Post 249 - The faces of the silent men below showed total bewilderment as they pondered be thine foily thing a duck or a goose

Winter in Tasmania - perhaps like other parts of the world, although in Scotland it brings on bunion ache if the legends are true - brings out the old folk who like to ponder to total strangers just how cold it is. I haven't seen their close cousins lately, the cheer up it might never happen family, but I'm sure they are about somewhere. Summer, they'll be in the same place, flipping and subverting the question to ask if it's hot enough for you, as though they are in charge of temperature and are keen to make sure you are comfortable. Eastlands even kindly got them a meeting place, a shop temporarily where the book shop used to be. When I say shop, it's three tables with tat on it, absolute tat like little ornaments you buy for people you don't like and Xmas trees made out of foil. There's nothing else in the store, no desk and no staff, just those three tables and so much space up the back in this once packed out store that you could sit there and have a picnic or just loiter for a while pretending to look at little foilnaments, but really just badgering strangers with comments about how cold . There's a printed out piece of A4 paper stuck to the window in a desperately apologetic font that seems to suggest this store will only be around for 2wo weeks, like a squatter they can't shift until the paperwork is finalised, or a relationship with a 2nd date scheduled before the first one that you go through for no apparent reason. There's something quite nostalgic to me about the apologetic font, a sort of throwback to my primary school days when inappropriate acts were made up for by someone printing out an apology on the BBC micro, and some of those apologies from under 9ines who took your pencil would still tear your heart out with their sincerity. There's an Elvis Costello a like up the back of the shop, picking idly at one of the foilaments, holding it up to the light as if assessing it on Antiques Roadshow. He's casually munching a sandwich when he sees me, and I suspect from the adjusted angle of his trilby that he's in need of someone to compare temperatures with. It's always a man in a trilby with me who bails me up in conversation, and I have no particular place to go, but no particular desire to get involved in the fading lights of suburban temperature assessment, so I shuffle on, not least of all because all the thoughts of temperature are just reminding me of flash cards with how to spell, and by the looks of the ornaments, some poor kids are spending their mornings learning to spell by flash cards, and their afternoons in a sweat shop with a box of foil and all the air out of the room...no one will ask them how cold is it...

While clumsy fingers and good old fashioned Scottish ineptitude - we used to invent in the days before Buckfast - meant that my foilaments ended up far away from any market stall, I did find in my cupboard a little bracelet my cousin made for me. That would be my cousin who we adopted from Korea who said Melbourne has too many Asians, that one. She went through a period in her life where she would spend her weekends making little trinkets and I must have been supportive and got myself one made with my idols name on it - Ralph Wiggum. Ah, casual cartoon irony, how you have kept me warm through the years. Why wasn't it Snagglepuss? He must have been out in 1995. She sold them on cold mornings at Penguin market, pre the gay guys buying it, and in howling gales next to endless tables stacked to the sky with buckets of honey and buskers who could only play Solid Rock by Goanna, she would offer up her items to the gods of Penguin commerce, little old ladies in the Lions Club who poked and picked at the market stalls on their way to lunch. Finding the bracelet made me a little sad because there must have been a morning where she got discouraged and stopped, like a million other ambitions throughout life that never got followed up on. My keyboard was switched off one day, my ice skates were thrown in the cupboard when Mum said I wasn't skating, I was marching around the ice like an infantry soldier. I could have blamed the skates, Magnum standard issue blue wellington boots with skates that acted as a bizarre ice repellent, but they bought me Gretzky hockey skates and I still sucked. Or so they told me, and on one final Sunday morning, I just lost the desire when I realised that my fun and adventure through the world of ice had become a learning process, and I hated education. Finding ice skating boring is sort of a defining moment for me, because I essentially realised that if I wanted to get good at something, I'd have to study, and as I stared into that grey Irvine sky, I for the first time couldn't be bothered. A little girl with a bowl cut and a fringe swept across her face excitedly held her ice skates up to the sky and smiled a toothy smile to everyone, and as she marched up the ramp enjoying herself, I yearned for her innocence. Mind you, I was 10en, and when I later recounted this story to Debbie over a shared Malteser, she told me I was too young to feel so old, and we sat in appreciative silence for a moment after she told a story about her sister, who was 12elve, who had got her first pimple, right on the edge of her nose. I might not have been able to skate, but my skin was soft as linen. Or something like that...

I had an afternoon nap on Sunday which terrified me anyway even before I found the Orbis Italia 90 sticker album and realised I was one South Korean Left back short of a full album - how can I fulfil that as an ambition? I had a nap because I had absolutely nothing else to do. I was on the computer writing a story, and lost interest in what I was writing. I had the ingredients to make a lime spider and I couldn't be bothered making one, and the 1/2 finished book on my table was so boring all the words curved into one, and that word was Bulgaria. So I went to bed, in the middle of the afternoon, and almost immediately jumped out of bed in fright, because while an afternoon nap can sometimes be a noble accomplishment, I couldn't imagine a time when my options were so limited all I could do was sleep until a new day came around. I know there were a lot of people at uni who would just go and have afternoon naps so when they woke up, enough time had passed in their day so they could recheck their e-mails and see the one extra e-mail they had got, and they didn't have to wait for it. I was genuinely scared that I had lapsed, and had nothing to do. Sure, I was hungover and been out all day the day before, but I had succumbed to the Sunday terrors, or some sort of horrible onset midlife crisis that I couldn't cope with. Did all the little unfulfilled ambitions in my life add up to one big waste of time, or had that just been something left offer thematically in my brain from that episode of Red Dwarf where they were all judged? And should I know more about art than Red Dwarf anyway? I freaked out a bit in my own kitchen in that oh my god my life amounts to 6ix Lily Allen VHS tapes and a lime spider shaker kind of way. This hypochondriacal mood passed quickly though, because out of nowhere I came up with a great idea for something to write, and typed it really quickly into my laptop. In the background, my football team failed miserably, and over the back fence an argument broke out over who really shot the sherrif, but my ambitions were clear, type, type fast, don't miss anything out, and there was no one around to disrupt me...it was such a wonderful moment of solitude I had to share it with someone...really and truly as ironic as a black fly in your chardonnay, or lime spider if you will...

