nostalgia for 2wo days ago, but still. His mother looks terribly aged, and she doesn't seem to share the enthusiasm for all our yesteryears as she patiently pushes a trolley around. My Mum has this big thing at the moment for saving, and when she came round for tea the other day she used a book I bought for 29.95 as some sort of conversational jumping point about the economic crisis - my mother will sometimes drop buzzwords in over tea and biscuits, although I still haven't heard her say bromance and Twitter - and I was able to nudge her out the door...sorry, parlay her conversational thrust by pointing out the decline of the bookstore. I even got up to the poor Classical music loving IPOD man reduced to the indignity of casual clothes, but she's on a diet, so her eyes were dancing around the array of chocolate biscuits in my cupboard. I find it interesting that this is where my mind takes me - straight to nostalgia from 2wo days ago. I had a hangover, remember that, what a great day, Mum wanted a Tim Tam...this amuses me endlessly that me and Mum unwittingly acted out a similar conversation to the Mum and kid in the mall, except I was the weary and tired one and she was the excited chattering child munching on something she shouldn't. Who can I share this with? My cousin? My friend who will e-mail me the words Jo Beth Taylor? The kid obviously doesn't care, and he charges off into the distance, screaming something about Corey Jones as his mother trudges off one ugh boot step at a time...

When I get home, I flick through my diaries to see if there was a time where me and my cousin - and I say diaries, I have 2wo, one from 97 which is so detailed and benny, and a 1/2 arsed one from 99 which was supposed to be the memoirs of a failed relationship but didn't get beyond wasn't ATARI great, so no change there - got on. I have this wonderful memory of a girl in Girvan - and I will say about Girvan, it's more renowed for chibbings than poetic sepia toned memories - who I talked to on a roundabout when I was about 11ven. There was a big private joke about something in Girvan called Auld Stumpy, a jail I think from memory, and when we saw a guy with a wooden leg walk past, even a joke writer on Friends could come up with something amusing about his sense of comic timing to walk by at that moment. I don't know her name, and it wasn't even a flirtacious conversation, but it was a good day, and I know she got the bus home to Dreghorn because she said the bus driver was an old perve, and when she got on the bus she rolled her eyes as if to say see I told you as a toothless hai...and obviously, I don't need my diary to remember all this, and yet I can't think of one positive moment with one of my closest relatives. I close my diary at this point, for it is a little sad. Still, I can't take it back now, and while I'm sure the logical and mature end to this would be to create some magical moment for the ages at the family re-union, but it simply can't be done. Back in the present, one of my other friends sounds grumpy on the phone as be gets upset about the story that on Friday night he burned everyone and snobbed them on the way past the table. I want to tell him not to lose friends over something so trivial, and I almost go to say something about not getting so worked up about turning off an imaginary TV, but of course, I don't. I'm too busy laughing at several jokes about Auld Stumpy, and his fury dissipates down the phone line, until it's a distant buzz in my ear...

Now, the Egg Flip Big M...

Just do your thing, we'll see how it goes, but what if your thing isn't that good to begin with

When I lived in Mount Stuart - many years ago when Beaverloop still had hopes of being a huge band and I still had hopes of a bright intellectual future and it was a time when you couldn't openly say You're The Voice was a great song - we lived with this girl who turned out to be a fat robber. There was supposed to be a big cooking roster but essentially we lived off charity ice creams that never went to charity and KFC from the takeaway store down the bottom of the hill. One night, Ronnie Biggs decided that she was going to cook us tea, and she made a casserole that she slaved over for a long time. Given her questionable character, I suspect it was salted with the tears of orphans, but anyway, she made a big production about this casserole, even doing the chef thing where you whip the top off the tray with a dramatic flourish. Needless to say, while in cooking the first bite was with the eye, unfortunately the second bite was with the mouth, and it was bloody awful. It tasted like the food equivalent of a bands B Side collection, scraped together from off cuts and things found on the floor and, dare I say it, things she took for herself. We retreated to my bedroom, and since my bedroom backed onto a balcony, went outside into the cold and tried to throw it to birds and stray wolves, but even they didn't want it. To put that in context, we threw a Spiderman ball out the window once and went outside three seconds later and it was gone, so it wasn't an especially picky crowd of fossickers and gatherers. The birds flew away to feast on the scraps of KFC, and the wolves went back to howling outside Steves Kebab House. Naturally, since everyone went from the dinner table and came back with clean plates six seconds later - oh my hand written diary in 1997 was nothing if not time accurate - the girl realised her meal was awful, and was legitimately crushed. I sat and ruminated that night in my Arial Black handwriting that her problem, well, among her many problems including social psychosis and theft and the fact she nicked a copy of Jagged Little Pill was that she tried. It's there in black and white, the lazy ironists handwriting. How dare someone try. It seems jarring to me when I read it back now, but it was an awful casserole, but in the middle of a diary entirely with lists of favourite singles, and references I no longer get, to come up with something that sort of sums up that whole year, well, I wasn't expecting it. I didn't really try very hard at anything that year except keeping a diary and making sure I didn't get robbed again. It was that kind of house though...if the orphans had got their ice creams it could have been worse...

