punk

12aug16
i was wondering when am i going do something more, on the blog spotty. i can't do something else, it's already been done, so something more it is. i thought there was something more too say about punk, that has been said already. punk isn't really an aussie word, i thought about this for a short period of time. the only real equivalent in aussie lingo which comes close is runt.

14aug16
"punk" word, when i really think about it, it's more an american term, which i can see in bands like the ramones. the term punk rock is a different kettle of fish, for which i can see the word runt applied somewheres abouts. i would not like to mention personal names to such labels,  but my mind often drifted to the runt description, on them first glances. runt cunt. so thats what happened to the guy who got kicked out of class, never to be seen again, you know the one. i thought i'd throw that in.

16aug16
like i said, i  just threw that bit in. i didn't mean any particular person, not even vic morrow in blackboard jungle. who was a childhood hero of mine, still haven't seen the twilight zone movie. i loved combat as a child, and had the trading cards, probably a story i can't remember. so the punk thing would be them mainly dead end kids film type stuff.

19aug16
three days on and i haven't given this a single thought. probably could stop there, but it would be a bit short. everyone knows what punk is, or their own interpretation. this is just my fill on the thing. punk is different in time and place. place being london, new york or anywhere. time, 19xx is different from 1977. even the sex bit, some people see it as faggots . i can see how people seen it as in yer face and needed to tame it down, like early jazz and rock 'n roll. my main view is more identity.

25aug16
i think i've added something more to "punk" word , even repetition. then there's punk 'product', which, i think, has lasted longer than my dr. martin brothel creepers, which i still have , just haven't wore for yonks, rust and dust have got the better of. some product indeed, the spirit of unsatisfaction. meaning something more you've missed, need or haven't got, vice. so after you've got all the vice you need to be a punk. someone comes up with a new device, creating a new semi satisfaction illusion, or some bullshit.

rust & dust brothel creepers

more punk than ever

call dr marten 

28aug16
thought about products, i remember the razor blade necklaces, which may have been circa 1975. they were 1 or 2 generic razor blades stuck together, chrome plated and blunt, on a chain. there was the dangily little razor blade earings too. as for these generic graphics that's google bloggers', not mine. i don't have time to make this pretty, so generic it is.

1sept2016
even thought less about this, or where to next. maybe in the future this shall be interesting to someone. that's where it's aimed. the forty year of punk is coincidental, i do these things mainly because i feel like it. for me when i look back to 40 years ago to this day. i was on the up, after being down for a bit, into work, seventeen soon 18, the big 18. hello alice cooper. the funny thing is with it at that time, or mainly a bit later. when your on the dole, you didn't really care to much about the punk thing. it's more of a working thing, for me anyways. buying records, clothes and such. there is the diy thing but there's only so much you can do yourself, there wasn't really hair gel then. some people used kitchen products the make the spiky look. there were secret concoctions. hair gel was a later thing, you could get it at some hairdressers, you could get 20cents worth of their supplies in a container that would last for a bit. certain hair oil worked okay too.

10sept2016
the products seem to go on, badges and pins were on a thing, a bit like the pearly king. these things weren't really new, even safety pins were used at high school, when someone grabbed you by the shirt and the buttons went flying. you'd used safety pins as a button. what punk done was the art form, or accentual accessories.  leather jackets

18sept16
you know i could go on, but i would like to move on. i feel like the relevance is 20th  century. then when i think about it, there is a runt out there who could really fit into them shoes. it would be their time and place, for i am no longer a runt, cunt? that's another story. you know the feeling, it was better before. so now is better than 20 or how many years from now to someone. as long as the runt thing is rock 'n roll we're okay. excitement.

da vinci code

26april2016
there is no code.

27april2016
i thought i'd end it at the beginning, rather than begin it at the end, is there a difference.

6may2016
when you do a lot of other  things, documentation takes a back seat.

24may2016
my basic thoughts of the average joe Renaissance dude is they couldn't read or write, just like the average joe iphone user doesn't know how it works.

