Monday, October 24, 2005

The calm after the storm

I came home from work to find the house clean... clean and empty. I am alone, Gav's moved out and Mark is AWOL (again) he could be on the run from the police or reality or himself... he cleaned up the house and left... he's never cleaned before except when he was on speed and even then he'd just scrub the bathroom sink over and over again till his hands hurt and get distracted before he actually achieved anything close to cleanliness. The floors have been swept and mopped, every dish washed and put in it's place, all the junk mail gone and the coffee table clean of tobacco crumbs... the house seems even emptier being this clean, sterile... the television is gone, it wasn't mine... everything is quiet and still, too quiet... all the noise is gone, all the life has left the building and I am still here... alone

Sunday, October 23, 2005

A random Saturday night on earth.

It's a Saturday night as I make my way to the fridge at the back of the bottle shop where the mixed drink cans live. Over the store sound system Elvis Costello is singing about how he'd rather be anywhere else but here today, looking around I note that many of the people in my immediate vicinity share these sentiments. I take my six pack of scotch and cola to the counter and fumble with the change compartment in my wallet in an attempt to pay for my drinks. I can feel the store clerk's eyes burrowing hatefully into me; I am standing between her and Saturday night torturing her with my lack of coordination and resolve. Shamed by the waves of psychic hostility being fired at me as I waste her time I give up on my quest for gold coins and decide to break a note... the girl behind the counter makes it very clear that we are not friends as she hands me my change with a trademark 'go-fuck-yourself' glare, her voice dripping artificial sweetener cut with poison as she waves me off spitting a "Have a great night!" through clenched teeth.


With my headphones in I get to the train station just as the train is pulling in, the carriage doors open and I find a seat. I am especially glad to be off the platform tonight because the security guard who always wants to tell about the latest girl he picked up and shagged in some random alley behind whichever 'smooth urban grooves' night club he happened to be at is working tonight and I am not in the mood... my migraine headache fading as the pills work their dislocating and disorienting magic on me, sitting there wandering around in my own thoughts listening to...

"Quick the cops are coming!!!!!!"


What the fuck was that?!


The meat head security guard's bogan friend is trying to freak out Lilydale stations' usual host of street trash rushing from carriage to carriage hoping for an outstanding arrest warrant but no one is biting... the whole world around me feels like it lacks the energy to care. A wave of disgust washes over me, I hate this fucking dead-shit place. The feeling that I want to smash something slowly fades as I melt back into a headache pill induced trance, the doors beep and the train takes off. I tune out till I get to Blackburn, pick up my bag and slip off into the night... at Blackburn I am busting for a piss so I go to an automated toilet covered in layer upon layer of graffiti, I recognise some of the tags from my end of the line... outside again and I am having trouble getting my bearings, this is not the Blackburn I remember. I stop to ask a girl for directions, she is dressed entirely in black and has weird scabs all over her face, she sounds very spaced and tells me she can't help me, a man who has no legs waves to her and she calls him over... obviously her time for me time has expired... I cross paths with her amputee friend as I walk away and notice that he too is covered in scabs.


A couple of hours later and my night ends in the messy drunken puddle I knew it would... I am propping myself up in some cut rate 24 hour Chinese place waiting for our takeaway order whilst my friend vomits in the restaurant toilets. This story is not remarkable, it is just another mundane Saturday night running parallel to a million others; smoke some cigarettes, drink some cans, talk some shit and try to forget that the working week is creeping up on us once again; before we know it it's time to wake up hungover, swear this is the last time and wish we knew how to spend our time more constructively... and life goes on...

Friday, October 21, 2005

Momma always said that there'd be days like these.

Imagine if you will... you wake up late with a headache, the rent is overdue and you haven't seen your housemate for four days. You shower, shave, get dressed and go outside to find a notice has been tacked onto the front door by a police officer from St Kilda (she travelled 40 kms to put that note on the door). You decide it would be best to phone your housemate to warn him, you give him the news and this is how he replies:

MARK: 'Shit, I can't remember what happened last night, I better call them... um, this could be bad... right?'


You hang up the phone, take a painkiller and write this entry in your blog... this is your life.

