It’s pink.

Or something.

I’m no good with hues. I’ve had it variously described as carmine, coral, dusty rose, cranberry, raw salmon and aaaarghjesusfuck. I’ve settled with calling it startled vulva, because I’m a romantic kinda guy.

Who designs these modern horrors? I yearn for gleaming old wood, buttressed entrances, intricate ceiling roses and lead-light skylights. I get startled vulva carpets (I know, I’m four, it still cracks me up) and electric purple feature walls.

What am I talking about, you may well ask, and I’ll tell you seeing as I went to the bother of posing the question myself. I got a new house. Well, I did this a year ago when I started writing this entry and having just realised I posted one, count them, ah, it, one entry for 2008 thought I’d better give it some welly. So here we are.

Awkward.

…And when I say new, I mean new. To me and to others. Well, probably not that new, but modern, and that’s plenty bad by itself. Worse, even. Just as soulless as a brand-spanker without the saving grace of cutting edge designs, which are still horrible but unfamiliar enough that you don’t recognize that straight away. They bamboozle you with their strangely placed feature lights and incomprehensible faucets and just like that WHAM, you’re shopping at Ikea.

Damn Swedes and their penchant for flat-packed furniture and chairs that defy common sense and a good deal of orthopaedic science.

Point is, at an embarrassingly advanced age (only because I’ve earned too much for the past three years to justify living at home) I am free from parental tyranny. Ding-dong the witch is dead. I say this with the utter confidence of someone whose mother can no longer get to them while they sleep.

Which neatly segues back to my own personal Alcatraz – the house is secure. Strangely secure. Panic-room secure. Grills and alarms abound. The front door is boxed off with a wrought-iron gated brick enclosure the likes of which I’ve seen before only on Parisian townhouses – in Perth it just seems out of place and paranoid. Which is kind of a neat description for me, come to think of it.

Finally, I’m bonding with my new house.

I suppose it isn’t that bad, but it isn’t that good either. It certainly isn’t worth the extortionate rate we’re paying. Especially as it has practically no land, much to the chagrin of my dog whose main pastime has become follow-me-around-and-stare-at-me-mournfully. Although that’s what he used to do all the time anyway, but now you can tell he means it. It’s like having your very own furry emo to follow you around.

Except I actually like my dog.

I was likened a few weeks ago to Pen Jillete, both in looks and manner, by someone I’ve known for awhile. I did, and have done, nothing to deserve this. It still made me happy for the rest of the day. Hurrah to you Penn.

The experience was somewhat less charming about a week later when it happened in the toilets of the Moon and Sixpence with a lot more alcohol involved. As I was innocently washing my hands (I’m not exactly sure what a guilty hand-washing would entail, though I’d imagine it would involve a lot of “Out, damn’d spot! Out I say” and general Scottish deviousness) my ablutions were interrupted by a bellowed “Penn!” from a swaying British expat very nearly pointing right at me with a surprisingly piercing look of gnostic inebriation and just the slightest glimmer of a challenge. Being hitherto unprepared by enculturation for drunken declarations of this nature, I had no ready response and had to settle for an unsatisfactory “Too right, mate” and a hasty retreat. Sadly, this did not stop a blow-by-blow replay twenty minutes later at the bar (with less hand washing), but sometimes that’s the price you pay for… well, going to bars. Yep.

I have more to say and hopefully with more eloquence, but for now I’m happy to have made my annual post. Next time: Canadian backpackers, unprincipled landlords and malignant street curbs. Stay tuned.

My wordy-word.

My words.

Or, if I can hew the bone of truth and expose the glistening marrow of my empty rhetoric for a second: my lack of words. It’s been a long time. What’s been happening? Yeah, me too. You look good.

No, you do.

Put on a little weight, sure, but it’s sitting well. Like a voluptuous renaissance woman, or well stuffed festive poultry. Just like.

Really.

You’re rubenesque.

Did you hear about Kevin? Yeah, I know. The slut.

I can keep this up all day. I won’t, but the possibility is there. I just thought you should know. It’s good to be abreast of these things. And other things, too. They say a little knowledge is a dangerous thing but they would say that, wouldn’t they? Those collective anonymous bastards.

Nevertheless you have to agree, nameless conspirators aside, that there’s a nugget of truth to that particular banality. You have to. Who hasn’t bore witness to (or indeed engaged wholeheartedly in) the ungainly wielding of tidbits o’ fact? Self-assured instant experts ineptly diagnosing the cause of economic depression or the source of your crippling fear of over-weight people in vibrant colours, because, well “I explored the intricacies of currency inflation and girth related hue-terror in my thesis”.

“Well ‘thesis’ is such a broad term, but it was a vigorously probing inquiry into the economics of cheer-squad uniforms and their repercussions on the stock market”.

