kidexxxile

Reconnected but confused

2006-05-06T18:59:00.000-07:00

Reconnected but confused... I suspect that when I moved house I forgot to take kidexxxile with me!
Is this the end of kidexxxile?

Until I'm a dust cloud hanging in the air.

2006-03-23T00:44:00.000-08:00

I've got a new place waiting for me in the suburbs miles away from this disaster. Andre is interstate... indefinitely; the run-away and I are not the best of friends... I've played this scenario through in head again and again trying to figure a way to do the right thing by people but either way I am out of here tomorrow morning and nobody's really gonna like it. Nothing is happening here but there is this low hum, hostility permeates the air but it just grinds away achieving nothing.

Keep my mouth shut and it will all be over soon.

It's best if nobody realises anything until my presence here is little more than a dust cloud hanging in the air. So I'm sitting here with this jerk pretending like everything is normal and waiting for him to go to bed so I can load up the car. I've done this before but this is the bit I hate most, the part where you have to make polite conversation and act natural when every atom of your being is screaming 'Let's blow this pop stand!'

I feel on edge, it could be all the caffeine, but I haven't liked this scenario from day one and that light at the end of the tunnel is driving me crazy. The kid never leaves the house, he barely moves from the seat where his computer is set up, I think he does this to spite me... it's as if he knows this particular course of drastic inaction will fuck up all my plans to slip away unnoticed... but that's just crazy talk!

So I watch 'Repo Man'... again

Drink a lot of coffee

Snack nervously

Try to get some work done and wait.

Come morning and this will all have been nothing more than a bad dream!

fresh

2006-03-21T06:03:00.000-08:00

The thought of moving house gives me butterflies of excitement. There is nothing better than the feeling of potential not yet ruined by the limitations of reality.

'When I get there I will be a different person, with a different life'

There's that moment when you've just unpacked all the boxes from which you construct your bedroom and put it together. You stand back feeling like you've finally made it. You are free of that cocoon. You are fully grown, bigger, better, faster, stronger. This is the moment you will always remember as the turning point in your life where you started living up to your true potential. This is the point in time when you became the 'you' you were always destined to be... the first step to greatness began with this move.

It all started with this change of scenery.

Then you go to the fridge, crack a celebratory beer and sit down in the living room with your new housemates. You hate the show they're watching and you can't think of anything to say to them. You feel tense and insecure all over again. You finish you beer get another, think momentarily about trying to achieve something but settle instead for that t.v show you hate, sitting around with the housemates you already feel estranged from.

What difference does one more night of mediocrity make?

You can always start again tomorrow.

Plugging back into the worlds mixing board

2006-03-20T20:43:00.000-08:00

Well Andre came back from his latest business trip with a 17 year old runaway from Central Queensland in the passenger seat of his car claiming this kid to be our new housemate. I was not consulted... I am not impressed. As a high school teacher the last thing I want to have to live with are people of high schooling age, especially brats who have an arguement with their parents and skip out on their entire state in the car of some 34 year old travelling sales man.

Andre dumped him on the doorstep and then left again leaving me alone with him... apparently Andre has now officially moved to Canberra for work... even as I write this knowing that it is happening to me I am struggling with how stupid this sounds.

The first thing the kid said to me was:

"You know, when Andre told me you were a high school teacher I didn't think this would work. I fucking hate teachers you see. Then when I first saw you coming up the drive I thought you were scarey but now I guess you are okay."

Immediately I knew... it's that time once again.
Time to get the fuck out of Dodge!

somewhere... nowhere... anywhere...

2006-03-18T02:31:00.000-08:00

We were on a bus listening to the crackling golden oldies straining to escape the ancient speakers when she turned to her friend and said:

"Everyone used to be all like, 'Why do you hang out with Jarred and that?' and I'd just tell them. I do what I want to do. See I like to live my life like I can go anywhere."

She got off in Launching Place and I wrote this in my notebook.

...the most stronger one...

2006-03-15T17:26:00.000-08:00

I once received a text message on my phone which read:
I hijack cigarettes.
I crash them into my face
and
set them on fire.

The message in question was sent at a quarter to midnight on the 5th of May... I was 24 then, I am 26 now... it has always disturbed me, this message, I have never been comfortable with it. At least it came from a friend, a close friend, I am not sure I could have dealt with it had it come from a complete stranger (or even a partial stranger).

The person who sent me this message likes horror movies. I like horror movies. We bond through horror movies. Once we watched all of the Friday 13th movies in a row without a break. It was 2003 then so we could only see up to Jason Goes To Hell... Jason X wasn't out yet and for some reason we ignored Jason vs. Freddy (or Freddy vs. Jason, I always get it the wrong way around).
It was kind of a numbing experience but significant to our friendship
shared experiences are important.

A couple of months after 'the cigarette incident' he sent me another message, this one said:
I don't have the most bigger one,
I don't have the most powerfulest one
but
I do have the most stronger one!
Its name is Juagar.

It was sent on the 8th of July at 1pm.

It is Engrish... I like Engrish... so does my friend.
When I read it I laughed (a lot).

It is important to find things to laugh about
or
that's what I think anyway.

Today I am going to travel all the way in to Melbourne by bus
it will take a couple of hours
and
I will probably regret my decision
but
that is not important.
I think people need to do things just to have the experience even if that experience is one low level boredom.
It is important to be out in the world even if nothing happens.

For this reason I like the following things:
1>Waiting rooms
2>Park Benches
3>Trainstaions/Bus Stops
4>Convenience stores
5>Supermarkets

I always find things to laugh about or write about or even just think about when I am around these places. And although these experiences will never make me laugh as hard as I laughed when I received the Juagar message they are still good!

That message.
Wow!
To get something like that
completely random and nonsensical
out of the blue
that makes me happy.

I like things which are random and nonsensical.

Like a car without wheels.

2006-03-14T17:11:00.000-08:00

A man walks into a bookstore in a small town inquiring after a copy of George Orwell's Animal Farm. The bookstore is strange in that it is very small and contains next to no books whatsoever. The store owner tells the man that he has the book in stock but is unable to sell it. When questioned about why the sale of the book is an impossibility the store owners replies by telling the man the following:

"I can't stand clutter, I hate it. See that's the problem with running a second hand bookstore is books keep coming in from all over the place and the only way I can keep on top of things is by packing up the old books in boxes and taking them home. To be honest I can't sell you the book because I will never be able to find it, there are that many boxes filled with that many books."

The man leaves the store feeling very confused... a bookstore which has books in stock but will not sell them to you because it would be too much trouble... a bookstore with maybe ten books in the entire store... it is very difficult to be a customer in a store like this one the man thinks to himself.

Later in the week that same man is having coffee with a friend in the main street when the topic of the bookstore or more specifically the sanity of the book store owner gets brought up. His friend informs him of the following:

"You didn't actually go in there trying to buy anything did you? He'll never sell it to you."

The man's friend tells him this in a way that is completely at peace with the fact that the local bookstore contains no books. She says it as if this is just business as usual and it would be strange of you to expect anything else.

^^ formerly known as >>

2006-03-09T00:50:00.000-08:00

felting against cardboard bunny slippers

Moral Dilemma

2006-03-06T23:44:00.000-08:00

The room was steeped in this dull gurgling hum... more of a moan or a slow motion whine
and
I was waiting for the photocopier
it was getting close to lunch.
I just wanted my copying done and I was dreaming of a salad roll.

She wasn't copying, she was barely breathing
she just stood there
completely
still.

That sound running through the whole scene.
What was it? Was it coming from her?

I paced
sighed
paced
checked my watch
sighed
dropped my papers (on purpose)

She just stood there
doing nothing.
The sound was coming from her I was sure of it

I cleared my throat
but
she just stood there and I could still hear it
that little noise
that wet hum
coming
from
her.

I didn't fucking need this, all I wanted was a photocopy and a salad-fucking-sandwich and here she was emitting some weird noise like her wiring has shorted out
that low hum bubbling out of her
an eerie constant
underneath everything.

She seemed upset
or at least wrong somehow
this whole seem seemed wrong
off kilter
and the noise was getting louder
more pronounced
more human.

She was shaking.
crying

Was she?
No she wouldn't be!
I mean people don't... do they?
Of course not!
She wasn't... was she?
Not in public.. not here... not at the photocopier... she couldn't.

but

she was

She was fucking crying and I needed to use the photocopier.

I could do something, reach out, say something
maybe even get her away from the copier.
or
I could make a difference

Then again it was nearly lunch
maybe
I could just put my pages back on my desk, forget about it and buy my sandwich

I really wanted that sandwich...

I feel... unfinished

2006-03-06T00:49:00.000-08:00

There is a lot going on in my head at the moment... I feel like this is a turning point in the narrative
but
nothing much is different... yet.

I have been sick and obsessed with sickness
and
it hasn't really worked out for the best
but
when do we ever do what is in our own best interests.

I was at a party and feeling very insecure, you see it was one of those inner-city deals... a house warming.
There were PhD students, professionals and hip young artists.
It was a very nice house in the middle of the city.
I was scared.
I don't socialise much these days
cuz
I'm worried people will see through my act

[my head is plexiglass]

After all... I am kidexxxile straight outta [the middle of] nowhere.
BUT
It's all bullshit.

I'm sorry, I can't tell you the rest of this story, I don't know how to.

A sixty second love affair at 'The Great Wall of Tuna".

2006-02-27T23:07:00.000-08:00

I had a moment in a supermarket.
It was in a big supermarket. The biggest in the valley.

I was standing at the 'Great Wall of Tuna' trying to decide what sort I required.
It's not that simple.
There sure is a lot of variety.
I just wanted tuna.

There was a woman standing next to me.
She looked confused... I was confused... I just wanted tuna.
Why did there need to be so many different varieties when it just made life difficult?
Overcomplicated.

We reached for the same tin at the same time, it was just like a Hollywood romance.

I pulled back first, it made me think to myself "Is that really the tuna for me?"
She looked deep in the same dilemma.
If we hadn't been there to get in each others way we would have had our tuna tins and been somewhere else by now.

She smiled... I smiled.
I said "There sure is a stupid amount of choice."
She nodded in agreement and suggested I get tuna with a chilli pepper "It's just got a pepper there in the tin. You can take it out and have normal tuna or leave it in if you like spicy."

I smiled, considered this option and bought sardines instead.
Plain sardines in olive oil.

True story.

sexxx is weird (a set of two)

2006-02-26T22:30:00.000-08:00

ONE.

A few years back after making a whirlwind mess off leaving home I landed back there with a thud. During this time I was smoking a lot of pot and eating a lot of codeine. Instead of sleeping at night I would prowl the nether regions of the internet looking for that one piece of internet porn that would go far enough to make me feel physically sick... I saw all kinds of BDSM, shit eating, water sports. role playing, midget sex, vomit extreme dildo action but nothing that could make me feel sufficiently enough ashamed to be human. Surprisingly in addition to hiding my rather unpleasant and unacceptable codeine habit I was also at this time able to maintain some semblance of normalcy by being engaged in a relationship with a real live human female. Anyway, one morning as the sun came up I was in my room trying to catch a couple of hours sleep before I had to be ready for work when I had the most horrible dream:

I dreamt that I was kissing my significant other when all of a sudden my mouth started to fill with semen which was leaking out from her lips. I tried to ignore it but there was so much it filled my mouth. I'd swallow but it would just keep coming and eventually I felt as if I was drowning in the jism.

Ay some point i woke up, vomited all over myself and passed out again only to wake late for work and glued to my pillow with stale puke.

TWO.

Last night Andre called me inside to show me pictures of genital herpes he has to study for work... his company is launching a new treatment for the virus. Most of the pictures looked like the people had attempted unsuccessfully to remove their sex organs with a cheese grater, a pot of boiling water and a sharpened spoon.

I felt quite unwell afterwards.

Taking stock of the new situation.

2006-02-24T16:33:00.000-08:00

This new life of mine, the house and my live in landlord/pseudo-housemate are a creepy kind of wholesome. It feels very strange but not the kind of strange I am used to or comfortable with. Gone is the 'I-haven't-slept-for-days-everyone-is-against-me-methamphetamine-I-can-smell-your-thoughts-vicious' kind of crazy I feel at home in and in it's place a low key sort of Twin Peaks hum is left to bug me.