6june16
i wonder if you got this yet. from the other blog , you know i have an interest in making things, ie electronic devices. thus, when making such things i often think of passed people, such da vinci and others. main thoughts are would they be impressed.

15june16
i have never seen the da vinci code movie,nor read the book. i have no interest in that. this blog has , as far as i know , nothing to do with them, excepting the title. it's more to do with the works and documentation.

27june16
so when you make things, you document them so you don't forget them. documenting can be a kind of short hand , a quick scribble, while  preforming the practical part. not so much a secret code. more like dotting down a bit of theory .

1july16
so there you have it. basically, my thinking is, he was doing many things in an unstable environment. so he just dotted down sketchy thinking on a subject, for later remembering and reference. even though accuracy would be the preferred, thinking would be more concentrated on the job at hand.   

4july16
you may think i just thought this and just jotted it down. this is not the case, this has already been written awhiles ago, i say awhiles, because your judgment senses think while is a short time, again this is not the case. this setup is done do to time constraints, no real other reason.

6july16
that last bit, is about something like chinese  whispers thing. you really have to get things really straight and narrow for dickheads to get it exactly. even then , things get twisted.

25july16
i think i've pretty much said what i had to say here , if you want more, then just go to the beginning. 

tin house shop

12august2015
after sinking low with street life and no money, time came to get a job. the guy who lived in branch ave , told me they're putting on at the steelworks, and his old man was driving him out to try and find work. he asked if i wanted to get a lift out with them, as i remember. so, i did just that. he said tell them tin mill, that's where they were all going. it was hard for me after being sacked from their mine. the company which owned the mine also owned the steelworks. also their employment office blokes gave preference to outsiders, immigrants and blow ins, rather than locals. i got in by the skin of my teeth.

13august2015
that was pretty much my mind thought on it. it had to start somewhere, the tin house shop was the crossroads, when i come to think of it. work is the bargain you make with the machine, to exist in the world. it don't matter if it's a penny or a thousand. this is not a rant , it's my thinking at that time.

14august2015
the time would have been around may 1976, could of been earlier. after getting the job , i can sort of remember we had to have a medical. after been given instructions where to go to  catch the bus to the medical centre. on the way , we were greeted by two blokes . they began tell us how we had to join their union if we wanted to go further on, and how if we ever had trouble they were on our side. we joined the union , they took a small amount out of our pay, fees. the steelworks bus was a double decker, which were once for public transport, double deckers were phased out late sixties. the bus trip was quite fun. back then the place was real busy, with 30,000 employees. the medical was the piss in a becker thing. we got work gear and had to report on a specific day for work duties.

23august2015
with the street and being low, i seen the journey as going nowhere. the people i hung out with were nowhere. i meet these sort of hippy types , born agains.  they started preaching to me in the street. this would have been a few months before getting the job. i thought about them guys, thinking more about me before, than what they were on about. for what they were on about  was something i had left behind. the job wasn't about them guys or what they said, it was more me picking up the pieces that had been lost. the people i hung out with just put shit on me. a few years earlier , pre teens i would have had just bash them, but through adolescence i had became a low urchin. not just adolescence, but heaps of other factors. them hippy born agains were the first lot of what would become them Pentecostal types ,  revivalist if you like. i never had much to do with them. my way, was more looking how i'd fucked up and try doing the right thing, and eventually things would improve.

26august2015
i thought that last bit would give me a bit of prospective and thought of that time. i can't really remember the first day, how many first days have there been, hey , when you don't really fit in, most days are first days. probably got a clock card number 62363 as i remember. i sort of remember going to the psm machine shop and hanging there until someone told me to go to the tin house machine shop. talk about not wanting to be there. like i said before mainly apprentices, my first taste of weirdos in action , and still going on. i really despise apprentices, they're dead shits , from the mine i didn't like them. now i was a labourer to them. money ways , i got more than a 2nd year, and on par with a 3rd year. some  called me ferret and some called me rat, i really didn't have much of a say.  another called me weasel. although there was one guy who knew me, so the sav name wasn't that far away, the guy i knew from birmingham  worked on a different shift, he'd been working a few days or weeks earlier than me.