The people who made the foilaments had a dream I suppose, a dream that their little foilducks and bears will one day spring out from the wasteland of Eastlands, off the tables and shelves, and take over the world and be feted by Oprah but if your ambition is fatally bad to begin with - making a Xmas tree out of foil in April for instance - failure is surely the only option. You could argue at least they are trying, while I toil chasing my Dad in football tipping, and perhaps the argument is valid. I watch as Elvis Costello ambles down the road. It's then I realise where I recognise him from. Many years ago, he had handed me a business card in the middle of the street. I think he was offering me a job. Or he wanted to nail me. One of the two. Girls with blue eye shadow don't offer me business cards. She was door bitch today, but anyway, back to the point. He made these little Tasmanian animals out of pewter or silver, and they were great. He had a stall of course and because he came into work he gave us all one one Xmas, I've still got, it's in the cupboard next to Choi Chang Uls non stickery presence and the bracelet with Wiggum spelt wrong - my fault. The ice skates went to another cousin of mine, personality so lost to time he's boring to write about. Of course, one day when I was walking past, whistling the tune of the day, possibly Soda Pop, I saw the animal maker go into the TAB. Nothing bad with that, we've all been there. It was after 25ive consecutive days of seeing him go into the TAB that I kind of thought something was wrong, and sure enough gambling debts got to him in the end, and those little animals ended up unsold and uncast in their moulds, another talent wasted, another dream unfulfilled. My empathy is up though, because later I'm standing in the sandwich shop, looking around, waiting eternally for miss I'm too old for a nose ring but no one will tell me to finally serve me. I smile idly at the passers by, and entirely to shake myself out of the comfort zone of unfilled dread, I ask the most beautiful girl in the shop if it's cold enough for her, and only step away when I realise she has a speaking voice that could shatter glass from a thousand feet...

Choi Chang ul, you don't know it, but I'm gonna find you...get ready...

Post 248 - The unfinished fragments of other peoples lives

Easter has a rhythm all of it's own, mostly the rhythms surrounding my life being people standing next to me gazing out at, say, a shop or a football crowd, commenting on the lack of people around us and with great depth perception saying that everyone must be away for Easter. Where do people go for Easter? They don't linger in Hobart nightclubs, they don't gather around the shops in the morning queuing for groceries and wondering what happened to the local newsagents, and they don't gather around big screen televisions wondering where the barmaid from Customs that boasts a lack of intellect as her most appealing quality is. That's my job, and I feel like a seat filler at the Oscars, filling in time and space in an empty part of the world. It gives me more time to think though, this blissful stillness. Time to put on the radio and hear vengeful people saying vengeful things about footballers who couldn't care less about them, time to pick at the fringes of an Easter egg or time to go on a pointless hunt for Newcastle Brown Ale for my Dad. I wish I had a greater sense of adventure on days like this, but adventure only leads to inquisition, and my brain isn't in the mood for it. I'm taken aback standing in the empty car park, struggling for anything to look at as the cold air sweeps through me, so much space around me, so many little shops in the Kingston Shopping Centre now shut down, leaving behind empty buildings, for sale signs limp in the window, other shops now coated head to toe on the outside by fliers, tattered pieces of paper flapping in the breeze, lost dogs and French lessons struggling to be heard in the middle of the early morning maelstrom. So often I have moments where I can walk by, hear a tiny snippet of a conversation or see something, just a moment, just a little fraction of time where I don't get everything that's happening, and the moment passes without the full story unfolding. It happens all the time, but it's not happening today, in the cold of mid morning, and as I clutch my little big of groceries and shove them into the boot, the entire scene is so ridiculously quiet, I think for a moment it isn't just the shopping centre that's ground to a halt, but my own brain. Luckily, my struggle to think is interrupted by a rogue trolley skidding guilelessly across my path, and normal order is more than restored...

It's Saturday night, although it's hardly live. A pub, a waitress struggling against the offensive comments about her weight mingles through the crowd with a swish, holding up a plate of meat while her own plates of meat ache against tight heels. A crowd gathers around a television set. A group from a table across become entangled with our group, joining our social circle and spilling their stories freely. There's an arrogant surfer boy amongst the group, who begins telling me about his whisky collection, with such surety and tedious detail I'm sure I drift off and when I come back, he's looped his conversation back to the start and seems to re-opened the whisky cabinet for another go. I drift off, watching the TV, watching the chunky waitress, watching girls having a handbag fight at the ATM on the wharf. He leaves, and his friends nudge and wink as they presume he's used his Mick Fanning hair cut to woo a lady, but when he comes back, he looks like he's about to burst into tears and seems woefully uncomfortable. I presume his charms, or his potency, have failed him, and he shuffles from foot to foot, suddenly a smaller man, diminished in stature but not in quality of whisky collection. What happened I will never know, as he drifts into the night, his last drink downed with undue haste as he spirits away into the night. We're left with his drunken mate, loud, offensive, making smirking comments with a racial sting at the end that hang in the air uncomfortably. He follows us out, and in the blink of an eye, he's gone from an annoyance to a threat, the smirk gone as he menaces a busker with threats and an aggressive piece of posturing out of a how to be a wanker manual. I'm left wondering what happens when I leave the scene at an awkward moment, shuffling off to the taxi rank as the argument breaks out. I'm left to wonder about the transformations people go through, the way confidence ebbs and flows and the way eyes can glaze over in an instant when alcohol sinks in, but only much later, as the taxi drives off into the night, a woman driver beginning her own life story and letting it sink into a mind, mine, that simply can't take it all in, as the argument flickers behind me in dim light and continues to unfold as the engine splutters, the radio hisses and crackles and my mind shuts down for the evening...

It's Sunday evening. I need some Red Eye, to shake off the lethargy of the night before. I didn't go to Syrup, which I was proud of, when the group I was with headed off that way to dance around with the bored DJ. I also didn't make fun of the waitress, for I understand the difficulty of not looking your best, as I think I do now, but my local store isn't the kind of place you want to be too dressed up. It's a flannel and ugh boots kind of store, basic products and the ever changing rotation of Greek owners who appear to be running some kind of immigration scam. I'll never know what's in all those damn boxes that pile up out the back and clog up the walkways, but I don't think it's Samboys somehow. The boy behind the counter has a Forrest Gump expression when I walk in, the doorbell that chimes perhaps should play duelling banjos such is his never changing monosyllabic tone and fiercely unblinking gaze from behind a mind as closed as Irish Murphys is to anyone who isn't blonde and 18teen. He goes quickly back to his Mercury, scanning the pages of the funnies and making strange grunting laughs. He's discomforting, which perhaps is the point, trying to hustle out the customers with blank stares and airless laughter, but I'm used to this store by now, and I take my time, sliding around the spinning rack of porn and heading straight for the fridge as his eyebrows follow me around. After a while trying to decide between Red Eye Gold and Red Eye, er, Red, a fight breaks out behind me - a man in a tracksuit so nylon it seems likely to combuse, who's doof doof mobile has pulled into the car park with ridiculous speed, is trying to get a Chiko Roll and wake up Forrest wasting his breath against a wall of indifference, turning to swearing as he verbally pokes the bear right in the middle of his grey hooded top. Suddenly thrust into the hurly burly of customer relations, Forrest doesn't really know how to respond, and the argument curls around into pointless loops of point and counter point and the chiko roll seems further and further away from being eaten as it sits unloved turning in the little metal grill it sits upon. The argument seems never ending, tracksuit sparks flying as a history of poor service tumbles from the aggressors lips, and I put the Red Eye down, go past the rack of porn, and leave the shop, as Forrests eyebrows follow me out, and with a weary flourish he turns back to the confrontation, and while I don't know how it will be resolved, I do know that that chiko roll seems absolutely unlikely to be eaten...by anybody...