So lets line up the facts and see what kind of picture it paints:

1>He never asks me for my rent and doesn't seem to care when I don't front up with the cash. Then on the odd occasion I remember to pay he looks all surprised as if to say 'Why are you doing this for me?'

2>He cooks for me every night out of his groceries without being asked or asking me if I want him to.

3>He plies me with expensive chocolate and imported beer every time he sees me lumped in front of the television set.

4>He has a huge over protective dog called Mitch. They share his double bed. When he sleeps in till lunch time on a Saturday he says it's because he looked at Mitch's peaceful, sleeping face and couldn't bring himself to disturb him by leaving the bed.

5>He is traveling salesman who represents a huge pharmaceuticals company hawking prescription drugs all up and down the east coast to retail chemists.

6>He takes Mitch along for his sales trips in the back of the car... even if he is going to be gone for weeks.

7>He is a passionate Volvo driver.

8>He used to be an officer for the Federal Police but quit because it was too boring... he says his new job is much more to his tastes, and far more exciting(?)

9>He has a television off to the side of his home office which seems to play terrible Hollywood formula comedy movies on an endless loop. This week I have seen various parts of 'The Guru' at least ten times (and I am not even the one who has to sit in there for hours a day!). I asked him if he liked the movie and he told me he hadn't really been paying much attention.

10> He has a floor to ceiling cupboard filled with brand new Nike shoes still in their boxes. Each box is spaced the exact same distance from its neighbours.

This shit just don't add up!

Eat my dust

2006-02-24T00:31:00.000-08:00

This is the point of departure...

holding pen

2006-02-20T02:07:00.000-08:00

There is something unsettling about the place where I work, I think there is something wrong with everyone who works there...

One woman is physically incapable of listening to anyone, she is an expert at looking like she is listening but there'll be a break in the conversation and she'll look you square in the eyes and say something completely random like:

"You wouldn't believe how difficult it is to get a worm farm toilet approved by our shire council"

Another lady suffers from chronic asthma, fainting spells, hay fever, migraines, she is also deaf, dyslexic and immensely short sighted. She is almost never at work but when she is at work I find it almost impossible to comprehend how she can be a teacher.

There is this other one who survived decades of spousal abuse only to become a person who finds a way to insert her traumatising experiences into every conversation.
HER: How was your weekend?
ME: Not great. Yours?
HER: Better than spending my Sundays sitting in an emergency room with a smashed in face pissing blood on the floor. Did I ever tell you about...
She gives of this reek of desperation that could only be generated through a lifetime of being a complete and utter victim.

Everyone is so fucking paranoid, they'll strike out at any signs of weakness in others to mask their own insecurities.

Our staff room is a psychic land-fill for ugly thoughts and nasty sideways glances.

I just do my best to remain invisible.

Whenever you ask anyone in their late 40's early 50's how they're going at the beginning of the work day they will usually reply by telling you how many school days stand between themselves and retirement.

It is like the holding pen for a slaughterhouse.

flashforward...flashback

2006-02-17T23:43:00.000-08:00

flashforward

I'm being dragged out from under drugged sleep by the throb of pain in my side. I am in the backseat of a car. I cannot open my eyes but with clarity I can make out the coarse rope binding my wrists and ankles. My mouth is so dry I fear choking on the scaly bloat of my tongue which lies dead in my mouth... my head hurts. I can make out the low rumble of highway as it slides away under car tires beneath me and into the past. The hiss and crackle of a badly tuned radio at pains to broadcast late night jazz standards. Whoever it is in the drivers seat exhales loudly and the air in the cabin fills with the bitter wooden smell of tobacco smoke.

I have no idea how I got here.

I have no idea where here is or where we are headed.

I can't focus on anything outside of myself for more than a second.

I can't will my eyes to open

but

I don't need to see or think to know that I am in trouble.

Big fucking trouble!

I wish I knew how long I've been gone. How many curtain calls have I missed? Could the show really go on without me?

Whoever it was that said that all the world's a stage didn't think their metaphore through too clearly if you ask me... I try to shift off my side but the throb grows louder till my guts flip and I am left semi-conscious spitting up bile onto the floor of the car... I mean, how can there even be a stage without the darkness of a backstage? The place a shadows behind the scenes where the nameless ghosts of power push the buttons and pull the levers which create the predictable little routine that is our lives.

The people who make the world tic.

No, the person who said that all the world's a stage didn't account for the ease with which someone could accidentally wander off too far into the wings and get lost in the shadows forever... lost amongst the pulleys, switches, levers, weights and sandbags.

If only they'd warned us just how fucking hard it is to wander back on stage, back into the lime light. I am in trouble. It is not safe here. It is too close to the truth to be anything but dangerous.

wherever here is.

flashback

(to the begining)

gone fishing

2006-02-16T00:21:00.000-08:00

Everything you've heard is true I've scored the motherload... a big-ass piece of cardboard (and I know how to use it). I is gonna build me a one huge cubby house and on it's side I'll write:

kidexxxile? A vicious rumour... and nothing more.

Then I'll disappear from view giving y'all the middle finger salute

viva

Built in escape clause

2006-02-15T03:56:00.000-08:00

The curtain raises to reveal a projector screen, the stage itself obscured by darkness. We are going to get a glimpse of the old me. Flashbacks and old home movies, there is silence in the auditorium as the projector whirrs to life and we see light wash over the flat of the screen, the scene flickers to life and there it is...

The bright light of morning, a white coffee cup soiled inside with soggy grounds atop a gleaming marble counter. I am there sitting by the cup... motionless, my hands resting on the counter. I appear calm; calm and healthy. Gone is the sunken pallor of before, in it's place there is eerie quiet.

The time is 6.30am and for once I am awake before my alarm. This is the me who wore collared shirts and brushed his teeth twice daily. This person I hardly remember who went to bed every evening before midnight to be fresh for work the next day. I used to be the kind of guy who worried about quitting smoking, eating well and getting enough exercise. I was going to live forever, or so I liked to think. It was my trade off for wasting the present, I'd collect my bonus on the other end after I'd ironed out all the kinks.

A large empty room piled with boxes I've never unpacked. My room; minimalism with a built in escape clause. My borrowed sofa bed in the far corner, a digital alarm clock sitting on the armrest closest to the wall. The time is 6.58; there are two minutes to go. Two minutes till we split the sound and vision seamlessly. The sound of my alarm clock playing over a shot of me, my back to the camera as I walk out the front door into the overexposed unknown flare of the outside world disappearing from view. In this final shot I am wearing the all too familiar fluffy bunny slippers, those checked flannels and an army coat.

It could be that you are supposed to interpret this sequence as my nervous breakdown, or maybe my moment of profound enlightenment but then again, it's probably nothing. I could just be checking to see if the mail arrived, maybe I wander back in seconds later clutching a bundle of department store catalogues, unpaid bills and plain envelopes addressed to current tenant... maybe I wander back in empty handed, unfortunately you'll never know, the films finished, left flapping violently against the side of the projector shocking you back into your own skins before the lights fade to black leaving you alone in the muddle of your own thoughts.

I hope your taking notes. I don't want any one of you getting lost or falling behind and giving up on this, this experience could change your life but you've got to pay attention because you'll need to pass the test to prove you understand before we let you in on our little secret.

Nowhere

2006-02-15T00:14:00.000-08:00

I'm sitting at some suburban train station... waiting. This is not really where the story begins but it's where we come in; when they raise the curtain you can see me on stage, sitting, minding my own business... waiting. You should notice at this point that I look sick, sick the way you'd imagine a terminal cancer patient looks sick, these details are important, it will come up again later and you'll probably need to know this for the exam so lean in and get a good look. My face has that hollowed out feel, the greasy grey stained skin which coats my skull is sucked in around my cheeks and eyes. My eyes, red rimmed, sunken by puffy olive bruised bags sit deep in my sockets sliced through with jagged veins like so much broken glass. Double points for anyone who noticed my twitching left eyelid or my shaky hands.

To put you in my shoes, which at this point in time are fluffy bunny slippers: faded pink and worn through at the soles but stuffed with cardboard and tissue paper to prolong their usefulness, this bench bolted down at this station platform which connects this suburb to the city is the kind of place people call the end of the line. That nowhere that exists between wherever you are and somewhere else, this place is a place born by accident, stinking of failure and populated by people who are either stuck or passing through.

It is a late afternoon in summer and the lazy breeze sits heavy with the odour of spray paint; a group of sullen teenagers in dirty tracksuit tops emblazoned with the stage names of dead rappers sit sullen, cross-legged in a circle on the cracked asphalt passing a shopping bag which drips with metallic blue in one direction and a wine cask bladder in the other. Between huffs of paint and swigs of wine they drag on cheap cigarettes, scratch their graffiti tags into the ground with loose stones and shoot menacing glances in the direction of anyone who looks like they're trying too hard not to notice.

I slip the hood of my heavy army surplus jacket up over my head to hide my face, close my eyes and dream of cigarettes and codeine. My head is starting to pop and fizzle... fill with static; I feel the red rubber balloon of another crippling headache inflate inside me, my brain swelling up against the inside of my skull. Beads of sweat being pushed to the surface along the ridge of my brow and my temples pulse with every heartbeat.

I feel something hot and wet spreading over my right thigh, the burning sensation growing, spreading with every tremor that ripples down my arms... distracting me. My hand! That's when I remember that I'm holding a Styrofoam cup of coffee. The lid has come loose and every twitch sends a new wave of steaming black liquid to break against the shore of my flannel pyjama clad leg. The brown stain spreading, eating up every blue and red check in its path. The pain in my leg is caught up in a feedback loop, causing my hands to shake more violently until the whole cup comes crashing to the ground in a tidal wave of black muck which washes up against the briefcase of a young executive type with whom I'm sharing this bench. He looks me over before picking up his soggy case and relocating his sharp suit and crisp white shirt to the other side of the platform. Out here people may be willing to accept that a man in flannel pyjamas and an army jacket is waiting for the 4:45pm city bound but they're rarely willing to acknowledge the existence of any such strangeness.

As the lights begin to fade and curtain comes crashing back down to the ground I'm taking my nicotine stained fingers to my mouth to rip the crud out from under my yellowed nails with my teeth. It tastes bitter and gritty and the smell of stale smoke renews my desire for cigarettes.

honest.

2006-02-14T04:20:00.000-08:00

Let's cut the crap... I am lonely and bored and restless and sick of making mistakes and I am even sicker of boring anyone who reads this to death filling up this space with incomprehensible emotional vomit... but most of all I am sick of waiting. Waiting... for things to make sense... for her to reply to my e mail... for someone to discover me and make me famous because let's face it, I am brilliant... for the next step in this derailed farce I call my life to become apparent... for anyone to find me and like me and let me know so I don't have to spend all my free time inside hiding reading depressing books about depressing people and listening to depressing music and wondering what my life would be like if I was into Jackie Collins and Kylie Minogue (well, I'd probably be gay, but maybe I could be both happy and into sex with boys).

I am sorry that I have been so over-indulgent and boring... I'm going to kick this whole misery addiction I seem to have plugged into... Jane says!

obligation free

2006-02-13T01:14:00.000-08:00

It's so quiet out here... living here is like needing to sneeze right in the middle of a funeral service, there is never a 'right moment' to interrupt. I have been feeling very strange lately, maybe it is this place but that feeling you get when you are standing out the front of a class who are ignoring you has spilled over into my everyday life... every time I speak, move or do anything I feel like I am cutting in. It is almost as if my every gesture is some kind of hostile take-over and so I stay in doors and recreate myself... the apology incarnate.

People at work keep asking me if I need any help... they want to know if I am going okay with my class load... 'How's the year started out for you?' they ask, ready for me to confide in them... I wonder how they would react to me if I said that turning up to work every day is the easy part? Everyone seems so eager to help... but with what? Have I slipped that far? Am I only deluded into thinking I am holding my shit together? Does my deodorant no longer cover over that stench of desperation?

(Maybe it's time to switch brands?!)

The days out here feel so BLANK, they just disappear and me along with them... rolling like waves of radiation or ghosts... things that never really were... dreams... time moves too quickly out here and nothing happens... it's a desert, uninhabitable space... a hostile land and yet I find it difficult to imagine being elsewhere.

