Entries from April 2005 ↓

I’ve been feeling a little flaky of late, and I don’t think it’s realistic to blame my disconnected mental state simply on my bike being in and out of (but mostly in) the shop constantly over the past few weeks, meaning I haven’t been as mobile or going riding as much. I’ve just been feeling pretty bland and uncreative when I’ve been at home, hopefully in the next week or two I’ll get a few things out of the way that have been dragging on me, and that’ll clear me up a bit. We’ll see. I imagine it doesn’t help that I’ve had this cold/sore throat/neck demon for at least the past two weeks now.

But in more positive news, the play I’ve been rehearsing for, Pygmalion, is coming up on the weekend. There’s a Friday and Saturday night show at the Mosman Park Memorial Hall at 8pm, doors open at seven, tickets are ten bucks and if you feel like coming along and want to book seats, drop me a line and I’ll give you a phone number to call, but you’re probably safe just rocking up.

My first school prac was today, but I’m a bit too rogered to blather on about it right now. Maybe another time.

So I went to the motor show today…

Thanks to the stupendous hot man-loving of Mr Roberto’s new web hosting company, wen.ch is now once again peeing in the well of information that is the world wide web. This won’t make a lot of difference to most people’s lives (or lice for that matter), but it does mean I can throw pictures up and do other little tidbits of great inconsequence.

My quest to get tickets to see the Coop was a brief, yet fruitful one and I now have in my possession two otherwise worthless slips of paper that will allow me admittance to the performance. BOCS are quite a timely mob. If I manage to squeeze some time from somewhere late this week, hopefully I’ll manage to get along to the motor show in the city. Ten bucks to paw all the shiny cars I’m never going to buy without having security called on me sounds like a decent deal to me.

I’ve also been getting the itch to go test riding bikes again after my recent dramas with the Honda. There’s a couple of new bikes I really like the look of and sound right up my alley. Whether they’re better and I like them more than my current bike are questions of not so much consequence as whether or not they’re several thousand dollars better than my current bike. When being tempted to spend stupid amounts of money, I try and quantify it in other terms. For example I could upgrade my bike, or spend a couple of weeks in a classy hotel in Paris, or pay my rent for the rest of the year, or buy more thousands of cinnamon doughnuts than any mortal man would dare to comprehend. Most of the time this does a fairly good job of turning me off spending my cash and have me err on the side of financial responsibility, but sometimes you’ve just got to throw your money away for the sake of pure, selfish fun.

I can’t understand people who don’t dig Meatloaf. I mean what’s not to like? You’ve got this huge guy with a perpetually bad haircut who belts out rock-opera love ballads while writhing in his own sweat. Tell me you can’t see the appeal. Not to mention his totally under-rated film career as a series of villains you just can’t take seriously, or a vehicle for the largest man-boobs known to man.

Speaking of guys I just can’t help but love, I read in the paper yesterday that Alice Cooper is doing a show in the city come July. It goes without saying that my life has now been put on hold for the quest to pursue tickets to the Coop’s gig. Hopefully this will will be a brief quarantine period and I can snatch some up on Monday from the box office, seeing as how I don’t have stacks of time to give up right now. I’ve been doing some work during my time off Uni, along with starting to pump out a series of large Uni assignments, which I need to get moving before I end up going on my first prac starting a week from Wednesday. It’s mostly just observation to begin with, but that doesn’t mean the kids won’t shiv you. Or is that prison? I can never remember the difference. I’m sure one has more sodomy and the other has more pop music, but I don’t recall which is which. It’s an unpleasant fate either way.

My bike’s been in the shop for over a week now (there was some trouble getting hold of some parts) and I’m starting to get withdrawl symptoms. I’ve been having the shakes, and thinking irrational thoughts (like about buying a car), but if all goes to plan everything should be back to normal shortly and I’ll be back to regular me, however regular that may be.

Earlier today I attended my Uni graduation ceremony (for the degree I completed fifteen months ago, it’s always reassuring to know tertiary education is on the ball), which was reasonably pleasant. The ceremony was really quite boring and speeches from both the occasional speaker and the student representative were terribly dull and uninspiring, but there were cookies in the foyer after the presentation, so I would be remiss to berate the whole event for too long. I can’t say I really got a whole lot out of it, and it cost me eighty-eight bucks to hire my Harry Potter costume for the day, but my folks really seemed to enjoy it. I can understand that it’d be nice to see your kids accomplish things, but I guess maybe I don’t put as much stock in the completion of a degree as is generally done, which could explain my blase feelings. Though it is nice to have one I guess, in a “been there, done that” kind of way. Moving right along.

In the past couple of days I have discovered many of the pitfalls and benefits of the city’s public transport infrastructure. The leading benefit is that you get to go somewhere, the main problem being that it may not be anywhere you want to go. I have come to the not unreasonable conclusion that the rail lines have obviously been laid in a fashion dictated by where it would be easiest to lay the tracks, inconsistent with where there may actually be population or any place of note. Thankfully the buses do not suffer from the affliction of needing to run on rails, but instead require you to be in the right place at the right time. This is generally not a problem if you have one of three helpful items; (A) All current bus schedules for the entire city, (B) latent psychic powers, or (C) access to the internet. Being endowed with none of the aforementioned items generally means that my journeys via public transport to destinations not located on train lines generally take far, far longer than would normally be tolerated by any sane human being. This then begs the question of whether I would rather spend $22 to get to Uni in a taxi, or to spend $1.30 on public transport and lose ninety minutes of my life irretrievably into the dark abyss of sitting at bus stops.

