My boring life vs. the giant mutant crustacean with heat-ray vision and an insatiable hunger for human flesh

I have not posted in over two weeks... it is not just that I have been working far too much and have not had time, it is also that I have had nothing post-worthy happening in my life. Sometimes I wish that my life could be a Roger Corman production... that would be cool. If Roger was writing them then my days could be filled with ghosts and demons and mad scientists and aliens and naked chicks and car chases and stuff. Instead I go to work, then I come home and watch too much television and smoke too many cigarettes; I think about how I should quit smoking and television but then I just get depressed about the amount of television I watch and how much I smoke and that prompts me to smoke more and turn on the television in search of distraction.


If this was a Roger Corman film there would be a secret defence base near my house working on a top secret laser weapon, it would malfunction during a storm which would probably cause it to fire at random thus hitting my aerial in the wee hours whilst I was up watching some lame monster movie. I imagine that at this point Mr Corman would have to decide whether my television would turn into a portal that sucked me into a monster movie universe or a portal that let the monsters escape into the 'real' world... either way I would be pursued by government agents trying to protect national defence secrets, hook up with the female lead from the movie I was watching on the box when this whole fiasco started and just generally save the world from some kind of icky giant mutant crustacean with heat-ray vision and an insatiable hunger for human flesh.

The DayGlo hitchhiker and his Doomsday Army.

At the very edge of suburbia there is a Shell petrol station and a housing estate where all the houses look the same, as if someone has tried to build a monument to the ideal of suburban bliss by photocopying a picture over and over and pasting these copies side by side. Beyond this there is nothing but endless highway, you could just keep driving and driving and driving and there would be nothing to get in your way, nothing to slow you down until the petrol in your tank burnt up.


I think about this endlessness everyday as I am heading out to work. Whilst lighting a cigarette or sipping coffee from a styrofoam cup I think about how if I had the guts I could just keep on going but I never do. It is on this never ending stretch of road that I first saw him...


He was a hitchhiker heading to Coldstream walking very slowly as he only had one shoe. His booted foot on the pavement with his other stuck down the side of a weed infested drainage ditch. Over a DayGlo yellow jump suit he wore an open military shirt, his face hidden underneath a dusty drover's hat peering out through World War II flying goggles. As I recall he appeared to be talking to himself. I don't think he would have made a very successful hitchhiker, the thought of letting a random stranger ride in your car is scary enough without having to contend with someone that looks like they have been admitted into a psychiatric hospital at some point in their life and probably should not have been discharged.


But then again I have often since wondered where the hell someone who looked like that could have been going... maybe I should have stopped the car, but then I was late for work... maybe that was for the best... but then again as the man disappeared from view so too did any hope of a memorable experience. I cannot remember a single detail of that day, nothing before nor after this moment which was history in a matter of seconds, it is funny to think of how much of our lives we must lose to routine, all those moments we live that aren't worth recalling which fade as our precious brain cells vaporise.


I saw my friend once again from the safety of my car as I made that same daily pilgrimage in pursuit of my weekly pay check. I was coming around a bend that descends into the bottom of the valley when I was nearly run off the road by a mob of people dressed in army greens, gas masks and a rainbow of different coloured plastic DayGlo jump suits carrying hiking packs on their backs and swags rolled up under their arms as marched at a ferocious pace up the hill blocking off the oncoming traffic lane.


Was the apocalypse near? Are there environmental terrorists in our midst hiding in the hills waiting for their chance to pounce and bring down the industrial-capitalist machine? Are the dispossessed psychiatric patients who've fallen victim to the 'integrated recovery' scam mobilising into a guerilla army intent on wreaking a revenge so terrible on a society that's turned its back?


Who knows...

Under Siege.

Next to the homeless girl trying unsuccessfully to sell me sex in the train station toilets this stands out as one of my strangest public transport experiences.


It happened about three months ago whilst waiting for the train at a nondescript underground suburban train station which is lost somewhere in the middle of the line on which I live beyond the end up in the surrounding hills. It was a Sunday night, the end of a weekend that marked a new low for outer suburban public transport services. Three quarters of the line was undergoing track works and as a result a bus replacement service had been deployed to ferry people from the city to this nowhere location; a bus trip which clocked in at just under two hours, which I had spent spent standing pressed hip to hip with some very drunk yobs from the roughneck lumber town of Milgrove who spent the time knocking back beers and harassing a man with a broken leg and strange pattern baldness that seemed to be creeping up over the side of his scalp. The smell of stale beer, puke and stupidity rife in the stagnant air.