Thursday, October 20, 2005

Worlds' wackiest trailer trash (PART II)

I was at a year level assembly yesterday standing out the front in crowd control mode while the middle school co-ordinator ranted to a room of fifty bored teenagers about uniform or acceptable behavior or both (I wasn't really listening) when Janet, a very entertaining, if somewhat neurotic colleague of mine leant over to me and said:


JANET: I hope I don't have to teach Liam again next year two years running is enough. That's one scary kid; today he was telling me that he's really glad that his dad beat the drug charges* because now he will be allowed to borrow his dad's cross bow to shoot neighborhood dogs that wander too close to their property line. I know I should be used to it by now but I was speechless.


I reminded me of the main characters in the movie GUMMO who used bb-guns to kill cats so they could sell them to a Chinese restaurant for glue sniffing money... as the ugly freak-boy from the film said (I dunno, it seems oddly relevant):

'Life is great, without it you'd be dead.'



* Liam's dad, a very rough tattooed and bearded man, who likes to wear leather vests and ride motorcycles was arrested last year for operating a speed kitchen out of their shed

Wednesday, October 19, 2005

Worlds' wackiest trailer trash (PART I)

It was a Friday afternoon, 2:26, the last period for the school week; a period my junior English class has taught me to fear. During this period in the past I have had full rubbish bins thrown at my head, I have been pushed into tables and I have watched in horror as students assaulted one another in a variety of inventive and truly violent ways. This is a period that has never gone well; but on this particular day an eerie calm set in which is usually a sign that when it snaps its going to be a big one.


I marked the roll, set the work and there was not the usual barrage of complaints... my God they were just sitting there doing what they'd been told and then all of a sudden something cut through the silence; it was an electronic rendition of some crappy top 40 pop song I had tried my best to ignore but couldn't help but recognise... a mobile phone. Before I could react Ami was out the door, her phone to her ear. It was against the rules but to hell with it, if this was the worst thing that was going to happen I could surely let this slide.


She had been outside for about ten minutes when I decided to stop worrying about it and get on helping the other students who were struggling with the days task when I felt someone tugging at my shirt sleeve... it was Ami:

AMI: That was my dad, he's out of jail and he said he's coming down from Broadford to kill me.


It's moments like these I wished I was an accountant... these are the things you can't be trained for, these are the things you never see on Boston Public. It is very difficult to know what to do in these situations, I knew that Ami was a compulsive liar but then I also knew that her dad was a bikie and a drug dealer and an all round unsavoury character. Ami grew up in a bus on a caravan park, her father was usually in lock up and her mother spent her time doing drugs and running a revolving cast of replacement daddies through the folding doors of their decommissioned passenger coach. Every time their dick got soft, their credit card redlined or their drugs ran out it was time for a new father figure.


I was thrown trying to formulate a plan but... what the fuck could I possibly do?!... standing there (most likely looking very stupid, possibly talking to myself) when all of a sudden the bell went and the room emptied out almost instantaneously. I walked out into the breeze-way, no Ami, checked the lockers, the bike shed, the school bus depot... she was gone. On my way back to my desk I passed the welfare co-ordinator, Liz and decided that this is the one person who had to know what to do.

ME: Ami got a phone call from her dad. He's out of prison and he says he's going to kill her.
LIZ: And what am I supposed to do about it... it's the weekend, just go home!


Sometimes my job can be so rewarding, it's one of those professions where you go home at night feeling like you've really made a difference!

Saturday, October 15, 2005

1:36, restate me assumption... I'm trying to understand our world. I don't deal with petty materialists like you.

This blog has been getting harder and harder to write over the last couple of months. This has been weighing heavily on my mind the last couple of weeks. I have been trying to figure out why it isn't just coming to me like it used to... it's been feeling like this blog has run away from me... why? What was kidexxxile and how could it be lost? Why did I start writing in here in the first place?


Who is kidexxxile? He is that part of me that hated moving out here for a job he wasn't sure he wanted, the part of me that hoped there was more to suburban sprawl that shopping complexes and television. It was the part of me that still loves the idea of 'Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas'... the search for the spirit of the American dream... I started this blog because somewhere within the single story sprawl of industrial estates, takeaway shops, factory outlets and planned housing development there had to be life... the story of the suburbs... it may be niave but I was looking for something real.