The reason for my recent unremarkable adventures into the industrial-strength upholstered world of transperth being the tragic delay in the retrieval of my bike. As it turns out, the slight ticking noise I asked the mechanics to investigate was in fact the cam chain rattling around on the sprockets that had been abnormally worn to a point of which we in the mechanical faculty refer to as “all buggery”. This involves again mortgaging organs vital to the regular functions of my body, but which I have no close personal relationship with, as well as being in the shop for more working days than I would like. All work and no play make Homer something something.

I write todays literary epic on a grassy verge, across from which there has coincidentally been a speed camera erected on Stirling Highway. Tragically, despite my best attempts, I have been unable to will passing dogs and their owners to urinate on said device from across the road. It is also interesting to note that in the past thirty minutes, the camera has been triggered only twice, both times by passing motorcycles who have audibly accelerated when spotting the camera, followed by braking heavily after flying by (motorcycles in the state of Western Australia are incidentally immune to the woes of multinova operation due to the states government facing the cameras toward oncoming traffic, a side from which motorcycles have no identifying plates. While said bureaucrats are happy to expend tax dollars on investigating methods of attaching front number plates to bikes, the suggestion to have cameras face the rear of vehicles as several other states successfully do, falls on deaf, or rather, stupid ears). Incredibly, the Earth continues to spin, regardless.

Been having a little trouble sleeping lately, couldn’t say why. I just seem to be overdoing the whole tossing and turning thing until way past the wee hours of the morning. I’ve wrestled with the idea of trying to pretty much cut caffeine out of my diet, but it’s a lot easier said than done. I may be mildly addicted to the stuff, or at the very least I’ve become so conditioned to the devouring of coffee that I just get these cravings for the stuff. Maybe I’l have to see if I can get decaf at Uni or something.

Every now and then I end up with another email listing a plethora of reasons why a motorcycle is better than a woman, most of which revolve around the use of the word ‘riding’, with the occasional warm-up joke and references to the use of other peoples’ motorcycles. But inevitably there’s always the punchline “A motorcycle, any motorcycle, is cheaper than a woman”. I’m not saying I’m immune to the simple humour of it, but after this week I stopped to think, and I don’t recall ever buying a four hundred dollar pair of rubber shoes for a woman and I definitely never paid another man several hundred dollars to service a woman for me.

Though maybe that’s where I’ve been going wrong…

So I had a haircut on Thursday. Now to any mere mortal this might not seem like much of a development, and it wouldn’t be, if not for the fact that the last time I stepped into a hairdressers with the intent of having someone approach my head with pointy objects was in January of 2000, some five and a bit years ago. As a result, my hair now looks an awful lot neater, but tragically is quite a bit shorter. As is the hairdresser way, it is established with the hairdressee how much it’s alright to cut off, then confirmed by showing them a length of hair and checking that “this much” is correct. This measurement is then thrown out the proverbial window and the woman with the black and purple highlights goes to town on your head, leatherface style. It isn’t actually all that bad, and I was expecting as much from them (my experience with hairdressers having always been of this ilk), but at the end of the day, my hair is now probably about a full foot shorter than it was beforehand, leaving it a few inches below my shoulderblades instead of past my belt.

I’ve had some terribly shocked reactions from people, but it’s not that big a deal. It’s not like I’ve got a shortage of hair anyhow, and it’ll grow back more, as hair does tend to do. It is a lot easier to deal with though in its slightly shorter state, and I’m getting used to not having to embark in a battle to the death every morning to get the thing tied down. So if all goes well, the hair hasn’t taken great offence to the new development either, and won’t try to choke the life from me during my sleep in retribution. However I have laid contingencies by hiding its passport and documents in an elaborate maze of catacombs, so if it becomes a fugitive from justice, it can only run so far. There aren’t many places for a foot and a half of red hair to hide out in this county. It’ll only be a matter of time…

So now I’m twenty-three years old (add thirteen hours and forty-seven minutes for accuracy). Doesn’t feel a whole lot different to twenty-two, but then again, it never really does. My concern over aging seems to surge and retreat. Some days I couldn’t care less that my days were passing me by and that my body falls apart the tiniest bit as every moment flutters past, but others I lie in bed in a quiet panic knowing that my time is running out and that every second spent is gone forever and never coming back. But today, like most days, is one of the former kind. As my life appears in its own right, I’m pretty happy with where my chips have fallen, not that it means I’m going to live idle on them and not change things up a bit, but all of the loneliness, all of the lostness and all of the malice I once had for my own existence and the ways in which it traveled have simply fallen by the wayside. I don’t sit awake at night anymore cursing my life and what I do, I don’t fear dying alone or having to face the day on my own anymore. It’s something I guess I take for granted now, and as far as things go, it’s one of those that I’m more than happy to be able to take for granted. Though it is the fool who forgets the battles past, right now I’m glad that I don’t have to.