Last night we were drinking outside the once majestic Irish Murphys, which is now just this horrendous awful place with bullying bouncers and everyone standing around this one keg shaped table bumping into each other. I realise when I say this, were I 18een I'd probably find the place fascinating and charming, but I'm a bit jaded with the whole thing now. One of my friends just totally snobbed us out, and that got some discussion going. I've got this other friend who whenever he sees this one girl just goes into full on oh why didn't I ask her out damn it damn life weird mode, and it's just not edifying as a spectacle. He's talking about cards on the table - shouldn't it be cards on the Internet, with the amount of offices wasting time playing solitaire - and I'm the one who always ends up saying don't do it you crazy fool like some wizened old geezer in a western movie trying to tell the young kids not to, I don't know, tackle the black horsed posse. I swear some nights I'm this close to saying consarnit and growing an old mans beard like crazy old varmits of yore. The thing is, I've decided from now on to say go for it, because what the hell, it's going to be a complete debacle, but it's better than being unsure and bending my ear about it. There's a guy standing outside the pub in a Manchester shirt who looks like he's hoping to pick up entirely on the basis of some neatly trimmed eyebrows, and a woman the very definition of the phrase mutton dressed as mutton who's, and I will say I don't know the context, bawling and shouting all over the place that her son slept with her daughter, which I believe is some of the alternate wording to You're The Voice. I must admit, the start of every evening is my favourite part, when the night crackles with possibilities, and you are still sober enough to just be happy to see your friends. I feel like sometimes, just going out is a form of trying in itself, and you hope by having done so, the night doesn't end up being trying. My friend has moved the card analogy onto one about, I don't know, ships that sail in the night or bands that never reform or some such nonsense, while the well groomed eyebrows of Top Manc have moved on to some other bar to stand outside wistfully and with mystery. For him and mutton girl, the night is young, the drinks are cheap, and who knows what tonight will bring. I suspect hangovers, where as I, on current pace, will simply end up with a busted eardrum...

My sports team never seem to try - well they never seem to win, which may be a different thing, and once again fail miserably. I like, well, I guess tolerate, the association people have with me and my sports team. When they play, people think of me, which is nice, but it would be nicer if they were any good, and not awful and reduce a crowded bar to about 4our people with their awful efforts. Naturally, since sports are on, there's no girls in bar, which might account for the fact that everyone files out in orderly fashion, there were rumours that maybe girls were spotted in a direction near the taxi rank. Shirts and collars are turned up as the Males leave, the barmaids tired already of being hit on as they ferry undercooked chips hither and tither. There's a grim looking Maori undertaker type picking up stools and making sure that all fun is orderly and timely and not too rambunctious. I get a rum induced flashback whenever he walks around, to the way teachers used to police school discos at Kilwinning and make sure winching never got into anything more flagrant. His is a thankless job, but his personality and his perfectly round head which screams intimidation, at least from a technical standpoint, make him well suited to the task of bouncering. A band plays some cover versions no one is listening to. The lead singer has dreams of being a rock star, but all he got was this lousy gig. It doesn't stop him trying though, he throws shapes to the large crowd in his mind as he digs out, sigh, a Train cover, you know the one, the one all pub bands do. In the corner, two guys, one with a sleazy look on his face, the other a rather shifty looking wingman, are sizing up one of the barmaids. Our favourite barmaid, and it's for different reasons across the group, the hairdresser one with the zomg things are shiny outlook, isn't on tonight, but this duo are planning an all out whats your sign assault on some poor girl who isn't even aware they exist. I kind of like the effort going on all around me, people really trying, people really determined to make this cold Friday night a memorable evening. I can't shake the little flickering box in the corner though where my so called personal sports representatives are floundering aimlessly. How could they do this to me I wonder, for all of 5ive seconds. They didn't try, so why should I bother worrying. In fact, without any trace of irony, and with many traces of rum, I'm soon throwing myself around a dance floor, quite happily, the little embittered sports fan on my shoulder shut down by loud noise, pride in my own dance steps however misguided, and by natures natural emboldener, more rum than the human body can handle...

About 7even years ago, I was watching the same sports team in much the same manner, and while my friends were getting banned from Montgomeries for life for abuse of the karaoke system, I was on the phone to dad calling them the c word down the phone and missed the whole thing. Popular culture swept me up a long time ago, and I'm ready to move on from it, unless Lily Allen is after a date to the Brits. I feel sometimes like the victim of repetitive cycles and patterns. What I plan to do is change them, not put my life in the hands of sports teams and bands and self consciousness, but to try harder. Obviously, this means more aimless nights in Syrup, where I don't go last night, due not to sports but because, well, it's Syrup, it's not especially great, and I can't dance anyway. You see the trouble is, I come from the "aye we see you" country - Scotland isn't a country that encourages bold statements of individuality. What it is great at and why I love it because it's cynical and hard and tough and yet I hate it for the same reasons. It's probably because I'm Scottish that I tip the taxi driver entirely for not talking to me, and don't see much point in pretending the Syrup is a panacea or some sort of dancing emporium. My friend - having lost all his cards apparently, or put them back in his pocket - charges over there like a bull, he can't wait to shimmy the night away to Dave Dobbyn. As much as I'd like a more positive outlook on life, well one that was less everything is bloody awful, I still think I'm allowed to think Syrup really aint that great. The DJ in there who looks like he's about to jump out the window puts me off. There's just this contrary battle in my head when I'm in there - the DJ puts me off because he hates being there, the dancers annoy me because they are throwing massive shapes around a strippers pole and it looks frankly awful, and I'm somewhere in between doing the Tassie two step with not enough detached irony to make it work but not enough effort to make it worth even being there. That said, I am determined to make it work a bit more - the breadth of my experiences is getting wider, in the space of about 6ix months I've been to both the best thing and worst thing I've ever been to, and I'm not judgemental to the Syrup queue jostlers...I wish them well as my taxi speeds off home, in perfect, beautiful silence...

And later, I make myself a casserole, so that was good...I'm also not a thief...2-0 to me I'd say...

Did he realise how quick it had all been? Not at all, not until he saw the sign...

