On Bullshit Anglo Complaining

In this unfortunate age, an age of super-gentleness and you-are-not-to-blame rhetoric it is harder and harder to take responsibility. I am not suggesting that hardships don’t exist and that people facing legitimate hardship should do anything other than what they are doing.

What I might be suggesting is that life itself has become a hardship That simply being an adult and paying your own way, learning some hard lessons and growing to proper adulthood  is so daunting we need additional assistance to deal with it. I call bullshit. Not bullshit on real stress, real worry, real angst but bullshit on facing adulthood being something you need to write home for.

My brother has just completed a course in aged care where one of his peers couldn’t pass the test because he was doubly working at a factory. He was of Indian origin and so not having a job was a no-deal, he tried hard to pass the test but couldn’t because he had to spend time at the factory to keep the lights on. That is real pressure, trying to better your situation when the odds are against you. Your grandfather giving you shit at Christmas about not having a wife yet, thats the generation gap. 

Anglo people like to make a crisis out of nothing. I shan't be so bold as to say it is only anglo people, but a great many of us white-folk need to find something to cry about. The perpetual pity-party that makes us feel hard-done by and lets us play victim but holds no water in the wider world.

People do it harder, all over the world, every day. We don’t think of them and perhaps that’s justified; their day to day has nothing to do with ours. But it is worth sparing a thought, kids who have to haul coal, sleep with dirty old men, hot-wire bullshit chips into phones so that we can check our bank accounts or update Facebook regularly. We feel pain, they really suffer.

Shit sucks sometimes. You can feel sorry for yourself, or you can prosper. You can push through it and play yourself as a survivor, not a victim. If the wi-fi goes out or if someone dies, you will have support. A vast difference in outcomes and a very similar responce, in a lot ot places. Just not ours.

Soundtrack to My Weak Little Life: Recollections of Five Compositions.

Sometimes songs live in certain moments, in certain times and a lot of the time in certain places. You can try to judge a song by how tacky it is now or even how tacky, shitty, absurd or overblown it was then. But the truth is if a song exists to you at any time in your life with any meaning, that meaning will radiate back when you hear it again. There will, one day, be eighty-year-old women listening to One Direction for just this reason. Here are five songs that stick in my mind as something more than they intend to be…

Big Balls- AC/DC

This was jukebox selection. I was 12 and the plural of a spherical sporting object was amusing to me. Naturally when the old man gave us a few bucks to play pool and feed the jukebox as youngsters the first thing we would do is play this amusing ditty and show each other trick shots.

Clearly we were two young to realise the euphemism power in Australia’s most famous band, it was simply a guy singing about his nut-sack in detail. Which is the absolute height of genius and humour when you are that age. 

Then, Later…

You realise that each of the lyrical phrases are open enough to apply to both his nut-sack or a literal social ‘ball’ (black-tie rave to the uninitiated). In essence you see the whole point of the song and wonder, for a moment, why you enjoyed it so much as a 12 year old. Because the whole point is precisely in how you enjoyed it.  While I run across it, time to time, and certainly enjoy the sex stuff, to me this song will always be playing pool while my dad gets drunk, laughing at the lyrics and admiring the hell out of the man who had the sack to sing about his Balls. 

Strutter- Kiss

When hormones overwhelmed me and I didn’t have a girlfriend because girls are dumb and I needed to take some highly emotional anger out, this is the song that did it. Emo wasn’t even a thing yet, but I found emo  ; in one of the most lauded party rock bands of all time.

The thing that really appealed to me was the first verse:

I know a thing or two about her

I know she'll only make you cry

She'll let you walk the street beside her

But when she wants she'll pass you by.

It made women seem shitty and, therefore, made me seem more normal for not achieving them. Granted ‘going out’ at the time meant holding hands during lunch, but it sure would’ve been nice to hold some hands.

My brilliant solution then, was to blame the girls. They, like me, were pre-teen to teen ages and weren’t totally sure of whats going on. But they knew enough to know enough to dodge me. The fact that I was too afraid to talk to a real life female never occurred to me.

Phase two of my brilliant solution was to turn strutter up on my soccer-ball stereo, listen to it in the dark and curse all the women who passed me by. 

Lou Bega- I Got A Girl

We all know Mambo No. 5. No-one really knows why it was the 5th Mambo, or what notable Mambos came before it.  And from the fifth Mambo (I capitalise for reasons unknown to me) we all know that Lou Bega wants little bit of a ton of chicks.

What very few went on to learn is that he has a ton of chicks. Like, a ton. They are everywhere, even in the Vatican dome.

The reason I went on to learn this about Lou Bega is that I had the album. The album? A Little Bit Of Mambo.Though it should have been called ‘A Smear of Mambo, and a Whole Lotta Songs Abouts Chicks’. It was new release when I got it which means I was 10 at the time.

The result of a Christmas that was the perfect storm of good intentions and bad ideas. As a result I had a portable stereo, a Lou Bega CD, D sized batteries and four hours of driving to a fishing trip with real men, my father and his friends. Being that the album is 43 minutes long, it was played at least 8 times, and still it exists in my head as the soundtrack to a fishing trip. 