I suppose it is like unrequited love... that dream of a better place just out of reach.

Obligation free, no self improvement necessary.

hugs

2006-02-11T16:51:00.000-08:00

Whilst walking down the highway which cuts my town in two a complete stranger who was taking his garbage out at the time hugged me for no seemingly good reason... it was a little odd. I was taken completely by surprise, arms extended, smiling with his gap toothed mouth... he just came out of nowhere and when it was all over he said:

"I really like hugging folk, blokes or ladies it don't really matter to me, except that you know I'm not gay. I just like giving hugs"

This happened four days ago.

Welcome to the road movie of my life

2006-02-05T01:52:00.000-08:00

It's just me and her... on the road again. I'm at the wheel, and Janis, sits perched invisible bleeding song.
[summertime, and the li-ving in ea-sy"]

Welcome to the road movie of my life.

After two years on the edge of the world I fell out the other side drawing bigger circles between nowhere and somewhere, between me and you. Leaving... only to find myself back at square one... again, but square one is always different. A new house, I am a new person, a clean slate and I can be whoever I want to be. The tonic of distance, that feeling that you are moving somewhere, the cauldron of smoke and mirrors that says 'further is infinite' until you've gone too far... in a theoretical world if you travel far enough in a straight line, you'll end up back where you started however the schizophrenia of movement keeps me reinvented, for now... I feel good.

The moments inbetween, all those things one forgets to see even if one is looking, they are the substance of novelty... watching a mother and son at a local coffee shop, both of them sporting dreadlocks and bare feet, a boy no older than eight drinking espresso and talking like a mini adult to his mother who is totally absorbed in his every word.

[fish are jumpin, and the cotton, lord the cotton's high]
in the late afternoon sun, even the drab expanse of outer suburbia looks like some lost work of expressionist art bathed in a deep impenetrable orange... my foot to the floor as we stream forward, as the years pile up behind me and although I am not yet old, I can feel myself being over taken but if I can keep this up maybe I'll find the formula to cheat time itself. Time makes me feel like a sex doll with a slow leak, I am safe, for now, but it is only a matter of time before they throw me stained and limp on the scrap heap, the stink of being used, the strain of being used up... safe for now but how long?

The day I moved... sitting with my father in the hotel listening to a jazz trio in the midst of a 90th birthday celebration. The birthday boy approaches my father and holds out a platter to offer us a piece of birthday cake.

BIRTHDAY BOY (to my father): "Cake for you young man?"

I suppose it's all relative but next to this smiling dinosaur my father, 23 years his junior looks tired and fed up like he's waiting for the final curtain call.

DAD: "So what's the secret?"
B BOY: "Plenty of good food, women, not too much to drink and learning not to worry so much."

I suppose the air is leaking out of everyone's skin but that doesn't mean you have sit there straining to keep it in till the tension building up tears to hole open bigger. By the time Janis was the age I am now she was well on her way to being dead and buried but she's singing her song to me now as we slide off the edge of the map and into a place where I can start again because your never to old to stop getting it wrong.

Random moments from a strange place (PART ONE)

2006-02-03T17:42:00.000-08:00

The land of the free... drunk in Vegas with a Swedish socialist and a U.S Military officer arguing the definition of a successful society, while outside families of illegal Mexicans stood out along the neon strip in the desert's night cold handing out prostitute's business cards. There is something horrible about being given a wallet sized glossy of a naked woman lying spread eagled by a seven year old boy. My first image of this strange new land was Gary Coleman, now in his 40's, frozen smiling... selling property insurance, nailed to the side of a warehouse just outside of LAX.

My headaches... gone... I feel... AWAKE!

Watching myself being watched... the bus trip was long and uncomfortable... sitting at a cafe enjoying the feeling of being outside. Around his neck, the sign read 'Adopt a Jewish Nigger'. He was smiling with a toothless mouth holding a Walgreens bag full of scavenged pizza crusts.

JEWISH NIGGER: "You've gotta smile, I mean look at me. I got nothing but I can still laugh. What's the problem with all these people? How can they enjoy life, if it's all so fucking serious and important? I mean shit man."

We talk and from the third floor of the apartment building across the street a woman sat and her window videotaping the street... filming us... I can never sure if the people are performing in vain, watching themselves in that video screen in their heads and praying for the sideways glance of a stranger or if the camera is are actually rolling.

Is there anybody out there? Brainfried by bus travel and junkfood... too much coffee, too many cigarettes and no sleep (some habits die hard). A new city deserted at 10:30pm on a Sunday night. I have nowhere to sleep and no plan, I'm wandering with my pack on my back and suddenly I am gripped by drunken hands and pulled into the familiar warmth of a city bar.

DEB: 'What's wrong honey?'
ME: 'Um... nothing.'
DEB: 'Don't be shy darl.'
ME: 'I just got here. I've got no place to stay and I need a map.'
DEB: 'Got here? Houston, why would you ever want to come here?'
ME: 'I don't know. I don't know what's here yet.'
Deb: 'Wait here!'

Enter Sherrie... trapped with a 42 year old alcoholic somewhere in the suburbs near a poor black neighbourhood. Barrelling through the morning streets, Sherrie behind the wheel with a 12 pack of Bud Lite under her belt and it's only 9:30 am. It started badly and got worse, in her house I learned to fake being asleep, to ignore the naked, drunk mess pawing at me. Call it prostitution, call it whatever you want. She looked after her great uncle who never left the house and carried a handgun into the toilet, just in case

SHERRIE: 'Look, I've gotta go out, I'll be an hour. Don't leave the room, I haven't told him about you and he'll shoot, I mean he is Texan. Born and raised.'

Paranoia 101

2006-02-01T22:56:00.000-08:00

What happens to a nobody headcase to make them feel that their life is important enough to warrant a silent number as insulation for them against us?

ME: Hello, it this Sam's mother?

HER: Excuse me? How did you get this silent number?

ME: Um... do you have a child at **** High School?

HER: What?! How did you get my number?!!!!!

ME: Um, so this isn't 9292

HER: No I'm sorry you got it backwards.

ME: Oh, so I dialled 2929

HER: I'm not going to tell you, you know my number is private!

[CLICK... beep-beep-beep-beep]

disfunctional

2006-01-19T11:07:00.000-08:00

There is nothing more disfunctional than being home!

There is nothing more disfunctional than being home?

There is nothing more disfunctional than being home...

This morning I woke up early in the wrong hemisphere freezing cold, thinking, I should quit smoking; I should stop talking unless I have something to say but at the same time I should learn to say 'thank you' without feeling uncomfortable.

and I was not home,

Not even close.

I can't help it, the road keeps on rolling out behind me.

2005-12-22T20:10:00.000-08:00

I'm out... the household was not disolved so much as dismembered. We killed it!

Riding on the back of a week of sleepless nights with three days to go and Mark has disappeared leaving all his stuff behind. It's 3am after a day of caffiene, codeine and ginko bilaboa... four angry texts messages and a half a bottle of wine later with no sleep in sight and the door explodes unleasing an amphetamine crazy on my insomiac drunk...

...Footsteps...
...CRASH...
...The sound of cheap pressed wood furniture being dragged over the floorboards...
...silence...
...and then sound of something else imploding, falling to the floor and starting a chain reaction that echoes though the house in wave after wave.

I hear Mark swearing, it's three hours till my alarm is set to go off. I crawl out of bed and stumble to my bedroom door. Even with the whole world out of focus and spinning I can see the sizzle in Mark's skin. His eyes are cruel little points, pin prick pupils, his sockets rimmed red raw... bullet holes.

ME: "Mark man, what the fuck are you doing?"
MARK: "Just what you fucking asked me to, it's all going... NOW!!!"

This is psychological warfare! I retreat into my room defenseless, plug myslf into my discman and pull the covers up over my head to wait out the offensive. My alarm goes off and the army of noise retreats into the rising sun.

Fast forward through a seemingly endless gas cloud of bleach. Hours spent with mop and bucket in hand or waltzing through slow motion work days. My home is being reduced, becoming 0, the last twelve months of my life are being sterilised; erased. My whole world is a stack of cardboard boxes in the corner again.

The clock ticks... thirty six hours and I will have no fixed address. I'm on the verge of another migraine when the phone rings. It's a travelling salesman from Warburton who needs someone to live in his house to safeguard his property whilst he is on the road. En route to Warburton in a rented van sucking on my fifth bottle of Redbull I pass the caravan park which marks my only other alternative and realise that I have already accepted his generous offer.

And then there is only five hours left and counting, Mark and I are sitting on the back porch together for the last time smoking and he turns to me and says:

MARK:"You know these have been some of the best times ever. Completely fucked up but fucking good" and as he says it I remember...

Gav, Mark and I drunk on homebrew throwing lit cherry bombs at wild rabbits in our backyard giggling like braindead stoners. I think about the time spent babysitting Gav's kids, malnutritioned and flithy after Bec told them she never wanted them, never loved them. I can almost feel the warm glow, that sense of being home like I felt on the many Saturday nights the three of us spent sharing pasta, drinking premium whisky none of us could afford and sampling Gav's painkiller smorgasboard accumulated over five years of being on workers compensation for chronic back pain. All the bad horror movies and joint roaches... the way someone was always home when you had a problem and needed to talk. It was a house where there was always tea on the shelf, beer in the fridge and a fresh mix in the bowl on the living room table.

Being here now after the fact sitting in some franchise coffee shop in the neighbourhood I grew up in and thinking about everything... knowing I'll be in L.A. in less than a week a smile spreads over my lips and for a brief second, just for a moment I'm actually glad that I'm the one who get's to be me... anyone else would just get it all wrong.

The place where everbody knows your name.

2005-12-14T22:57:00.000-08:00

I walked into the fruit shop in town to get boxes in preparation for my moving house, the man behind the counter had a huge beer gut and a beard down to his belt buckle, it was an unusual beard as the hair that grew of his chin was shaved clean, leaving these huge mutant mutton chops to crawl off his head (and almost down his pants!).

I had never seen this man before in my life...

ME: Hi do you have any empty boxes? I'm moving house.
MAN: Yeah... just a minute aren't you the guy that walks down Fernhill road every night at six?
ME: Yes, that's when I go for my walk.
MAN: I see you every night whilst I am watching the telly eating my dinner, I thought I knew you from somewhere.
ME: Oh.
MAN: So I guess I won't be seeing you anymore soon. Where are you moving to?
ME: Um... Warburton, eventually.
MAN: Oh, well good luck.

He handed me the boxes and I left.

You know some days it seems like the small world experience just keeps on getting smaller and smaller.

Analgesic calm

2005-12-08T00:33:00.000-08:00

I am a teenage werewolf... prowling the streets looking for life. An experiment in cause and effect... as I move up the hill the curtains of a hundred front rooms swing open for a split second, prying eyes glint and then fade away as the curtains fall back into place... call it voyeurism, call it community mindedness... call it whatever you want, maybe I'm just paranoid. The rhythm of blood thumping in my temples... I cannot medicate myself heavily enough to force the pain into a background hum... turn the corner to the bus stop and there is a man there... long scraggly goatee, tattooed from his knuckles to his shoulders, can of bourbon in hand, arms like tree trunks, mirror shades... is he looking at me?

ME: "Yeah, what do you want mate?"
I here it come out of my mouth and I have no idea what I am doing, it's automatic... this is how you get yourself killed... he looks confused "Did you say something buddy?" I know they're my words but I feel like someone else is driving... this guy could snap me in half...

MAN: No mate, your right... I'm just standing here, waiting.
He's backing down like I am the threat... this is the power of illogic, this is the magic of the migraine and then...

I am on the bus, and then...

Chirnside Park, the consumer equivalent of a cancer ward; painted in beige and pastel pink and all wrapped up in the diffuse glow of weak lighting... everywhere you look your surroundings say: DON'T PANIC, EVERYTHING IS GOING TO BE OKAY... now that you are here.

I am anything but okay!

I am a ghost, weak at the knees from a headache that had been crippling me for days. It feels like invisible hands twisting an ice pick into my back pushing up between my shoulder blades. Dry heaving, I force a grey oval shaped pill down with the coffee dregs from my styrofoam cup. It is Friday, just before closing time and I don't know why I am here... it happens... sometimes the pain gets so bad that you'll do anything just to keep going. It's that feeling, like if you sit down you may never get up again... ever. To stop is death, to stop is to let the pain in and go under. This is the momentum which carried me out into the street and onto the bus to here... everywhere around me the world is saying: BE CALM, RELAX.

