thursday : 30 mar 2006

Silly me. I bought the Metallica documentary Some Kind of Monster yesterday, and only started watching it at roughly 10:00pm. Then I decided to go through the supplementary extras and additional footage, which totals 40 minutes. So I ended up going to bed on the other side of 2:00am. It will be an early night this evening, that's for damn sure! Anyway, I've been playing old Metallica albums for a couple of days now. Fuck they were good in the 1980s.

Code Monkey (aka Chris) leaves his old job tomorrow. Naturally there are drinks happening after work. We had the farewell lunch today at Gaylord Indian Restaurant. The assorted curries were okay, about on par with Indian food-court cuisine, though not the slightest bit hot. Disappointing. Avoid the buffet meal deal if you want to breath fire at this joint. Still, I think we all had a good time there. Kingfisher goes down a treat.

sunday : 26 mar 2006

Just a few brief notes about the trip to Brisbane.

As usual I left it to the last minute to pack and shunt myself off to the airport. The public transport thing went smoothly, but when I got to the Qantas departures counter, the woman said that I'd missed luggage check-in time. Which meant both bags had to go on as cabin luggage. All well and good, except that I was carrying scissors in the toiletries case. Ooopse. I told the screening staff, naturally. However, when the bag went through, other staff who didn't know came over when the machine beeped and became very grave. I explained the situation but still yet more security staff were lining up to give me a second scan, asking questions and generally being quite tedious. They also took the scissors. Plus my flight was already boarding. Arrrghh! For the trip back from Brisbane to Melbourne I made sure there was plenty of time to spare.

Late on Friday night, St Patrick's Day, I ventured into Brisbane's CBD to checkout what was happening and grab a few drinks. Unfortunately, the bloody train system was down. At 11:50pm, a shuttle bus carried us into town via all of the stations, including Brunswick Street in Fotitude Valley. What I saw there looked like bedlam: lots of drunks on the street, shouting, milling about, engaging in some biffo. Two scruffy blokes – real shockers – were even carrying around pints of beer. It was a similar, though more subdued, scene in the city, with younger revelers spilling out of venues and onto the streets. One girl was lying on the bitumen on Edward Street, dry-retching into the gutter. I did some bar-hopping and caught the first train home in the morning roughly five hours later.

What else? Oh yeah, I took dad to Jupiter's Casino on Wednesday night. The meal we had was fine, but the casino itself is pretty dull. I popped a few dollars into various poker machines. Dad made a go of it too, though we both agreed that the machines were not that generous. Not only that, the nightclub upstairs seemed to be closed permanently. Tough break...everyone knows that most clubs are only popular until the next modish venue opens.

Another word about Fortitude Valley. I hung out there for an hour one day while waiting to pick mum up from the hospital. The place is going backwards after the council's attempt to yuppify the area a few years back. Some of that effort remains, but on the whole, the crusty old denizens have returned in force. This is no St Kilda, with its population of twenty-something bimbos and himbos. Still, I prefer Fortitude Valley the way it is. There's something comforting in seeing an aboriginal bag lady crossing Anne Street in front of on-coming traffic, or watching a dole bludger in a torn And Justice for All Metallica T-shirt eating a grease burger across the road from the Cash Converters shop.

Anyway, flying off on another tangent, I love the series of TV commercials where the salesman wakes up snoozing people with electric guitars, horns and buckets of water. Fricken hilarious!

thursday : 23 mar 2006

After two nights on the town 'living it up' as the saying goes, it was marvelous to stay home this evening, cook up a serve of steamed vegies, drink two glasses of refreshing ice water, and watch a rented DVD (The Proposition). I had two more of Code Monkey's home-grown chili peppers in the dish again – bloody hot! I didn't need to gargle three glasses of water to extinguish the volcano in my mouth this time, but they were still lively.