Van Morrison- Days Like This

Van Morrison exists as something beyond myself, something so profoundly before me whose work will so profoundly outlast me. This particular song lives in my Aunty’s kitchen. It was always the one I registered, late in the night when everything for foggy on wine and good memories.  I was a kid so was only faintly aware of adult business, but this song always stuck with me.

When I was living in Sydney with another Aunty and working through her extensive collection of rom-coms this song showed up at a montage of reflection and nostalgia. It was well placed. It suited well, an anthem to swallowing life’s endless shit and moving forward, which is why I bought this one and an album from the next artist when I needed to start swallowing shit….

Running Scared- Roy Orbison

I had a panic attack at town-hall station. Shortness of breath, foggy head, blind fear and flashes. The whole deal. I slumped in a corner and two distinct things jumped out at me; Van Morrison and Roy Orbison. I’d had a strange urge for two things that linked me, irrotrievably, to me childhood. My father, the drunkard and hopeless but relentless fan of ‘Roy the Boy’ and my mother, the ditzy and vague but keen Van Morrison listener, despite a voice coming out of ‘something so ugly’. I rushed to a CD store and bought both these men’s greatest hits.

It was a trip down memory highway, so much each taking me somewhere else. To some little patch of my younger years. Then, Running Scared.

My dad should have died in the war. He was born just shy of any real conflict but has a real tendency toward songs of the tragedy and beauty of war. Plus he is also a die-hard Roy Orbison fan. The two combined to make his ideal song and my ideal memory.

At the time we had a big Valiant AP5 and would drive up to vacant parts of the Lithgow valley as the old man would tearily remind us that Roy the Boy is singing from the perspective of a young soldier, scared but willing to go and do what he has to.

Now when I hear it, its a road yacht cruising to the end of the earth, an emo father and the voice of an angel.

NP 

My First Super Account, AThinly-Veiled Reminder of Death.

The older I get the more I realise how inept I am at proper adult life. Oh sure I can shop for myself, in that I can sustain myself on cereal alone, I can do my laundry when smell becomes tactile and even wake up on time if I have a billion super-loud alarms and a person as safety.

What I can't do is just about everything else. I got a group certificate this year and it scared the shit out of me, I am supposed to declare my income? I don't know how and, even since then, I have not. I have a feeling this is one of those things with distinct and costly terms and conditions, but I don't know what they are and am too intimidated by the precision of it all to find out. Odds are this will be the thing that eventually destroys me, but for now it's just another thing- on top of every other shitty thing the world can cough up, and no more relevant.

Then today I get notice the boss has put me in a super account. Super, for the uninitiated, is superannuation. It is money put aside, bit by bit during your working life,for the purpose of losing it at a casino somewhere when you retire. Or, buy a caravan, pay off your grandsons dog-fighting debt, budget it out to cover you in soups and hard candy for your remaining years or give meth a go. There is no right way to retire, you guys.

So the kicker with this account is that is also has life insurance.166 thousand for my head. Being that a funeral in this country averages between 4-15 grand, I can't imagine the necessity of all the rest. Like my donated organs, the money is something that would only be useful to me if I were not dead. Though I see why the price exists, so let's break it down.

166 thousand dollars would be useful to someone who:

Wants a Fancy Funeral

No Thankyou!

I don't. I shan't be there to see it,so it means precisely zero to me. An ideal in my mind is to be shot naked into the ocean which, admittedly, would cost some. But dying wishes are the easiest to ignore, and its not like I can hold a grudge. The money would be better spent on people sustaining their aliveness, which is someone who....

Has Dependents

I have zero. Some might say; 'But dude, the world is a strange place, your in your mid-twenties, shit can change on a dime. You might have a family ten years from now, then where will you be?'. To them I say, hopefully Louisiana. And also, your probably wrong. If a relatively basic concept like superannuation warrants a wordy blog, how in the world shall I handle little monsters? Sure, Lady GaGa fans are tough, but I mean children.

I have no desire and have trouble believing 'no desire' will turn into any more than that in however many years. Stranger things have happened, no doubt, but you can only go on the most current data. In years gone by I always said 'if the woman I love wants children, I will oblige'. This is convention, I suppose. To me now though, I wonder why she loves me in the first place if she knows my stance on the offspring issue. It is only slightly different than having a child to resurrect a troubled relationship. Which actually works great.

Needs To Settle Debts

I have none. No car loan, mortgage or fifty to the awkward neighbour. I may own a house at some point, but it seems unlikely. Commitment is a definitive weak point of mine. The stereotypical argument is that rent is 'dead money'. In a sense, yes. But in another, rent allows a certain flexibility that mortgages do not. A dream of mine is to see the world, like, all of it. I have seen 13 countries, which means 191 more. That is not possible with a 40 year mortgage. My sister is frustrated by her own mortgage. It limits you, which is great if you want to stay in the same place forever. I don't

With the retirement age looking like it will roll up to 70, there is every chance I won't live to see any of my super. So, at 25 and still pretty obviously naïve about things, the 310 dollars I do have in super has been hastily invested in, likely, super-risky ventures. It is the absolute height of financial apathy....YOLO, I guess.  

NP

My Gripes 2014.