What happened?


I got caught in the trap... I've had too much t.v. and I got lost in the surface image, in the last eight weeks I have waded through kilometres of VHS tape looking for a way out of myself, O.Ded on monster movies... I had started to write my self into the same narrative I was trying see through... television and junk food were killing kidexxxile... it is not the cure but admitting I have a problem is the first step to recovery...


1:36, restate my assumptions: the suburbs are alive, there is life outside of television, I am not dead yet... what happens next?

Stay tuned.

Wednesday, October 12, 2005

The devil in a black box or how I learned relax and love the television.

I went to my room last night at 7:30 to do some work and woke up on the floor three hours later to the sound of Gav's son crying... his mother (soon to be a figure of history) had been admitted to hospital with a kidney infection (a steady diet of speed, booze and pot will do that too you). The boy was crying because he wanted his family back, not just a drug addicted mother who bathed him once a month and made him sleep in his school clothes so that she didn't have to get him dressed in the morning. He hadn't wanted his father to move out and even after everything that's happened in the last six months since Gav has lived here he doesn't want want his mother to disappear for good either... sometimes other people's lives make you realise how lucky you are.



I should pass out more often, today was the first day in ages that I haven't felt like I was being dragged under.


CURRENT MOOD: Awake
CURRENT MUSIC: the voice of some guy on T.V.


When I got up in the morning the television was on but no one was up.


The television is always on these days, it almost never goes off. I almost can't imagine my living room without it being bathed in the blue flicker of the box... is Law and Order really better than reality? I know that everybody loves Raymond, the thing is I used to hate him with all of my little black heart in my previous life when I had a brain. Maybe it is time to skip down the yellow brick road because it sure is scary to feel that you are on first name basis with the residents of Ramsay street (sometimes Gav and I even have conversations about Neighbours where is sounds like we are talking about actual people)...


'If I only had a brain'


The second house I lived in out here in the hills was in a nasty little suburb full of mullet hair cuts and Eminem fetishism, I was sharing with a Chinese business student who's name was Sean. Sean watched television... it was about all he did. He lived in the front bedroom on a dirty mattress on the ground, his room had almost nothing in it: a desk (no chair), a discman (no batteries or headphones or CD's), a golf putter and two golf balls... that was it, no clothes in the cupboard, no books on the shelf (no shelf!)... nothing. He spent hours on end in this empty room with the light on without ever making a sound. It was like he went into his room and just died.


Sean never talked... we could go weeks without exchanging a word... he was pretty much mute unless we were watching television... he watched reality TV and he could talk about the contestants as if they were a real part of his life... sometimes it sounded like Sean had a real life but in truth he hardly left the house and he spent all his time in the null space of his room or in front of the box soaking up another instalment of Big Brother, he was like some kind of television vampire whose only weakness was real life... were he to actually do something he would shrivel up and die like Dracula trapped out doors at dawn.


I used to really think that this was odd but then again; Sometimes you want to go, where everybody knows your name, and they're always glad you came. You want to be where you can see, our troubles are all the same;

You want to be where everybody knows your name.

Be glad there's one place in the world
Where everybody knows your name,
And they're always glad you came;
You want to go where people know,
People are all the same;
You want to go where everybody knows your name.

Where everybody knows your name,
And they're always glad you came;
Where everybody knows your name,
And they're always glad you came;

(fade out)

Monday, October 10, 2005

For all my wiggas drink the pain away, for all my wiggas smoke a pack a day...

Keep living, get drunk, smoke another cigarette, turn up to work everyday worried that someone will notice that you have no idea what you are supposed to be doing (are you incompetent or is that just the way it goes?)... another night spent watching television, another day playing catch-up (being ahead is like the horizon), falling behind, never enough sleep, the bills are only just paid when they roll around again... is this what being an adult is about? Keep moving, forward... more television, another drink, they have to see that I am drowning in this place (why did I take this job on?!!!!)... another birthday, another year and it's making less sense... move house and start again, a second hand couch, a broken television stand and a mix bowl on the back porch... turn up to work dazed on head ache pills, losing sleep, I can't believe that no one's noticed that I am lost in here, I am going to quit this (I am no good)... television and take away, buy another pack of cigarettes and promise yourself you'll quit tomorrow... wasting time... learning the difference between alone and lonely... wait out the uncomfortable silence smoking... I am going to die of lung cancer... headache tablets... television... I am going to quit... junk food... running late for work (again)... I am going to quit... paracetamol... empty beer cans... the end of the day... tomorrow!

