Author Archives: justin

They say it takes two to tango, and you can’t make an omelette without breaking a few eggs – but the truth is, if you’re lonely, and you’ve drunk too much Stone’s green ginger, it’s not that hard to put on Amelie with the picture down and dance yourself into oblivion, clumsily removing pieces of dignity like a human Jenga. Also, if one Googles ‘egg free omelette’ they’ll find a number of potentially hideous, but unquestionably practical ways to keep chickens right the hell out of it. My point being that the same applies to guys and girls getting together – and in a way, Rod Stewart and Tina Turner were ill-informed in saying “it takes two,” when in fact, I believe when it comes to getting the party started – it should really only take one – the guy.

Now, I don’t usually put on my ‘potentially misogynistic suggestion of gender inequality’ pants for less than a grand, but I’m passionate about the subject, and Centrelink gave me a bonus for not biting my nails this week. In my vastish experience, (vastish…ladies?) I have determined that like the DeLorean must be travelling at 88mph to safely travel through time, a guy should be travelling at roughly 88 thoughts per second by the time he musters the gusto to ask for the number of a prospective lass. What is important here is that the guy, who is for example, off the top of my head, massively introverted and painfully awkward about himself, is able to experience the dodgem car thrill of potential rejection, and earns the surge of gratification from the action to restore his famished stocks of perceived ‘manliness’ that he has derived from society, pop culture, and his social peers over the years.

Yes, the guy needs to make the first move. This may not necessarily come in the form of asking for a number, but be as simple as an ice breaker at a social event, an invitation to a connotation free occasion, or a genuine, heartfelt, open flyed leer on the 86 tram.

If the girl ends up making the first move, it throws the man’s kinetic energy into a tailspin of counter-cultural woe. Sure, he’s excited that someone’s taking an interest, but feels an instant sense of guilt that he didn’t approach them first, and a fear that they’re always going to be subconsciously disappointed in him. He might even think the girl’s just taking pity on him for being so clearly trapped inside his well dressed shell of inaction, or perhaps adopt a loner arrogance, questioning why the girl wasn’t already involved with another guy in the first place. What is he? The encouragement award? And before you know it he’s plummeted behind a wall of confused father-based anger, tearing up the mental Mcdonalds voucher and showbag.

Girls need the guy to make the first move. I will wear nothing but speedos and a surf club cap and parade around Bourke st mall with a megaphone defending my words, and encouraging readers to shop between the flags, for I truly believe this. I don’t care how many feminism-brits you eat for breakfast, or how many episodes of secret housewife of us in bridget’s desperate city sex diary you’ve watched – part of you still incubates the little girl dream of being swept off your feet by a charming man with strong shoulders who is mainly Patrick Swayze in Ghost. In every woman there lies a part of the P.J. Harvey meets Punky Brewster: ‘I am an enchanting complicated she-treasure who deserves to be impressed by this pale, lanky, plain clothed species I have learnt to depend upon and be disappointed by over the years.’

In almost all cases, most notably not in salaries and executive positions, men and women are pretty equal – and in all other facets to a healthy loving relationship, this should be the case as well. Yet there is something about the Shakespearean chivalry of a door being held, first drink being paid for, and initial text being written, that can feel casually harmonious when it’s the guy ‘buying the tickets to Shrek,’ and yes, that is a euphemism. Having said that, some girls like making the first move, and hey, there’s heaps of egg omelette recipes on google and an authorised tango instructor has already refuted my earlier claims.

Four years ago, a small, poor Tasmanian boy came to Canberra, down on his luck, with only a Beck cassette and a brown vintage suit to his name. He spent his time as a horse whisper at the Civic carousel, but this meant working long, voluntary hours, so he quit there and took on a casual job fishing shopping trolleys out of Lake Ginninderra and throwing them off Telstra Tower. It didn’t last long. One grey Thursday afternoon, he spent his last cent on a Sweet-chilli chicken burger from Chicken Gourmet and some poems from that tall guy called Rudi with the wonky eye, and sat down beneath a poster pole feeling very sorry for himself. It was then that a massive gust of wind blew, causing a stray magazine to blow into the boy’s face. It was open to a job advertisement: ‘Columnist Wanted.’ It was a local magazine, and as the boy looked around he noticed that everyone else his age was reading it.