It's Monday morning, the shuffle of single mans slippers slip across the supermarket floor as the early morning staff stack groceries and a 15teen year old boy eyes the shoppers with youthful disdain. My own basket is such a classic grab-bag of single male shopping it feels like I'm trying to be cliched, and I look less than appealing, so luckily it's not Thursday night and singles evening and I don't need to go and grab a melon. I'm still a bit hungover, and my manky green jumper is such a loud shade of flouro it's really not helping. As I turn the corner an even more shambolic looking woman in an even more disgusting jumper that seems to have a pattern designed to follow me around the shop, a mess of swirls and twirls so lurid I suspect if I stare long enough I'll see a Magic Eye dolphin. Round about the cake section there's a wide open door and a woman with loud and plain anxiety says loudly that Sarah must be dreading 4 o'clock. There's real concern in her voice, and it doesn't seem right to linger, no matter my curiousity. The 15teen year old doesn't look old enough to shave, and gives me cursory service, blank eyes and a tie that only a mother could tie. It doesn't seem right to linger once again, it doesn't seem right to criticise someone who is only doing this part time, as I once did, and I wasn't the warmest of checkout operators, but I packed a mean bag. I shuffle through the less than packed urban sprawl, past the closed down shops and past the bottle shop where a woman with straggly hair and puce coloured cheeks can feel like a queen once she is flirted with by the young lifter of the beer, with a swipe of his mighty fist lifting up her beer carton and she giggles and twirls her hair as if he's personally asked her out. I don't even mind that meanwhile I'm left struggling with a distinct lack of service and am hanging as I grow idly by the counter as they walk slowly, joined in a mutual moment that they'll never get back. I guess the guy just doesn't like the cut of my gib though - or doesn't know what a gib is - because I have to lug my own beer carton through the car park, past where the old pizza shop used to be, past a thousand memories of ugly nights out and hanging around on pointless unemployed weekdays, as my fingers grip the cardboard and cut against the easygrip handle, I think the carton of beer is about to snap in two and send beer cans cascading down the road, but if someone makes a twat of themselves in a carpark and no one is around to offer moral judgement...well you know the rest...

That's how I ended up alone in the car park, that's easy to explain, but how I ended up here in life, that's a far greater jumble...

The Leaving Of Brashs

There's this kid outside the library on Thursday, a big dopey looking kid with his hat on backwards. From a distance I can see he's trying to show up the library visitors to impress some girls, and when he gets to me, I see his schtick and raise it, subtly, for his joke is to shake hands with the visitors and say his name is Borat. Hilarious you'll agree. When I say back to him, yeah and I'm Bruno, he pauses a little awkwardly, and laughs in this hollow loud voice as if he's really got me good. I don't mind, if he gets a pash out of it, whatever. I used to get really sensitive about people trying to play pranks on me, especially the guy at Central who was trying to convince me that to get into the pub there was a cover charge and when I fumbled for my wallet laughed uproariously. I was so close to telling him to grow up like some camp sitcom character it was embarrassing. There was a huge lumbering fat guy behind me anyway that the big dopey kid was desperate to try and prank anyway, so we parted ways very quickly. Roadside Jesus is still around showing off his sign and making sure everyone knows the true meaning of Xmas isn't licking a Creme Egg or watching a Goodies Marathon on Foxtel, and everyone was in hustle and bustle mode as they finalised their Easter shopping. In the case of my Dad, this involved a last minute trip to Kingston shopping centre to buy my Mum some Rocky Road, his thanks generally involving some sort of quaint Glaswegian phrase like who did you steal that off or what happened to my egg? I just feel old though, not just because I've now got to an age where kids are playing pranks on me rather than the other way round, or because I can remember specific episodes of the Goodies and which TV dinner I was eating in Penguin when I watched them, but because I'm tired, I just feel mentally quite old at the moment. I know it's just because it's Good Friday, where nothing seems to move and inner reflections come in hammocks that sway even gentler than normal, but I feel like I'm spending far too much time lately talking to people pining for the 90tys. Perhaps I spend too much time thinking about Grant Dodwell and old TV shows, but I quite like now, I quite like my life now, and such meanderings on the phone seem to just age me more than I would like. Then again, I have a pet panda that's sitting on top of my TV, which is the other extreme - that makes me feel too young. There's nothing in my house that feels like balanced stuff to have for a 30ty year old. And on my phone, so proudly sold to me by a bogan chick in Big W Kingston as the phone Big Brother winners get, there's a long text pining for 1997, ah, such a good year, when I was sober enough to enjoy it...

When I first moved to Hobart in 1997, I wasn't one for playing silly youthful pranks or games - well apart from one late night game of statues that got out of hand. I spent my first few weeks getting used to the variety of flavoursome treats that North Hobart had to offer, adjusting to the little things like trying to find a milk bar that was afraid of experimental milkshake flavours, and spending my meagre allowance from John Howards government on un-necessary items like The Incredible Sound of Jo Whiley CD and a rugby league jersey. You know, I could have studied or bought books, but the Gold Coast Chargers live on through my jumper. For the first 6ix weeks I lived in Hobart, I would stalk around the local record store, a store called Brashs. I don't think we had Brashs in Burnie, I think we had the 7BU Record Bar for a while, a massive scam, and that shop in the mall next to Coles where the girl smelled of milk and was a bit too much of a fan of Lisa Loeb. There was a girl who worked in Brashs who I liked because she was personable and wasn't screaming about Shania Twain liked those pushy 7 Habits of Highly Successful Sales readers at Sanity. She was about 2ty 3hree, and didn't smell of any dairy products that I could discern, and our relationship never got to the stage past casual conversation where I'd either make an arse of myself, or she'd have a boyfriend, which were my main 2wo dating responses in 1997. Our nascent conversational relationship about orange vinyl floundered though when Brashs closed in a flurry of financial trouble and bad business decisions, and the girl who had seemed so cool and interesting suddenly got quite sad and wistful as the closing down sale whirled around her head, and the last conversation we had was interrupted by a burly man who shoved straight past me to haggle about the price of a U2 album. It seemed apt I couldn't find anything interesting to say in our final conversations, because she had an adult problem, losing her job, and in the first flurry of freedom from home, all I was doing was wasting my time with immature decisions and time on swings and conversations about Snagglepuss. It was a shame that I couldn't empathise, but we'll always have our chat about vinyl. An interesting discussion it was, until I realised I probably should have been in class - oh well, plenty of time to catch up I guess...