So yes, on the town. Last night I ventured down to St Kilda with Dave and Andrew from work for a pleasant night's chatting and drinking. Nothing heavy duty, although I did lose my wallet, as I discovered when I got home at 12:30pm. I was about to call the bank to report my cash card lost/stolen when I remembered where the thing probably got marooned: Prince of Wales Hotel, Fitzroy Street (yep, only classy venues for us). A quick phone call to the public bar and the mystery was solved, the angst alleviated. Whew. Swung past at lunchtime today to pick it up, heh heh. The scruffy barflies wondered who the hell I was, waltzing in there wearing a suit. I've handed my share of wallets and purses in to lost property. It must have been my turn to collect some Karma.

sunday : 19 mar 2006

Yours truly is back in town. The Brisbane trip was fine. Most of it involved looking after mum, so I didn't cut loose and roam around like I usually do. Mum's recovering well and she is in good spirits. Thanks to everyone for your thoughts. More details about the trip to come, as well as some overdue site updates. For now, enjoy the Puma cat picture (don't worry, that's not a real T-shirt in the photo). I'm still waiting for the Nike shoe tutorial to show up, heh heh.

friday : 10 mar 2006

12:21am. Woah. I just walked in after trekking home from the train station, and almost wet myself at the front door. Major bladder emergency, you see. Of course, it seemed like an unimportant matter earlier, when leaving the CBD: a vague, evanescent impulse, like an electricity bill you forgot to pay. But 42 minutes of enforced urinal captivity later, well, it became a bloody Gojira – a monstrous force of nature, hell-bent on destruction. On the trudge home I resisted the urge to take care of business on some yuppie couple's recently painted beige fence. You know, those Backyard Blitz suburban abombinations that have every fifth pailing painted burgundy, or a hole shaped like a tulip jigsawed through the top of every second plank for 'aesthestic effect'. Arrgghh, right? Then again, what do I know? Unprompted, I walk up to and stare at the Eureka Tower with something akin to cosmic reverence, reduced to a microbal Lovecraftian protagonist awed into Aeroplane Jelly by something way beyond his understanding. (Have I mentioned how high that sky scraper is? Jeezus wept Drambuie.)

Anyways, right now I'm sitting at the PC with dance music playing on the G08. There's rugby league on the TV. At Bridie O'Reilly's pub, where I was drinking with Richard from work and his old mate Nick, they had a rugby union telecast playing on the screen. Hmmm. It could be the Queenslander in me, but....yukko, right? Yeah. No real interest from me what so ever. It's got to be rugby league or nothing. Come on, it's the only football code that uses an oval-shaped 'ball' (huh?) worth watching.

Muwahahaha. Can the neighbours hear the music coming from my stereo? I have no adjacent walls apart from a single garage that separates my home theatre zone from the house next door. Air is a great sound insulator. Ditto for heat, actually, which is why you should close all interior doors when it's fucken 45 degrees outside, to create more air pockets that act as buffers. Basic physics...just don't ask me to do the maths.

So what am I doing right now? Eating a bowl of steamed peas drowned in "Iain Hewitson's Kansas City Tomato Ketchup" and browsing a softcore pòrn website, all the while keeping an eye on the rugby, too. Needless to say, the pòrn is a waste of time: most free pòrn is. That's an immutable law of the jungle, unfortunately. What, some dude in the CZ Republic wants to make money from photographing backpackers rather than eat petfood to stay alive? Call me debased, but I'm prone to let him indulge his corporate ambitions. No guilt, just lousy bandwidth.

Now, there was an absolute stunner serving drinks at the pub. Dead set (maaaate). For a single bloke, women you find attractive – and not just on a physical level, which is one of the greatest fallacies of the 21st century – who serve the public for a living are a tricky proposition. They have heard it all, or so you think. And if not, nobody likes to be interrupted whilst hard at work, correct? Still, there is the conundrum of Destiny, Predetermination, Fatalism, Desperation – whatever you want to call it – to deal with at that moment (the word 'moment' probably should be capitalised, too). Also, not being sober, there is Dutch courage sans intellect. Eyeballs that resemble a page of the Melbourne Melways don't help: just some free advice there (inc. GST) for neophytes considering the viability of barfly coquetry. You're welcome.