The boy had never written a column before, and at first he thought it was some kind of labouring job involving the building of cement columns, so after an awkward job interview, he sold his overalls and cement truck (it was borrowed anyway) and bought a typewriter, and settled down in some bushes outside the University of Canberra computer labs. Under a neon moon he wrote like a man possessed. This wasn’t very good, as when you’re possessed you tend to write about minotaurs with bleeding eyes and stuff like that and it tends to get quite repetitive, so after a decent sleep and a breakfast of a muesli bar he found on the oval, the boy wrote all day like a man obsessed, (which is a better status.)

He read over what he’d done and couldn’t believe the way he’d effortlessly balanced engaging prose, journalistic structure and edgy, post-ironic humour. He raced into town, which was an awful idea as it was about thirty five degrees and it took ages, but eventually he marched into the offices of the magazine and delivered his life’s work. The editor was confused and it turns out it was the wrong office, BMA was next door but the thing is no-one was in there at the time, so he ended up coming back the next day, and I probably could have left that bit out.

To keep a medium story medium, the boy landed the column and the editor loved him and even gave him a tip-off about a mattress in a back shed in Woden he could stay at and the boy thanked him and spent the rest of the year writing column after column. He’d write about everything, himself, bands, himself, TV (if it related to him), feelings (his own), and about the people close to him that reminded him of him. The general public fell in love with the boy (more like a family kind of love, like tolerating an occasionally funny uncle) and soon he was invited by bands to come backstage and hang out with them and this meant he could steal cans of coke out of their rider for later. Sometimes, girls wanted to talk to him too, and one time he slept with a girl, but only sleeping and in the morning she made breakfast but didn’t offer him any.

This amazing success continued for about four years until one day he decided he would take a break from it to concentrate on his music career. Did I mention that? No. Sorry, I’m not the best story teller. But what about the bible? It doesn’t say what Jesus did between the ages of 12 and 33 and it’s the most popular book in history so just lay off.

THE END.

There’s a lot of things I like about old people. Their cardigans and slacks fashion sensibility. Their passion for storytelling. Their lo-fi attempts to understand popular culture. Their predisposition to whistle in public places. And, probably most of all, their generally friendly nature. We’ve all had the experience of being zonked out on public transport, only to have a raspy voice waddle into our thoughts, with a non sequitur about the weather, or the ‘nice bag you’ve got there.’ Sure, to many the elderly are to be seen and not heard, and sometimes not even seen – but to me, these mini-scapes of social interaction take me back to the golden dust of yesteryear that my Nan and Pop are made from. These were hard working, potato eating, sun drenched simpler times, when a tip of the hat and a ‘good day’ to a passer-by on the street were commonplace. Despite your political stance on social conventions, you have to admit, it just seems like good manners.

These days, however, it’s just all a bit too hard. ‘Hello’ has been infected by the introverted fear virus of the communication age. Suddenly, ‘hello’ is a loaded question – a potential weapon – an accusation – a sleazy ghost haunting your personal space. I’m endlessly fascinated by the concept of saying hello to strangers. The fact I feel like I’m one of the daily greeting’s potential ambassadors, yet I can barely let the words escape my toast crumb dotted lips, provides an intriguing paradox.

I used to test the theory when I first arrived to study at the University of Canberra. Strolling up the path from Ressies to campus, I was presented with a steady stream of sullen student traffic. Nine times out of ten people were Eyes Down! playing footpath bingo. I’ve always been a gawker, and find entertainment in staring people in the face and letting subconscious fireworks of judgement explode in my imagination. Occasionally, the whites of our eyes would collide like comets, and I’d feel an urge to break the tension with a fancy free ‘G’day.’ But years of shyness would over-ride, I’d lower my gaze like a guilty toddler, and let the aborted greeting grumble into my closed mouth like a burp with amnesia.

Sometimes, I was taken off guard by the casual lope of a sports studies student, in wrap arounds and terry towelling hat. ‘Hey mate,’ he’d say without irony – and I’d find myself so out of practice of replying, that it wasn’t until I was already past him that I’d eventually let out half a crappy ‘hey.’
”Oh no, now he’ll think I snobbed him!” I’d think, and inevitably, his action of friendliness would end up making me feel worse, and I’d vow never to let it happen to anyone else.

Sure, when I go back to my hometown Burnie, or a similar country area, and find myself on a suburban backstreet, the ‘hello’ can happen, and seems obligatory and natural. Fair point, in the city, you can’t just be saying hello to everyone you see or it’d become a full-time job, and you’d end up with everyone giving you a dollar and running away. And so we continue to avoid eye contact and bunker down like battery hens, trapped in the cages of our own consciousness, farming ourselves for achievement – fearing interruption from the outside world, even if it is a sweet faced old lady who’s actually asking for help to get her frame on the bus.