“…A short pamphlet on John Symond’s Hawaii get-away?”

“I mean sure, I just sat outside a Kmart change room for a while, but I know how to fix the economy. And you. Let me into your house.”

Okay, I got a little carried away there but… God people are pratts. Damn you, people. Damn you all to hell.

On the other hand, deliberately misunderstanding people is just a swell way to pass the time. I can’t wait to be aged. I have no biological imperative to reproduce, the only thing driving my urge to spawn is to later pray upon my off-spring from behind the armours of senility and incontinence, or more importantly a charade thereof. Given that I’m twenty three and already partially deaf and have to squint to read small (or vaguely approaching small) print even with my glasses on there probably wont be too great a need to playact, but regardless of my actual audial acuity you better believe I’ll answer every question, statement or randomly hurled abuse with a bellowed “Whut? Whut! Speak up! Bloody whippersnappers” trailing off with antiquated obscenities, half-remembered curses and vague yet strangely upsetting threats. This is the reason I get up in the morning.

Well that’s just plain not true. As indifference gives way to mindless rage I find I do care, I do mind. I do, as it turns out, have an emotional investment in this our most soul-destroying of celebrations.

Because I now officially hate Christmas.

For my money Ebenezer and the Grinch had the right of it, and probably could have achieved great things if they had have been left unhindered by emotional blackmail and insipid children. They were stopped too soon. Like Hitler. I’m sure he was going somewhere with all that war and what have you (before you start I’m part Jewish, admittedly very distantly but Jewish none the less, so let’s just not).

What I’m trying to say is: fuck you, Santa.

There.

I said it.

What are you going to do? Huh? Whatcha gonna do? Didn’t think so.

Okay crazy man, drop the rotting seagull and stop doing that to the life-size cut-out of B. Arthur. That chick is hot. I’m tired and a little disoriented, but I think I’m hiding it well.

I am serious about this though, or something close to it. Obfuscatory belligerence aside I’m not sure what Christmas is actually for anymore. The obligatory disillusionment of adulthood – that inevitable and crushing loss of childlike wonder mostly brought about, I believe, by having to be part of the solution rather than the problem – is a real festive show stopper.

So I’m blogging in what is certainly not my finest hour, and am incoherent because I’m tired and frustrated. I’m sick of Christmas before it’s happened and I don’t expect it to get any better, but worst of all I hate that I hate Christmas. My childhood Christmas’ were winterless wonderlands, full of love and enchantment. But Christmas is one of those things that other people are meant to make happen. I want to know what threshold it is I crossed that left me shopping for Christmas ham, that has me giving more than I receive, that makes me honestly more concerned about cleaning up after Christmas than enjoying it while it happens. I want to know what it is that, in short, made Christmas stop being fun. When did I become this person?

This is not my beautiful house.

Post Script

Hurrah and hurrah again to Peter Carey. I just finished reading Theft: A Love Story which so far is the worst book of his I’ve read by far, and I still loved it. Hurrah.

It’s spambots, you see. Spambots everywhere.

Anti-hurrahs to the spambots of the world. Well I suppose boos to the spambots of the world would be a better use of… you know… real words and stuff, but less in keeping with my already sorely stretched theme, or ‘leitmotif’ if you’re that way inclined. And like my grandma always says; stylistic continuity beats lexical integrity any day of the week.

My grandma is awesome.

That is all.

Most of the trip continued in that vein.

Geraldton itself was much the same as it ever is; stuck in that borderland between small-town rustic and burgeoning city, seemingly intent on destroying what little charm it has left by whoring up local business and generally “improving” the fuck out of local landmarks. Luckily for them my terrible wroth was narrowly averted by offerings of honey-seared scallops at the Camel Bar, which were so freaking awesome I even forgave them for advertising BECKS ON TAP in ten foot letters on the street-front, which apparently is a very exciting thing to have and means you can charge ten dollars a pint for it. Bastards.

Delicious, delicious bastards.

Local beaches haven’t escaped the ever-vigilant eye of progress but thankfully, so far, only the city-centre marina has truley suffered for the cause. This meant the unmolested dunes and shores of Pages beach were free to host the high point of my trip as I tore up and down the headlands in my car’s first test of its all-wheel drive abilities. To quote Euripides “Aww yeah, that shit be pimpin”. You have no way of knowing he never actually said that, so stop giving me that look.

I have to admit I was sceptical to begin with, the Outback looks like nothing more than a middle-class overture to the off-road realm designed to let soccer-mums mount the curb and not much more, so when we first drove onto the beach I was pretty damn sure I was going to get bogged. Turns out my car is invincible and I am the lord of nature. Who knew? I was so impressed by my vehicles prowess I even let Kate drive in all her licenseless glory along the beach and sand dunes.