As an aside: tonight at the pub, Nick recommended Irvine Welch's Filth to read. Seems like a good tip. Currently I'm ploughing through the celebrated novel Wide Sargasso Sea by Jean Rhys. Beth generously lent this book to me last year. So far it's OK: the subject matter is not working for me yet. I'm waiting for it to become baroque and perhaps gothic. Fingers crossed. It is what you call a 'literary' tome. While I prefer genre fiction, the last book I read – Something Wicked This Way Comes by Rad Bradbury – was bloody hard going, I tell ya, steeped as it was in dark midwest fantasy, yet crippled by prose poetry as caustic as hydrochloric acid. Bradbury's purple prose gave me sunburn, honestly.

Tomorrow afternoon I'm jumping on a Qantas jet and flying to Brisbane. Mum's operation was today, and I will be in Queensland for seven days during her convalescence. My brother called me at the Irish pub to say the procedure went well. That's a great start to something like this. The other day I pondered: has divine intervention saved my mother's life as well as my brother's? No. It's more like a bunch of smart, studious men and women worked hard to understand and figure out how to best combat these physiological mutinies. Sorry, no god was involved, just an application of the good old Scientific Method, the same process that gave us television and the light bulb – technological advances that 'spiritually fundamentalist' folks take for granted as they castigate non-believers and impose irrelevant moral values on our (currently) secular society. Subscribing to your own belief system is fine 'n' all. Just don't ram it down my throat, OK? Pretty please, with sugar on top. Call me whacky, but give me knowledge over faith any day. It's funny how Christians want you to read the Bible so bad, and yet when I recommend The Elegant Universe to them, the thought of even touching such a book is instant anathema. As dad would say, "Eeeaaahhhh!!!"

Finally, does the acronym for Single Income No Kids have to be so...inglorious?

wednesday : 8 mar 2006

8:27am. We had a few drinks nearby after work last night, then for some reason, I did a mini-bar crawl in the CBD, visiting a couple of venues. Actually, I wanted to gauge the pre-games vibe, to see if venues were filling up already. The casino at Crown was very busy, and I saw punters being lead to their tables at Number 8 well past 10:00pm, but the other places I went to – Waterside, JJ's Bar and Grill upstairs at Crown, and PJ O'Brien's – were fairly subdued, which is typical of a Tuesday night. I arrived home at twenty past twelve.

2:56am. Yawn of the Dead. Just walked in the door (fell asleep in the taxi) with another night of mild bar hopping behind me. Two things I forgot to mention about last night were (a) I walked down to check out nightspots at Eureka Tower. Holy crap and JC on a stick, you don't know how tall that motherfucker really is until you've stood at its base and looked up. The sense of sheer distance to the top is staggering. (b) Whilst in PJ O'Brien's pub, I accidentally relieved myself in the women's toilet. Hey, it's not my fault that the doors are labelled in bloody Galic. A girl was in there when I emerged from my stall, still trying to figure out why there was a sanitary bin next to the bowl. Brain fog. The lass laughed (not with me, but at me) and I tried to stroll out of there as casually as possible.

Perhaps the most remarkable incident tonight was me spilling gyoza sauce all down my white business shirt at the food court in Crown. Andrew wet his pants laughing (not with me, at me) with his hands over his face muttering, "what the hell am I doing here with this tool?" But I recovered well by washing the soiled apparel in the loo downstairs with totally excellent results. Then we carried on to PJ O'Brien's before it closed at 2:00am. Memo to self: lots of young punters there on Wednesday nights.

monday : 6 mar 2006

And the award for best picture goes to Brokebaaa...Crash. What the Fuck? Yep, I just spent a very entertaining night watching the 78th Academy Awards at Mr Hooverdust's abode. The host of the show was droll and delivered several scathing jokes about everyone and everything related to the awards. That was a highlight. Also, how about the speeches for best film and best original screenplay being cutoff by the infamous music? Ridiculous. Like Christian Bale in The Machinist (who should have won the award for best special effects), this Oscar ceremony was lean and mean, with utterly no fat. Well done to James, who scored a high number of hits amongst his predictions. However, none of us picked Crash for best picture. It was a decent enough Saturday night / recovery after boozing the previous day / lonely bachelor surround sound DVD rental, sure, but best picture of the year? Pull the other one. No points for the pathetic Richard Wilkins red carpet appetizer. Groan. Livinia Nixon would have been a much better choice.