I am moving as quick as I can, the knot in my stomach tightening... I can feel the metallic cool of too much saliva flooding my mouth. I feel light headed and dizzy and I am scared that I will be sick here in front of all these people. I am looking for something to focus on, searching for something to grab my attention but around me all I see is neutral calm plastered to the walls. Even the store front neon seems to have been toned down to suit the mood. Everyone I pass is mid-forties, saddled with toddlers and stuffed into cotton print leggings and and over an sized t-shirt.

I am trying to shake the image of myself flat on my back where I stand spitting up vomit all over the Pine Fresh floors. Messing up the placid off-white swirl of the tiling with splashes of bile yellow and the murk of undigested coffee. I tuck my thumbs up into my closed fists and center myself around the pain as I sqeeze, I feel my joints pop and I keep going. I'm trying to block out the anti-depressant calm of the place but I can feel the weight of my surroundings falling in on me.

...I can't breathe... I feel like I am fading, like the Tardis, a damaged dimensional travel vessel with no control over where it ends up... and my mind is taking me back to the days of the first headaches...

The pattern had always been the same, I am fine but I can feel the pressure building up and then it explodes... white hot sparks... pain... like the aftershock of fireworks burning into the retina for days, weeks, months... they come in clusters, nothing for ages and then... I was nine when I remember going to the doctor, a nasty little man; lean and stoic, unsympathetic, he asked me a bunch of questions, took some scrapings to test for allergies, drew blood and sent me away... I was always a nervous child, I didn't know how to interact, when I was in my first year at primary school I remember needing to go to the toilet. It was just after afternoon playtime and I was so embarrassed and uncomfortable, I decided it would be best if I just ignored it. I wanted to be invisible... we went back and the doctor said he didn't know what was wrong.

I have never been able to relate to people well on their terms, they talk to me and me head goes warp speed trying to figure out how I am supposed to react, I et so caught up in notions of appropriateness that I forget to listen. It used to be that I never spoke, I'd just stand there trying to look thoughtful and wait for them to let me go... that was until I discovered that if I did all the talking, I would never have to relate to people on their terms, the more noise I made the more control I would have over the situation.

I am back in that classroom trying to concentrate on my comprehension sheet but the pain in my bladder is so bad, that I can feel the nerves in the ends of my toes tingling in sympathetic complaint with my bursting bladder. It hurts so badly I as though I am going to start crying but the feeling shocks me into my original embarrassment and can feel my cheeks start to burn red... the family doctor wanted to be a championship cyclist but he didn't have what it took. His resentment was expressed in his lack of concern for his patients, he had two methods of showing how little he care: if nothing was wrong he'd prescribed whatever you wanted without checking you over to see if it was appropriate, or if you were in genuine pain he'd refuse to let you have anything, he'd tell you you were fine all you needed to do was get back to things to take your mind off whatever it was you'd come to see him about.

Every muscle in my body crying out, I'm standing behind my chair, waiting to be dismissed at the end of the day, waiting for the bell. I don't think I have ever experienced pain, like the pain of my straining bladder and the illogical fear of admitting anything was happening, my skin crawling with phantom tingles, a sharp stabbing radiated in quick pulses from the pit of my stomach causing my body to jerk visibly. The bell is seconds away but the time stretches like an eternity of desert between my pain and the toilet... the night before our third visit to the doctor I'd started vomiting uncontrollably at the dinner table, the world had greyed out, everything around me felt like the the low hum of an air-conditioner fading out against the noise of the headache, this was before I learned how to control it, before I knew how to focus. The doctor had no idea what to do, he prodded me here, poked me there, tapped my knees with a rubber mallet, took my pulse, my blood pressure and stood there hands on hips looking defeated.

I am nine years old, standing behind my chair in class with urine streaming down my leg in torrents. My light blue shorts turning black, saturated.

Hey creative genius... your shoe's untied.

2005-12-07T04:13:00.000-08:00

NOTE TO SELF:

Now it's true that I am a frustrated artist destined to waste away teaching media to a bunch of teenagers who are not the least bit interested till I grow old and grey but that doesn't mean I can get inappropriately creative.

Tonight whilst trying to edit a video of the year's school sports highlights for presentation evening I got a bit carried away and attempted to use a Melvins song as the soundtrack... it felt very wrong, all dark and evil and shit and I couldn't get it to go with the pictures right no matter how I tried.

That's when I realised... there is no place for doom metal in high school, not anywhere, it's just not appropriate.

Weather board refugees.

2005-12-01T22:04:00.000-08:00

I go to bed, Mark comes home, I get up, Mark goes to bed or so it has gone on for almost two weeks. I come home from work and the only light bulb left in the house is in my room, the rest have gone to some mysterious place.

ME: I had to buy all new light bulbs yesterday, what happened?
MARK: Um.. I had an accident (going bright red) I'll get a bunch of spares and um... (trails off)

We had a talk yesterday Mark and I...

MARK: I guess you've noticed that I've been all fucked up lately. Nocturnal, I don't know what to do anymore, I'm back on the gear... too much gear.

The art of keepin' on truckin', it's a balancing act... I take the psuedoephedrine to get things done so I need to take the loratadine to put myself down at night, which only means I need to take more psuedoephedrine to get going again and pretty soon my health is such a mess I am on a steady dose to codeine for the headaches and vitamin supplements to keep my immune system from collapsing... we are not that different Mark and I.

MARK: Megan really fucked me up man, the way she came back into my life only so that she could leave for Canada and destroy me all over again. It's been hurting so bad, I was on the train yesterday coming home from work and I broke down. I just started crying so hard I hyperventilated and the security guy thought I was some crazy and almost herded me off the train, I was heaving so hard I couldn't even explain myself.

The problem with gutter drugs are that once you understand how the system works you can get on anywhere. Some pills you've got to avoid because they are cut with things to make you sick if you dose up excessively and some pills are dangerous because they are chock full of aspirin or paracetamol which you can't extract. There is also the issue of finding the right pharmacies, some of them make you sign off against your drivers license which get's logged into some central database to keep tabs on how often or how much you buy, this is usually the bigger chain stores. The stores that are too small and under-staffed to follow procedure during rush periods are good but unpredictable, unlike the pharmaceutical bulk buy warehouses, department store for over the counter medicine staffed by teenagers who don't know and couldn't care less. Consumer information websites will usually tell you what unlisted ingredients go into the manufacture of the different pills, a pharmacist can tell you the generic equivalent of any big name drug and any place you visit that asks to see your license should be visited no more than once every six months.

MARK: Dude, I'm really sorry about the lights, I smashed the bulbs to cook my gear so I could smoke it... I've been so spun I completely forgot to got new bulbs. I'm so sorry you got dragged into this shit. I feel like a total fuck up, all the pot just makes me so lethargic I start to fucking hate myself, but I only started this because I couldn't deal with shit... and the speed, it's like a holiday from sitting around so fucking dead I can't even think. Now I've got two habits I can't control and I'm scared I can't deal with that either.

We are the white niggers of suburbia... the displaced weather board refugees who move from cheap rental to cheap rental, we get stuck in one another's gravitational pull for a while, sharing a house and at that point in time everything is shared, rent, bills, furniture, habits, troubles, neuroses. Our households, our lives are unstable ecosystems... environments on the verge of collapse... the threat of displacement ever present. I have moved four times in the last two years with a block mounted poster of Michael J. Fox ('Family Ties' era), a growing collection of trash cinema and a medicine bag that looks innocent to everyone but keeps me going, keeps me moving forward and focused whilst screening out reality just enough so that it doesn't really matter.

MARK: I swear to God, if I lose this job I'm going back to Adelaide... even though there's more trouble waiting for me there. If I lose this job I don't know what I am going to do, I'm such a screw-up!

A girl named Kath stayed with us for a while, Mark met her in Falls Creek, where she had been working and living for the past two years. She came to us because she wanted a place to stay so she could look for a job and find a place in the city. She found a job at the Vic Market and moved to East Melbourne with three gay men, all of whom had monster drug habits. There she was a country girl (born in Albury), a self professed homophobe who was trying to leave drugs in her past living with three gay drug addicts. She lasted six days, six days during which she was so wired on whatever they were giving her to snort that she didn't sleep, so fucked up that she couldn't leave the house to start her job. Finally her mind and her wallet buckled under the strain and she found herself back in Albury... another success story.

In three weeks we leave this house and all of this will cease to be of any importance... nothing more than a funny anecdote I can tell at parties when the conversation wanes and I've had too much to drink to know better. I am going to L.A. and then I am moving into a caravan park to plan my next move... I have not stopped moving since I was 21, I have eroded many friendships to dust, I have not had a girlfriend in almost two years and I have lived with so many freaks, geeks, burnouts, slackers, psychos and head-fucks that I can't even be sure if I am the normal one anymore.

Have I left my home just to whine in this microphone?

2005-11-29T19:29:00.000-08:00

The sound of the alarm hammering my ears in, the morning comes into focus and there is a pain in my side starting at my left shoulder, my breath rasps painfully with the rise and fall of my chest and my eyes sting. I roll over onto my left side and the pain builds to bursting point.

Cancer?

Stroke?

Am I having a heart attack?

At 6.30 in the morning the thought of serious illness makes me smile, it brings to mind the image of a swimming pool filled with medical certificates, dates stretching from here to eternity and I'm doing backstroke Scrooge McDuck style.

Happy... like a pig in shit.

urbs: both sub and ex+b

2005-11-28T21:57:00.000-08:00

I have an upset stomach... they should never have made throat lozenges with ibuprofen in them... please only use as directed or you may upset your stomach... the last thing you want to get on the wrong side of is your guts because as they say:

"Hell hath no fury like a stomach scorned"

seriously

Ain't it the truth?

2005-11-27T22:45:00.000-08:00

If I were the thinking man's Brittany Spears things would be very different around here let me tell you!

A head full of white light behind the wheel... everyone needs to go a little nuts every once in a while.

2005-11-27T03:07:00.000-08:00

Twilight... the last time I'd looked at the clock it was midday, only minutes ago (or so I thought)... my head humming, my limbs like distilled water running hot with electrical charge... the world in my laptop, the organised grid pattern of reports, a wire frame tunnel like something out of Tron... burning hot, my fingers dancing over the keys, flying through the pile of reports untouched... and then it happened.

I spaced... how long have I been sitting here? What time was it? Did I have any cigarettes left? Links in the chain of questions pulling taut as the draw-bridge drew closed behind my eyes severing continuity... time pulling in all directions at once and I can't lay the day out in sequence. There is no coffee on the stove. I eat another pill, crushing it up on my back teeth and sucking it down with water straight from the tap... I'm lost, floating and the colours of my kitchen pulse neon.

A phone rings somewhere in the distance... The Stooges snake waves of feedback guitar out of my stereo speakers and mix with the strangeness in my head. My body clock is driving into the future at warp speed with the hour hand swinging dangerously fast in arcs of lost time round and round and round and round and... I am behind the wheel of my car driving up the hill.

Stop to get some smokes and a bottle of orange juice.

A magpie on the road in front of me... a flash of white hot hatred and the chase is on... I am in no state to question my motives, I can barely catch hold of my thoughts long enough to understand what I am saying... the magpie is staring at me, not moving... FUCKER... I speed up, the bird won't budge... shift gear... CUNT BIRD... seconds from impact and the bird takes off, I swing the wheel to catch it on my grill as it passes across the front of the car mid-flight and then it is gone... SHITFUCKER... I am going with it into the sky and any sense that I am still behind the wheel of my car gone... gone and I am going after the bird with bile in my heart; up, up and...

crash.

The car mounts the curb and starts its way up the grassy slop of the embankment and I snap back into myself, slam on the brakes and skid back down onto the road.

Back at home... the laptop's keys under my fingertips and I am safe in familiar territory... Iggy howls over a wall of distortion and I sip my coffee, good and hot... everone hates writing reports but I like the chaos of being lost in a deadline which looms too near... push yourself and see what happens, going a little mad sometimes is tonic for the soul... my head shifts gears and we are off, lost in the task... climbing the mountain of paper work, racing onwards and upwards.