I've been a hostage to by shoes in the last few days - not that they've lead me to some special place via an enchanted spell, just that they are new, and painful, and make me shuffle awkwardly like a grumpy penguin until I need to sit down. They've been like wheel clamps these things, little leather wheel clamps clinging to my heels. Whats been interesting about these shoes - what wasn't interesting and unable to be paragraphed with proper phrasing was the weird hypnotically evil looking eyes of the girl who sold me the shoes in Harris Scarfe which twinkled with some kind of strange mischief like she was about to tell me the shoes opened up a magic portal - is that in my full on shuffle stage, I've become everything I hate, that is a slow walker holding everyone up. As I wandered through the midst of the single mothers and the cigarette stained shop girls, I couldn't help but notice that I was ambling at a pace that was well below my usual stride, and several groups of kids brushed past me as they excitedly discussed some girl named Sharon. Sharon seemed to have a hell of a weekend. Anyway, things got so bad today that I had to go and sit down opposite a sports shop. Most of the shops in Hobart these days have a depressing air about them, Harris Scarfe for instance has long faded from it's glory days when it was Fitzgeralds and hired creepy Santas by the dozen. Most shops I go into in Hobart have a warehouse feel, like the ones that cropped up in Ayrshire on the edge of town, the big shed ones where cordial was a gallon for a pound. Plastered all over the walls are signs with big percentages off, and shop girls mill around aimlessly. I swear my grey headed curly nemesis in KMart has been pricing the same book for the last 6ix months, just no one has noticed. My mate lost her photography shop, an achingly poignant thankyou note pinned to the window in one final act before it's swept to the history books. I'm considering telling her it would be ironic if she took a prize winning photo of a failed photography shop, but she totally wouldn't get it. Inside the sports shop, a woman haggles over the price of a hockey stick. I'd say from her size it's not for her, but it might be, I'm certainly not going to judge a woman entirely on her taste in big baggy pants. Maybe amidst Hobartian gloom, a larger lady is reclaiming her glory days through the power of hockey. Or she's planning to rob a bank. When I look, I notice an old man has sat next to me, and he's got his mouth half open as if he's about to speak. What's frightening is that I'm basically resting my feet just as he is, and it's a stimulus to leave the hockey stick question aside to a 3am moment when I'm sure it will come screaming back into my head, and move away, in what should be some sort of defiant get out of my way old age I'm not dead yet leap from the horrible vinyl seats, but instead becomes a terrible awkward shuffle and if the old guy really wanted to, he could catch me, and tell me all about how his grandson is far more successful than me - he just doesn't want to, because he's sitting in the old man squirrel pose...you don't me to tell you what he's fossicking for...

My time spent on the bench pondering just how stretchy some material is wasn't in vain though. I realised in those 5ive desperate minutes that not only is my entire week defined by tight leather clamps, and not only depressingly that there's probably no cobblers left in the world, but that this kind of thing - that I've got tight shoes - is somehow likely to affect me more than a terminal illness. There's no question in my mind that I could take a major inconvenience with a greater stride than something trivial. My main injury in life was a serious knee injury - it was the summer of 92, the sun was shining, the spunky band Girlfriend were inspiring the nation, and Collingwood obviously didn't win any games. Probably. I was playing cricket in the backyard with my Dad, a notorious competitive with a fine line in post match sledging, and our backyard was pretty pathetic. It was when we rented the house in Penguin, the depressing one next to the bakery that Vicki, my pash buddy, called quaint. We sometimes sat on the train tracks and just bagged it out, which was a little unfair. Anyway, I took a desperate spilling catch low to the ground to get Dad out, went to celebrate, then noticed I had gashed and smashed my knee into oblivion on a little hammered into the ground metal base for a garden shed. As I looked at it, I went, wow, that's going to smart, and I had a big needle ploughed into the middle of it, and then I went home. I had a limp, and Vicki dug the scar, but Mum was hysterical, and then thought that I all did was cope because the nurse was cute. The kicker in all this is this - I mashed my knee up good and proper, needed 16 stitches, and what do I remember about that day? The local milk bar was out of Banana Big Ms. I remember that really shook me out of stride. The shoes are like that - work is awful, the economy is crumbling, depression is everywhere, blue eye shadow girl looks incredibly stressed and it makes me sad, and the only DVD I can find is Friends, and yet, this week is a write off because I have horribly tight shoes. Are they excuses? If only I had long flowing hair instead of page 6ix of the army handbook, maybe things...I think I spend too much thinking about things I can't change, and a giant drama just is easier to cope with. If a world crumbles, I'll be the guy wondering why the liferaft isn't inflating and why the Chokitos taste different to how they did in the 80s...

The bookstore is the most depressing of all the stores around Eastlands, since the 50% off stores are in massively giant letters, and the bearded guy who has quite happy listening to his IPOD is now dressed in casual clothes, just waiting to push the boxes into the truck and shove off for the sunset. I can't even go in there anymore, it's just too poignant. The only two books left are the Popbitch book and some Manning Clark book that just seems to be the last book standing. I'd love for something illuminating and sparkling to just light up Tasmania - an event, some big development, anything, but it's just not happening. My home town in Scotland is now, if you'll let me invent a word, entirely rubbled - reduced to nothing but rubble and faded dreams and faded posters stuck to walls that no one came back and peeled off advertising much better events from the past. When I walked around Irvine, there were posters stuck to the walls advertising a big night of ladies wrestling, championship ice skating, Kim Wilde (yes!) live in concert, and just two steps away a shambling old jakie shuffled down the street and spat at the space where Woolworths used to be. Then again, I could do with a spark myself. I find it strange sometimes that I get a spark from sports, or from hearing Lily Allen on the radio - I question my own ambitions on days like this. There's a book on my floor by a sports star, all about how he wouldn't lose at marbles without a fight and how he held up a party once because something about him in the paper was wrong - I don't find this admirable. Should I? Should I be more like that? I don't have the time, I've got an IPOD to fill. There's a girl with a face like the proverbial bulldog chewing a wasp walks past me as I look at the IPOD trying to flick through the songs in a hurry, a hurry converse to my gait. I'm so stereotypical, I presume because she looks like Miss Warrane 2009 she has no ambition - her absolute resolute hurry to grab chips and then more chips seems to confirm this, but I musn't judge. My spark could come from an absolute moment of unpredictability, someone not being as they seem. You never know, this time next week Rodney, we could all be millionaires. Or at least, get some chips from the shop, before my new snarling friend gobbles them up in a frenzied assault...