I come from a house where we never really played any pranks or practical jokes. My Mum hates them, plus she has a vicious streak of revenge. Her favourite motto is you have to sleep sometimes, and some of my childhood games of tag were vicious affairs. It's probably not surprising that when I lived in Ayrshire, I never tormented the old woman who lived on the corner. Due to her busybody nature and bolshie Ayrshire attitude, she would often come out and claim to all the kids she was going to call the police no matter what was happening, even if it was just because she didn't like their face. The kids, in the middle of this eternal stand off of kids vs the man, only the man was an old woman in an apron, would respond by knocking her door at 3hree in the morning and getting their dog to perform sinful acts on her lawn. It came to a head on water balloon Sunday, when all the neighbourhood kids decided on an assigned time to throw water balloons at her door. Except for me. It wasn't that I wouldn't have done it, my exploits in knock door runaway were semi legendary, I just didn't see the need to harass an old woman who hadn't done anything to me as far as I knew. And anyway, I had confirmation class to attend, in a nice part of town called The Village, and as I got off the bus, I saw a parade of flying balloons hitting the door and a confrontation beginning. I lingered around the back out of sheer curiousity, and learned a lot of words I didn't know. In fact, I saw a lot of people who really wanted the nonsense to stop and looked really weary, but didn't quite know how to back down. It was then though the old woman looked at me and said something about how come all the kids couldn't be like me, mature and sensible. It's amazing to me that I wasn't instantly beaten up, on account of being a swot, and I had to shuffle off embarrassed past policeman who had lost all respect for me and my immaculately pressed shirt. I almost for the sake of my self respect got up at 3hree in the morning and lobbed a water balloon through her window, but of course, I couldn't be bothered. I probably even got up, put my jacket on, and then saw something on Eurosport and sat back down again. I couldn't bring myself to hassle someone just for the sake of it - I still couldn't do it. Mind you, I had to do something to redeem myself, and when she brought round some Easter Eggs the next year, I didn't enjoy them...much...yeah, that showed her...power to the kids....

I've been immature and mature in the same sentence sometimes, said just the right things but not shown the right actions. However, I'm more than happy with the peace that Good Friday brings me, and don't feel the need to beat myself up. There's a perfect stillness to the day, until the phone rings, the only sound I hear all day. The sound disrupts my mood, and I notice that I never got my paper delivered and get upset that I had to move out of the hammock. Good Friday most people say is the most boring day of the year, but I appreciate the respite, I appreciate the afternoon nap and the way nothing is opened. I hope Roadside Jesus was still out there though, plugging his Xmas message. I've made some mistakes in my life, but today is not the time for reflection. It's a time for peace and quiet, and as a result, I'm going to give you the best gift of all - a short paragraph...

It's not an egg, but it's not too shabby...

Snagglepuss, Jesus and the rise and fall of the Easter prophet

It says a lot for my mindset that a man dressed as Jesus holding a big cross by the side of the road doesn't draw my morning attention away from anxiety and pre Easter stress. Yes, Hobart has this week accquired Jesus, probably on loan from a 3hree week stint at the Sands in Las Vegas, who has been booked to stand by the side of the road, usually across from VIP Driving school, to hold up a big sign about Easter penitence. I suspect it's not really Jesus of course - I don't think he had disciples who wore thongs nor had such a patchy beard - and it's best that I don't pay him any mind. Besides, Lily Allen is on my IPOD, and in this celebrity obsessed culture, well, Jesus hasn't released a new album for a while. I think though that the roadside Jesus - which is a great name for an album - on 2nd view is purporting some sort of John 3:16 message (which I can recite on request incidentally), and when I was growing up around Mexico 86 you would see people in the crowd holding up John 3:16 signs as Scifo scythed through the Iraqi defence. I fear for our Jesus though because it's bitterly cold, even by Hobart standards, and his religious powers of persuasion might be dimmed by sipping soup from a flask. When Joan Osborne said what if God was One of Us, I don't think she meant literally - literally a bloke taking a week of his annual leave from Officeworks to stand by the side of the road with a sign, literally an ordinary bloke. My priest at school incidentally one told me the story of his conversion at Easter, and it was such a simple story, well told, that I completely believed it but Roadside Jesus seems to be in it for the glory, for the notice, and to be honest he might as well have a honk if you give it up for Jesus sign. VIP Driving school, we always laugh and joke about that place, because I failed my driving test so many times, we think they built a special wing devoted to me. It is cold though, as my car winds and wanders through a mass of traffic. They are trialling some system where the buses have all the rights on the road and the poor plebs in the cars are stuck lingering while they take over. The car next to me is the gaudiest thing I've ever seen, lime green sports car with big wheels and a horrifically tacky personalised number plate devoted to a football team. As I finally drive off just as 22 fades out on my IPOD, I see Roadside Jesus catching a glance it, and I know he's probably thinking some pure thoughts about the commercialism of modern society in these troubled times, but surely even he is thinking, seriously, what colour paint is that...

I've never been big on Easter - I don't know why, obviously Good Friday can feel like the most boring day of the year. It's usually cold, and in Penguin there was nothing on but religious programming instead of Transformers - badly drawn cartoons and that whole in the jungle one day ad on ad naseum. I can't really talk too much about Roadside Jesus having played the role myself one Easter. It was in primary school, and I was given the role of Jesus in an Easter Parade through the school. Luckily it was the good bit, where people waved palms - well, weeds if I'm honest - as I rode through the school with regal purity. Incidentally, it bugs me to this day how I rode through the school, since obviously we didn't have access to a donkey. Was it skateboard, bike, trolley, or piggyback on a fat kid? It troubles me that I don't know. And since I had previously played Joseph in a Penguin church production - you won't recall the Joseph goes to sleep bit of the bible, that was pure Penguin, but when I woke up a woman in the front row either mouthed this is awesome or awful and I don't know which - it all feels a bit Springeresque in hindsight. My cousin - the one I don't like - has the distinction of playing Jesus more famously than me though. During his roughly 6ix week stint at my secondary school, he was cast as Jesus in a Grade 10en play, and decided to play him as a sort of Frankie Howard character camply accepting his fate as a martyr for the Catholic religion with swishes, swirls, interpretive dance and an accent that was pure Snagglepuss. My exit stage left joke would have been hilarious if anyone got it. Or I had friends that year. I love Snagglepuss a lot, but there's a time and a place. I like to think my reading of the role was a lot more subtle, but all I can remember about it was I loved the attention, especially given that it got me a free Violet Crumble from the tuck shop because I did such a bang up job. Obviously, and luckily, after lunch I wasn't crucified, but I was bowled for 2wo during after school cricket by a ball bowled by a little smart arse who's foot was clearly 2wo feet over the crease, a clear no ball. It would have continued the motif of the day had I been resurrected by an umpires decision and given a 2nd chance, but I wasn't, and the smart arse kid proceeded to hook my bouncers over the fence time and time again...lousy Easter, probably got an Easter bilby that day, stupid....