28august2015
i find it a bit boring writing about a job , although there were times that seem okay. my main things back then was sleep, not an early bird lifestyle,the early worm catches the bird, night owl, bird of night hoot not. at the start i was on 5 day shift work in the machine shop, that fitted in okay with my lifestyle. you've got to really understand that i was 17 and a half years old then, and you had to be 18 to work there really. there was exceptions though , you had to sign this bit of paper. you could get a job there a 15 as an office boy. that job fizzled out around 1978. apprentices were a different kettle of fish.  day shift was the only shit shift , afternoon shift was okay . i don't really remember much of night at the machine shop.

2sept2015
i was thinking about the guy from birmingham, who has since moved on , rest in peace. i've been in two minds about whether to use his name, i wrote a bit in an earlier blog. he came to australia around 2nd or 3rd form, 72/73. he was in a higher class than me, so i never really had much to do with him at school, although we did play house baseball, if you can understand that. at that time he had long hair , most of us had short hair from the parents authority , so he was a bit of the in crowd at school. you know in times of your life you're teamed up with unexpected characters. so, we were in the tin house machine shop. we got talking about things, like music and such. he was into stuff like yes, close to the edge, probably eno and that type of stuff, but he did go on about yes. i decided to join the record clubs tape section, with the record contact all paid up. this would of been the time i switched to cassette tapes, the bought ones. so i got 6 or whatever tapes for $1.99, one  being, yes close to the edge, couldn't get into it really. i did have a record we both had though , king crimson , in the court of the crimson king, and we both agreed the song , 21st century schizoid man was the heaviest thing . to be honest, i bought that album because of the cover, a few months or years earlier. after a while of being on the same shift , he was moved to 7 day shift work, in the dreaded mill.

4sept2015
the mill was the roll shop, a noisy cunt of a place, were you did chuck changing . without getting into too much detail, chucks contain  bearings that fit on the end of rolls, big rolls that need to be changed when necessary. the machine shop was a fairly quiet place compared to other sections. you could hear the difference by just walking into them places, you also had to wear a hard hat in the mill, in the machine shop you didn't. it would be fair to say the machine shop was a laid back atmosphere. they both had there different characters to boot.

fm

11april2015

i was trying to figure out where to go after that bit of a glimpse. i could of easily continued on , but the need to sort of distance myself from that realm, became appropriate. i wanted to go lighter but not too light. i couldn't really figure out where to go without repeating , which will be a problem, for most things repeat. so if you wanna distance yourself, don't repeat. then i thought about doing another band or music thing. some light shit what i liked over the years. there's a ton of stories of such bands. bands you maybe like a few songs, maybe an album or two. i didn't feel right about writing on one band, that i may have listened to for a short period , then hardly ever. although not really that light i did think of the eagles. i liked a few, and then i didn't. you know there's heaps of stuff like that, and it would of become complicated . i wanted something that i could turn on and off , come and go real easy like. then i thought about that fm movie and/or album that was associated with that music in the 70s .

13april2015
fm or frequency modulation, was invented by a bloke called armstrong. in australian terms he would have been called a Larrikin , that being, sort of boyish thrill seeking, prankster type. i'm not too sure of the history here, i did see a doco on him years ago now. r.c.a. basically fucked him up. i have to do some research on him. at this point in time, that's about all i know. as for the fm movie/album, i've never really seen it. i think it was on telly one night , i started watching it, but thought it was passe'. i checked out the album on the wiki. much to my relief there is a eagles song there, life in the fast lane. thats off hotel california as i remember, i was well past them by that stage. i think the earliest thing there , that i was into years before, was steely dan. i had can't buy a thrill album, i think the song ,do it again ,still stands up today. it's as much disco as new order. maybe not. the rest of the album is typical of that era, although i did like the cover. now, i can't even remember the other songs on the album , reelin in the years, that's all i can remember.