So I was standing on the train platform enjoying the peace, thankful that the Milgrove drunks having shot off on their own strange trajectory. Whilst I stood, I smoked and I listened to a middle aged Fijian woman complain to her daughter about how no one cares if people out here never get home when all of a sudden there was has deafening crash. An empty beer bottle sailed through the air thrown from the top of the escalator and exploded at our feet, followed by a teenage girl, who with her mascara running dark lines down her flushed cheeks, clutching a half full wine cask bladder marched passed us all the way across the platform and over the edge as she howled tears and screamed random expletives. She sat herself down on the tracks and called back to us 'What the fuck are youse looking at?!'


The Fijian and I looked at one another, then up at the arrivals clock when we realised that there were two minutes till this girl was a smear of red on the tracks. The woman shot off after the girl and I bolted up the escalator to find a station guard; moments later we were reunited on the platform with a rather befuddled station guard and a group of similarly foul mouthed and drunken teenagers locked into what was fast becoming a very strange standoff. The train was stuck halfway in the tunnel having stopped about five meters short of the girl and she was not moving, it was obvious that she had no idea how to end her now defunct suicide attempt so she sat on the tracks crying and screaming abuse at her boyfriend who was struggling to get free of the arms holding him back and run out after her. He was frothing at the mouth... spraying us with spit and foul language... kicking in frustration... the cords stood out along his neck and every vein in his forehead pumped its way to the surface and then in an instant he was gone, disappeared into the dark train tunnel followed closely by his friends.


The whole train station came under siege as the drunk teenagers spread into all three tunnels delaying every outbound service, the entire underground held hostage with the screams of teenage melodrama. The station guard sat defeated and helpless on the sidelines slumped against the barrier railing staring at his watch whilst we stood around him waiting to see what would happen next aware that any sense of normalcy had ground to a halt with the trains.

ME: Shouldn't you call for reinforcements or something?
GUARD [sighing]: No point, we can't set foot on the tracks till the police arrive.
ME: Oh, so are they coming.
GUARD: Yeah... oh... worst thing we could have done is stop all the trains. Now that there is no immediate danger there's no rush... cops could be hours. Even if the kids disappear we can't take off again until they've checked out every last dark corner of the place.


I lit another cigarette and turned my attentions to the drama in the tunnels trying to see the funny side of being trapped and at the mercy of teenage hormones and an excess of cheap wine... the folly of youth... those were the days.

Qu or K. Que; entropy... viva!

Gav is missing, the VCR is broken and a computer recording just called the house representing the telephone company to warn us of the impending service disconnection. A serious downside to living with unemployed, drug-addled fringe-dwellers who have a bad habit of going missing is that between their unexplainable absences and their incoherent days it is hard to find the time to get the bills paid.


Things are not holding together too well...


A couple of days ago whilst I was running late for work Mark, clad only in flannel pyjama bottoms and fluffy slippers rushed out in front of my car as I reversed out of the driveway. Panicked and turning blue, almost naked on a day so cold the frost had fused my windscreen wipers to the glass Mark ruched around to the driver's side window:


MARK: Dude, what are we going to do about the phone bill it is huge and way overdue?
ME: I've got to get to work man, I am running seriously late can't this wait?
MARK: Not really man, I've gotta get back up to the snow today. Should I try and squeeze some more out of my credit card? I don't know how far this is going to stretch!


So he's worse than broke and making another trip out to complete the video which from what I recently saw consists of three hours of Mark prowling around the Falls Creek local pub with his camera asking girls to show him their lower back tattoos and some footage of three drunks tripping on magic mushrooms falling off their snow boards and hurting themselves which was shot in the middle of the night by Mark whilst he was too wasted to hold the camera steady.


In the meantime... the house is starting to give way to entropy and no matter how much I clean I can't seem to hold back the chaos. Everywhere I look I see empty Coke cans, deflated wine cask bladders and mangled cigarette butts clutter the room. The corner of every room is being suffocated by growing piles of discarded junk mail and ever dish I wash is somehow replaced by three more dirties in the sink by morning. The air smells of mouldy food scraps, damp towels and sweat and I don't have the energy left to resist this filth.


Mark gets on speed and stays up for days, every light burning a permanent mark into the night. He stays up downloading amateur bare knuckle boxing videos, extreme sports and the odd spot of rape porn, he watches the television at the loudest volume possible and decides to clean vacuuming the floor around the piles of detritus at 4am. He has no money and has had to resort to scamming crisis packages from the Salvation Army, hitting a different office each week and making away with sandwich bags filled with coffee, white sugar, condensed milk powder and armfuls of stale bread, slightly old sausages and cheese slices.