Trade secrets revealed

2005-11-26T01:35:00.000-08:00

Writing reports is the bane of every teaching professional, however, I have been told that it is something I am particularly good at... although my methods are somewhat unorthodox. The art to writing reports is to find some way to key into the rigid process of box ticking and standardised phrasing by cutting through the background noise of the big interesting world that exists beyond the screen of your laptop.

I do this by using drugs!

Initially I found alcohol to be of some use because it slows you down and makes it virtually impossible to concentrate on more than one thing at a time. Perfect in theory except that the implicit sloppiness and lack of care or co-ordination that comes with drunkeness means that the morning after involves wading through a sea of incomprehensible typos with a bad hangover, plus there is always the risk that overindulging will leave you passed out on the keyboard.

No, downers are never the answer... but caffeine and psuedoephedrine, now there are two very useful drugs!

Before I sit down to write reports I brew a pot of strong turkish coffee and buy a packet of slow release pseudoephedrine based decongestant tablets. I pop two of the pills in my mouth and chew releasing 48 hours of runny nose relief in the one hit and then its time to pour myself a cup of thick brown Turkish muck and get down to business. There is something about the synaptic crackle of amphetamines, a kind of ultra-single-minded-ness that comes from feeling so fast you've got to grab onto anything you can to ground yourself in the moment, a simple process like writing reports becomes an all consuming reality, a world of limitless possibility. There is a logic to the process which makes it hypnotic, combine this trace with synthetic stimulation and it becomes a rhythm your mind can dance to... palpable... physical... visceral

There is no need to eat.

There is no need to sleep

There is only the hum of the laptop and the music pouring out of the stereo and the next cup of coffee on the stove. I have written my reports straight in one hit waking up Friday morning and bashing away at the keys until Sunday afternoon stopping only to urinate or light a fresh cigarette... it is in the grips of this frenzy that I see my job not as a weekly meal ticket but as a way of life.

A forgotten comment from a deleted post.

2005-11-23T20:05:00.000-08:00

"if you see me I'll be joking... the last of the angry clowns."

Welcome to 'the rest of us'.

Tune in, tune out. Change Channels

2005-11-22T22:08:00.000-08:00

My neighbourhood is so suburban it feels like a dream or a symbol, like a place that could only exist as an ideal. It calms me to walk through the prozac streets, a holiday from my own tangled instability, watching the sun set as I replay my day, all jumbled and jump cut, through the projector in my head.

Today someone I worked with asked me why I haven't bought my own house yet.
I shrugged and walked away, feeling like I must have fallen asleep on the bus and woke up a long long way from home.

Nervous, jangled by a steady diet of coffee and cigarettes. Hemmed in by looming work deadlines, overdue house inspections, physical distance, routine... the alarm goes off, coffee, breakfast radio, coffee, work, drive time radio, beer. How did my life turn me into the sort of person that listens to breakfast radio every weekday morning whilst driving to work sipping on a styrofoam cup of takeaway coffee? Another bad dream perhaps? A symbol? An ideal? No, it's my life as it becomes a growing repertoire of cliches, a cancer that is strangling my time, a cancer running backwards forcing order onto chaos by rote.

Listening to a conversation between two students in class I overhead one of them say:

"If Aboriginals get money from the government just for being Aboriginal and spastics get money just for being spastic then do we give gays money because they're gay?"
No one seemed to be sure of the answer but they all thought her logic was reasonable.

Tune in, tune out. Change channels.

In two months I will be living in a trailer park, renting a $60/week cabin in the worst bad part of town... it's only temporary ( but how many times have I had to tell myself that?!!?!)... the inevitability of something so ridiculous makes everything that happens around me seem like a big joke.

Our school band playing a Beatles medley... badly... another fucking cliche, a brutal reminder of...

Tune in, tune out.

Switch off.

inprogress=true

2005-11-21T23:53:00.002-08:00

I am having difficulty walking the walk so I guess it's time for PLAN B... talking the walk (and hope no one is paying too much attention).

A lady just came to the door asking about a catalogue of homewares she left in our letter box.
She was coming around and collecting them back.
When I found it on the weekend I threw it straight in the bin.
I lied and said someone else who lives here must have brought it in.
She said she'd be back later tonight.
The rubbish was collected this morning... it's gone for good.
I feel a bit bad about it... but not really.

I may get sick soon... there was a frying pan that had been sitting in our kitchen for days with chicken stir-fry in it.
The chicken went rotten because of the warm weather and stunk out the whole house.
It was my stand-off, my message to Mark that he should do the dishes once in a while.
My stand-off failed.
Today I was hungry and there was nothing else to cook with so I washed it and used it.
I don't trust homebrand detergent.

When I get frustrated I tend to tuck my thumbs into my fist and squeeze till the joint cracks.
I have been doing this a lot lately.

The power of symbols

2005-11-21T03:28:00.000-08:00

Today during lunch break Sam said:

"Do you ever feel like the world is talking to you in symbols. This morning when I went to open my classroom for first period I found that someone had broken into the room and taken a huge shit in the middle of one of the front tables. Before any of the kids could see I pulled the back cover off a spare exercise book, scooped it up and threw it away in the bushes. Afterwards I couldn't stop laughing. It was like one of those 'this is your life' moments."

I have had a similar moment of symbolic revelation. Years ago I used to work for Crown Casino and on valentines day as I was walking through the complex to my division office I found a bunch of roses that had been discarded, then vomited on and trampled into the floor. When I found them the flowers had been walked completely flat and the congealed puddle of yellow puke had dried leaving the imprint of a large work boot right in the middle of the mess.

Trash is my life.

2005-11-19T22:23:00.000-08:00

One of my best work friends has a schizophrenic son who himself is also quite likeable... one day sitting at a computer work station next to her son he turned and said, "The only thing you have control over in the world is what you choose to see when you look, the problem with people like you and me is that we can't help but see the litter, even if it's lying next to the most beautiful flower in existence."

Since he said that he has been institutionalised again and converted to Islam... one morning recently on my way to work I saw him walking along the side of the road about 20 kilometres from home, he looked so calm and happy walking in the morning sun. It was about 7:20 am, he must have been walking all night.

signs

2005-11-19T17:43:00.000-08:00

#1 The secret life of public toilets

'The school boy with the Stussy backpack. I watched you blow three guys at once, you did an awesome job for a sixteen year old? When are you back? That was an huge load you left all over the floor, next time you can leave it on my face'

#2 The small world experience

'To the man who stole our sign, people have seen you and we know who you are! If you do not return it in 48 hours we will get the police involved'

#3 Political theory (Thug life style)

'Vandalism is better than a brick in a pig's face!'

non sequiturzzzzzzzzzzzzzz..!

2005-11-18T17:56:00.000-08:00

I have to keep moving, through the rain-soaked streets of another Saturday night, weave past guys with their hair spiked and their collars up inspecting each others' car stereos... somewhere in the distance a fight is breaking out and a small boy in a three piece suit and bright red rubber gumboots is playing on the busy street corner next to me: pressing in the pedestrian lights to stop the traffic and giggling at his new found powers.

My head is a muddle; floating through days on a headache cloud... the little yellow pills with the muscle relaxant and the codeine... claws of jagged pain working their way up the back of my neck to take hold of the wet rope of muscle behind my left eye and sqeeze till I feel my stomach flip and bile rise up into my throat... the little blue and white pills, a strong anti-inflammatory... I can always tell a migraine, it always manifests itself as a hard little knot of pressure in the centre of my forehead and spreads out around my eyes, spilling into my temples. When the throbbing reaches my temples, that's when the world gets greyed out... the oval shaped off-white pills, the ones that dilate the blood vessels in your brain and make you feel very dizzy, swirling.

Sitting smoking on my lunch break at work talking to Sam, it is one of those maudlin conversations which always makes it difficult to step back into the classroom and dodge the shit-slinging with a smile. There is a small uncomfortable pause and she offers me a valium to take the edge off. Everywhere I look at work I see people leaning on sedatives and anti-depressants. I like my coffee strong, black, no sugar and sometimes when the pain in my head won't quit I chew three or four paracetamol tablets into a acrid bitter pulp and wash it down with hot expresso... on occasion the gag reflex kicks in and I nearly choke forcing it down; the last thing I would want is to spit up hot coffee on the staff room floor.

Almost every car in my street has a Christian bumper sticker on their car... 'God created Adam and Eve, Not Adam and Steve'

Some headaches are barely even there, you only feel it when interacting with others... some kind of dislocated internalised hum fed through you in waves of dull throbbing sealing you off from the rest of the world... sitting at an outside table in the only cafe open after-hours in Boxhill watching the small-time drug dealers outside the video game arcade strutting. Sip of coffee, sucking on a cigarette and reading a trashy book about L.A.P.D officers on the verge of a nervous breakdown.

Arabs!

2005-11-15T03:21:00.000-08:00

Sitting on the livingroom couch at my parents house watching television with them I realised I truly was my fathers son. Whilst we were watching a documentary on the history of Islamic suicide bombers Dad decided it would be fun to teach his dog to bark on command. Normal enough you'd say, except that he decided command cues like 'talk' were far too commonplace and opted instead to teach Lucy (short for Lucifer) to bark and run around when he said 'Arabs! Kill Lucy kill!'

It is no longer a mystery why the general public finds my sense of humour inappropriate.

So lame it hurts.

2005-11-10T01:44:00.000-08:00

There is a poster at work that really bothers me, it shows some kids sitting on a graffiti covered bridge next to their skateboards reading books and it says 'Bored? Read a book' under it. Why is it that 'The Powers That Be' (or TPTB) always feel the need to dress up their messages to children in baggy cargo pants and a hooded jumper, slap a cap on it and set it rolling across the page on a skateboard? It is just so lame that every time I walk past it I feel the almost uncontrollable urge to rip the poster down, tear it into a million pieces and stomp it into the mud. Is this really how TPTB plan to get to the kids, we are going to patronise them into submission... it's just like when you were sixteen and your Dad did an awful "I'm just hangin' with my homies" routine to embarrass you every time you tried to bring friends home, but at least when Dad's are do that they are trying to be embarrassing (that's how they get their kicks). I'm sorry but the only kids I've met in my two years as a teacher dumb enough to buy into a routine like 'Yo dudes read a book they're radical!" would not have the mental capabilities to do so.

On the road again.

2005-11-06T23:22:00.000-08:00

Last Friday night I went out... not just outside but all the way out. I started to notice things, things that did not fit and I decided to write them down just in case... here is what I noticed:

1. There was a man at East Ringwood station, very clean-cut in appearance hugging the small fluffy dog to his chest.

2. Why is Boxhill Central full of extremely overweight people in wheelchairs at 8:00pm on a Saturday night?

3. It is never appropriate to sing along to Throbbing Gristle in public:

"There's a hundred ways I could persuade you,
I could do it with money, I could just look at you,
and if I do, I've got a little biscuit tin to keep your panties in"

4. Why do goths of all ages feel the need to wear a backpack with Sesame Street/The Wiggles/Power Rangers characters on it for ironic counterpoint?

5. The sign at the counter in Clay Pot House said: Homade Chilly Sauce.

6. The Carpenters really do sound better when sung in some South-East Asian dialect over a kareoke backing track!

7. Oh my God, the woman at the counter in the Asian grocery store across the road from Clay Pot House is an exact replica of the restaurant owner.

8. Whilst waiting for a city-bound train at Boxhill train station I become a acutely aware that the girl standing next to me who looked like your typical indie-rock hipster was not what she seemed... attached to her belt was a utility pouch containing a pair of worn electrical pliers.

9. The junkie at Richmond Train Station (yet another changeover!!!!) does not look friendly. He is carrying a component hi-fi radio tuner looking suspicious and his girlfriend has very tattooed calves. Everyone on the train platform seems very anxious to be on the move and this restless vibe is causing me to pace and write very messily.

10. Still at Richmond waiting for a service on the Sandringham line and... GODDAMN IT... why are the clocks and the next available train monitors never in synch? How can it be 15 minutes to the next train if it is currently 9:17 and the next train is coming at 9:28?!!!!!!