Vicki and I had a conversation once about ambition. It was late in the day after she'd got off from the bakery - it was early in our pash based relationship, and we sat on the train tracks and had a conversation about Penguin. I was in my full on snobbery mode which was charming for a while, but ultimately if you carry on like that you end up with that whole stand for something or stand for nothing issue based conversation. I wish that I had been a bit more attentive, since it was an attempt at an adult conversation, but I don't even really remember it that well, but I know she was trying to think about the future and I was entirely caught in the present, devoid of energy and hope in a town foreign and alien - maybe I should have said what I thought, that I was just terrified of being so far away from my family, but I didn't, I said I hated that I had to wait until Monday morning to get the St Mirren score...I'm sure my Dad would want me to bowl in one day with a detailed plan to find a missus, a better job and not have to hear about Lily Allen and Megan Corkrey for once, but that part of my mind is a closed shop, the sign on the window very much thanking the past patrons. Can I change? Not sure - my mate is getting a tattoo of a hummingbird on her neck apparently. I have no idea why, but it'll pass the time - interestingly, in a major moment of status, the guy behind me at THAT party who said celebrities were only people was trying to shout to the minor celebrity about the size of his tattoo comparitive to the minor celebrities. Like a star struck child, he then chided himself in a one sided conversation that he wasn't impressed to be there at all. I smile at the memory of how much he was a tosser, and send my friend an e-mail with a shared private memory of the whole debacle. The surrounds aren't the best, but the people are good - that is something I value, and will when the world falls off the cliff, and people are huddled in Village Cinemas receiving crisis briefings. Trust me, some days if you squint just right, it can look like the car park is already preparing, such is it's horrible visage and lack of glamour...

I'll be the guy up the back of those crisis briefings saying the coffee is a little too cold...

The cyclone and the Capp (Robert Tepper remix)

My house, apart from the lack of two cats in the yard, is connected to the city by a road called The Southern Outlet. Hardly evocative in name, it is a depressing stretch of road, especially at night where it's just long enough so you can't sneak home easily but just short enough so all those thoughts that gather in your brain don't really have time to develop before you are thrown out at your own doorstep. There's no beautiful scenery to take your mind off things, no glamorous end point to the road, nothing you could write a poem about, unless you have a rhyme for roundabout. When a night out proves to be utterly disappointing, like last night though, you can feel some poignancy. After all, you have to drive down the road, with spirits high and then drive back up the same road blinking into the less than bright lights and wondering what happened to your sense of adventure. Don't put your hands in the life of a rock and roll band? Don't put it in the hands of two minor celebrities. I knew I shouldn't have stopped watching Rocky IV to go out anyway, but I was taken in by a lure, the lure of having a ticket no one else did. Like some horribly grim socialist fairytale, the other side of the fence was horrible, disappointing, and the only reward for this so called privilege was a free packet of lime and cracked pepper chips, and having a minor perve on someone, but then regressing because she doesn't have blue eye shadow. Large boobs, but not blue eye shadow. What I do like about her though is her sense of importance - I like watching people, receptionists say, rewarded with a night out, a freebie, the joy as they get a moment of appreciation, even though this appreciation is tempered by the fact she still has to give away free chips from a box, and make small talk with patrons, mostly about the chips, but sometimes bitingly scathing little bites of cynicism, which seem out of tune with her pregnant companion, who couldn't be more gleeful if she wasn't pregnant and could leap around to Dave Dobbyn at Syrup like it was 1999...

It's cold in Hobart at the moment, it's biting a bit more, right into the skin, the wind it's clamping teeth, the rain it's dispiritingly soggy gums. As I stand in the cold, when spirits were still high, a man in a skin tight T-shirt a shade of browny green you only see on serial killers and army men is holding court. His ticket - more valuable than mine since it's spare - is his weapon of choice, and he's using it to, well, lure young girls into the party with him. I'm decidedly uncomfortable with this, seriously uncomfortable by the time one young girl with stringy blonde hair and a purple top all shades of Cadbury is offering a hundred dollars for the ticket. He begins lording this spare ticket over a gaggle of disappointed and shivering youngsters, raffling it off via a quiz question about rugby league. Of course, when he selects his vic...I'm sorry, the lucky girl who gets his ticket, a plumpish girl in grey who reacts as if she's won the lottery, he enters and begins a process of bemoaning the entire event, from start to finish. After all, he thunders, famous people are just people too, they just have advantaged circumstances, and better taste in T-shirts...OK, I made that bit up. Which doesn't preclude him from some excited whooping at the appropriate moment. He quickly loses his intended and frankly illegal date with his witless wonderings, since the novelty of a guy who finds everything shit can be culturally cute at first but loses lustre. Down three metres in front of me, a little kid is seriously body popping to John Mayer. He's throwing shapes at such a mad rate, he comprehensively qualifies as serving somebody. The kid has no comprehension of what's supposed to be cool and what's supposed to be in, he's just enjoying the music and letting himself go, even if it is John Mayer. I hope that kid never turns into the guy behind me, who's complaining about the pizza now, making sure everyone can hear him, the centre of the crust. His date stares outside the fence, down towards where her friends are sitting outside the fence, and although her face is a mix of contempt and loathing and indifference and little chipmunk cheeks from eating far too many mallows, as she perches high above them sending them text messages, she looks like she feels she made the right choice. Meanwhile, my friend and I, taking on board the lessons of the man behind us, loudly to annoy him declare things like why are people so excited about the Pyramids, they are only buildings, no better than the Hobart Silos...his confidence as fragile as pick up tactics are illegal, he eventually quiets, munching on a chip as the little kid takes centre stage again, dancing up a storm to some 80s tune he couldn't possibly know, just, you know, cos...