This isn't my bit, to be very fair the topic of this blog came from Irish comedian David O'Doherty who does a similar thing most years called 'My Beefs'. Albeit with a cheap casio keyboard and as part of a comedy routine, which is kind of genius in that it naturally breeds fresh material and allows him to vent simultaneously. As anger is something I routinely choke down and which, in turn, makes me an arsehole in other elements of my life. I am hoping an annual blog will likewise allow me to vent and produce, at the least, some readable writing. I initially altered the title to throw you off its origin, between that and the first word in the piece I thought better of it. Either way, this is a textual incarnation of my yearly pressure valve being gloriously released all over your face, neck and chest. Feel it, live it and hit me with some of your own.

The Government.

I know, I know. But between the fuck the poor mythos of the budget and the fat feet in the mouths since then has really signalled the high-water mark of low thought. It really seems a government hell bent on taking conservative to the point of reversing progress and trying to stifle progress that was made many years ago and which are the last vestiges of what makes Australia even barely 'great' on the world scale. Poor people don't have cars, abortion causes breast cancer and coal is good for humanity. Take your own pick, but know that we have a thousand monkeys in control and we are well off Dickens.

Asshole Drivers.

If this were not the first, this item would make My Gripes each year. The criteria isn't overly stringent; you don't need to be a hoon, nor drive like an elderly person, you don't need to be indecisive, nor do you need to have a feeling of self importance. Essentially you need to be one of those who has no consideration to other people driving.

So long as you can hold a straight line, turn corners and, if you are one of those showy folks, change gears there is not a great deal to the act of driving itself. What is more challenging is driving around others. I am, naturally, not talking of L Platers. But those who know how to drive? For the most, fuck you.

Are you self involved? The odds that you comprehended the question of someone else without immediately registering the first two words means, probably yes. Which makes you a bad driver and an even shittier person. Cut me off if need be, you will anyway, as I fully understand wherever you are going in your BMW is much more important than where I am going in my early 90s Toyota. I am poor and not meant to be driving anyway. Just know, from me and the hundreds of other early 90s Toyota drivers, we sincerely hope your mothers all choke on the bit-off dicks of your fathers.

Internet Based Acronym Speakers.

Again this is the first, but it has bugged me this year. Bugged me to a degree of relentless homicidal rage that is best expressed on an almost reader-less blog. We all understand that when someone LOLs they, likely, aren't laughing out loud. Likewise when they ROFL or when they are LMAO...ing they aren't really doing that.

But they are. There are a great many people saying LOL at amusing things rather than, like a civilised human being, expressing their humour with loud, irritating caws. To say LOL rather than type it may seem like a small jump, but the implications are enormous.

For the first, you are raping an unwilling acronym. With no warning, going in dry as a desert sandal. LOL was a happy little guy, existing on phones and in between tabs of porn and torrent or streaming sites. But you dragged him out, nails clawing at the only world he has known, to impress people. What a radical you are, that is a step above, bravo the sheer brass balls it must've taken to use an internet word as a real and bonafide piece of English. I can tell you one thing, if there was a step beyond cool, a step beyond fashion; you, good sir have reached it.

For the second, you are using the word to describe something unseen. LOL and his friends were happy without your vocal intervention. But to LOL at something amusing in old people life is wrenching the wizard from behind the curtain. I know you aren't Laughing Out Loud, I can see you dumb ass.

Ponytail on Top Hairdos.

These men, yes men, are war criminals. Outrageous hair is certainly nothing new, though each generation thinks they can reinvent it to be unique and to piss people off. So these piss-ants who think they are reinventing the wheel by shaving where bald people have hair and growing the top bit into a bald-guy pony tail are...half right.

There are forty million of them at my university and in my city, and each thinks they are really shaking shit up. A long-haired guy who is also actually short-haired? Help my brain work it out?

The preceding is petty. I am not fan of this cut, don't get me wrong, but I am no fan of mullets either, or mohawks or bangs really. The difference is, the top-mounted pony tail is usually mounted to total fuckwits.

This is the cut they should give you when you go to the barber and ask for a 'Pretentious Cunt' or a 'I want to annoy everyone I know by acting like I am a heavy-hitter in the scene with advanced ideas, but really I am a guy who raised cows and had a balanced and wholesome family life. But I changed my name and abandoned all my previous friends and dodge them in public for whole-grain rice, which even cool places rarely have'. 

                                                               This Thing.

Store Starers.

'Is he gonna buy something?'. To be fair, probably not. It is something I come across each time I walk into a fancy or even half-fancy store. Don't get me wrong, I tear it up in K-Mart. There is no risk there, on their end or mine. But I run into that look more than I would like. I am no window shopper and wouldn't go in to a shop I didn't have the money for. But appearance is everything and I simply don't look high-class enough to buy their luxurious items.

I would think it is in my neurotic head, but for the fact that I observe the looks of the store keepers when wealthy housewives rock in (I shop where a lot of ladies do) a glance and barely more. But I am a theif because I am an overweight, 6'3 male with awful skin. Certainly not the usual clientele.

