...and then there are the good days.

"I love my job and the students with whom I've worked, with a few exceptions... every day is something new and it's usually amazing. It's not always pleasant, but it's something I'm grateful I got to experience, something that I like to believe I'm better off for having gone through"


-Dave (from 'On Subbing: The First Four Years')

Last year I had a student who I was not getting on with, her dad had died recently and I think she found it very difficult to take orders from another male as a result. She was always beating up on herself, telling me that she was stupid, she couldn't write or read, she should fail. She ran out of class crying on many occaisions. Eventually after having tried everything else I rang her home and told her mum that her daughter was refusing to do work because she thought she couldn't, I suggested that the girl stays with me an hour a week after school and we will work on her reading where she can't escape.


I wasn't sure how this would go down. The girl fronted to her friends about how much she hated what I had done, she made me out to be a total dick. That didn't bother me, kids aren't allowed to admit that they appreciate the attention from you, the more they do the more they complain.


We read together for about four months, slowly at first, swapping over to share the reading a paragraph for me a paragraph for you. We read every week, she complained about me most days, we never spoke on a human level and she wouldn't look me in the eyes but she started trying in my class. I was never sure what she really thought of me but every time I forgot about our sessions she would be there waiting without fail, she'd never said a word but she'd turned up every week and by now no one was twisting her arm.


Together we finished the first book she's ever read cover to cover, we got good grades in my English class and she stopped telling me how stupid she was. She never said thank you but then she never really spoke to me at all.


I don't mind that we never finished up chummy, at least I know I will always be remembered as that prick teacher who made her read her first book all the way up to the end... for better or worse.

The internet claims another man's innocence.

So Gav bought a new teev and I have a household back but that hasn't been the end of Mark and his downloading of antisocial video...


Man inserts his head in a vagina (must see)

Over 40's swingers party private video

Mexican gang street fighting

Fist-fuck orgy

Negro beaten to death by riot police

Woman drinks cum after giving dog a hand-job

Man hit by two cars

Death by firing squad


This list goes on and on... he just sits there watching the Limewire search monitor and jumping on whatever tangent flashes across the screen. It is like a virtual Soddom, every concievable sin, most video's home-made and the madness never ends! You think that you've experienced every unspeakable act imaginable then there it comes flying across the screen, Daddy gets hand-job from daughter and friend, KKK lynching, squirrel fired from potato launcher it scrolls on and on.


I wish I was making this shit up, I wish that squirrel didn't have to die but then... that's entertainment!


The worst part about it is that it's so damn fascinating, but why? Am I actually into dogs cumming into women's faces (I don't think so), so what then? Maybe it is the proof that no matter how fucked up you think you are this is irrefutable proof that there is always someone who deserves a bullet to the head more than you!


I don't know what it is, but I do know that it's hard to do any honest soul searching when you can hear the sound of the KKK torching niggers coming in from the next room!



My brain is broken, good night.

I feel a flashback coming on...

I have hardly left the house this weekend... I feel crusty.


I need a life but I don't really know anyone around here and every time I go out I seem to only ever find freaks. I guess I am still recoiling from the last time...


It was a couple of months ago, I was in Ruby's (a bar in Belgrave) with an old high school friend when this lunatic in a jester cap floated over to our booth in a cloud of dope smoke. His name was Michael and according to him, he could get the best buds in the whole of the hills. He liked the look of my companion's head wear (his hat was like Joey's from Degrassi High).


Between business transactions and joint rolling our new friend filled us in on his views of new-age spirituality and trips to Amsterdam. He seemed very intese but friendly. Everyone in there knew him, I guess he was like the house drug dealer or something because there was this knowing wink thing going on between Michael and most of the people in the bar. When he ran out of grass and beer money we were leaving so we gave him a lift to his grandparents house. I don't want to sound like a hippie or nothing but the whole night had this terrible doomcore sort of vibe about it. Something was definately wrong, but I didn't yet know just how wrong things were going to get.


I went home, forgot about it and got on with my week.


The next Saturday Michael called in the grips of a suicidal depression and said he needed a good listener. I was a bit shocked but I agreed to meet him at the organic cafe in Belgrave in half an hour anyway. When I arrived we ordered strong long blacks and Michael told me the story of his amphetamine addiction and his experiences in psych wards... his tale of a battle with drugs however quickly turned onto the subject of scoring.


I tried desperately to sidetrack the topic but before I knew it we were embarking on a pilgrimage through the hard drug terrain of the hills. We started out begging for phone change infront of the local newsagency. I had the money but Michael insisted that he would pay for himself. I pleaded with him but he would have none of that.


After a humiliating half an hour we made our first call, got their answering machine but spotted the dealer's son Dylan hanging around out the front of the toilets on the main drag. Michael tried to talk business but Dylan wasn't interested and told us to try his mum again. We gave up and Michael begged for more change.


Back at the phone booth we got through but Dylan's mum said she was only holding grass because their supplier had been busted. I thought it was over but Michael wouldn't let it go so we made another call, got another machine and cruised the street waiting for dumb luck. Instead of dumb luck we found a teacher friend of mine, Mark, out with his girlfriend and to my horror Michael proceeded to ask for spare change and probe him about good places to score. As I watched Mark's reaction I saw my career in education evaporate, my eyes pleading with him not to make this into an amusing annecdote for Friday drinks.


