Entries from October 2005 ↓

I had always been under the impression, personally, that 4am on a Monday was a quite reasonable time for a man to be asleep. Particularly when he doesn’t have to be anywhere until nine at the earliest and was up to a reasonably late hour doing assignments. I have obviously been mistaken.

I wake to the soft ‘bip’ from a phone across the room. A tiny noise, normally I don’t even hear it when it’s next to me, even when it sits in my left breast pocket and the device vibrates in kind as well.

0446
I turn out the covers, wondering what catastrophe I am about to walk into.

Glen: Wake up and finish your physics plans, foo. Aint fair just me gotta be awake.
Sent: 04:45:33am 24-Oct-2005

0448
Unconsciously I punch in a password.
Authenticating
(04:49:35) Dwight: I’m gonna go have a shower, then I’m gonna explain how someone oughtta kick you in the nuts

0458
*psch*
The odour is unmistakable, its presence instant.
V perches quietly on the desk.

someday I must give up this mad, carefree existence.

The longer it is between the times I write in my journal, the less likely I am to do so. Every time I leave things for a day or two, more things happen, more stories that need telling, and the post that should come next grows and grows in size and the effort it would require increases, so the less likely I am to feel like starting to chip away at it. Generally the spell gets broken after a while when I forget enough of the things I was thinking of saying so that what I have to write comes of manageable size again. This log of mine, I believe, is in essence a funny shoebox of all the stories and anecdotes that I tend to tell to the people I run in to as time goes by. Sometimes I won’t see someone for a while, or I’ll mistakenly think that I’ve already told them the one about the hooker with the dysentery, and it’s nice to think that if I make such an error that there’s some way they might get to hear that story. Other times it’s full of things I’d never mention aloud because I still have a firm enough grasp on reality to know that it’s better for my ends not to wind up in the rubber hospital. Still, I like it all the same.

A couple of weeks back I did some mock TEE exam supervision at the high school I did my second prac at. The money wasn’t great, but for the effort involved, it’s easy money and surprisingly enough, it was less boring than some days I’ve spent working behind a desk. Watching seventeen-year-olds to make sure they don’t cheat on their tests for three hours in silence doesn’t sound like a frenzy of entertainment, but it has its moments. Some of the students have the most curious habits when they’re under pressure, one fellow brought in an inch-tall golden elephant every day and sat it on his desk, another chewed through about a dozen toothpicks each exam, one was quite animated in the way he would swear at himself silently and wave his arms around in what I can only assume was either a deep internal conflict or an irrepressible urge to act out a Monty Python skit from his chair. There was a girl who I counted changing the way her her was tied up no less than twelve times in one sitting, one boy made it ninety seconds into writing time in English before having to take a couple of minutes discussing his breakfast with the cistern, and there was a girl who began quietly weeping in the middle of the History exam. These idiosyncrasies are paled however when placed next to the fellow who managed to back up the Gents by leaving a mass inside which, considering the volume, must have contained several organs or other that he didn’t need for that particular exam session. Hopefully all of these plumbing antics are unique to the school, otherwise I’m going to invest in air freshener stocks when I get posted.

Speaking of which, I’m starting to get a little itchy now that it’s probably closing on eight to ten weeks before I find out where I’ll most likely be spending the next three years or so. It’s a somewhat sobering thought.

I also recently bought a new electric shaver to replace the aging model that I had lovingly referred to as the crushinator. Not only can I now shave without being fixed to a point in the wall, but it takes about an eighth as long, much less effort, and the new gadget only removes hair from my face and not large bloody chunks of flesh as the crushinator tended to do from time to time*.

Reading Fear & Loathing In Las Vegas only took me the space of a couple of late evenings and I loved every minute of it, sometimes upsetting the cockroaches and possums in the roof who were trying to sleep when I burst into a raucous chuckle at 1am in bed. I’m finding that I can plough through books at a fairly decent pace when I actually read the contents between the front and back covers instead of staring at them sitting on the desk looking like an ominously large number of words, so I’m going to try and keep on a roll and dig into the next novel at hand, pronto.

Of course there are still many uni assignments to do and many lectures to attend, the nearest of which will be in eight or so hours’ time, before which I intend to spend some quality time with a mattress, so I best delay no more.

(*) constantly.