Jesus is a difficult role to play, but so was an 80tys Easter Bunny at North West Coast schools. It was a tough gig, less glamorous and more difficult to pull off than a Fitzgeralds Santa Claus, requiring a greater leap of faith from a child than Santa as well, and a far worse costume. I mean, Santa was plausible, you could basically tell that one of your teachers had just put some bunny ears on even at 5ive. Pippa - ah, Pippa - was always ahead of her time when it came to telling us all such home truths around the monkey bars, and I lost my Bunnyfaith when the designated bunny failed to give me an egg one year in a mad scramble, and I saw him driving away in a 1974 Ford Mercury Cougar Coupe with his bunny ears still on, and a Winfield Red in hand. It was the talk of the fort for weeks to come. Easter is an awkward one at the best of times, I never know whether to buy everyone an egg or not, and unless I get a Cadburys Creme Egg, I'm never happy with my lot. Big W had eggs in February, and they've still got lots left. I'm pretty sure Panda Eyed Girl has been flicked, and they still haven't fixed the light near the DVDs that keeps flicking, which makes my head hurt every time I walk under it. No one today seemed in any kind of cheerful Easter spirit, let alone me because I was snowed under with work and couldn't really get my motivation up at all. Everyone is just hanging out for their free government cash, and until then all commerce seems to have ceased. Blue Eye Shadow Girl had a weird haircut today, I'm sure it was her Easter treat to herself, but I'm not sure about it. My Easter treat to myself is probably just going to be my usual packet of football cards, and maybe a Creme Egg. As I walk through the shopping mall, a stern faced security guard pouts from behind a mask of toughness and leathery craggy lines. Someone got stabbed here the other day, a good samaritan - sadly we haven't had a roadside version yet - tried to intervene in a shoplifting situation and got a knife in the ribs for their trouble. It doesn't put me in the spirit of the season, whatever that is, as I walk past as quickly as I can, away from the cragg, away from the weird hairstyles, and out back into the car park, where no religious figures, fictional or real, are waiting on me, and there's no prospect of a virgin birth around these parts, because, well, you know the punchline...

Ah, Easter, what a web it has weaved. From the horrible despair of the 3hree days at Eddie McGuires house in Melbourne looking at my bicentennial medal and wishing I could do anything to live in Burnie again to the cash splurge of 97 when I recklessly spent all my uni book money on a Gold Coast Chargers rugby league top and got depressed that Brashs was closing - a post in and of itself by the way - to all those wasted fitful Good Fridays sitting around the house staring out the window at grey skies. I'm sure there's memories of egg chasing - literal egg chasing , not playing rugby - in there somewhere, memories of painting up and egg and then throwing it down a hill and some other bugger finding it, supressed by the cold weather and the lack of ingredients to make a lime spider. I'm unlikely to use the holiday season to be born again as a new person, since I'm set in my ways, and there will be no twists in the next few days to make me bold and positive. In fact, I suspect I will wile away at least one of these precious days wasting my hard earned free government cash at Syrup in a I thought this would be a good idea moments at 3am. Such is the flesh on display whether you want to see it or not around that big stripper pole, Roadside Jesus could have a field day encouraging people to repent. I think though my Mum would quite like me to have a kid, I think she's beginning to try and nag me into it. There's just enough time obviously for a Syrup pick up and time to...no, I'm not going to have kids. Given the hissy fit I've had trying to get lime spider ingredients, I don't think I could handle a child. Instead, I decide to head out on a possibly fruitless search for Halls Lemonade, and just enjoy my day, my time off, my own moods and my own sense of independence. I'm sure Roadside Jesus would appreciate the individuality of thought I'm displaying, after all, if you are out in the cold of a Hobart morning holding a cross, what are you but an individual....maybe we'd get on...mind you, the religious people want to ban Lily Allen from the radio...so maybe not...

I'm not sure he'd like Snagglepuss either...too fruity...

Sleeping alone in a field

If Moonah through circumstance remains, poetically perhaps, the winter of my discontent, it's probably un-surprising that my happy memories are all pretty much tied to my years living in Penguin, shopping at Cut Price Sams for Bubble O Bills and having really long summers out the back trying not to hit a cricket ball into the pampas grass. I'm aware as I get older that it wasn't Penguin that was so wonderful so much as my youth, and my ability to run around and around in a circle until I fell down if I so wanted. It's probably one of the reasons I don't go back - the family Xmas of 2000 nearly broke the spell and allure and I don't want to do that. Everything I ever learned in life pretty much started in Penguin, fashion, how not to ask for a Golden Gaytime, that when the siren sounds at a football ground you really should come off. To explain that, at 1/4 time in Australian Rules Football you used to be able to walk onto the ground to hear the coaches address to the team. It's where I learned all of my swear words and where I saw the classic 80tys moment of women with paddle pop sticks scraping mud off the players boots. It's also where I heard the Penguin equivalent of I Have a Dream, a coaches speech about netballers and skirts which is still being recited in pubs to this day. We were playing Latrobe, and at 3/4 time, as the crowd dispersed, I probably saw something in the shape of the clouds that I had to study, and as I stood staring up at the sky, the game was held up for about 3hree minutes while I wandered around quite oblivious to the drama, until an announcement had to be made over the PA can that kid get the hell off the ground. That's why I was so happy in Penguin, I could just wander around thinking and playing, without a care in the world. It surprises me sometimes when my Mum sometimes says I was a whinger when I was younger, because I don't remember ever whinging about anything other than the time Joe Brown turned the hose on me or the time they took off Wide World Of Sports and put on some nonsense called Live Aid...I mean who's going to remember that, Peter Gilligan reading the sports, that's what the people will remember...no wonder I went to my room all day, huffing and puffing...

One thing I realise I've lost as I've got older is summer - summer in Penguin was always a fantastic treat. As soon as the last of the board games was packed away and the last school chair was on the last desk, summer began. Even though by modern standards, those summers weren't exactly technologically exciting, since the most exciting advance we had was when it was really warm we could tune in Melbourne TV, it was still fun. There was a little general store around the corner with a KISS make up set in the window - still there in 1992 - which seemed like Willy Wonka to a youngster, given the amount of chocolate that was available, even though in hindsight my description of the owner of the store simply sounded like wonka. By the time I moved back to Penguin after 4our years of living in Scotland, everything seemed incredibly small, including my mind, after a large dose of what you might call the real world - drug dealers at school, that sort of thing - and flint hard Ayrshire cynicism. To my discredit I was horribly snooty about the place even as everyone around me worked overtime to keep my face straight. I was a little bit like Mums friends sisters who picked up the local paper, the Mercury, and bemoaned the lack of news about Scotland when they were here on holiday, and I'm sure that the fact I couldn't find the right kind of bread to toast caused a few troubles, little pains masking life changing despair. The little kid who stood at the bottom of South Road and said Penguin was a beautiful county was long gone, and I think it took a while to rediscover my love of the place. It was the little things that made me rediscover why I liked the place - particular ice creams, friendliness in the newsagents, and probably the tranquility of Hiscutt Park. Once I found my spot - the spot in which I could compose my thoughts - I felt a great deal better about everything. That when I listened to my thoughts, they were poisonous and bitterly homesick, I find that natural, logical and it certainly wasn't Penguins fault...apart from the people who laughed every time you asked for a Golden Gaytime at Alannah Hills Dads Milk Bar...that was entirely Penguins fault...