The party is dull, lifeless, people are beginning to feel a bit disappointed, so they flick everyone a drink and hope no one notices that the promises on the tickets aren't being lived up to. The party hosts are congenial, but they don't mean it, it's work for them, another crowd to work and then leave. It distracts me that a long time ago I learned to read eyes, learned to study people, or did I just become Scottish and not trust anyone? I was reassured that when spirits were still high, the lone voice of dissention was this Scottish bloke complaining all the roads were closed. Bored, I begin humming various movie themes to myself as the cold continues to bite. They film a TV segment right through us - delighting receptionists everywhere but leaving me massively non plussed. Nothing much happens, time passes slowly, uncomfortable glances are being shared, and so they turn the music up to drown out independent thought, move some lights around to ramp up the feeling of excitement like when my Mum used to put on a record at my early birthday parties whenever the excitement of pin the tail on the donkey lapsed or some kid was chewing lego. In the midst of this alleged minor celebrity induced thump thump tsh tsh excitement, it's no surprise two middle age women begin a conversation that seems to be entirely about knitting needles. As The Presets thump ever more poundingly, they retreat even more into domestic tedium, covering scones and jam as desperation sets in on the ground floor. A big TV screen tries to hum into life, but then cuts out about the same time my interest does. Strangely, even after the receptionist with the big boos has gone bored and the John Mayer kid has long ceased to be Youtube friendly, our cynical mate behind us is still screaming out affectionately to be noticed, trying to engage the minor celebrity in conversation, and then claiming it to be horribly shit that he bothered to reply. His date has long since abandoned her pretence, and is shuffling to the left, as subtly as her weighty self possibly can, enjoying a lolly snake and using all her hearing to listen to the Presets, making sure she doesn't catch our hero getting onto the topics of how lolly snakes aren't as good as Chokitos...

Eventually, our so called party hosts leave, without saying goodbye, simply turning tail and leaving. They promised us their heaven to hold on the invitation, and then made us feel uncomfortable for hoping for something more. One poorly constructed video later, and it's all over, leaving everyone to shuffle around like livestock in danger until we all leave and go our seperate ways. For some, this disappointing evening is ruinous and instead of triumphant post party drinks at the Observatory as Rihanna thumps on the big screen, it's straight to the car and a drive home. Others are more sanguine, although the guy behind me of course has an opinion on it all, a very loud opinion. I'm patently not cut out for this alleged VIP treatment. Last year, I took Dad to a reception at St Mirren, and we sat around a table talking to two businessmen who were very nice, but it was networking for them, they were there to hand out cards and try and win the bingo. By the time I get home, I'm over the disappointment, a flickering film and a jam sandwich enough to make sure that the night isn't a total wash. There's no way I should have expected anything else, but they sure bumped up the party on the ticket as thumpingly good, and then delivered a packet of chips. It won't stop me though - disappointing as it was, no matter how the minor celebrities behaved, there were still things to be learned, experiences to gather, girls to fancy, people not to emulate...famous and not so famous. Charm, the it factor, well, close up, it's not there. If you get out your highschool yearbook, it's surprising how lame people you aspired to be can look, how the hot girl just seems utterly ordinary and, well, Burnie. Charming smiles, and then, they just left, back to their own lives without a thought. Well, my thoughts mostly revolve around a receptionist, about a kid who lived for the moment and a skeezy guy who lived to criticise, and just exactly how lime became a chip flavour but tomato sauce isn't...it won't be about how the other half live, because tonight, I saw how the other half live, and it was horrendously disappointing...the last I saw the receptionist, her smile had faded, and she was lugging a box, head down, talking to the pregnant girl, nudging her gently and shaking her head, a mass of non verbal communication, much better than me at direct emotions...

Peoples show my ass...

Whats so funny about peace, love and Big Ms (not to mention old school ruefulness)