There is no money spare for rent but he's got an ounce of pot sitting in a snap-lock bag on our coffee table.

Inbetween daze.

"There's something else chief, the bodies, th-they showed si-s-signs of cannibalism!" [Zzzzzzzzzzt] Mark, Gav and I, we brush past one another in the halls and you can feel it, there is something straining just bellow the surface, an unspoken tension that underlies everything we do and say. I deal with this by watching too much television, carting home arm-load after arm-load of B grade horror films from the local videostore and burning out my retinas until well into the witching hour. [Zzzzzzzzzzt] "This is the New York City Police Department's emergency number 9 1 1. There is no one in at the moment, you are listening to a recording. At the sound of the beep leave your name, telephone number, a short description of the crime, and the perpetrators."


Mark hasn't worked in weeks, he keeps going away for days at a time up to the snow to make some snowboarding video that will never happen. He's blown the limit on his credit cards and has had to resort to selling drugs up at the snow to keep his head above water. [Zzzzzzzzzzt] "There's a man here with some sort of a parasite on his arm. It's assimilating his flesh at a frightening speed!" [Zzzzzzzzzzt] On the odd occasion when Mark is home no food in the fridge is safe, he's never here long enough to shop, and if he does he leaves before he eats it and we have to throw it out before he returns. He'll walk in the door devour a 500g block of somone else's cheese and go to sleep, wake up either in the middle of the night or after we've left the house for the day eat all our bread, drink the milk and be gone back up to the snow before we realise that we are all out of everything.


"She says some monster came out of the sewer and ate her grandfather." [Zzzzzzzzzzt] Meanwhile Gav is slowly slipping over to the dark side. Things between him and Bec, the mother of his children have degenerated to a point where he is breaking into her house to take photo's to give to the Department of Human Services (DHS), he has a snap-lock bag in the kitchen where he keeps all the joint roaches he steals from her ashtray when he is on one of his photography assignments, he claims to be keeping them for DNA testing to prove to the DHS that she is back on drugs. [Zzzzzzzzzzt] "What are you kidding? Your man has a camera, mine has a flamethrower."


"Every dead body that is not exterminated becomes one of them. It gets up and kills, the people it kills get up and kill!" [Zzzzzzzzzzt] I am the center of calm in our house, I go to work, watch television and take up my listening post with both Gav and Mark, one ear and one eye on the television, one ear and one eye on them; I get to hear about how Mark is trying to pressure Gav into financing some ridiculous drug deal, when Mark comes to confess his imminent financial ruin I am half listening, sometimes Gav will stick a digital camera under my nose and show me the horrors of Bec's house, I'll glance down and grunt. [Zzzzzzzzzzt] "Do you believe in reincarnation Eve? I do, but then I am immortal and I have seen the same souls inhabit different beings throughout history." [Zzzzzzzzzzt] This space in the middle is mine, stuck somewhere between awake and asleep, between a fantasy world of imginary predators and a predatory reality where my housemates have waged a psychic cold war on reality. [Zzzzzzzzzzt] It took me three-hundred years to find you. I've waited so very long to find out you are not a god. You are evil!" [Zzzzzzzzzzt] [CLICK]

A new point of reference.

Driving along Kangaroo Grounds-St Andrews road on the way to the St Andrews market with Tania.

There is a point at the top of a hill where the scenery to your left drops away down a sheer cliff face and you can see the whole of Melbourne city like a grey smudge of vertical lines sitting on the horizon; it looks like the Emerald city out of the Wizard of Oz only filthy and out of focus. Tania smoking a cigarette and me coughing into my hand whilst on the radio Jedi Mind Tricks are trying to tell us that aliens exist. The driver's side speaker is broken, fizzing static and mimicking the music with rhythmic chatters of white noise.


It's weird to see the city looking so vulnerable, a tiny place like the plastic fairy-tale shoes people put in with their mice or the castles at the bottom of fish tanks. A scale model you could steal from someone's mantelpiece and they wouldn't notice for weeks; small like something that doesn't really matter in the grand scheme of everything.


Ever since I'd left it behind I've wondered if I made a mistake, what was I doing out here anyway? A refugee from the real world hiding out in the hills till he'd figured it out (the problem is, you've gotta know the question before you can come up with any useful answers). And then to see it like this, like the first time I was in Michael's house looking at the view out his living room window: the city lights as if the night sky had sprung a leak and all the stars were pouring out over the world bellow. A mirage, a laser light show facade disappeared with the dawn to reveal ancient concrete naked and alone. It seemed stupid to care about it, about anything.