But the real fun begins when I buy something. Sometimes I buy something just to watch the apologies fall. I am not vindictive and I shan't blame people for doing their jobs. But I am not a second class citizen, though I do raise cows and have a balanced and wholesome family life.

These people can sit on it, eat a dick, to the moon or whatever TV reference works. These are my Gripes for 2014.

NP.  

All The Good Ones Are Sex Offenders

The last few years have changed the game, somewhat. If you've read the title you know which game and if you keep up with your huge news stories you know how it has changed. There is nothing particularly shocking about 'Iron' Mike Tyson being a convicted rapist, nor R. Kelly pissing on under-age girls or even Gary Glitter molesting the hapless children of Southeast Asia. No the shock comes with the 'new age' sex offender.

But before going on, a necessary note of sanity. Sex offender is legally, painted with a broad brush. This piece does not, in the slightest, refer to acts such as those of Pee Wee Herman as legitimate sex offences. Rubbing one out in a porno theatre is a salesman’s Friday night, not a sex offence.

The new age sex offender is the once darling. There are two specific cases I am going to mention here, though the upsetting thing is that these two suggest an emerging trend of good guy perverts to come. If you haven't solved the riddle the two (once) gentlemen I am referring to are Rolf Harris and Bill Cosby. Both initially wholesome, PG, beloved figures in the hearts of their respective nations. Now, something else...

To begin with Rolf, perhaps the more heinous of the two as he has been convicted. Rolf Harris, an Australian artist, presenter and weird musician was once a benign name in Australia. At worst he was non-threatening, at best good old family fun. Harris was a revered figure in Australia and the UK, to the point that he was knighted, did a portrait of the Queen, announced as a living treasure in Australia and performed before her majesty one year before the shit storm hit and snatched his reputation.

The offense? Groping two girls aged 14 and 16 in the 80's. Naturally other counts of sexual wretchedness have emerged in the wake, but the official is horrid enough. In some respects Rolf was once Australia's grandfather; a goofy old bloke who wrote novelty songs and captured enough of the Aussie sensibility to be relevant in his own country, but not niche enough to exclude the adulation of a global audience. At the very least he was a tolerable ambassador of our country and civilised enough to marginally deflect the image of us as wild colonial Neanderthals.

But the truth pulverises any merit he, or his work, once had. I was truly discovering him and his music about a year before he was arrested. Now it is awkward, it is a stretch at best to dodge the image of old craggy hands clutching for underdeveloped breasts when I hear something like this...

I usually end up yearning more for this...

It is a somewhat different case with Cosby. The allegations are just that, allegations. He has not been convicted of a thing, though if history is anything to go on allegations of such a scale are usually true. He likely will not be convicted either, the statute of limitations has run the cases dry. Like Rolf, he did his dirty work in his earlier years.

If Rolf is Australia's grandfather, it is hard to see Bill Cosby as anything but America's father. The celebrated clean patriarch of American pop culture. Bill Cosby is so staunchly vanilla that Eddie Murphy did a famous bit about it.

How then, could someone so concerned with blue humour, allegedly drug and rape as many as sixteen women? Common sense would suggest he was brazen enough to think it wouldn't get out, that the belief was private and public life were segregated. They are not, and his private deeds have obviously shaken his public standing. It is understandably difficult now to enjoy a Cosby Show rerun or see him talking to children saying darn (significantly not damn) things without thinking of his transgressions.

Then what do the two have in common? I mean beside the fact that they were both once heralded, good taste performers to their respective audiences.

They are both old. It is one thing to have a legacy tattered posthumously, but to be living is quite another. Harris was 83 when the past came for him, above the Australian expectancy but close enough to the end that death would've been a relative blessing.

Though allegations have lingered around Bill Cosby for a while, the guy is 77. Had he alluded the truth a few more years, it mightn't have affected him in any meaningful way.

The two of them could have shuffled off with a clean reputation, if not a clear concious. To be blunt, thank fuck things didn't roll that way.

While most of us enjoyed some element of their work, the adjustment is awkward and the trust that all our inoffensive idols aren't unabashed sexual deviants is quickly evaporating; the adoration of a widespread audience doesn't grant you license to grab, grope and gouge as you please.

My only hope is that we don't see Mel Brooks and Patrick Stewart here in a year, or ever.  

A Note From The Fish as an Unlikely Sympathy Candidate Desk

My mother feels sorry for fish. Carnivore though she is, she has a unique perspective on fish. The logic is simply that fish are the only animal mass harvested from their home for the sustenance of humans. The paddock is certainly home to it's sheep and cows, the sty to it's pigs, the coup to it's chickens. But in all of these cases the home is owned by the farmer and leased with the life of the tennant, for shitting and eating purposes. Though the ocean largely has no owners, nor are the fish there for the purpose of catching.

I will admit farm fishing and wild hunting exists, which would seem to undercut the argument.But as the demand for grain fed beef exists, so too does a demand exist for 'wild' fish, 'wild' could be readily exchanged for 'free' without too much consequence. And despite other protests of the fish and it's limited memory the point remains. Cows are bred to be steak and coats; pigs are three kinds of meat, sheep are lamb, jumpers and mutton. Logically fish shouldn't be any of these, they shouldn't have an automatic category for human enjoyment. Yet they do, fillets, sushi and canned.