11. Graffiti writers trying to look very 'tough' and 'street' should avoid spraying their tag in bright pink paint.

12. If you are a girl there is a fine art to getting shit-faced and trying to vomit whilst wearing tall stilettos and a short skirt. Bend over too far one way and everyone can see up your skirt but but bend over too little and you risk your party dress being covered in vomit chunks.

13. There is something indicative about white trash... they are always the ones trying to scam a free ride on the bus at the end of the night like it is their birthright to be there!

Think I'm gonna eat some worms!

2005-11-02T23:01:00.000-08:00

Last night I had a dream that I woke up one morning with a brain tumour and no one believed me... I tried to tell everyone: my family, friends, work colleagues, even the students but they just laughed at me. I could read the thoughts of the people who I talked to, no one believed I was dying they just assumed it was a ploy to get some attention.

Saved?

2005-11-02T22:56:00.000-08:00

She'd hand me the pamphlet and I hadn't turned and walked away so I suppose that I was asking for it. She talked about God and I nodded forcing down my smile which I knew would turn into a giggle if I'd let myself relax into it. She was trying to save me and it felt nice... I've been so lost lately.

It didn't bother me that she looked psychotic staring with robot reptilian eyes lost religious reverie because she was telling me what I wanted to hear, she was saying that it was not my fault. "Let the Lord into your heart and you will be happy, the angels will fly down from the heavens to walk with you and keep the Devil at bay." She put her hand on my head and I wanted it there, she closed her eyes and I did the same. "Don't you want to be a good person? Don't you want to feel that you've made the right choices? All you have to do is acknowledge your sins; the sins you were born with and the ones you've collected along the way. You'll have to let it go, let it all go."

She was praying so that I may be saved, praying so that I may have the Lord reveal himself to me. Praying for my happiness, my safety and health. I didn't believe it for a second but I liked that feeling that someone was trying so hard. I could feel the people walking by so I shut my eyes tighter trying to retreat further into the warmth of her delusions.

She stopped talking and I opened my eyes. She was smiling. "I felt a power flow through us. Did you feel the energy?" I smiled but kept my mouth shut. "Of course you did, look at you, your overwhelmed."

We shook hands and I disappeared, retreating down the steps of a subterranian Korean Internet Cafe where all the seats hang off bolts in the ceiling like the love swings in the front yard of the idealised American family home. I listened to old punk rock albums on my discman, watched crazy game shows, drank overly sweet milk ice tea and felt calm. The Cramps were singing 'Fever' when I looked up to find a forty something bald man dressed as Michael Jackson grab his crotch; The Fall was playing as frenzied contestants fought for fish in a tank pulling them out with their mouths... (and Mark E. Smith sang) I think I am going bonkers in Phoenix.

Walking the city streets some time later on a sugar rush, alone but not lonely I watched the world walk by in the opposite direction. It was a big weekend in Melbourne town and down around the casino the race crowds were out in full force. Women in their best dresses with their faces painted on, wearing impossibly silly hats, carrying their heels in one hand and tiny designer handbags in the other. I was walked the hoochie momma gauntlet: a corridor in the casino shopping complex lined with display windows full of porn queen lingerie. The whole spectacle a clutter of shiny fabric and bright colours clinging to headless mannequin bodies in suggestive poses. There were men in wide lapelled pimp suits wearing fedora hats with basketball sneakers. An old man looked lost in a cheap sports coat two sizes too big hugging a Playstation. He and I were adrift in the crowd, the odd ones out and I still had my punk rock thundering in my ears. The Go-Betweens, X Ray Spex, Television... lost under a Marquee Moon. It'd been hours since I had left the house, the static in my head eased off, the sugar cutting through my lethargy.

Outside on the banks of the Yarra river I watch sea gulls attack abandoned paper plates for scraps of congealed Chinese food, smiling as I light another cigarette.

The calm after the storm

2005-10-24T05:26:00.000-07:00

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

A random Saturday night on earth.

2005-10-23T02:01:00.000-07:00

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...

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

2005-10-21T18:47:00.000-07:00

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.

Worlds' wackiest trailer trash (PART II)

2005-10-20T06:00:00.000-07:00

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

Worlds' wackiest trailer trash (PART I)

2005-10-19T00:16:00.000-07:00

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!

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

2005-10-15T13:36:00.000-07:00

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.

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

2005-10-12T01:41:00.000-07:00

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)

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

2005-10-10T04:40:00.000-07:00

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!

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

2005-10-09T04:04:00.000-07:00

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!

Bobbing...

2005-10-07T00:16:00.000-07:00

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!

Haunted by virtual ghosts

2005-10-06T05:27:00.000-07:00

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!

2005-10-06T02:44:00.000-07:00

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!

My secret shame PART TWO.

2005-10-04T00:02:00.000-07:00

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...

My secret shame PART ONE.

2005-10-03T03:27:00.003-07:00

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!

Where for art thou Michael Burch?

2005-09-06T23:08:00.000-07:00

I had a terrible revelation today at work, I was marking the roll in my photography class when I realised that Michael Burch does not exist. I mean he's a real guy and he's even a student at my school but he doesn't exist in so far as that he is not actually a student in my photography class. His name appears in my roll book and I have been calling his name out for the past six weeks (even marked him 'here' a few times?!!!!?!) and whilst no one has mentioned to me the error of my ways the biggest problem I have is that there is a mid-semester progress report headed for his letter box (as I write) with an attached photography report.

What's funny about this is that when I was faced with the challenge of writing a report for a student who didn't exist I managed to include what was possibly the most stupidly ironic (and inappropriate) comment on the page possible-

'Michael needs to take more initiative with his work and improve his attendance in this class.

I don't know whether it is time to laugh or cry!

School spirit

2005-09-05T00:17:00.000-07:00

Alpha, step. Omega, step
Kappa, step. Sigma, step
Gangstas walk, pimps gon' talk
Oooh hecky naw that boy is raw

ME: "Amii, you need to calm sown, you need to put the stick outside and get yourself to the office before you do something really stupid."
AMII: "No, you go to the fucking the office, I'm gonna smash his fucking face in!"

There are those dead-end days, dragging yourself to work like so much meat on a stick. Eerily calm. The lights are on and no one's home... everything is going wrong and you know you won't win so you don't bother trying. A window gets smashed, a student is reduced to hysterical tears for no apparent reason when you ask him how he is doing with the work. It would be funny if it wasn't happening to you but it is. It's a living but it isn't much of a life, or so the saying goes (round and round in your head) as it gets harder to fall asleep at night, harder to wake up in the morning, you're waking up two or three times through the night in the grip of night terrors and it's hard to separate the nightmare from the darkness at 4:30am.

AKA, step. Delta, step
S G Rho, step. Zeta, step
Gangstas walk, pimps gon' talk
Oooh hecky naw that boy is raw

SAM: "Can I go get a drink?"
ME: "No, the bell just went, you know the rules."
SAM: "Yeah, but my dad had a heart attack. Can I go to the toilet please?"
ME: "What does your dad's health have to do with the rules I said no."

Sometimes you should keep your mouth shut, your not thinking straight and everything that comes out is the wrong thing to say. It's been bottling up inside and every word stinks sour with venom. The job won't sit right, you feel like a fuck-up and you can't reconcile with yourself all the ADHD and asbergers and parental neglect and poverty and teenage pregnancy and low self-esteem and serious drug abuse and teenage crime and unemployment and all the other serious problems to which there are no real solutions. How do you live in the world knowing that 'normal' is not the norm. If you worked at a good school in a rich suburb it wouldn't look like this but you have to face the facts... education for the rich, for everyone else it's about getting used to the disadvantages passed down by birthright, this is not a classless society, this is a society where the lines are drawn in invisible ink.

I feel a woo coming on, cuz. I feel a woo coming on, cuz
WOO
There it was
A some woos coming on, cuz. A couple woos coming on, cuz
WOO, WOO
There they was

I repeat; THIS IS NOT A CLASSLESS SOCIETY, THIS IS A SOCIETY WHERE THE LINES ARE DRAWN IN INVISIBLE INK.

I feel a woo coming on, cuz. I feel a woo coming on, cuz
WOO
There it was
A couple woos coming on, cuz. A couple woos coming on, cuz
WOO, WOO
There they was...

The Bing and I.

2005-09-01T21:29:00.000-07:00

I have this student named David who suffers from Obsessive Compulsive Anxiety Disorder... he used to have a thing for Bing Crosby and so every time he felt he wasn't coping with the work in my class, or life with in general his work would start to feature pictures of Bing. The worse David felt the more Bing there was and sometimes he felt so bad that his essays started to look more like commemorative photospreads than English assignments. At the moment David has a fascination with the Adolf Hilter and so recently he has been unable to write anything without casting Adolf Hilter as a character, quoting Hitler or including a picture of him somewhere on the page.

The strangest piece of work David has ever handed me was a story where he had been hired by Satan to facilitate my nervous breakdown... in the story his relentless obsession with Bing Crosby reduces me to a quivering lump; David finds me hiding in the cleaners storeroom, hands me a gym-sack full of guns and tells me it is everyone else's fault... the rest writes itself! When I showed the story to the school social worker she said that it was great to see that David had finally found someone at the school he can open up to... I am not quite so sure about her optimism.

One banana, two banana, three banana four.

2005-09-01T05:41:00.000-07:00

"Dude, you are so gay."

"So, you are two times as gay as I am."

'Bullshit, you are three times as gay as that!"

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

2005-08-30T03:44:00.000-07:00

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.

2005-08-17T16:32:00.000-07:00

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.

2005-08-13T22:47:00.000-07:00

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!

2005-08-12T03:33:00.000-07:00

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.

2005-08-07T03:30:00.000-07:00

"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.

2005-08-06T03:29:00.000-07:00

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.

2005-08-02T03:27:00.000-07:00

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."

Sex for pocket change.

2005-07-30T03:23:00.000-07:00

The train beeps and the doors open, we get in and sit opposite each other in the same booth. The feeling is edgy like that terrible silence when you know something drastic and unfortunate is about to happen...

She gets up and moves to the far end of the train carriage.

“Um, ‘scuse me sir but I just need to ask for help. See I’ve gotta get home to my step-mum in Alamein and I need forty cents to call her and… thanks a fuckin’ lot. Fuckin’ cunt…“Um, ‘scuse me sir but I just need to ask for help. See I’ve gotta get home to my step mum in Alamein and I need forty cents to call her and… thanks a fuckin’ lot. She starts to ping pong her way up the train carriage sliding in and out of each booth, left then right then left again muttering obscenities with every rejection. Before I know it she’s in the both opposite mine and I’m digging around in my pockets for change.

“…listen then if you haven’t got any money then can I just use your phone I really need to call my mum, um step, step mum m-my step mum and…” The guy she’s talking to is staring at her with a look that suggests he doesn’t understand a word she’s saying, as if he’s trying to pretend he doesn’t speak the language and I start to feel outraged on her behalf. Outraged because I know that this girl can’t afford the dignity to tell him to get stuffed until she’s sure he won’t cave in. I can’t stand watching people being made to beg, I can’t stand all these people with change jingling in their purses and pockets sitting there struck suddenly broke. It’s only forty fucking cents, who cares what she’ll spend it on? Everyone is sitting in silence exchanging conspiring looks of disdain, disgusted that she may be trying to eat into their weekend beer budget, begging for change which is obviously for drugs; but then it is a Friday night so I guess… and then it’s my turn and we sit facing one another again.

Before I even fully aware of her I notice the stench coming off her clothes, she’s got that spicy sweat smell of homelessness and her white fleece tracksuit is covered in green and brown stains. Her face is a mess of red splotches and running mascara and her matted peroxide blonde hair is pulled back into a ponytail; she’s no older than fifteen. Even before anything is said I am already holding out the forty cents. I look at her, at the desperation in her eyes and feel stupid about the book in my hands and the sentence I have been reading for the last half an hour to avoid this moment. She shifts over so that we are no longer facing each other but sitting side by side and whispers into my ear-

“Hey thanks darlin’ all these other cunts’re so tight they prob’bly don’t shit. Hey do you do prostitution, would you do it with me? At Boxhill I need five bucks you know” Everyone is trying to draw me into their conspiracy of silence, offering me a look of sympathy, I ignore them and produce another dollar hoping this will buy her off but she looks at it and bursts into tears. “Fuckin’ no, you can’t say no I need to get home. Please, please I’ll do it for two dollars why won’t you... fuck Fuck... FUCK ME!” Everyone seems to have found part of a discarded newspaper to hide behind and I don’t know what to do. Her whole face is going red, a deep bruised red and she has snot bubbling out of her nostrils mingling with the tears which pour out over her cheeks and drip off her chin into a puddle on her dirty lap.