friday : 3 mar 2006

7:45am. Boat cruise tonight. Work social club function. Beer, wine, spirits on menu. Yes, spirits. Expect many revellers to be speaking Klingon. Your Humble Narrator? Talk to single women first. Then I drink. Heathen: wanna join in? Contact me. 33° Celsius and calm weather conditions forecast. Everybody excited. Eating brekky. Got NOFX emo-punk bashing out of stereo. Must iron a shirt. Finish the Bradbury novel on train. Buy coffee. Endure annoying interruption that is work. Cruise in a meeting this arvo. Head to Docklands. Party.

Party. Party. Party.

thursday : 2 mar 2006

7:39am. I don't do memes, especially the ones that figure out that you are a "Third-Level Cyber Tadpole in the Leafy Webstream of the Infoverse". I mean, in real world terms, who gives a flying fuck? Last week, Groovy Hoovy included me in the Quatre Meme thing, which is less offensive than most. So here we go:

Four jobs I've had:
Builder's labourer
Computer programmer, Suncorp, Brisbane
Computer programmer, Melbourne
McDonald's burger slave for two hours and nine minutes

Four movies I can watch over and over:
Leaving Las Vegas
Hard Eight
Notting Hill
Blade Runner

Four places I have lived:
Brisbane
Melbourne

Four television shows I love to watch:
Daria
Amazing Medical Stories
Extreme Makeovers
Rage

Four places I have been on vacation:
Great Britain
New Zealand
Cook Islands, Polynesia
Sydney

Four of my favourite dishes:
Lamb curry
Boston baked cheese cake
Any fast-food
Steamed vegetables

Four websites I visit daily:
Ogrish
Terror Australis
Michael's R4 DVD Info Page
Refused Classification

Four places I would rather be right now:
65 million years ago hanging with the dinosaurs.
Any oxygen/nitrogen rocky planet.
On a space station with a great view of the Milky Way galaxy.
In close orbit around a black hole to time travel into the future.

Four bloggers I am tagging:
Yet to be determined. Any takers?

wednesday : 1 mar 2006

7:31am. Last night I made a long-overdue return to the Moonlight Cinema at the Melbourne Botanical Gardens to see the rap-clown-hip-hop-krumping documentary Rize with Christine from work and three of her friends. On the way down from the CBD, we spotted hundreds of joggers masochistically doing laps of the gardens. Some looked like they needed a toilet urgently or were chasing a purse snatcher. Inside the cinema grounds, we found an oasis of normal human beings: lying around, cracking open bottles of wine, and downing cheese and crackers. All very pleasant and spesh. We quickly joined in ourselves by laying out blankets. I was drinking cabernet shiraz from a can...

(I would have preferred cab-savignon, and the pretentious git in me thought there was something definitely wrong about supping red wine from an aluminium apperture. There was nothing wrong the the taste, thankfully. Plus a can minimised the chances of accidental spillage on the uneven turf.)

...eating a crummy hot dog, lying on the grass, scanning the crowd for single women, chatting, watching the fruit bats flying past, and watching the film itself. As exepcted, it got bloody cold by the end of the show. That was fine, because I'd had enough of dancing clowns and krumping toddlers! Good flick, though.

Well, some more bad family news. Mum has breast cancer. I'll be going up soon to see her. They caught it early so the prognosis is excellent. Let's hope the operation doesn't reveal more trouble. Makes my petty grievances pale into insignificance. On a brighter note, my brother is in the first stage of remission. That's fantastic progress and good news for him, since he may not need my bourbon-drenched blood stem cells after all. As for dad, he's right into the bachelor lifestyle again. He had a girlfriend for three weeks, but that ended on the weekend. Shit happens, dad. I sent him a few DVDs on Monday and they should arrive today. For some reason, he really wanted a copy of Las Vegas Vacation. I have to be adopted, surely? Aiiiieeee!