I enjoy fish, as does my mother. I enjoy most kinds of meat I have sampled, so please don't take this as another plant-thumper carrying on about the virtues of all animals and how those who eat them are irrecoverable dead-shits. I am no militant, no radical. I understand humanity does things a certain way and for the most I enjoy the way it is done. Though there is some disparity with how animals are considered.

This, too, isn't intended to start any dialogue or argument or even so much as change a single persons mundane behavior. It is merely a thought, my mother had and I translated. It certainly hasn't changed the way I devestate marine life with my face hole. Perhaps it made me feel a little worse for it though.

My mother also feels bad for the caged bird.

“How'd you be? Having wings and not being able to fly?'

A Note From The Goodness In People Desk

In many ways the world today is a reiteration of those tentative decades from 1960 to 1990. Children and young people of that era had the cold war, ever threatening its heat, we have the age of terror. The age when people seem positively heinous, indiscriminate in their acts of power and brutality on both sides. This propagates and is amplified through the media and the tried and true campaign of fear is under way, to breed and build on itself, as is it's natural course.

But this post is not another piece to be added to the already overwhelming canon of literature of how they hate us and our freedom. Nor is it intended to add to the collection of 'media as a necessary evil' take down pieces. It is, quite simply, intended to contrast with those sentiments. It is a piece on the goodness in your fellow humans.

Last night directly in front of our place, a car hit a motorcycle knocking the un-helmeted passenger to the asphalt. It was a moment of sheer chaos. Immediately on emerging from the door I suspected, or feared, the man was dead. His leg was clearly broken, that much was certain. I told my brother to phone for an ambulance, but one was already phoned for. A woman (whom I later found out was a nurse, but I suspect not a very good one) audibly called for his removal from the road, which anyone who understands the spine will know is the worst thing you can do. He wasn't moved and slowly things became organised; an old man waved cars by as two or three people attended to him as people stopped to indulge the human compulsion toward catastrophe. Eventually paramedics arrived and I could hear the man scream. Periodically I looked on, partly to satisfy my own compulsion toward catastrophe, but also with the conscious objective of ensuring the man would walk again some day.

But the fact is this; between hearing the tyres squeal and emerging on the scene 20 seconds later, aid had arrived, an ambulance was on its way and traffic had been diverted. This is a supreme testament to the goodness of humans. Though it might be said that no-one would leave a man to die in the street, the urban mentality breeds a certain disregard for others.

Nevermind, there are less dramatic examples of this concept in practice. Earlier this year I fell down a flight of stairs. Not in any kind of significant way, just tripped on the first one and slid across the following seven. I was not much worse for the wear at the bottom, though certainly a little embarrassed. At the spot of my landing were three hands to help me to my feet and behind me a woman asking if I was OK. When it would have been perfectly acceptable for them to pass by with their headphones in, eyes on mobile screens, concerns a million miles away. Yet their hands reached out in a literal, and to me, profound sense.

It is becoming easier to discredit most of the people you run around with as shitty to the core. In the age of king-hits, terrorism and hacking a picture of human ugliness is painted. No-one is without shittiness, for all I know a hand reaching out to help me out of my fall might well have been that of a violent drunk or a terrorist sympathiser or a violating hacker, but those hands had a basic goodness. A care for their fellow human, that was devoid of outer perception. With the news the way it is, it is nice to see.

NP.

A Note From The Glory Glory to South Sydney Desk

Last week, for the first time in 43 years The South Sydney Rabbitohs made the Grand Final. That is to me, and many like me, roughly the equivalent to whatever the opposite of heartbreak is. Jubilation maybe, something so profound and meaningful in something so seemingly silly. But sport is that way, a logical fallacy, but to the fan; meaningful beyond belief. In the case of South Sydney that is all the more pronounced.

It is the old Freudian theory of symptom formation, specifically projection. Your club is you and you them, when they win you win. And be you a rabid sports fan, or a functioning member of society; everyone could use a win. A fleeting moment to say; we were the best, we achieved our goal, we reimbursed you for years of blind faith, we made it happen and, by proxy, so did you.

This is the stick falling after decades of ribs being jabbed and in that sense it is just as much a relief as a triumph. In my mind, and the minds of the Bunnies everywhere, this is something right; no matter what is wrong. No matter the horrors or hardships in our individual lives, this is a positive to all of us.

So the anxieties that bind to living, that make life supreme misery for most of those living it; can fade, even if for an eighty minute football match, while you draw focus and muster hope. Your team can provide that for you, the forest blatant for the trees.

We are a South Sydney family, on both sides. There are outliers as there always are, but for the most we abide by that strictest tradition of sports loyalty, the pass down. It is not a masculine exclusive tradition, but in our case we've a mother with not much care for the realm of competition and so we followed our father into Red and Green fandom and a love of the underdog.

For the last 43 years, the two have been one in the same and this year it has culminated in a real shot. I have been saying for the last four years that this one is 'ours' on the hope that it would be, this one is.

So this Sunday night I will tune in, in the heart of Aussie Rules dominated Melbourne, to watch the mighty Bunnies march on to Glory once again and will raise a well deserved toast to the team so many have written off, but so many more have poured unwavering faith in.