“Listen if you want to go to Alamein don’t you just change over at Camberwell?” I say feeling like such a dickhead, knowing how pathetic what I’ve just said is. I'm staring at my hands unable to look up, I know she’s looking at me as if I just couldn’t understand and I realize that I really just can’t.

Reading this over I wish the story was fiction, I know that the local paper keeps talking about our local youth homelessness problem but when it is all statistics and expert opinions it is easy to believe that there might be a solution... like all you have to do is... this however is not quite so simple when the problem materializes in the seat next to you on your way to wherever and tries to sell you sex for pocket change.

A picture postcard of community atmosphere.

2005-07-26T03:21:00.000-07:00

There was tension in the supermarket today, definite tension; as the shoppers shopped and the workers worked a group of children no older than six or seven gathered in front of the automatic doors blowing on their recorders next to the charity can shakers; a picture postcard of community atmosphere on a Sunday afternoon but alas, something was wrong, very, very wrong. With every note blown on the recorders a visible shiver swept through every person in the place.

Teeth ground down into powder, furtive sideways glances were exchanged and the band played on; as one rendition of 'Mary Had A Little Lamb' finished a new one rose out of the fading final note, volume fluctuating momentarily with the opening and closing of the doors. I found the items on my list and made my way to the checkout.

As people laughed their nasty little laughs... 'Mary Had A Little Lamb' was playing

People sighed... to the tune of 'Mary Had A Little Lamb'

People mumbled swear words under their breathe... as they listened to 'Mary Had A Little Lamb'

At the checkout the cashier looked far away, eyes glazed over and set deep in puffy sockets.

CASHIER: You know, they are here every fucking Sunday! I work every Sunday, for ten hours I listen to 'Mary Had A Little Lamb'. Sometimes coming into work I see them and I think about smashing my car into the store and fixing the little shits for good.

It is difficult to know what to say at times like these, a supermarket employee who I didn't really know was confessing her desire to kill children to me. Luckily the store manager came by during this somewhat awkward silence and filled the void, standing there all jangled with a wild look in his twitching eyes.

MANAGER [to cashier]: Our friends are here again, if they don't learn a new song soon you'll be visiting me in prison. I swear to God!

Outside, walking up the hill on the way back to my car I passed a group of supermarket employees on break sitting at a public bench lighting their next cigarette with the butt of their last. No one spoke but as they exhaled their smoke rode high into the air on the back of whistled renditions of 'Mary Had A Little Lamb'.

The 6am bong stem incident.

2005-07-23T03:19:00.000-07:00

A horrible nights sleep last night.

Listening to The Mountain Goats on repeat trying to block out the psychotic mess that share-housing can sometimes become as the sun came up. Other peoples' amphetamine habits and my inability to sleep are a recurring theme in my posts and this is going to be another one of those stories.

So I get home and the whole house is sparkling with cleanliness and nervous energy, the coffee table has been unburied, the bathroom is glowing white and our kitchen is immaculate, Mark and Gav are standing to attention staring at me with such intense grins that I thought their cheeks were going to tear. It's all too weird so I get a glass of water and walk out back for a smoke.

Of course I am followed.

MARK: "Gav and me having been smoking a bit of ice."

I looked at them again and see the lost on Mars look in their eyes, things are starting to make sense and that's when Mark hits me with the big guns.

MARK: "I solved it, my money problems, got all this meth and a ten bag of eckies on credit if I sell it even after I pay the dealer back I'll clear $380 easy. Oh course me and Gav had to have a bit, just to tell how pure it is, pure as fuck man, so I after I cut it I will..."

At this point I had to jump in, listening to a person recount get rich quick schemes that can get us killed by bikies are hard enough to take from someone who isn't speeding but from someone speeding on the very gear they haven't yet financed and can't afford? I look at Gav, he has the fear and I have a sick feeling in my stomach.

I asked the question, didn't want to know but I needed to hear it;

ME: "So how much have you used?"

MARK: "Oh well we smoked a couple of points each and then I've done a few lines and..." He must have heard me groan because he decided take a different approach "but when we started cooking up we'll make heaps of coin [insert a growing sense of dread]. Dangerous business you know but you gotta be ready cos if some cunt walks through that door to do harm you've gotta take matters into your own hands and stab the motherfucker, you've gotta be fucking hard. You've gotta defend your shit! Fucking kill him with scissors when we get our own lab going we're going to be fucking rich"

Gav's not saying much but he looks like his insides are vibrating at warp speed and he's gripping the porch rail white knuckled eye's the size of saucers.

It was after midnight when Mark put Pink Floyd's 'Comfortably Numb' on repeat, over and over till dawn. The whole time he is freaking out about a scar on the back of his newly shaven head he's never noticed before stopping every fifteen minutes or so to let rip with a childish whine and moan about his need for a bong; "I can't do it man, joints are not giving me anything anymore!" We don't have a cone or a stem and neither Gav nor I could really care less so Mark is stuck complaining in vain.

I know it is futile but I decide to go to bed to escape the endless Pink Floyd and continuous circular diatribe about unrequited bong longings and mysterious scars.

The Floyd doesn't end and it sounds like their is an athletics carnival being held in the corridor outside my door. Change jingling, plates crashing to the floor, unravelled laughter and that fucking song playing over and over and over and over and over and over and over and over and over and over and then...

NOTHING

At about 6am everything stops dead and I emerge from my room, the house is dark and still, not a sound until...

BANG

...the door smashes open and Mark comes tumbling in red faced and puffed holding a length of obviously stolen garden hose in one hand and a steak knife in the other.

MARK: "Fuck, got caught man, I needed this, it's for my bong. Went next door [insert feeling of sharp chest pains] and was all stealth down their driveway but I was cutting the hose and the lady was in the basement doing laundry, she was staring straight at me through the window so I thought fuck it cut the hose and ran!"

ME: "Which hose?"

MARK: "The one to her washing machine."

ME: "But wasn't she doing her laundry?"

MARK: "Yeah, but...[I am no longer listening]

Three moments I would rather not forget.

2005-07-21T03:17:00.000-07:00

1. Monbulk Rd, Kallista.

Walking on the roadside I saw a man, he was wearing a saffron robe, he had his head shaved and he had no shoes on. My first reaction was, goddamn hills, goddamn hippies... what did I expect, but then I looked a little closer; in one had he had a retractable dog leash which was attached to a tiny chihuahua wearing a tartan dog coat and he was holding a very new looking mobile phone up to his ear with the other hand. This man reminded me off a very strange night I had in the city about two years ago, I was in a bar in North Fitzroy watching a reggae band, everyone in the audience was white but sporting dreadlocks, rasta caps, ponchos and corduroy trousers. The band were singing out in a Jamaican accent and the whole audience called back sounding similarly fraudulent, a ganja smoke-screen filled the room and girls shook their booties like it was a rap video until a mobile phone sitting on one of the P.A speakers went off cutting the bands sound to ribbons with the incoming call stutter. All of a sudden we were transformed back into a bunch of middle class white kids sitting in some bar in one of Melbourne's gentrified inner-city suburbs.

The year of the reggae incident I moved out onto the Dandenong line... I would start the day with black coffee sitting on the wrecked couches in our back yard. Whilst Ice Cube's Ghetto Bird blared I would stare at the skyline of factory roofs and misplaced palm trees feeling gangsta, it was my morning ritual... we used to call the Clayton Sri Lankan massive Afro-Lankans, (had TuPac been alive and living in Clayton he would have been proud of his legacy!) There were always Afro-Lankan's hanging around out house which we named 'Trenchtown' in honor of the regae incident.

They used to smoke pot and talk jive.

2. Flinders Lane, Melbourne

On our way to the Bill Henson exhibition we have to stop off here to pick up one more free ticket. We walk into the lobby of a high-rise building, Dave leading the way through the cramped stone corridors until we come to a bank of elevators. The middle elevator opens first and we step into another world. It must have been the last lift car in the country which still employed an operator. She's small and old standing hunched over with huge glasses weighing her face down. In the back left corner of the lift is a small stool with a lunch box and a dog-eared paperback. All four walls covered with family photographs from floor to ceiling: parents, brothers, sisters, uncles, aunts staring out from special occasions frozen forever, we are surrounded by her life, momentarily trapped inside it.

"What floor boys?"

The funny thing is that since I moved out to the hills I no matter where I am in the city I always feel trapped by something; all that concrete reaching for the sky makes me feel like I am indoors... to me Melbourne looks like someone forgot to put the ceiling on some gigantic elaborate fun-park maze. Back in the days when I lived in the city it was harder to get that 'lost buzz' but sometimes after I had worked a nightshift I would walk to the office district of the CBD and explore those self contained 24/7 office complexes the ones with the gyms, cafes, convenience stores and relaxation lounges tangled into the mess of workstations and management suites. I would get all the way to the top floor with my matted hair and dirty Shell uniform dragging the bags under my eyes on the floor as I walking wondering what the hell they paid the security guards to secure. No one ever asked me what I was doing, they just pretended I wasn't there.

3. St Kilda beach, St Kilda

Smoking cigarettes at the end of the pier after dark when Tania turns to me and says:
"How do you draw a line between love and the fear of dying alone?"

The corperate media virus kills conversation.

2005-07-18T03:16:00.000-07:00

Shopping centres, a monument to the endlessness of suburbia, giant consumer biodomes with everything you could ever want under the one roof. Out where I live it's all about the Eastland shopping complex... (a mobile phone conversation overheard whilst on the Ringwood connector train) So where are you, in Sanity, right, ok you're on level two, listen to me. What? Yeah, okay keep on walking till you see K-Mart. See it, okay okay, good. Now walk through till your in the food court. Do you see it? Yeah, walk all the way through and turn at the Mc Donalds and keep going till you get to the Big W. Got it, now just go up the escalator. Good okay, your at Hoyts, with what? TWO COKES! Cans or 1.25, look I got a 2 litre L.A Cola but it's only 2/3's full... as I said a whole consumer universe.

My favourite place in Eastland is the foodcourt.

For a start it is totally tribal, I can get lost in the subcultural wonderland, a table of teen goths talking trash about the skate punks two booths over who are eyeing off the old schoolers with their tartan, suspenders and leather jackets or denim vests covered in safety pins, Exploited patches and badly drawn Dead Kennedy's symbols scrawled in permanent marker. Every colour of the rainbow: scrawny emo kids with tight black pants and greasy fringes forever in their eyes, metal heads, ganstas with doo rags and one pant leg rolled up, ravers with huge reflective pants and fuzzy hats as well, each staking out a piece of real estate, claiming a set of tables as there own, staying there all day. It is like an open range zoo for youth culture stereotypes:

"And over here we have your common outer suburban goth pack, notice the black trench coats, dyed black hair and Lenore lunch boxes. In their natural habitat they pose little threat to others and similar to the native emo kids they are frequently targetted by ferocious bogans; the king predators of these lands."

But the most most awesome thing about this bad dream incarnate is the tables. It seems that nothing is too far for the advertising stategists of the modern world: Gone are the days of not being allowed to watch tv with dinner, at Eastland they have installed television monitors into each table top so that you are forced to eat off an endless advertising loop. It is amazingly difficult to ignore it, everytime you look down to aim your fork or find you napkin it is there flickering up at you. For very young, the elderly and the uninitiated this can be deadly, all conversation feezes, people forget where they are and who they are with as they stare headlong into the commercial void learning about account saver schemes and affordable dry cleaning. Aside from the stereotype gallery who have become immune through over exposure (like a junkies who must shoot up to stay normal) the food court is filled with tv zombies, eyes fixed, chewing slowly and completely unaware of their surroundings.

I guess it's the flip-side of reality tv, whilst the teev strives to get real, reality is busy trying to absorb as much television as it possibly can. I can't wait for them to have cameras everywhere so that they can just pump live footage of everyone (who at this point in my science fiction future will be forced by law to wear t-shirts provided by sponsorship corperations) onto the walls of our favourite shopping centre complex (which at this point in my science fiction future will have grown to encompass whole suburbs).