Towards the end of 1996, I had become disenfranchised from my own life. Amid a blizzard of pop culture references, days idled away pretending to write a pile of poems for Writers Workshop - most of them referencing Kurt Cobain and fish - and being surrounded by terribly fractured friendships, most of my days were spent thinking about anything that wasn't my own impending future. In fairness, Grade 12 was a confusing mix of emotions for me - after all, I suddenly friends, social commitments, rock climbing on a Tuesday night, a job that was just awful, girl problems, hangovers and my horrific life long problem where I always think about how rapidly time has passed and philosophise on it way too much all combined to ensure that I was in a constant state of flux. 12 months earlier all I had was a job and 48 solid weekend hours of me time, even down to the fact that my alleged job at Coles had become a solitary vigil of cleaning meat trays and collecting trolleys. If it wasn't for the hookers in the car park that year, there'd be no one to talk to at all. They would gather in intermittent bunches and be disgusted with their station in life, which made them far more relatable to me than any supposed cool kid role model. Much of that year, as much as it all went sour, was pretty great - for one thing, they never teach you properly about the sheer joy of having no responsibility, the freedom to just sit in the park all day heckling people walking past trying to have a sneaky office formed lunch break timed pash in the middle of their middle aged May to December affairs. I was always entranced by one couple - he 40s, she mid 20s, they would stroll around the perimeter of the park in Burnie, never anywhere the main area or where we sat, in perpetual shiftiness, a holding of hands as surreptitious an action as they could imagine. I felt bad for her, because she always looked uneasy, while he just strolled around with his hands mostly in the pockets of his big black overcoat, smiling like Michigan J Frog released from his box. I had a mate who composed this entire back story for the two of them that was so poetic it was sepia toned and had rhyming couplets by the end of the year. Of course, we would sit and believe we would never be middle aged or let the grass grow under our feet. Ironically, that's what we were doing obviously - idly standing around in a park at a pre drought time when grass actually still managed to grow. Eventually the couple stopped their lunch time walks, so he either went back to his wife, or left his wife and skipped town with her, or the wife killed them both and whistled as she did it. No one I've ever seen holding hands did it in quite the way that she did it - when he took her hand, she would just beam, like she had tied all her hopes and dreams tied entirely to this guy. Maybe in the end she chopped him up and put him in a bin, such was her intensity every time they walked. Her sense of purpose just put me to shame, every step mattered, every syllable deliberate...she was the opposite to me, where every step was awkward, every syllable irrelevant to anything that mattered...if you wanted someone to tell you the names of the members of Garbage that weren't Shirley Manson was...

When the Kylie situation - unrequited love, no yes or no answer, angry exchange of view points - ground me down the most, I turned mostly to my hairdresser. I had a crush on my hairdresser because I thought she was pretty deep. She had a hippy style single person salon in the middle of Burnie, and we would talk long into the, well, haircut, about all manner of things. Sure, my Mum ruined one of our chats by coming in and interrupting one of my monologues on religion, but otherwise, our relationship was intense. Mind, my previous hairdresser was a Slavic guy called Swannee who when we lived in Penguin would put on Harry Lauder Donald wheres yer troosers for gods sake kill me now shortbread tin vinyl LPs of Scottish music, and who once nearly cut my ear off, so she didn't have to leap over too high a bar to impress me with her hair cutting, but she had cool things like fashion magazines from other countries and a little chamber with a beaded door you had to step through to get your locks trimmed. I think I liked her because she was older, and smarter, and made a trip to Egypt and damn the consequences, and she had a whole Megan Corkrey vibe to her that I just really liked. That was, until Aaron entered our chats. Ah, Aaron, her new boyfriend, who she was going to move on Adelaide with and sell the business to be with. I couldn't compete with Aaron - I mean, he drove a van for gods sake. I was ferried around by my Mother in a red car that had a smily face sticker on it. I had to concede defeat, but our conversations thus became depressingly one sided, and I had to make the grown up move in the end to go to a more Male hairdresser where the only conversation came when money was exchanged for goods and services. Our final encounter was plainly unsatisfactory. She looked incredibly tired, and bought Sprite and a yoghurt, a haul which didn't deserve the basket. I'm sure she eyed my haircut with some suspicion - there's every chance she was just stoned or something - and I really had nothing to say. It was very strange, and I believe, truly believe to this day she wanted to tell me something and didn't. I'm sure it wasn't I love you run away with me you'll never have an unevenly shaved head again, but it was something, and no words came out other than 7.99 and goodbye, and by the time I had printed off a receipt and begun to serve one of societies dregs who was taking advantage of the 50% off chickens, she was off. No one needs that kind of finality issue over a Coles conveyor belt under a dimly flickering light with a red and white next server please getting caught up in the end of the belt. It somehow seems like the story of my life - instead of fixing up my proper life, I get distracted by some problem like a conveyor belt getting stuck. And if you think this paragraph was confused, it was mostly because once I mentioned my hairdresser in Penguin, I got a real craving for a musk stick, so basically regret bites deep at me sometimes, but in small ways...beautiful Megan Corkrey style girl, or a craving for a musk stick? This is going to kill me at 3am...

By November, when I should have been hitting my study schedule, I just lost all interest in my own life and in making an effort in anything. David Boon day probably summed up my malaise, my mental ennui that grounded me making a tribute day to a cricket player - officially decreed by the government no less - more eagerly anticipated to me than any exam or final decision on my life. Instead of studying or smartening myself up with a sensible haircut, I was on a couch at a party in honour of Mr Boon drinking beer in a futile attempt to get drunk, with about four people and we sat in a dimly lit living room which didn't match the promised cricket and BBQ brochure at all. The turn out was something of a disappointment, since no one seemed willing to make the effort to party on this particular day. The beer was drunk by the gallon, but nobody really got drunk, so it was a strangely middle aged party, the host reflecting on his life like some Bold and the Beautiful character emboldened to make one last speech to camera before his reign on the show was ended. The reminisces were a little uncomfortable, and I tried to lighten the mood a little not just by pointing out how, like, some bands have, like, funny clothes in music videos - what a wag I was - but also the comedy genius of Benny Hill. Strangely, later we would watch a Benny Hill video, and it really wasn't that genius, I think I just liked Yackety Sax. As far as I am aware, it was the first time I noticed there was a schism in our friendship group...well, I noticed it when I thought about in 1999 when I was making a sandwich. People didn't attend the party because other people were attending it because they were uncomfortable and it really sticks in my mind as quite an upsetting day. I was relatively inoffensive, nice to talk to, and still lost friends through my actions, so the jerks were really screwed. I don't remember pondering the temporal nature of friendship at the time though - more like the qualities of Space Jam and the decline of Bill Murrays career with some girl in a garden and then falling asleep in a garden and waking up somehow having got to a couch. I think the problem with my writing is that sometimes it's all hangover and not enough drunk. In this case, the fact is, the party was, ultimately, depressing, but there was still beer and I would still say I had a great time, although perhaps I overstated Michael Jordans acting ability in all the excitement. I think Oscar winning stretched it...