Glory Glory to South Sydney.

NP.  

Note From the Truth in Excerpt Desk

Sydney was founded by convicts and flat-out drunks, which is probably why I like it so much. The road map looks like it was drawn by the wayward hand of a wino and, even today, it's contours all want to hold you in. But this is the unseen beauty of a city that, by its essence, wants to fuck it's occupants out of an easy life. Life shouldn't be easy, least of all city life. Sydney, as any metropolis worth its salt should, picks a fight with you, challenges you, demands you conquer it.

I was trying to do just that when I landed at 19, bush fresh and knowing nothing. I was wearing a red flannelette shirt in 38 degree weather, I laid 5 dollars at the feet of a busker who was torturing Dylan and waited for the little green man to hold my hand across an empty street.

But this was more than my new arena; I was its new project as much as it was mine. Maybe the challenge of the city to the young man was not trying to find yourself there, but lose yourself. Forget where you came from and become the dog who needed to eat other dogs.

Central station occupies what was once the site of a cemetery, parsonage, women's sanctuary and police barracks. The mix is still there; authority, death, desperation and a good deal of bibles being bashed. It isn't utopian as a slice of society, but it doesn't belong to anyone either. Though those with convenience rather than necessity on their minds tend to look a certain way down their noses.

I hauled up out and onto Elizabeth St., a long and filthy birth canal that full of other babes seeking rebirth or abortion. The globe was crammed into my cheap suitcase, whose wheels struggled under the weight. All of the things I thought I would need but none of what I did. The street sparkled with filth, a long and dirty vein through the heart of the city. A lot of people smoked and I thought maybe I would smoke too.

XX

I smoked another out of boredom and wondered why I had ever started. They dug into the lungs more in the heat and it was hot, only a few degrees off its hottest in a city heralded up north for its horrible weather. As I watched the grass of a once school yard surrender to brown I wondered where this famous horrible weather was, it was one of the big appeals of the place.

The heart of Melbourne, Australia's cultural capital, beat somewhere in the distance but I was oblivious. Holed up in an old school house, thinking of my family and sweating through the spider-manned doona cover like others had probably done. Melbourne was, to the anal lining of it's inner-outer suburbs, square and straight. It was the tireless mother spoon-feeding its new residents.

I walked hoping to get lost, but I couldn't stop noticing the aggressive signs. Always telling you where you were, where you are, where you will be. Nothing was left to guess work. I grew frustrated on a trail that had only forward and backward and lit another cigarette watching yuppies whack golf balls.

Another sign heralding the history of the area. Tom Roberts had painted what was now the Box Hill golf course, McCubin too. I bounced between the defaced picture and the scene it was supposed to represent; now swarming with bulbous-arsed men in plaid shorts, agonising over irons and woods. What a hundred years could do; I'd have preferred they concrete the thing to hell, smokestacks, coal and industrial disease. At least then the imagination could have run a little bit, instead of having middle aged beer-guts trot through the Heidelberg School and snuff out its romance like a dead cigar.

XX

My American friend Jack greeted me at the doorway with a long joint clenched in the corner of his mouth. An old hand at city life he was typically unfazed by the families and professionals shuffling in to their terrace's. My room was upstairs, and up a ladder. For 150 a week my square of the city, three floors up and overlapping two others below, was priceless.

Surry Hills runs onto Central station in the west and Oxford St. in the north. Initially I felt like an outlier, a rare occupant who found something rent-controlled, something manageable in a sector of the city that's exorbitant rents usually ran such riff-raff down the sewer to Stanmore or St. Peters. But it's high society was simply that element which shone the brightest, demanded the most attention. There was a whole wealth of slackers, booze crippled vagrants, degenerates and wayward children of God that sprung from alleys and rose with the moon. When I found them, that was where I hitched my wagon.

The city promptly opened up, as I had prompt money to spend. Bars, brothels and breakfast; there was nothing that couldn't be done. The guilt of rapidly spending through an inheritance chewed on me from time to time, Jack simply said that's what it was for; money was for spending.

This was not my element, my element was talking old blue collar drunks through suicide and onto the next schooner. But the resilience, the heartiness that grew in country origins made these arseholes easier to swallow.

I barely thought of home. We drank, drugged, ate out, went through a million healthy but temporary diets and regularly slumped our useless pasty bodies onto bronze beaches. This was a new kind of chaos and was well suited to a city that had learned to turn a blind eye and cold shoulder to such mischief. It was the ideal outlet to the teenager with a new brave confidence and backers on the front.

XX

He approached smoking a cigarette, which had become all too rare and seemed a good sign. I was 23 and expecting new friends was a thing of the past. Yet I craved human interaction.  

Note From The Things They Won't Tell You In Orientation Week: Part 1 Desk.

Orientation week at university is something of a farce. Usually in one of two ways; a cute little fun tour or an all out piss-up. While both these can be fun and informative, key things are often left out. Such useful information might not be realised until a senior year, or never. Some things are for your own good, others for the benefit of your co-students. Likely a lot of it will have already occurred to you as critical thinking, logical studiers. In the event it hasn't this is what has occurred to me in five years and three tertiary institutes (I could say universities, but that would be giving a false accolade to one of the tertiary institutes).