Sunday, October 09, 2005

This is what you should fear, I am what you should fear.

I was in a Salvation Army Op shop yesterday looking for novelty t-shirts and as I walked out of the change room I started sizing up the lady behind the counter. Seeing a member of the Salvos as a sexual being is a terribly wrong thing (I am sure you would agree). I didn't mean to do it, it was an accident, in fact I think the auto-pilot unit in my brain is broken... there are some boundaries that can only be traversed by the desperately lonely... I have joined the club, there is no denying it, soon no one will be safe from my prying bedroom eyes, not the elderly nor the sick... watch out world here I come!

Friday, October 07, 2005

Bobbing...

Poor Gav his ex-wife recently paid us a visit and told us that she was moving out of their home and that she was not going to take the kids with her; if he didn't want to lose them to a shelter he had better think of moving back in and becoming their dad because she was not going to stick around to be the mum.


Weird vibes since that day.


Shortly after her visit Gav had to go to the dentist to get a wisdom tooth out, a procedure which left him reliant on liquid foods for survival. A process which has also seen him rediscover a love for Endone, an extremely potent and addictive pain-killer. Most days I come home to find him stoned off his head on tablets unable to move or speak... I suppose he's just killing the pain (in every sense of the word) but staying home has felt like sleepwalking ever since. I have even started taking naps (when in Rome... I guess!)


Anyway so Gav is about to depart and Mark has not been seen for about two months, I have no idea where he is or what he is doing. I call his phone to leave a message telling him when he owes me some money and without a word my bank balance jumps that exact ammount... things never seem to settle down surreal just seems to keep redefinng itself at my expense!

Thursday, October 06, 2005

Haunted by virtual ghosts

Wow in the last week I have been hit six times by spammers leaving fake comments on my blog trying to hawk something... my readership profile grows: one anorexic wannabe, one pervert and a bunch of virtual ghosts... I would like to thank mom, my God and all the fans out there for making this dream a reality, I love you all...

If only I didn't know that ignorance was bliss then maybe I could be happy!

I recently went to a young writers festival which had a series of panel discussions on blogging. One thing that was discussed was the question of who are bloggers blogging for. Some people insisted that if they weren't blogging for themselves they couldn't expect to interest an audience because blogging should be about 'real' people and you couldn't be 'real' if you weren't pleasing yourself, whilst others said that all published writing was a product and so all blog writing was shaped by the preconceived notion of what the blog was supposed to be... I got very confused and it all seemed so complicated until I checked my site meter stats this morning and found that someone had found me by google searching 'how to be anorexic' whilst someone else had got here looking for 'sex in the train'... what does it all mean?


Probably nothing!

Tuesday, October 04, 2005

My secret shame PART TWO.

O.k... for those people who didn't bother checking out my link to unpretty here is a teaser to show you just how dope it is...


daniels_pengies
Would you like me to send you a care package loaded with naked pictures of myself stradling semi phalic shaped objects? I bet you can buy a bitch in prison with something like that...


unpretty
hell yes
i would own that prison with those pictures...


daniels_pengies
lol I'll do it too...I like it when overweight murders drool over my naked body...


unpretty
who doesnt?


daniels_pengies
Martha Stewart?


unpretty
i bet she was all over her cellie after about a week...

Monday, October 03, 2005

My secret shame PART ONE.

CHECK IT OUT!!!!!

unpretty


Okay I am completely aware that there is something wrong with this but I am totally hooked... written by a nineteen year old girl who has been previously addicted to meth and is awaiting a court case which will most likely see her sent to jail. She drinks too much, spells badly, never really has anything to say, and is relentlessly pursued by these ultra-creepy LJ denizens who keep trying to make like they understand and they are there for her (some of their recent comments are especially cringe-worthy).


I don't know why I love it but I do!

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