I admit though that I love people who spend all their time thinking about the old days. Moods are so interchangable that thinking about a glorious past is to cut out all the negative feelings, and focus on how wonderful it was to live in the pre 87 economic bust. There's a pub in North Hobart called The Black Buffalo, where only the barmaids stay young. A man pulling up a bar stool at 40ty can very quickly find himself waking up at 60ty with David Byrne handing him a big white suit and posing some questions. Time stands eternally still, a parade of blonde uni students left to fend for themselves amidst a stream of innuendo and routine from the patrons. To them, to the patrons, it's a mecca, an old fashioned pub, but there's a dining bit attached to it, a big glass room full of wooden furniture and good new fashioned family fun as kids tuck into fish fingers in a basket. Even though only scampi should come in a basket. It's a strange meeting of old school thinking and new school thinking, as manly old men in flannel shirts bemoan a world that they don't understand before heading over to the football to do the whole thing in an entirely new setting. Never breaking from a long established pattern of nostalgic yearning and fast drinking, they must have had a day when the plans for the adjoining family restaurant were unveiled and grumbled about it as more modern thinking. The trouble with nostalgia is it clouds every moment of the present. I had to cut myself short, and still do, when I start muttering about how football was a lot better in my day. An old boy meanwhile is in the corner of the pub, hitting physically one of the computerised betting machines. Disgustedly, he curses in the general direction of the ceiling fan all kinds of curses at modernity as the blonde behind the bar contemplates just how long it will take to finish her degree and get out of there, and a bespectacled barkeep fills in his football tipping and pretends nothing has happened. Our eyes are all drawn towards the simple fact that the betting machine isn't plugged in, but we figure from the craggy drawn lines on his face and the Maurie Fields style way he keeps saying the phrase mongrel that the old boy deserves to let off some steam, and besides, I know tomorrow I'll be stuck in traffic muttering similar curses about how, in my day, we didn't have so many gas guzzling 4WDs, and when I curse, I'm sure I'll miss a gap by which I can accelerate through the traffic...Black Buffalo, warm me up a barstool, I don't get todays modern world, I need the horse and cart to make a comeback...

My Mum used to say when I asked her that the best day of her life hadn't happened yet, a typically Glaswegian response. My best day - concession being so far - was probably some time in the golden summer of 1986. It was the year my trampoline flew down the street in a hurricane and we had to chase it down the road. That trampoline, even with it's ability to electric shock me in a variety of ways, was my crowning achievement in my first 8ight years. A real realisation of a goal, in that I had spent most of my year nagging, cajouling and seeking a trampoline, and then when I got it, I felt like I needed a cigarette, such was the satisfaction I felt at my achievement. That would be a candy cigarette of course straight from that little packet with the drawn on cowboy before a tedious family group got them banned. I had planned an entire summer of doing nothing but bouncing, lying, and then bouncing some more. Before then, one of the nuns organised an end of day softball game, which to me just got in the way of lying on a desk with Sarah playing Operation. Such tedious nunnery was an early example of the nunny state, making people do things like play sport when there were perfectly good board games to play. As it happened, I hit the winning run, off the last pitch of the last action of the school year of the best year I had had to then off the school jock in fading sunlight to general approbation and appreciation before heading off to a blistering summer of excitement. Even though this scene plays out in my head like the dying scenes of Major League, some things don't add up. Was it really a big home run or did I just bunt it and someone else scored? Was it fading twilight or just lunch time? Was it the school jock or the school nerdy girl with hair in a bow and an inhaler who pitched the ball? Do I just remember it all wrong and have elevated it to some magic moment? The last time I was in Burnie, I began to doubt myself, lay down in the middle of my old school field, and decided that whatever the truth, the past didn't have this obsessive desire to video tape every single moment, which made me happy that I could tell my own story how I wanted, and let it stand as a perfect moment. As I said, it's why I don't go back to Burnie or Penguin all that often. As I lay in that field, a janitor began mowing the lawn around me, but I didn't care, I was happy, content, as I always was, and not even Groundskeeper Willie on a Victa was going to disturb a long stream of happy, fantastic memories...

Then I come back to Hobart, and create new memories that for the most part are equally good...I guess you could say things aren't too bad...

Sleeping alone on a landmine

One of my skills - if I can be arrogant enough to say I have any skills other than the ability to unfreeze an IPOD - is an ability to say meaningful things about netball games without paying attention. A simple comment about over officious umpiring used to do it, and if the opposition team had a big stocky monster, a massively thighed Goal Defence with hair in a pony tail and a skirt that doubled as a cape, you could simply say her size advantage made the game unfair. This is almost entirely from my year watching my girlfriend play netball - when I should have been looking for work obviously, and sometimes when I was meant to be at work - on windy days at Creek Road in Moonah. Sometimes I would take a stroll to the video store and smoke a cigarette, sometimes I would go to the putt putt golf course or mill around Harris Scarfe trying not to be given into trouble by fat security guards. Mostly though I would sit on a bench wondering why girlfriends team wore such horrible yellow and green uniforms, and talking to other bored boyfriends or life partners - I think we were just starting to be corrected on the use of lesbian around 1999, certainly at uni - about life in general. I think I probably exaggerated my abilities in life at that point, I'm sure I said there was a screenplay in my knapsack and a song in my heart, but there was one guy called Jeff, who was always trying to claim he was the boyfriend of the hottest girl in the team when in fact he was the boyfriend of someone who was a little less hot - this is looks wise, Moonah in mid June, no one is hot, even if they busked as a fire-eater - and who would constantly tell us sub Del Boy stories about how he was about to go straight to the top. The stillness of those games, the cold and the ill informed conversation and the poetic ennui sweeping in from the hot dog stand could make you feel like time, like your life, had ground desperately to a halt. My girlfriend, a super competitive person who was highly driven to turn the clash of the green and yellow skirted someones against the blue and blue skirted somethings into a Wrestlemania worthy contest, would always try and win in spite of her less talented team-mates, and her voice would resonated around the court and pierce the stillness. I wonder sometimes if she ever looked up to me for support and I was reading in the Herald Sun a Fred Bassett comic or a Mike Sheahan article about Australian Rules Football and got upset. She never mentioned it, but the saddest and weariest I ever saw her was one day when I looked up from the paper or from Jeff telling me that his girlfriend really was the hot model one - look Jeff, she's gay, we all know that - and the game had finished, her team-mates were already scattering to the pub, and she had taken it upon herself to collect some stray netballs. I looked up, most of the people had gone around me, and she must have known that I wasn't paying the slightest bit of attention to the game and I didn't even know if the game had ended or who had won. Even though it was from a distance, I knew that I had made some kind of tactical error, and a chill went right through me even before I could mouth a very weak good hustle or some kind of platitude, and she went right back to collecting the balls without changing expression. She always looked incredibly beautiful in those moments when I realised she was right and I was wrong, but I never found the right way to tell her. I thought perhaps over effusive praise of her meatballs was enough, but somehow it never was, and when I saw Jeff one day by the side of the road wearing a Dominos sandwich board, it was my loss, not hers, that we couldn't share his misfortune together...