So ultimately, my Grade 12 experiences were far more educational about life than maths and science - it wasn't every year I had a friend excommunicated by a church he didn't belong to just for taking communion when he shouldn't have. Today, things like that - trendy parties excepted - don't seem to happen. My hairdresser today was a slightly dumpy girl with, ironically, a bad haircut, although I'm debating now whether I've broken my own rule of mis use of irony. There really wasn't any mystery to her, no philosophical conversations, although in a strange and eerie twist, she nicked my ear with the shaver. If she'd given me a musk stick at the end, well, that would have sealed the deal, although I think she'd eat it herself. I'm not much help either, my childlike sense of wonder died a long time ago. Besides which, it's a factory hairdressers, multiple seats, cherub cheeked youth next to me discussing product and fringe adjustment gel and such like young people nonsense while I'm getting page 6 of the army handbook. As I make my way back to the car - through the car park where I was offered crack once by a genteel Amnesty schoolgirl - a slightly depressed looking pregnant woman in an orange T lopes towards me, looking as weary and depressed as I've ever seen anyone. She's been to Chickenfeed but she's never been to me. Her other kids are milling around the trolleys and running amok and she can't even muster the most basic life in her eyes and she stumbles with her bags towards me. Her unwashed hair blows in the wind, and every step looks like it hurts. I drink my Big M - now called Big M edge - and feel compellingly moved by how sad and broken she looks. If good things do happen to me - and contrary to how depressed I get when Collingwood lose, they do - I'm not taking the time to appreciate them, for different reasons than Grade 12. I can feel old sometimes, and like I've seen it all before, but sometimes suburban despair still gets to me. If she has a blog, it'll all be depressing twists in her life, weary paragraphs and bemoans loud and proud. Still, as she carries her bag, she still takes the moment to lift her head in the rain and muster as much dignity as she can, just in time to swear loudly at her offspring, piercing the grey sky with words you couldn't print in a family friendly blog...

Maybe I need 6ix weeks off from doing this, it just makes me hungry and thirsty and in need of getting a haircut...

The diamond that wanted to be a lump of coal

Around my neck hangs an invitation, an invitation that has apparently made me a much more interesting person according to my people on the ground. Although I feel the same - I still want to join Twitter and post updates like I'm throwing cats at a pencil case until the authorities investigate - it is provoking envy and offers of cash for me to relinquish. I'm rarely in this position of envy, and habitually throughout my day I have thrown it into conversation, just because it annoys people I am going to something they can't. It's made me think that if I was somehow in a position of real power, I'd be insufferable, I'd be constantly flicking the ears of underlings and firing them if they didn't know how many games Graham Yallop captained Australia for. Maybe. Certainly articulating this invitation and what it entails makes it seem a little silly, but it's fun to taunt, even just a little. Such festive thoughts of social bettering were a little disrupted as I gambolled carefree past a sandwich shop, and a bearded guy in a camel coat was praying. Or he was possessed, I'm not quite sure. He was facing away from his dining companions, and he had his eyes shut, and his hands clasped, and in the outdoor setting he seemed oblivious to how uncomfortable he was making the female who wasn't his girlfriend, and eventually she shuffled off to buy some rather unreligious T-shirts from the T-shirt shop that blasts pumping techno out all day long but still seems depressing. There really isn't anyone to envy at midday in Rosny shopping centre, no aspirational figures, no social leaders to look up to. Shuffling bogans, bewildered old people, shop keeps with a do not touch that merchandise folded arms stance, tinkling Lily Allen in the background not loud enough to hear. Fat Sweaty Girl is back working, exhausted as ever. She's taken a younger girl under her meaty wing, and she's pointing out all the features of Big W. The younger girl has this horrible frozen expression on her face, as if the horror of her starched blue and white stripey shirt has begun to imprison her soul. Her mind, wherever it is, is already dreaming of Syrup, of the weekend, of escape...I want to tell her, just to really get at her a bit more, about my exciting social event, but her eyes are rolled so far back into her head as fat sweaty girl shows her how to use a pricing gun that, well, it would just be cruel...