Movement cures the blues.


Feeling awake for the first time in ages, feeling mobile and kind of free like I didn't really have to get up for work on Monday. At the market, a woman in her 40's with bare-feet and dreadlocks vends ganja cookies, floating up and down the aisles wrapped in a shawl and headscarf offering her wares to passer-byes in a soft voice communicating calm with her every body movement. We're talking to a man about how the crystal lamps he has for sale radiate negative ions, we take a pamphlet which claims that the lamps can cure ADHD and alleviate the stress of daily living. We smoke a cigarette on the porch of the St Andrews hotel listening to a duo sing the blues and pick over the second hand book stalls.


We drink organic coffee, eat falafel rolls with chilli and the right amount of hommus. We smoke some more cigarettes and I confess my closet consumer anxiety to Tania, I explain to her that in the company of others my purchasing anything can only be theoretical at best and Tania laughs.


On the way back we decide not to go straight home and stop at a cemetery in some town so small almost looks as if it can't really claim to be anywhere in particular. Wandering through the gravestones we look at all the families laid to rest, the children dead before they'd ever lived and Tania talks about how weird it is to think of a world where we won't exist anymore...


...and then we're crossing through Toolangi state forest, nearly home. Tania's watching the ferns at the side of the road reach out over our heads, we're listening The Pogues and there is a warm feeling in my beaten-up falling-apart car.

Doing the integration student tango.

It was one of those out-of-focus days that follow a run of sleepless nights, sitting in the teacher coffee lounge sucking down mug after mug of Nescafe trying to reach some sense of coherence. Beyond that point of terminal exhaustion; marooned on the ocean floor or worse, stuck inside one of those plastic buildings at the bottom of a goldfish bowl. It is hard to function when the world seems that far away.


Someone pounding on the door, shuffling their feet loudly, sighing and pounding on the door again.


"Heeeeeeeeeeeeeeeloooooooo-oooooooooooh" It takes a while to register but I know the voice, it belongs to one of our school's most infamous victims of the Ritalin generation: Mick, a boy so profoundly ADHD he makes Speedy Gonzales look like a borderline overdosed heroin addict. "Hey, hey, is anyone there? Hey, heeeeeeeeelooooooooo-oooooooooooh?!"

At the door, worksheet bunched up in his clenched fist, shifting from foot to foot like a nervous boxer swaying in his trademark parka.

MICK:"Seen my aid Mr L?"
ME: "No. Have you lost her?"
MICK: "Nah, I think I am in trouble. You good at science?"
ME: "What?"
MICK: "Can you do my science test for me Mr L?"
ME: "Um, err, what do you mean you could be in trouble?"
MICK: "Our teacher's away yeah and we got this new substitute right. Anyway I didn't think we were getting along good, he kept screaming at me and telling me to sit down and every time I tried to explain myself he just got angry again so I thought I would make him smile by acting retarded. So can you do my test?"
ME: "No, have you been sent out?"
MICK: "Oh nah, everyone was trying to do the test right and I was trying to explain myself and everyone was shouting me down and I didn't want to get into more trouble so I started screaming like I couldn't talk properly. Make 'em laugh, you know... but then I was getting in more trouble so I cut my loses and left but I took my test with me because I don't want to fail. So I thought I could get someone to do it for me, impress them by being smart so I wouldn't get into trouble."
ME: "By cheating?"
MICK: "Yeah but that's not the point... is it?"


And with that he was gone and I was left in a stupor of sleeplessness and confusion.


This is the student who burst into my photography class wearing a hangman's noose of heavy rope screaming 'Hey everybody, I've got a new necklace aren't I a pretty girl?!' He tied one end to the door handle and convinced another student to slam the door as hard as he could just to see what would happen before I could get to him. The same student who learnt the noose trick faking his own suicide in the dining hall at his year 8 camp.I remember the look on his English teacher's face last year when he insisted on handing in a story about eating magic mushrooms with his brother for his school magazine story (which was never published).


He clocks in at barely 4ft tall, a result of the drugs he's been prescribed to keep him from exploding.


In the time before the drugs he used to be a cutter which he attributes to a futile attempt at keeping the world in focus. For the brief time last year when he decided to go it alone and leave the Ritalin behind he started cutting again, sitting on the benches outside the library, his arms covered in gauze he told me that he only wanted to find his personality again, to be normal; he was nearly in tears and it was the first time I'd ever seen him when he didn't look bullet-proof.


The only other time I've seen him falter was after the Japanese exchange students came to town meeting their host families at a whole school assembly.


MICK: "I wonder why no one told me? I would have really liked one."