While I have another journal entry that I’d really like to write right now, ambushed me with some thing about writing twenty random facts regarding myself, and it’d be impolite not to do that first. So, here we go…

1. I never mention to people I know that I have a blog/journal/website, though I’d be happy if they read it.
2. I want to race motorcycles sometime. I don’t know how my folks are going to take it.
3. Sometimes when I’m teaching, I refer to myself in the third person. “If you pack up quickly, you can go early because Mr Jolly really needs to get a muffin.”
4. A lot of students don’t believe that I’m Australian.
5. I’m a sucker for women with West European accents. A sucker.
6. Even though I have dozens of riding friends and over a hundred biking acquaintances, the last person close to me that died was my Nanna on my Dad’s side. That was over ten years ago. There have been a lot of close calls though.
7. I’m now slightly worried that someone is going to remind me of a friend of mine who is dead and I’m going to look like a heartless bastard.
8. I watch a hell of a lot of movies.
9. I’m not as ‘in touch’ with the music scene as I used to be, but I still keep tabs on the bands that I like.
10. Somewhere along the line, Trent Reznor went from being a demigod to being a bit of a whiner.
11. I only have one jumper that I really wear out. Sometimes I wonder if anyone has noticed or not.
12. I recently got tips on caring from my hair from a group of three fifteen-year-old girls. It’s surprising how well it’s worked.
13. I don’t play computer games by myself anymore. Sometimes I think I’m missing out on some fun and some great stories, but most of the time I don’t notice.
14. I can’t remember the last time I was actually stressed out. I don’t know when it was, but it just kind of stopped happening.
15. Sometimes I have these quiet moments where I’m afraid that I can’t tell the difference between who I am, as my personality, and what is just the effects of the mind-altering drugs I cram into my system every morning.
16. I often talk or mumble in my sleep. Sometimes I scream. I scream. I don’t know if it’s Night Terror or something else, but lately I’ve considered that it might make things interesting if I was sharing sleeping quarters with another person.
17. If I knew what I wanted, I think it would take a lot of the fun and mystery out of life. But also a lot of the worrying.
18. The making of this list was interrupted for about twelve hours after number sixteen when I went to have lunch with my brother, my sister and her husband.
19. I think I should hug people more often than I do at the moment.
20. I don’t know what’s coming next.

Tag action: , and .

I think this yarn starts Friday night some time after seven in the evening, where I’m sitting with a bunch of old biking friends making a nuisance of ourselves making raucous conversation and re-telling stories involving sudden encounters with native fauna and contact with the constabulary. A few hours go by and a bit after ten, we decide to hike off and I check my phone on the way out the door. 1 Message Received.

Katy - Garbage is playing at the scotsman tonight. the line is out the door. Sent: 08:43:17pm 30-Sep-2005

This requires a little clarification. Firstly, Katy (my flatmate) is a bartender at a bar called The Flying Scotsman. Also, Garbage are most certainly in town as I have tickets to the show the following night. With knowledge of this, and being the incredibly articulate soul that I am, I responded in kind with a message:

What the fuck?

At least three seconds passed as I was standing outside in the rain before I decided she wasn’t going to message me back if she was working, and I should get me to the scotsman. So, at speeds somewhere between ‘Go To Jail’ and ‘Make The News’, I tore up the streets to pull up outside the bar and see that the line to get in is longer than my…. well… it’s pretty long. Waddling up to the back end, two ladies get up from a table and stand behind me when one asks the other “Do you think we’ll get back in?“. I start to wonder how much cash I have in my wallet and how underpaid the security staff might be when a strange man who looks like George Lucas appears behind me.

“Are you Katy’s roommate?“.
… yeah.
“Come this way.“.

I follow George Lucas out of line and past some security folks and through a guarded set of doors. “Short cut“, he says, before showing me into the bar and telling me to ‘go for it’. It turns out he owns the bar. After elbow-wrestling myself a bog lap of the floor, I found Katy in the back bar and find out some of Garbage is up the back and there will in fact be music played.

A little while later and Butch Vig, Duke Erikson, Steve Marker and a couple of roadies take the small stage in strange wigs and after introducing themselves as The Dickle Brothers, start cranking out Jimi Hendrix and I spend the next hour listening to these guys getting well lubricated and playing Elvis, The Doors, Aerosmith, The Beastie Boys, Lynrd Skynrd and other old rock covers. I was three feet from Butch Vig going mental with a drumstick and a cowbell. You get funny little graces sometimes.

The next night we went along to the actual Garbage show at the Burswood Theatre, and after they had Red Jezebel open, and piping some eclectic interval music over the P.A. finishing with cranking the volume and Johnny Cash doing Hurt, Garbage came on.

Suffice to say that the gig was bloody excellent. I saw Garbage once before at the Big Day Out, but a festival isn’t that conducive to getting a really personal performance from a band. This on the other hand, most certainly was. And I loved it.

So it was an extraordinary weekend, and when I stop blaring music through my ears I can still hear them ringing, but I expect the high to well outlast the tinnitus.