15april2015
i  did the old google check about armstrong, it sort of sums up what i said, as for steely dan i forgot about the dirty work song. that pretty much sums up steely dan for me, i never really got into of their other stuff. a band thats not on the album but would sort of fit in , is america. the single, horse with no name, was a big hit on the pool room jukebox . i actually thought it earlier than late 1972, a lot of different types of music came out in 1972, when you think about it, that you couldn't keep up with it. thinking about the pool room jukebox, and the double a sided, judging by the plays, america - horse with no name/ sandman, the doors - riders on the storm/ the changling, the bee gees - run to me/ road to alaska, the surfaris - wipe out /surfer joe, i don't know how wipe out was still on the jukebox , but it was. other songs got played a lot , but the b side didn't get a look in, you know i'm talking 1972/3 here. as for fm radio , non existent at this time period.

17april2015
not really non existent, but most transistor radios pre 1975 were am and those with alternative waves were short wave. although tv volume was transmittered in fm. this guy had a radio and it had fm, as i remember. there was no stations transmitting, maybe a foreign language thing, i can't remember. going through the frequencies pretty much silence, except for buzzy noises and morse code  beeps, they reckoned it was ships. he said the only thing was a tv channel broadcast, i think we listened to gilligans island with amazement, that ran thin after a couple of days. thats about as good as fm got here then. another artist on the album was bob seger, who i heard a few years before the fm movie, not through countdown or radio. on wednesday nights there used to be pool comps up mt kembla pub. all the unanderra boys used to go on wednesday evenings, which i was part of at that time, when ever the night moves album came out. apparently the jukebox was on the blink up there. and the ant hill mob, thats the mt kembla boys brought some records to play . although there was hillbilly types up there, there was also well off, tuned in guys from school living up there. they played the night moves album, i thought the first song was ok. well the song came on ,the fire down below, i said who's that they said bob seger. i really liked that song then, i can't remember it at all now, haven't heard it for years, i did buy that album and flogged it to death. although he was popular here later on, i didn't go much on the later stuff. you know my names robert too.

18april2015
i forgot to mention steve miller band, he had a big hit with the joker, my sister had the single, as did the pinny jukebox. the album, fly like an eagle,  was a  hit, mainly through word of mouth. it was like radio here weren't playing the overseas stuff in favour of local product or some reason. maybe i was listening to the radio less , having a few records at the time. when i think about, i got an el cheap 3 in 1 record, tape and radio, it had fm and fm stereo, that probably would have been 1975. before that i had an old stereogram record player and radio, a big thing that was part of the old tv from the early 60s, but a separate unit. it never had  fm, but picked up sydney am quite well, probably had the same old stylus, i never bought one. at that time i only had a few lps any ways, it was mainly radio ,in my room. with the steve miller i bought the book of dreams lp, but by then my tastes were changing and i saw that as like pop rather than psyk, compared to pink floyd. again i never got into his 80s stuff, although he is quite a talented artist.

24april2015
you can't help it if you got fans for what ever reason, as for the fm radio , personally i never really got into it. what i mean by that is , i knew people who used to tape this and that, that's fair enough. i may have taped a few things here and there, mainly just to listen afterwards , then tape over it with something or rather. tapes weren't cheap either , not to tape some radio and just keep it, if you ain't gonna play it what's the use. sometimes i think about the things i could of recorded. you know it don't matter none, things sound different then and now and again. it's how you perceive it, and incorporate it , that's the spirit. things in a box or on a shelf never played are just that, things in a box. after time it becomes lots and lots of things in a box, then the format changes and it's even more things added on, then you just watch crap on telly.