Those Saturdays were never pretty for me. They were good in the sense that if you believed as I did that you were bit of a tortured and misunderstood poet, that life and fates had conspired against you, watching old women run around playing netball in the rain felt like quite the conspiration, if that's even a word. Out of necessity sometimes our post match analysis would take place in the grim strains of the towns McDonalds. If the Austudy people stuffed up and put money in my account we would splash out on the towns bakery, an award winning bakery that would one day win, er, awards for it's Reggie from Big Brother biscuits. One day my girlfriend was queueing idly for her Big Mac and some girls from another team began sort of having a go at her for the fact their team beat her team. It was probably something of a relationship high point that I told them to fuck off, and they did, and we had a lovely day having a go at them back while the fitfully and nervously ate their chips as quickly as they could until they rushed out. Most of my times in McDonalds involve my Dad, Fathers Days mornings where we eat pancakes and he has to wait endlessly for his specially cooked McMuffin that takes a Kevin Rudd style tantrum to get cooked. Those mornings are easy, light hearted conversation about sport, easy banter, the occasional tantrum, then a drive home, but that's lovable old Kingston, with it's lovable old familiarity and it's lovable old old people who don't know quite how to use their indicator. Moonah never felt comfortable, and nor did the conversation. But the thing is, I'm sure there were games when she won and I had money and people were stupid and we laughed at them and then smoked and drank and played ATARI and talked about art, but I can't remember them. Not easily. Not until I've had my early morning pancakes, and talked to my Dad about Paisley and got into a relaxed frame of mind. Anxiety to me breeds anxious thoughts, and Dad and his silly face as he mutters about getting an egg when he didn't want an egg, like he wouldn't get his pudding if he didn't eat his meat, is the perfect relaxant for any aspiring thought composer, never mind one suffering from flu who can only think of bad things otherwise...

Anyway, the point is that I can never objectively go to the town of Moonah and think positive things about it. It's a place of strangely dark mid mornings in my mind, a place of silence and mood changes and helplessness. It's not Moonahs fault of course, they certainly did design their video store with a car park specifically designed to make the bored seem even more miserable. Just happened that way. It's probably apt that when we went on a morale boosting work trip to play putt putt golf we couldn't play the 18th - a testing lie with a steep uphill slope - because, how can I put this, someone had left a bodily function near the hole. Their precision was admirable. The night descended into further chaos because a Scottish guy - why is it always a Scottish guy - demanded a particular type of milk and in the single minded pursuit of getting him some milk everyone else had to hang as they grew waiting for their own food. I never got that hedgehog slice by the time anarchy descended on the group and we were forced to march out as a protest en masse. Even though In fact, that putt putt course, as far as I can tell, is a victim of my eternal mindset in this place, because the 2nd time I went there, I threw my putter away in a terrible huff and was left to play about 3hree holes of catch up on my own behind my own playing group in the rain while an attractive but bogany girl stood with hands on hips, her hair streaked with highlights and attitude as she impatiently waited for me to play through. I pushed my hands through my hair and cursed Moonah indignantly as my little yellow ball lipped out of the cup time and time again until I cheated and stormed off to my car with the putter thrown in the boot. I've still got it. Sorry putt putt course. It makes up for the lack of a hedgehog slice. I'm so sensitive to the history of a place when I'm in it, I wish I could turn my brain off and just wander around, like a normal person, but of course, I can't do it. All it takes is one damn breeze, just one little damn breeze to remind me of all those wasted moments, all those black Saturdays, all those damn weekdays smoking outside the video shop. And it never seems to stop whenever I drive through there. Even with the windows wound up, it still finds me, still runs up my spine. It was only the other day that I realised I had the same kind of huff in the same town, but playing ten pin bowling...maybe I'm just crap at sports...actually if you've seen me throw a javelin, you'd know it really is just me...

The first fight we ever had, I slept on the couch. I could have slept in the attic and played ATARI all night long, but it felt like a more apt punishment for whatever my offence was. After an Artificial Joy Club lyric, I used to say such punishment was sleeping alone on the landmine, since banishment to the couch would require plenty of thinking time until she exploded and got it out of her system. After a while of tossing and turning and not being able to adjust the rabbit ears television antenna to pick up whatever late night sport C7 was running at 3 in the morning, I went for a long walk around Moonah. My impressions of the place weren't, as you have read, very positive even then. I kept walking, through the cold, hands in the pockets of my little denim jacket - hey, looking suave unemployed boy - head down, past some drunks and some bus drivers knocking off for the night, one of whom may have hit on me but a 3am booty call with a Metro driver in Moonah would definitely have been rock bottom, or as the bus driving community call it here in Tasmania, the school run to Warrane. I kept walking for ages, with a clear head, just out of boredom, frustration and having nowhere else to go. I could hardly go back to Mum and Dads, and cop another lecture about all this wasted beauty - mental beauty - that I was frittered away. I couldn't go back to the couch because I was freezing and fidgety and wide awake. So I walked until the sun came up, up and down, down and up, past the same drunks, past the same horny bus driver, past the same drunks, past McDonalds, past the NAB bank, got on first name terms with the drunks...it was hardly a memorable road trip, but it at least cleared the head a little bit. Since the only thing open was a late night pub, I got her a bottle of wine - which was a step up on my normal contribution of milk and bread - and left it on the table when I got back at some random time mid morning, feet absolutely aching and throbbing and the shoe leather down to littlest Hobo proportions, before I took off to some pointless job interview where I wore a suit and said I had all the attributes they wanted and my tie choked me and I knew that the brother of the interviewer would get the job anyway. She never really thanked me for the wine - as I've said, it wasn't our style - but that night, my dinner got tremendously complimented. And when we watched whatever current affairs program was in vogue at the time and bagged out the presenters hair, it was possible to forget all the troubles in the world around a plate of tepidly cooked chips washed down by the best wine a 3am pay packet could buy...

For Moonah, and for me, especially in 1999, it was as good as it got...

The unfinished writing exercise of TAFE class, 2002, not the one about Cocoa Puff Man