By now I was in a terrible panic, I had no idea how I was going to get myself out of this. Michael suggested we go for a drive and at that point in time I would have agreed to anything that got us off the streets. We drove to a huge house in Kallista but it was a no go so we decided to get back to Belgrave, ring Dyan's mum and settle for some grass.


We drove out to this run-down little cottage house which stunk of pot from the street. Once inside I could see why, every table in the house was piled with mountains of the stuff and Dylan's mother, Susan, was sitting in the middle of it all just about to take her morning methadone when we came knocking. We made our purchase and I hustled Michael out to the car, we needed to go somewhere, anywhere that was indoors and away from the streets where we were vulnerable to more strangeness and misfortune, so without thinking I took us back to my house.


Michael rolled joints and I brewed turkish coffee. I had already smoked myself into a deep funk when Michael accused me of spiking his coffee with LSD. I tried to convince him that this was not the case but he decided that it was a good thing and was in the kitchen producing more.


It was at this point that my new housemate came home.


I freaked out, Michael was taking off his belt and telling him about all the memories this belt held, all the good hits he'd used this belt to tie-off on. So there I was, a sloppy stoned mess with a derranged drug addict accosting my housemate with a belt. I couldn't explain it to my housemate, I didn't understand it myself so I did the only logical thing... I lost control. I ranted some uncomprehensible excuse at Michael and bundled him into my car to be deposited on the other side of the hill.


I set Michael down where I first found him, at Ruby's and then I went home and went to bed.


Oh where, oh where, have all the normal people gone?

The thin chalk line.

Spent most of the day so far sitting at my local cafe correcting VCE work listening to Eyehategod and Arab on Radar on my discman and to other table's conversations. There was this family birthday lunch taking place which seemed to represent every negative stereotype of my current locale. The whole family smoked including their youngest daughter (who couldn't have been more than 13) and mummy was supplying the cigs. They were having an extremely distracting conversation, a conversation that has solidified in my mind the meaning of the word bogan. Inbetween complaints against multicultural Australia they exchanged gossip... forget work the VB and mullet hair cuts this is what it is all about!


They discussed who of the daughters' friends was into self harm, who was annorexic or bulemic, who had parents into hard drugs, dole-bludging, cheating their partner and neglect of their responsibilities. Being a bogan is more than just a pair of tracksuit pants for every occaision or a cigarette brand that boxes their product in 50 packs, it is a lifestyle. Bogans are the unsung heros of counter-culture, self destructive, drug addled, dropped out and sex mad. They embody everything Tim Leary spoke out for gone wrong.


As I sat there distracted drowning in work, pen in hand something of the irony of my own situation also became glaringly obvious to me. Like all the cliches about the nuthouse where the only thing seperating the doctors from the patients is a white coat, I started to understand that all that seperates the teachers from the students is the direction they face in relation to the whiteboard. I am a conditioned institutional animal: like Pavlov's dogs a bell rings and I come running, I take my homework home each night and I eat a packed lunch of cut sandwiches, my students and I live mirror image lives.


There is an imaginary chalk line drawn through the middle of every classroom or as a student of mine put it last year-

"It's the kids who really run this school, we just let the teachers feel that they have control but it's in our hands and there's nothing you can do."

Solutions

Gav still hasn't come home, his solution to the no teev is to live at the pub, he has everything he needs there: beer, a pool table, television, people around him to complain about his ex-wife at and a heated room in which to enjoy all of this.


My stoner housemate Mark made a late appearance before I went to bed last night (somewhere around 1am). He had his own solution to the lack of television; using Limewire to down load uncut XXX rap videoclips. Mark doesn't fuck around with Limewire, he pulled twenty odd videos of black dudes in Lakers singlets and bandanas waving their hands around and throwing hundred dollar bills at naked strippers who were usually writhing around in jelly jiggling their jiggly bits just for starters. I went to bed feeling queasy and I was woken by a loud noise sometime later in the night by insane stoned laughter and the sound Ludacris' voice droning on about his manhood.


I got up a couple of hours later and hauled myself off to work with a mouth full of mothballs and a head full of static, I got a takeaway coffee from the bakery on the way for the car and fit two more mugs instant in before the bell rang for classes to start... as I walked out of the staff room en route to period one the caffeine started to surge and carried me kicking and screaming to the last bell of the day.

Too much work to do and the tv is broken

Hello and welcome to my life... a nice place to visit (and you know how the rest of the saying goes)


Too much work to do and the television is broken!


I miss the teev, I like the way you can just sit infront of it and vaporise your life, get home from work, switch it on and teleport to bed time without moving or thinking... it is like a diet version of having a life or something.


Anyway, I am sitting infront of the computer listening to a whole bunch of depressing music, avoiding doing what I have to do and I have no televsion, no cigarettes and no Coca-Cola... since the television broke down my housemates only seem to be home long enough to eat and then they leave again. It is good to know that our relationship was based on wasting our time collectively (and largely in silence).