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.