I learned about patience from a girl at my primary school. I forget her name, but I remember her toothless smile, and the carefree way she would hang her yellow Supergirl bag on the hook, daring it to fall to the floor. For a full year, Prep it was, she would stare at me every single day as I walked past, her yellow polo neck clinging to her spindly youthful frame like a tight cotton trap. If got a lunch order bag, she would stare at me. If I cried during The Wizard Of Oz, she would stare at me. While we waited for that weird ginger kid who everyone hated to finally jump off the fort, she would stare at me. I had never been stared at before, and it was bugging me. I tolerated it for a while, but eventually it got to me. It was when we were colouring in one day. I had finally learned that I wasn't supposed to write one letter on each page of my book, my big giant Ms in captor cursive no doubt the talk of much that boy aint right animation in the staff room, and I was colouring in a pig or some such nonsense. I can't remember whether I was a good colourerer or not - I was a terrible drawer, so it was good, and it felt good, working within the confines of a structured environment. Sure enough, I was in the zone of colouring, every single part of me a perfect synchronicity of crayon and page. Her stare broke that, and with the first noted flash of temper I would display in my life, I asked her what the hell she was doing. It broke her stare, and she indifferently asked to borrow a black crayon. I shared it, but she never stared at me again. I'll never know if she liked me, she was patiently waiting for a crayon, or just thought I had a weirdly shaped head, but I was rude, and she didn't reveal her true intentions - I had broken whatever carefully planned or imagined process she had. Many years later, after 6ix months of planning, I asked a girl out after what I thought was many months of groundwork, and what I thought were mutually beneficial glances. but before I could finish she was interrupting me, to ask a question so pointless and vapid, that I lost all ideas and my entire train of thought. Instead of asking her out, I asked her for a crayon - she didn't get it, but I did, and left her behind that day. In fact, I felt like finding that girl from Prep and apologizing. An interruption to patiently planned thoughts that have taken months to formulate is enough to drive anyone to drink - in her case, water from the bubblers, in my case, a carton of Pura Milk, bought from the fridge of an Upper Burnie Milk Bar, where Jimmy Barnes was on the jukebox, and only Jimmy, on an endless loop, the owner daring anyone to break the spell...

I learned about success from page 115 of a revised edition of the Guinness Book of Records. Once upon a time the book would thud on my doorstep and I would use it to learn about the universe, long before they invented bloody Google. I would intently study weird long necked Africans and big fat Americans, but most of all I would study a picture of a big yellow Lamborghini. Oh how I would study it, in fact I would precociously tell people that if they stuck with my life story, I would one day repay them by picking them up by the side of a puddle in such a car on my way to my hot date with Bridget from the Gruen Transfer. I now drive a Hyundai. No need for connection of points in that life story. Anyway, there was a large and supportive network of people in my early childhood who invested in the early intellectual promise I showed and help me get my dream. My Dad was showered with copies of the Young Composers to nurture my interest in, er, Chopin and other composers (like all magazines in the 80s, you bought one, got one free and the company went out of business by edition 3hree). There was a Sale Of The Century board game in our house with electronic dancing buzzers and so much trivia my head exploded. And best of all, there were airplanes, from a short lived interest in air and space travel from the visit of Haleys Comet. Sure, when my cousins husband who works in air traffic control took one look at the model airplanes my Dad had made, he laughed and said the wings were upside down, but hey, no one is perfect right? And I was sure I would get that Lamborghini, with all the fancy and finery...funny thing is, I was outside a nightclub in Melbourne, and out of a not dis-similar vehicle stepped an AFL footballer with a sub hairdresser intellect of a girlfriend in tow, who walked straight in, made sure everyone knew who he was, and then proceeded to vomit much later all over the floor in a flowing motion that was far more controlled than any of his kicks ever were. To the outside world, I guess he's a success, but there's other things in my life I value now. I'm sure that player, for all his frippery and finery, has no friends of any value. In fact I know so, because as we left the club, we was behind a velvet rope, all on his own, sitting there watching his girlfriend leave with a better footballer, while he looked aimlessly at his phone and waited for someone to ring...

I learned about failure from my Dad. The way he tells it, I was training for the state soccer team on a windy November day at Montello soccer ground. I wasn't without hope, or so I thought. Montello was a harsh field of dreams, uncut and unmowed pitches as far as they eye could see adjoined with disparate little hills of dirt - metaphorically and literally, you could climb the hill or fall down it on your arse and make a mess. I can't say my Dad has been a pushy parent - on the contrary, he finds my sporting failures endlessly hilarious. 10en people stood in a line, a line I was at the back of. They all took penalty kicks, they all hit the ball in the same place, the coach saved all the penalties, and carefully explained 10en times that the ball really shouldn't be hit straight at him, but placed, tucked into the corner of the net. Inevitably, I ran up and hit the ball straight at him, then went back to studying cloud formations with my shirt tucked into my shorts. The way Dad tells it, he was laughing because rather than learn from the lessons of the previous 10en kickers, I had copied them and thus failed embarrassingly, what he doesn't mention is when I looked over, he had his jacket pulled over his head, and looked utterly forlorn that he had got out of bed to watch such a stupid child. That's how I tell it anyway. I remember that as the biggest failure of my childhood, that and the whole blackboard spelling debacle. Funny thing was, many years later, I was at Love Street, watching St Mirren play a game against some team miles better than us, Hibs or something, a cross came over, and our striker, on a run of horrific luck, missed an absolute sitter, from right underneath one of the posts. As he looked into the crowd of groaning, gurning St Mirren supporters in mid whinge, if his mind hit the pause button as he looked at the plastic bucket seat where I was sitting, he would have seen me pull my jacket over my head, in disbelief as to what I was seeing. I should have sympathised, but I didn't, I was one of those yelling and screaming, but if he wanted to take a moment to tuck his shirt into his shorts and decide whether a cloud was a sheep or a dog, well, I certainly wasn't going to deny the man his moment...if he wanted to drink from a Chocolate Big M, I'd have understood that as well...

I learned about love from my first ever girlfriend. Her name was Sarah, she was a twin, one of two I believe I'm right in saying. I don't know if we kissed, there's every chance we didn't, that we simply bonded because she liked Punky Brewster and I thought it was OK and that was good enough for everyone. She was a philosopher, and more or less my first 3hree girlfriends were. Although her philosophy was breathy and tended to be about how wonderful she would find the simplest things, she was definitely inspiring. No-one could pick up a leaf and find beauty in it like Sarah. When we broke up, I remember feeling upset, more upset than I did when my sandwich had paste in it instead of cheese, or more upset than when I couldn't find my Ju Jitsu Heman figure when I needed him for a battle. I'm sure there was a moment when Punky Brewster came on and I missed talking to her about what happened, some hilarious mix up involving her friend or a chewed up video tape, and felt sad. Our breakup was wonderfully mutual I think, I don't remember any acrimony. All that happened was that when it was lunch time, we just were a little bit further apart in the circle when we sat down and ate our lunch. Damn it, paste. Many years later, I was at a night club, watching one of my friends break up with their girlfriend. He was yelling and screaming and she was crying and yelling and he was stomping and she was screaming and the music was thumping and the joint was jamming. And such things. They both left, her face like one of those wronged wives on the CI channel, his face like someone who would be watching the football from the hospital. A girl tapped me on the shoulder and said something about what was their problem, I said they didn't watch enough Punky Brewster as children, she laughed and asked if all my solutions to problems were so childlike, sat next to me, and that's how I started the most significant adult relationship of my life. It made me wonder if adult relationships were overrated, and when we broke up 1ne year later because, you guessed it, the solutions to all the problems in my life were so childlike, I still hadn't worked it out. Incidentally, this is my version of events - she says I asked to buy her a drink with such clammy desperation it was endearing, and she felt bad for me. I prefer my version better, although with her version, it ties in a bit with how I asked Sarah out, and in both cases, it could have been a Big M I was offering...

I learned about resillience from...oh sod this, I give up, I'm going for some chips...