Perhaps I’ll start marketing my range of ‘Hello!’ Tshirts – they start whistling whenever anyone’s in earshot.

Sometimes I think people take streetpress for granted. I mean, really, how many times have you walked past the latest edition of BMA thinking ‘oh yeah, I suppose I’ll get one, seeing as though they’re there.’ C’mon! Streetpress is a hyped-up turbo typeset of omnicolour pulp-beans and sub-cultural superscenery! It’s a defiant oblong flat-pack of grass roots democracy and the artistic epicentre of everything creative and intellectually fruitful.

Quite frankly, I don’t trust people who don’t read street press. To me, it suggests some kind of 1950’s, wool over the eyes, ‘no thanks, we’ll be right with Bert Newton and a sherry,’ middle class arrogance to pass amiably through the working week, valiumed out under the deluded notion that your local arts scene is something of a ‘superflous nuisance,’ and they’d all be better off getting jobs and keeping the noise down. “Oh, I don’t go and see a show until the ‘Times’ tells me. I’m a four star kind of guy you know. My wife and I believe going to see acts based on unsolicited ‘footpath publications’ is like giving money to homeless people.”

Then there’s the other kind of ignorance. When I was at University of Canberra, much to my confusion, the pile of BMA’s were often stuck off in some dark corner of the Union, mostly untouched. Based on my three year sociological dichotomy of the mentality of the average UC student, I reckon to get them passionate about streetpress you’d have to have some kind of three dimensional, voice activated, pop-up cheerleader on the cover, printed on latex, as well as sticking several fifty foot, neon billboards around campus promoting the offer of a free keg with every page turned. And even then, you’d get the artistically bereft, course obsessed Law and I.T. students staring off into the distance and getting distracted by their phones – while the A.T.M punching, ‘BBQ whisperer’ sports studies students moaned that every article wasn’t about Pearl Jam or Dave Matthews Band.

“Streetpress? Sounds like some kinda hippy political shit. BMA? I thought that was the Belconnen Marxist Alliance.”

Having said that, sometimes street press overwhelms me. It can act like a weekly catalogue of non-me achievement, constantly reminding me of the gigs I’m not doing and the industry rungs that I haven’t yet climbed. I could try and intellectualise it, but let’s face it, I’m the kid in the playground getting jealous of his friends shoes, except now instead of footwear its half page colour ads, when all I can afford is a quarter page mono.

Making it all about me. What a surprise!

At the end of the day – I remember that streetpress is written by good men and women. These children of the night gatecrash the tea party’s of our day-to-day with fire and promise in their eyes – connecting those of us who live like sun gargling super-punters through the paperchain portal of the people’s press.

If BMA is left in a shop, and nobody reads it, does Canberra make any sound?

I remember when I was about five I used to amuse myself by scampering around to the local Telecom phone box, picking up the receiver, pressing some random numbers and having pretend conversations with Mickey Mouse, Donald Duck and Goofy. The particulars of these discussions is appropriately vague and mysterious. I suppose ‘we’ discussed the sociological and political issues of the day. Perhaps I used them as a sympathetic ear for the existential complexities of suburban Tasmanian kiddie life. Should I buy a new matchbox car? Did Fatcat jump or was he pushed? Why do my toys smell funny when I set them on fire? Would the princess from The Never Ending story ever like to share a minimum chips with me? How good is condensed milk?

One day, for the first time, the random statistics of my fictional dialling got the better of me and I was suddenly faced with jarring curtness of the operator. Instead of my own cordial voiced playfulness, there was a cold, plain adult asking ‘What number please?’ To my only-child one man play it was the equivalent of Mr T popping up in the middle of Alice In Wonderland and doing a spiel about testicular cancer. I hung up, ran home, and hid under the bed.

Around the same age, I was down at the Burnie Kmart Plaza with my Mum, to witness some of the stars of the local production of Snow White and The Seven Dwarfs. I was gazing at the colourful fabrics and elegant faces when one of the dwarves walked past me and accidentally stepped on my foot with his hard, black heel. ‘Sorry’ said the small, bearded man, earnestly. I peered back at him, eye to eye. It hurt my foot a little, but I was more effected by the jolt of this fantasy world clumsily encroaching onto my reality. Had I made it happen somehow? I asked Mum to take me home.