There weren't many aspirational figures to follow in mid 90s Burnie - a girl who's Dad owned the furniture store here, a firey brimstone football coach with spittle flecked tones there, but they were merely aspirational figures for those who wanted to stay in Burnie and while away their lives toiling outside KMart and pondering the fate of the South Burnie Hawks over chocolate milkshakes. In the library room where we sat and pondered our fates, me with pen in hand making notations in a tattered notebook that ended up being far more gossip riddled than I had intended, we would ponder what was to become of our youthful selves, and when the pondering became too ponderous, we'd go out and drink beer instead. I was enrolled in the slightly facistic sounding Young Achievers group around about this time - not just for the irony - but because well everyone else was doing it, it being some sort of after school project which was supposed to teach you how to run a business, and it was a good excuse to hang out at the Pulp Mill every Tuesday and eat free Mars Bars and hit on girls with nary more than the odd quip about Spiderbait. In truth, my enthusiasm dimmed for the project on night one when I wasn't voted the group treasurer - who knew that basically coasting through life was uninspiring to the electorate? Damn girls with enthusiasm and ambition and, quote, plans, unquote. Ah well, it just gave me more time to eat Mars Bars and come up with slogans for our bumper stickers. Since I couldn't treasure and I couldn't sew, I wasn't much use to the business project, so I became social co-ordinator. To boost morale I would come up with time killing games such as throw the rubberband over the spike, whatever happened to LL Cool J, and plan far off parties and social events that never really got off the ground. I think they gave me an office, thought I suspect that I've made this up, and I actually just went into someones office to play Solitaire on the computer. The glimmer of light in all this though was our planned trip to Hobart, the big city, to allegedly sell our product at Salamanca Market, but which really was just an excuse to stay at older girls house and get smashed on alcopops and then go out and smash Hobart to bits - which were new in 1996, I read it in Select. This trip was talked about in hushed tones in the library and it began to take on a life of it's own, it was talked as if it was going to make Satyricon look like an episode of Keynotes with Richard Wilkins. Even Kylie, the girl I really liked, took the time out from her busy schedule of indecision and confusion to ask me to take care...take care? What was I getting into? Well, the classroom for Maths if you don't hold me up for much longer. Like chinese whispers - or like Chinese Democracy - I had no idea if this trip to Hobart was going to be my wild road to ruin, but it sure was going to be fun finding out...bring on the achievement I said, for young and for old...

It was 10:30, when I was in a sleeping bag since the older girl and her friends had all gone to bed and no one else was up that I realised - as I would be with Chinese Democracy - I had been rather mis-informed. It's part of why I hate Robbie Williams, because his cover of Freedom was the first thing I heard that morning, as the girls milled our with perky glows and made breakfast and said that last night had been awesome. I felt that they had rather missed the point. I felt incredibly deflated that such a massive build up and only delivered an early night, intermittent disturbances from a ticking clock, Robbie Williams and muesli congealed in a bowl. Deflated, I had to get out of the house, and got hopelessly lost in some sort of decrepit broken down sing park with jutted metal corners on the swings and where the kids learned hard lessons about life as drunken hobos slumped against walls that seemed to go on forever. Where was I? Somewhere, some suburb, with a drunken feeling in spite of my alleged sobriety. A dog was looking at me suspiciously, but I didn't feel like engaging him in a stare off and he shuffled off to sniff a rogue frisbee just because it felt like the right thing for him to do at that moment. Pondering what went wrong, I began to think things had possibly gone wrong when my friend - perpetual motion machine, maths calculations, that guy - had taken as false ID a photocopy of a passport page with one of the numbers crossed out in pen. By the time I realised I was hopelessly lost, I really didn't have the energy to debate it in my head. By the time it started to rain, I really pondered the temporal nature of cool. To take the taste of muesli out of my mouth, I ended up in a local shop scrambling around for change in my pocket trying to find enough to be able to scramble up a bag of Twisties, and as I mused whether pocket fluff still counted as currency, the shop keeper looked deep into my bloodshot eyes and made the universal fnuh fnuh gesture which one male makes to another to indicate he knows what you got up to last night. Yes mate, muesli for breakfast, it was one bacchanalian delight after another...but there was something about his little gerbil face that compelled me to lie. I don't know why I did it, but the party I made up in my head just to tell him about was an absolute riot. So deeply did I immerse myself in my story - I bet it didn't have paragraph breaks - that it took me a full minute after I left the shop to reconcile with the truth of the evening, maybe when a piece of muesli caught the back of my throat. It was nothing compared to the story I told Kylie though - that one had live music and depravity you couldn't dream of. Yes, someone ate Fruit Loops...the horror...the horror...

Back in the present, I've got Lily Allen on, and my sense of social importance has well and truly dimmed as I mill about in my slippers reading books on Dream Team Football. I often, just as I drift to sleep and when I don't have Jennifer Adams dreams, think about the nature of envy, the exaggerations slipped in to my life like pills in the cereal. Not just the never to be named Tasmanian celebrity in Sandy Bay who had a party going in his house with flashing lights and loud music while he sat in the living room on his own eating mac and cheese, but every day. Will my much hyped social event be another disappointment I'm forced to cover up with tall tales and cheeky winks? Who knows? In KMart, a gang of giggling bike panted girls - and again, I'm at that age where my reaction is less of a Sid James cwor and more of a why aren't you in school finger wag - are eyeing off one of the shop assistants. Shame on them for fancying shop assistants...anyway, as they check out that way he puts the toys on the shelf, one of them casually walks past and says hi. Oblivious to the scene he's causing, he says hi back with no real grace and certainly no cwor, but the girls take it as if he zomg totally loves them, and go off giggling into the sunset - or the electronics department if you are less poetic. I would imagine this call and Kmaresponse will become massively exaggerated on Twitter tonight, especially by the girl scowling at the back with her imitation Fisher Price My First purse and store bought pout who no doubt is convinced that zomg he totally likes me. Ahead of them will lie the same experiences I went through, the crushing disappointments of over hyped parties and the surprisingly amazing oh my god we said we were just having one beer what happened to my keys why have we been hugging for an hour parties that have no hype at all. I'm sure they'll figure it out, and I'm sure they'll move on from Twitter to something else, and I'm sure they'll realise in time that it's not worth chasing some boy with slicked back hair who can't even hook a Randy Orton WWE figure onto a hook at the first attempt. As for me, my phone is still twittering with text messages from a friend trying to get into the party - I turn it off, turn it off so I can swear at Max Sharam on the TV, and then go to bed aware that tomorrow, I do it all again...

And by again, I don't mean learning to use a pricing gun...that poor, poor young girl...

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...