Where to shit?

While this is unpleasant and we all love to pretend it is not our problem, it is, I assure you. I am no advocate of public toilets, particularly in tackling the 'dump question'. But it's a reality and something that bears thinking about. It will likely cross over to your day-life, but will be pertinent at university. Long hours studying, bad food, frantic class schedules, stress smoking, stress coffee and a pack a day prune habit (#studentlife). Unless you are a hot chick in a yoghurt ad, the odds are you will have to deal with your godless deed on campus at some point.

What you are looking for here is the least awkward place to do the devils work. Isolated buildings, disabled toilets, a staff bathroom (stathroom?) or the little porcelain palace on the edge of campus. The obvious thing here is to dodge the chance of running into ANYONE. Or, if others chance to have the same tactic, to be as far from the scene of the crime as possible when they show up to commit. Deny responsibility, avoid detection.

This varies extremely from campus to campus. Libraries are a traditionally anti-brown zone, though the library at Sydney University is 8 stories tall and each has a personal, and lockable, toilet with a floor-to-ceiling window view of the ANZAC bridge. Just joyous.

In a general sense though they will be seldom used lecture halls, neglected floors of tall buildings, underground retreats that are not known to the general pooping public. Your best bet is to explore with an empty colon. I do, every time! Happy hunting true believers.

Where to sit?

Class is a nightmare for the socially awkward. If you consist on a diet of meat and tobacco, as I do, or consist on a diet of regular phone calls and texts or chat snaps (A thing?) and such, this is a thing of careful consideration.

The conventional wisdom is to sit near the door. It ensures easy escape when the boring teacher quits being dumb, or when your bestie calls cause Jamie likes her or whatever. But conventional wisdom is just that, an idea shared by the masses.

It really depends on the two schools;

If you are expecting a phone call, or know you will get one because you are cute or dreamy, sit by the door. But not right in front of it; the rear corner nearest the door will ensure a quick turnaround and might have the perk of no neighbours. A seat in front of the door will put you between two others who have similar theories. The chance that you will all get bestie calls at the same time is too great, do the wise thing.

If, like me, you are smell conscious. Sit as close as you can to the teacher. As a 24 year old male I am comfortable enough to sit near an adult (#totallamewad) and understand the dynamics at play amongst my fresh-out-of-high-school comrades. People will actively avoid sitting that close to the dumb teacher and you can breathe easy, knowing that your stink cannot possibly jump a desk-long barrier (CAN IT!?!?).

The only problem is with a crammed class or a mature aged student. A crammed class will ensure a neighbour, who is often late and wants to redeem themselves. Mature aged students have the equal comfort near the teacher and, apparently, bloodhound like noses.

When To Talk?

Questions opened to the open forum of a classroom are a two pronged sword:

The first prong is the 'I might be wrong so I will wait until someone else says something'. This is by far the more noble and logical choice. No-one likes being torn down by their peers and, in any case, you can be only ever be kinda right. The risk to reward ratio is a fools errand. So sitting on ones hands is the logical course of action for those whose esteem is holding on by a thread. Also, if they make fun of me Jenny won't think I am kick-arse.

The second is the 'no-one is talking, my time to shine', the anti-thesis of the first. It's a thunder-stealer, the realm of teachers pets. OR, a big or, it is the realm of people who got confidence from the silence of the squad. If the quite-types had a valid inclusion, aka any reason to tear you or your thoughts down, they would say something in the first place. This is someone who isn't letting their parents pay several thousand dollars a year for quiet time.

But to the thunder-stealers, the silence is not an invitation for you to air all of your thoughts on the topic. Every question has an answer. If you have one, come forth. If not, be super uncomfortable like everyone else. The problem is that you don't just throw a verbal spanner into the works, you throw everything at it and don't know when to quit.

The key here is; try to gain enlightenment by benefiting the greater good, not just allowing them the benefit of everything you ever thought about.

A Note From The Grass Is Always Greener Desk.

Since I first left the merry ol' land of Aus, I have been frustrated every moment of my foot-setting on Australian soil. It's true enough I am no patriot, as true as it is that I love this country, in some respects. Since I was 19 I have wanted to leave and never, or scarcely, return. Objectively I do not hate Australia, but as an Australian with my sensibilities I am frustrated by it.

I fit in and so I can rest on my laurels. I am the supreme example of a laurel-resting type. If I don't have to strive for it, I won't. If I desire a change or something new in my life, I will let it melt in to the ether as something not attainable. I am a cynic, a skeptic of almost everything and will naturally follow the path of least resistance.

I moved interstate some years ago hoping to provide the same fire under my arse that a trip to Europe had done, to no real avail. It's too similar; there is the stress to find accommodation, employment, friends, a niche. But once you do it becomes home and 'home' is a trap. A trap some people are content in. Like my brothers, who never want to leave but I digress.