A couple of years later, when I was seven, I was sick in bed for a couple of days. After the usual combination of Lucozade and a double dose of Sesame Street failed to raise my spirits, I decided that I wanted a cat. Mum drove me down to the pet store in our yellow Volkswagon Beetle. The shop smelt like fur and warm birdseed. There were about five kittens flopping about in the cage. I knelt down and put my finger through the wire. A rather serious little black thing peered back with LCD green eyes and nuzzled my finger. Destiny had nuzzled. I named him Blossum, not wasting any time on contemplating his gender. Looking back, I like to think of him as the feline equivalent of Johnny Cash’s ‘Boy named Sue.’ I imagine that on the street, other cats called him ‘Rex,’ and spoke in hushed meows to each other about what happened the day the late ‘Mr Tibbs’ called him by his real name. Blossum turns 19 this year.

That year was also my debut as a Nipper for the Burnie Surf Life Saving Club. Plunging into the subzero ocean armed with nothing more than Speedos and a sense of junior optimism were commonplace. Under 8’s weren’t allowed to use the hard surfboards, and instead were trained on ‘foamie boards.’ Foamies were literally the foam core of a surfboard, and in rough surf, it was like trying to negotiate a motorised block of ice through IKEA. Being extremely short sighted, my ‘prescription goggles’ involved my glasses strapped to my head with underpants elastic. For my first Burnie carnival Foamie race, I got into trouble early, being swept well off course by strong winds – left to finish the race in last place, stranded, freezing, near-blind and crying. In the crowd were Mum, Nan and Pop, cheering me on. The thought of their boy flailing on that godforsaken foam is still one of the most miserable things I can imagine.

At the same age, I had one of the best dreams I’ve ever had in my life. The clock radio had come on and Enya’s ‘Orinoco Flow’ was playing. My subconscious mind created a personal film clip for the song. Three perfect women in white flowing dresses were interpretive dancing in unison. They moved as if underwater, in outer space. I awoke that Saturday morning with the sun pouring through the window, certain that the world was trying to tell me something.

Its 10am, Monday morning and I’m stocktaking my emotions for the millionth time. Another restless night in bed has left me feeling like the test patient in an experiment on insomniacs, but when I wake there are no men in white coats with fresh printouts to tell me if I’m normal or not just breakfast, a silent computer, a few vague deadlines and the fading engine zoom of traffic outside, giving the impression that there’s a world out there that already has a head start on the day.

I read back through some old journals. In certain moods, old writing can make you melancholic about the past, and ‘better times.’ But lately, I’ve been taking strange delight in re-reading the more miserable chapters of my life. During my early twenties, betwixt the funny ideas and observations of people, I’d launch into intensive self-therapy rants. This involved me documenting the last few troubled days in point form, (getting it out of my head, onto the page), before drawing the same conclusions: You are a sensitive person. You worry too much about whether people like you. It’s okay to have these feelings. Don’t be so hard on yourself. You are a good person. People love you. The bleeding earnestness of this period still makes me quietly cringe. Looking back, I find the concept of having to write ten pages just to reboot myself and be self-reminded of the basic fundamentals of being human, a little depressing. And it certainly was at the time but as Lennon sang ‘whatever gets you through the night.’ He also sang ‘everybody’s got something to hide except for me and my monkey,’ which probably doesn’t relate as much.

At some point over the last two years I feel like I’ve grown up. By this I mean, I’ve finally done enough mind mapping and fallen prey to the same low self-esteem programming to cast a light on my negative patterns and reveal them for the pathetic little shit-gremlins that they are. If knowledge is power, then knowledge about yourself is the most valuable feather in your cap and if you stuff enough feathers in there, then eventually you can start to fly a little. (*Justin is booked by the metaphor police*)

I’ve decided that I’m actually quite confident but even a feeling of confidence, like a new mobile phone takes a while to get used to. The high school idea of yourself has been so heavily branded onto your soul, that even though it’s not something you like, there is an odd comfort like weeing in a wetsuit – in reverting to your nervy, awkward, pathologically submissive, self-hijacking mode.

There’s nothing convenient about upgrading your personality, and I can safely say it’s taken a good decade of genuinely hard work. As any performer will tell you, if you do enough gigs, you’ll inevitably become better at what you do. I guess I see my life as being hundreds of shit gigs, from which I’ve been able to learn a little bit, and gradually get better at being me. So the moral of the story is: don’t quit the life industry, because there’s some amazing opportunities in store.