Personally, I think I handled myself with remarkable aplomb both when we became airborne and when we mounted the native scrub. Sure, she later described my soothing murmurs of encouragement as “girlish squeals of terror”, but that’s just her way with words.

Aside from that we were mostly just sort of there instead of here. We saw relatives as rife with bitterness and in-fighting as always (all part of their own private charm) and Kate got to reclaim a substantial portion of her missing book collection. Good, because she’s got a lot of good books. Bad because (station-wagon or no) trying to cram a couple of crates of books, two people’s worth of luggage and two people’s worth of dog into the back of a car for a five hour trip isn’t all it’s cracked up to be (not helped by Kate spending most of the trip trying to reach back for her books, all the while cooing softly and stroking them creepily).

So here’s to hometowns! To places we escape, to places we return, to places we never reach. Here’s to you Geraldton, for being better than I remember and for being worse, for being nice, for being idyllic, for defiling my chlidhood, for having that guy in the bar who called my mp3 player “that faggy radio thing”. Hurrah to you Geraldton for just not caring what I do.

Christ that took me a long time to say. I talk alota pretentious wank, don’t I?

Yeah. I do.

The endearing closeness of everything, of people and places and the things in between, a feeling of connectedness that makes holism seem plausible.

The general affability of the natives, not anything so passionate as goodwill but a willingness to tolerate that teeters on acceptance, a sort of benign indifference that’s strangely comforting.

The folksy charm that comes with the conspicuous absence of corporate monoliths, only occasionally marred by encroaching franchises that are still forgivable in their haphazard management.

The way the ageing process is broken down to binary states, graduating people straight from the vigours of youth to the complacency of the well-aged, the sort that suggests they’ll be fifty for the next thirty years.

And everyone looks so damned healthy.

I get it, I really do.

Small towns, country towns, they’re good and wholesome, quaint and lovely, a bastion of traditional values and a simpler way of life. A place where community is a reality and Tönnies’ Gemeinschaft makes sense… so long as you don’t look too closely or stay too long.

Because the thing about small towns, the truth that people like to ignore is… well… they suck.

Hard.

They suck like a piglet (watch Ordeal, and you’ll get that, get it so much you’ll need steel wool afterwards to cleanse your eyes and soul. Belgians should not be allowed to use video cameras). Maybe you feel differently, maybe to you small towns are freedom, isolation, better ways of life or just better communities.

You’re wrong.

Like Lynsey is want to say: ‘You’re welcome to your own opinions, not your own facts’. By which she means you, not me, because my opinion is fact. I mean, obviously. Small towns suck. Fact. I know, I’m from one.

I just want us to be clear on that. “Me thinks he doth protest too much” you say, calling my feeble ranting a sad attempt to distance myself from my country origins. Well what’s that all about, man? I thought we were friends. And what’s with the faux-Chaucer parlance? I don’t have time for this shit. I’ve got things to… you know, and… and places… Screw you. I went to Geraldton for a few days. Yeah, segues are my bitch and I’m their sweet pimpin’ daddy.

Geraldton is my hometown. You probably don’t know it. I was born there and I barely know it. We moved when I was six and I’ve been back a lot since then but I lost the essence of the place a long time ago. The familiarity and feeling of rightness that lets you know you’re home just isn’t there for me. People always say that you can’t escape where you’re from, that somehow it’s in your bones and claims you forever as its own. But honestly, when isn’t sentimental-cliché total pants?

The damnable thing is small towns are nearly always nice to visit. It’s part of their camouflage so you don’t expect them to go all children-of-the-corn on your ass. It doesn’t work though, every time I see a group of blank faced youths a massin’ I get ready to start laying about me with a scythe (which has its own problems because slack-jawed yokel and corn-cult crazy can be hard to tell apart in the heat of the moment). Point being despite my best efforts to the contrary, I actually had a pretty good time.

We drove through Dongara on the way up (an even smaller town 100 km’s south of Geraldton) and after spending the first five minutes driving around town vehemently cursing country drivers and making a spirited attempt to mock every local person and artifice I saw, we stopped at a beach-front called Southerly’s.

Friendly staff, neutral decor, cheap beer and an outdoor area that opened up onto the pristine marina, its general pleasantness antagonised me. It’s like they do it on purpose. Do you know how hard it is to maintain an air of civilised contempt when you’re getting your buzz on and staring literally at a sea of tranquillity? I rallied briefly with a diatribe on the generic pop-electronica but my heart just wasn’t in it, and then the jukebox switched on and played nothing but triple-j hottest 100 albums in what I can describe only as a deliberate and malicious attempt to undermine me.

…

The music that blares from the pimp rides makes no sense; it all sounds like a man with severe autism halfheartedly explaining human sexuality to a parrot, while in the background a dangerously unqualified Caribbean contractor rhythmically installs an automatic garage door opener. Bollocks.