"Hi my name is Adrian and I am brought to you by Marlbro Lights and KFC, it's finger licking good!"

Two worlds meet.

2005-07-16T03:11:00.000-07:00

Well my worst week at work ever finally ended but not without leaving me with at least one memorable moment...

One of my VCE students plays bass in a band and he knows I am in bands as well so he likes talking about music with me. On Tuesday morning he tells me he's playing a gig at Ruby's. Ruby's being the place where I accidentally befriended that lovable amphetamine addict Michael. As it is just across the hill from my place I promise to be there setting up the sitcom scenario of the century- respected educator bumps into insane drug addict buddy, student and family, all in the same place [insert canned laughter here].

So I get there early and find Nathan at the back of the room, "Hi Nathan, hi Nathan's Mum, hi Nathan's friend, hi Nathan's friend's Mum, hi... oh no, it can't be, I mean it couldn't have been, but it was; not only was Michael there, he was sitting with my student's family! My mind racing at a million miles an hour: Did they know him? If they did, taking into account how he was, wasn't that worse? If they didn't, what had he already said? Before anything useful came to mind he was up, hugging me and complaining that I never call. He looked a little nutty and two guys hugging was probably a bit too homo-erotic for the 16 year old boys looking on but at this point nothing too damaging had transpired.

That was until I asked Michael the stupidest question ever:

ME:"So Michael what have you been up to?"

MICHAEL: "Adrian man, I have been up for seven days speeding. It's so beautiful, so many good drugs, oh you have to meet my friend Julian, he has such clean speed and, oh, do you have your car here?"

ME: "Yeah" thinking he wants a lift home, hopeful that there is an end in sight; but instead...

MICHAEL: "Oh excellent, can you drive my mate and me to Boronia, we need to pick up a quarter"

I come in quickly with a forceful "No"

and Michael looking hurt replies "But we will give you your cut"

ME: "No I don't want it, I don't use it, I..." but the damage has already been done, the reality is glaringly obvious.

I am looking at Nathan's family looking at Michael looking at me and decide it is time to go to the toilet and think. This is a delicate situation which needs to be handled with care but unfotunately I am at the mercy of chaos: I cannot justify it to Nathan without drawing attention to the situation [I could also look like I am trying to cover up the mess]. Drug addicted mental patients are notoriously unpredictable and so there is no reasoning with Michael either [plus I had been rude and gotten in the way of his drugs and his general sense of good vibes, so he was probably pissed off]. Seeing the hopelessness of it all I head back to Nathan's family finding my problem has migrated and proceed to grind my teeth and look nervously around the room trying to feel on top of the situation but the eye of the storm lasts only a few seconds.

The first band get up fronted by... [you guessed it]... Michael, and he started singing about... [what else but]... DRUGS and not just any drugs; a ten minute freestyle ramble about the joys of snorting cocaine every day until the men with the butterfly nets and white coveralls have to be called in to take you away.

So Nathan's looking at me, I am looking at my shoes and Nathan's mum is filming everything on her video camera.

When it's over and I'm leaving, a broken defeated man, Nathan shakes my hand and says "You know this is a side of teacher's lives we never really get to see, we wouldn't even know it's there!" There's is a big smile of his face and I am sure both he and I both know he has something big to hold over me:

my double life

Lost in Randomness.

2005-07-14T03:11:00.000-07:00

I am not having a very good week. I am exhausted and everytime I turn around I seem to either fail at something or make myself look stupid or both.

Not being able to wake-up puts me in a very random mood, like someone has taken a whole bunch of flashback sequences and editted them together with all the sound out of sync and the joiner tape is slipping as the film winds through the projector.

I remember my first night in the hills; living in Montrose in a dysfunctional couples back room, watching Jai smoke endless cones out of a filthy looking bucket bong wondering what went wrong... our neighbours across the street used to sit on their back porch and shoot rabbits in their back yard... Kate picking arguements at the dinner table, with me sitting between her and Jai as if I had turned invisible... Kate's friend with a beer in one hand, cigarette in the other telling me she had cancer and shouldn't drink or smoke but 'What do they know anyway?!'... getting lost on my way home and finding a drug bust... touching the cancerous lump and the smile on her face whilst I did so... riding to Frankston to score pot with Jai drunk behind the wheel... being drunk and alone and drowning in work and beer at dawn...

...I remember... feeling angry at wasting half my life on buses and trains just to have a social life; being cold and half sick whilst three guys tried to scam blowjobs off an underage girl on the nightrider bus at 3am... I remember how dangerous Mooroolbark felt in the weeks after Chris Bourke was killed; all the graffiti and goon skins, and bored angry high schoolers in their hooded tops making idle threats to passer-bys... the first time I ever saw a fist fight on the train over a broken last cigarette and how the blood seeped out all over the floor... the pregnant 16 year old on her way to the women's shelter trying to share her potato chips with a carriage of people who were trying to pretend she didn't exist; she thought that she had a boyfriend who was Scottish royalty by birthright... and the speed freak that threatened to fire bomb the trainstation after they closed the toilets...

...all the stuff that happens during the empty moments and lost days...

...the life of trainstations, bus stops and suburban sprawl out of control...

...the endless cycle of work>eat>sleep...

...the things that happen in that life we live whilst waiting for something better...

...wating for... motivation... inspiration... sleep take hold... the computer to boot... the phone to ring... the rent to get paid by flatmates $180 in debt to some drug dealer somewhere... the life you are living to become a shrinking speck in your rearview mirror...

...waiting for everything to feel alright again, like you remember it feeling sometime before, some time you can't place and don't really remember but are sure must have existed.

Clothes makes the man.

2005-07-12T03:12:00.000-07:00

I left the hills last night, first time in about a month... took the train into the city.

Something very strange happened.

It was very cold so I was walking down the street with my big Blank hoodie on, hood pulled up all the way over my face when all of a sudden I felt a hand on my shoulder. I turned around and there was this very dodgy looking guy standing there smiling with his hand held out, I didn't really know what to do so I shook it. He had a dirty parachute material jacket on and a baseball cap, no teeth, tattoos and a torn gym bag.

"Awesome top man. You a writer (graffiti tagging) huh?" I didn't even get time to breathe before "Yeah, where do you write? I used to run around with a lot of crews from the south Frankston Bomb Squad, Dandy Boys and shit. Never got into much bombing myself but they all good people. What you up to, huh, oh you got a bag full of paints, wish I could come with you man? Can I? Which train yard you gonna hit? Yeah, I got time I will come along? S'all right yeah? Which line you ride?"

So like a dickhead I answer 'Lilydale line' and we are off again...

"Sick man, what you peakin' on, I've been up for like four days, just cruisin' Eckies yeah, you look it. Big crew? Don't matter, but you know John of Dandenong, famous writer, mad famous he's in a wheel chair now, you seen him since the payout? Course not, you ain't a junkie scum with his hand out, he knows who you are but so... Don't shoot up man, no good crew will let ya but if it happens it will fuck even the most organised boys. Dude, I really wish I could roll with youse tonight but I got things to do? Seen Will, his new bitch she's like into the smack... falling out of her bag all everywhere, it's no good but it's not my place, you reckon? Course you think I gotta tell him to drop it. I gotta find him, we was in prison together and he kept me, ya know, ever been? No way man, you look too smart. Well it was good to talk to ya bro, names Mick"

Holds out his hand, I shake it and reply

"Adrian"
"Well bro it's been sweet."

And with that he was gone and I was very confused.

Amphetamines are like that, the whole world runs far too slow and I guess you gotta just fill in the gaps! It didn't really matter who I was or what I had to say, to Mick my jumper was graf and he made up the rest.

Sleepwalkin'

2005-07-08T03:08:00.000-07:00

I have been sleepwalking through my days lately.

It is funny what happens when you are running on autopilot, the other day I was driving home from work not really paying attention and then all of a sudden I was walking through the aisles of a local supermarket. I didn't need anything, I didn't even really want to be there, maybe George A. Romero was right when he made Dawn of the Dead: Shopping has become an instinct or a reflex.

I was struggling to find anything I could purchase so as to justify turning up there and I couldn't bring myself to leave empty handed. Leaving empty handed would have been like admiting that I had no idea why I was there. So I purchased some panadol, a three instant dinners and spare disposable shavers. It seems like some kind of significant statement: instant, disposable, pain relief and everything wrapped in brightly coloured plastic packaging.

Standing in the cheese and dip section of the coldstore I was nearly run down by a runaway trolley being driven by two kids, no older than five followed closely by mum who was screaming after them "This is why I never take you to come to the supermarket!" They had a trolley full of potato chips. Everywhere I looked kids in school uniform were bullying their parents into purchasing something that was currently being advertised as the latest in snack food technology: A new type of cheese stick, cola flavour, chocolate biscuit.

Ahhhhh, I'll tell ya there's nothing quite like the modern world! I have also been watching a lot of television in the evenings, I can't remember exactly what it is that I have seen except I am pretty sure that someone was murdered, someone is always murdered on television.

Stereotypes lie.

2005-07-05T03:07:00.000-07:00

Anyone who has ridden the Lilydale line out to the end on a number of occaisions will at some time have feared for their safety. The gauntlet from Ringwood to Lilydale of kids with their caps pulled down and their hoods pulled up drinking wine out of styrofoam cups and looking for a fight. I have narrowly escaped violence with homeless single mothers (Mooroolbark) and psychotic homeless men (Croydon), I have been solicited by runaways (Mooroolbark), spattered with the blood of drunken bogans beating the crap out of one another (Ringwood) and stepped over comatose junkies (Lilydale)... I have many stories and some of them will probably be posted in the future.

The story I would like to tell happened about two weeks ago at Lilydale station. It was four o'clock on a Saturday afternoon and I was waiting for the train into the city eating sushi which I had picked up from the noodle shop on main street. There was violence in the air, as usual, a group of teenagers in Dada and Fubu milled around a cask eyeing a bored security guard with menace. I slunk down, pulled my hood up over my face and turned my discman up.

I was in a world of my own smearing wasabi on my handrolls and listening to the paranoid ravings of the Residents when I felt a hand on my shoulder... oh shit!
"Hey buddy?" I looked up: dirty Ruff Ryders windbreaker, baggy linen pants stained with grease and a well worn cap pushed down over a greasey head of hair. I felt very sick all of a sudden!

The guy smiled and pointed at my sushi,
"Doing some cooking huh?"
"Er, yeah I guess. Sushi." He looked very surprised and I replayed what I had just said in my head, SUSHI, fuck why didn't I just say "It's okay, roll me I don't mind coz I'm a complete pansy" Lilydale is not a very sushi kind of place! But then...

"Oh wow, is that really what sushi is? Geez, I've heard of that stuff but I never seeen it." As his grin widened I began to realise that this was not the usual 'your-about-to-be-swallowing-your-front-teeth' smile I was used to. He sat down next to me pulled out a pack of Longbeach and a can of Wild Turkey. A look of concentration on his face as he extracted two smokes and handed me one "You've got a lighter?" He asked.

I was dumbfounded, I gave him my lighter, he lit his smoke and then held the flame out so I could light the ciggie he had given to me. These things don't usually work out this way trust me.
"So it's like rice and fish but what's it wrapped in?"
"Seaweed" I said starting to relax.
"So you can eat seaweed?"
"Um, yeah, sure you can."
"I reckon I'm gonna have to try it."

Without thinking I handed him one of the three uneaten rolls instructing him on how to apply the soy sauce and wasabi. So there I was smoking his cigarette and there he was eating my sushi and five minutes earlier I had never seen him before.

The train came and we thanked one another for our respective generousity, shook hands and got into different carriages. Sometimes the world can be a surprising place and although I couldn't go around expecting this sort of thing from everyone I meet in these streets (I would very quickly end up in hospital) sometimes it feels good to be proven wrong.

...and then there are the good days.

2005-06-29T03:06:00.000-07:00

"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.

2005-06-21T03:04:00.000-07:00

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...

2005-06-18T03:02:00.000-07:00

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.

2005-06-16T03:01:00.000-07:00

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

2005-06-12T02:33:00.000-07:00

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

2005-06-09T02:28:00.000-07:00

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).