'You never really feel at home' is ponied up as a negative. Why should you? If you don't feel at home, you will live differently than you do at home. The point is not to feel at home. Melbourne, my current city is renowned as a great city; of pubs, clubs, live music, entertainment, comedy, theater, sport and culture. Yet I feel no need to properly partake. Why? Because Melbourne is forever and I will forever be able to access those things.

I was in Dublin two and a half years ago, two weeks coinciding with my birthday in June. For those fourteen days I went out every night. Why? Because I may only be there once and wanted to do all I could.

This is a flaw in me and my attitude. But traveling provides the well heralded new experience. Which could be seeing the Taj Mahal, or simply finding a bed. Necessity and desperation drag you out of your comfort zone, in which you can dwell but not live infinitely, and into the adult world of interaction.

It is this world I crave and it is this world, eyed from Australia's distant horizon, that the grass is greener. Or looks greener. And if you get there and it is much browner and more dead and in no way pleasant?

Notch it up as another experience and move on, it's greener over there.  

The Start Of Something...Maybe

The Merger.

By the time of the merger John Prescott had fallen in love, or whatever was close to it, with Margot Frieche'. He had fallen in love though it was only a guess, he had fallen in love though his family hated her almost as much as they did him, he had fallen in love in spite of himself. What a horrible thing. He had never forgiven the French altogether and Margot was so undeniably French. She ate pastries in tiny bites and sipped wine with vigor and smoked cigarettes so thin that the vice seemed pointless. Besides, he was now dependent. He had to watch her and be infatuated and spend money on the silly things that women liked and be happy to do so. It seemed to him that love or being in love, was something close to insanity.

But there he was, stuck in the mud, stuck with her. It turned out John Prescott was the only heterosexual man in county or country that was disappointed with an exotic knockout.

The day the merger began he was shopping for a night dress which Margot was set to wear to a dinner party with his family. It didn't really matter that the Prescott idea of a dinner party was toast or cereal to soak up the booze or booze to drown the toast or cereal.

She was eager to turn their image of her. She had never been anything but loved, adored, admired and wanted so badly for them to be enamored with her. John could have helped and explained that dress sense meant nothing in the Prescott good book. But he wanted to be rid of her and wasn't under his own power, so he had to let bad things happen.

Margot examined every dress in the store; holding them up to her bosom and pivoting. Then she examined them again, and again, excluding one or two with each rotation. He watched this routine and wondered what the fascination was to him, yet he couldn't deny there was one. All else that had excited him could be logically explained, yet this couldn't.

'Oooh dis one' she said with luster.

'Alright' he deadpanned.

The thing was a deep purple that did nothing for her or anyone. He painted the underside of his boat the same colour and was glad he didn't have to look at it. It was awful but he didn't know what made women look good; she was the only one that had ever looked good to him.

'That's four hundred and eighty-nine dollars' said the wide eyed woman behind the bench.

Prescott looked at her like she'd given him a life sentence. He never thought in dollars and cents, people who did were fools. Rather, currency was just the yard stick to improve his practicality or provide the tools to facilitate ones own self-sufficiency. It was a chain that began in a mans hands and ended when his dependency was at a minimum. There at the counter a decent rifle was being traded for a cloth sack and he would rally against it.

'No, that is ridiculous' he said.

'What is?' Margot laughed.

'The price, I won't pay it'

'Oooh....too late' she laughed again.

Prescott was standing outside the store holding the bag and the receipt. He had jumped an important pocket of time and thought this as clear a sign as any that love was dangerous. She was elated and sang in French until a thin cigarette occupied her lips.

She sang all the way to dinner, messes of words rounded off and smeared together. He maxed out the volume of a Christian country music station trying to drown it, but on she sang with defiance. She was overdressed; the purple sack, blood red lipstick, hair pulled into a modest behive beneath a tiara, long dinner gloves and the smell of perfume at war with that of stale tobacco. She reminded him of Audrey Hepburn and how he had never cared for her.

He was in sharp contrast; a contained mess of flannelette  

A Small Piece of Insignificant Garbage

 It took more motivation than it should have to write this. Just this. This small piece of insignificant garbage that's sole purpose is getting words down as I have some small shred of esteem when I do. I am sick of being the drama queen, really sick, but my head isn't right and I have less motivation to fix it than I did to begin this strenuous piece of insignificant garbage.

I find myself repeating Brandos bit from Along The Waterfront ; 'I coulda been a contender'. Great line and I believe I could have, shit maybe still can. But not while my head is wrong and I have no willingness to fix it. It is not a willingness not to be better, to feel better. I want that more than anything, but that mountain doesn't seem worth crossing.

I am increasingly skeptical of therapy and that initial push is the hardest fucking thing. Its coming into me and out of me in strange ways- clinical depression, anxiety, whatever. I feel sorry for people to extreme levels over something they probably don't and I am having weird crying spells in the car. I am losing control of myself and I don't know how to get back hold of it. Trying hard to crawl out of a hole but the bottom is dropping, all the time dropping.

But its when you don't even try to crawl that you let it in, you let it get you. And once it has you, its a bitter marriage of convenience. It might be the worst possible feeling, but trying to fight it in vain might be worse. Besides it all you're used up and the worst of the worst is you don't know what to do about anything. Except maybe tap out a small piece of insignificant garbage.