Nothing, NOTHING can be added to that. Hurrah to you Mr. Rowland.

Unless you’ve worked night shift, alot, for a long time, you just don’t know. Everything becomes just a little out of step, a little askew. Things seem pretty much the same yet not quite right, like someone snuck in while you were asleep and fucked with all your shit, putting it back where it was but forgetting that you always put your watch clock-face up. You feel like someone’s grabbed your plane of existence and twisted it just a little bit to one side. It sounds like I’m exagerating, and I probably am, but sometimes you can almost see the edges where my world and reality meet. It’s mostly just the little things, like getting up when it’s dark. Not honest morning dark, just before the sunrises, but night dark when you can see the last little afterglow of sunset like a horizon-wide penumbra and your body tells you that’s just wrong.

That feeling of things not quite right stays with me all night. I work strange hours, with strange people, in a strange room deep within the bowels of an unusual building. Everyone and everything at my work has an unsual edge to it, a peculiar warp that on a really bad day, like today, makes everything seem like you’re looking at it through water.

Nothing and no-one is nearby our little world at that time of night in that part of the city, so we do most things with less options. Even dinner becomes something hard to do. If you don’t bring your own the only food available is from the vending machines, floors and corridors away. Leaving our strange little room is a relative rarity, so it’s part of our etiquette you ask: “Anything from the machine?”, a mantra intoned so monotonously and freighted with such grim expectations that it’s started sounding a little strange to me, gaining new meanings. It’s now The Machine. Funny how such a little thing becomes important, but The Machine worries me, always evoking for me some Huxley-esque distopia. I’m sure the machine was sourced from Orwell’s Ministry of Plenty, here to give us the food we need and just maybe a little soma. A little soma would be good right now. “You want anything from The Machine?” I’m starting to think I really, really don’t.

I work alot of hours, strange hours, but sometimes that doesn’t seem so bad. Yesterday I worked for a long time, spending first eight hours in a staff room reading a book I’ve always liked, and then eight hours in our strange little room discovering once more how little I know about the internet. Webcomics people, I knew they were there, but in such density? I read seven different artists’ entire catalgoues, some that had been posted tri-weekly for four years, and skipped briefly through I don’t know how many others. Make no mistake I was at work and I wasn’t neglecting my duties, I just didn’t have anything to do but be there. I made five hundred and seventy dollars. Like I said, on days like that it doesn’t seem that bad. So hurrah to you mechanical overlord of vending, for trying your best. I shouldn’t fear you, you’re just doing your thing.

A girl walks into a bar and asks the bartender for a double entendre…

So he gave her one.

Pithy hurrah to the author of that joke. Tell me that’s not gold. Go on. Do it.

I slap you.

Point is, I caused a three car pile up. Well, I say pile up but really it was just a three car fender-bender (more costly and less fun than gender-bender, but just as good to say). So, yay! Debt forever!

“But James”, I hear you slur in your ill-begot way, “Wont insurance cover it?”.
No. Okay, just no. Stop rubbing it in. Bastards. I drive shitboxes for five yeas and never so much as look askance at another car. I buy a new car (yes, yes, new to me, curse you all) and twenty eight days later WHABANG! How’s ya father!?! You want car? You want car! I GIVE YOU CAR!!! I crash it.

So, so, so much money. Worst thing is I have to replace two bumpers and a bonnet on other peoples cars which will cost far more than is seemingly reasonable, but they drive away happy and filled with the spirits of dead Buddha while I gaze teary eyed at the carnage of my Subaru’s bumper and headlights, and the accusing toe-ball shaped hole in my radiator bleeding depressing green blood of you’re-not-driving-that-homeness. Did I mention the lots of money? I mean it, thousands and thousands.

On the bright side, the laptop I ordered over the internet six days prior arrived later that day, reminding me I just spent one and half thousand that I could no longer afford. But that’s good anyway, I’ve put off buying one so many times the last thing I need is a compelling and genuine reason not to, so with exclamations of “It’s too late now, biatches!” I set about the necessary brand new toy rituals, which mainly consist of me drifting about in a daze of glee, shoving the source of happiness in people’s faces and yelling “Look, look, NO TOUCHING!”.

Because if they touch it, it becomes that little bit less special.

Thing is, I don’t really need a laptop. I mean, I can use it for study at work because, well it’s not like I actually work at work, that’s just not how we roll. But I keep spending money on things I don’t need. I suppose causing five thousand plus worth of automotive damage is rather an elegant solution to the problem, but I’m sure there has to be a better way. I bought a six hundred dollar vacuum cleaner. No one knows why. Well, it was part of my war chest for when I moved out, but that’s never going to happen now. All my savings, gone. And I sit alone, sad and inert. But with a very, very clean floor…