5july2015
you know i could have finished the whole blog there, ending where it began. the whole purpose of the blog was to put up the john peel fm tapes, which i worked into a story. part of my story, like i said before, there's billions of stories on the net. i find mine interesting. the peel tapes would have been in a box, and going nowhere. now they're somewhere.

19july2015
ps.. did you like the way in which i could of ended it anyway. that's how it is beginning is middle is end, continuum. the beginning here was the eagles, i didn't know how to incorporate them in this. i still don't. they were part of the fm film though. everybody knows the eagles. i was watching some ogwt, whistle test, they were on it not once but twice.  

21july2015
moon day on a tuesday, you know one great step day.(get it, 21 july is tuesday) the eagles, landed with their greatest hits hype, although you could choose from 2 albums, their greatest hits or one of these nights. it was a bit like cat stevens albums of their time, tea for the tillerman and teaser and the firecat. i had teaser and the firecat, but that's another story. me being, of take the easy way, back then. besides it had, take it easy, on it as well as, one of these nights, choose one of these nights. to tell you the truth i felt ripped off. i thought they were shit country,, first listen. at that time i was further away from country as you could be.

22july2015
that last bit seems a bit confusing , i bought their greatest hits, probably confused to which one to buy. like i said, i felt ripped off. i felt that way about a few albums i bought over the years. that album sat in my small box of about 40 or so records for a few weeks before it got another listen. being bored with the other stuff i had . i gave it another listen, then just songs that i liked. one of these nights, then take it easy, then desperado, then i sort of liked a few, but still thought of it as country hippy shit, at that time i was far more into ian hunters first album, even that only had a few okay songs. but i had never heard of mott the hoople.

23july2015

 match book doesn't indicate fm though,
all rooms outside ?, probably outside view

25july2015

by the time hotel california came out, my life had changed somewhat from when i bought their greatest hits. i had gone from life on the dole, $aus72 a fortnight, although it was $31 a week first, actually it was $26 a week first. when i first applied in dec 74 it was $22.50, over time it did go up bit by bit, i had friends who were on it in 1972, it was $7.50 then and labor changed it. so it's pretty obvious why i was pissed off buying, their greatest hits, forking out $6.99 wasn't cheap. even so, my format had changed to tapes for some reason, so the eagles and ian hunter would have been about the last records i bought, excepting for the occasional second hand thing. so, i was working, cashed up pay day, new clothes and new music. i probably just bought the latest which i knew, it's hard to remember now, but i can sort of remember, buying 3 tapes one thursday night, one being hotel california. i think one of the reasons i switched to tapes was they ? sounded better no scratches or you could take them places in your pocket or some reason. tapes were in, records were out. that would change of course.

27july2015
been thinking about that time, it might not have much to do with fm, maybe there's some relevance to something. before i get to hotel california. i was thinking about that fitters labourers job, i got in the steelworks. at first, it was in the machine shop, just sweeping the floor and emptying metal shavings from the apprentices machines. i got talking to them about shit, like music and that. they were mainly 3rd and 4th year, i would have been 2nd year if i never lost mine. they were into some pretty rank things, one guy was going on about nazareth  loud'n'proud album. i thought this must be a good record if he's going on about it. i thought it was shit, that type of rock never did much for me , that some old stodgy dribble, dinosaur rock. i told the cunt i bought that shit too, he reckoned it was great, pull the chain. another guy on a lathe, a goatee bearded hippy type, probably a fourth year, reckoned he heard a great album on double jay radio, that was then on am. where i lived was like slum gully as far as reception was concerned pretty bad. the old stereo gram had gone by then, i just had the small 3 in 1. them days i was out mainly anyways, not at home listening to the radio. a little bit of radio in the mornings from the clock radio , them very first ones where the numbers turned around, poor reception from sydney, 2sm was just okay on a good day, i didn't bother with the local stations , 2 then, abc and commercial station. getting back to this lathe dude. the album he was on about was j.geils band - full house. i can still visualize him telling me all about it, and what good music they played, yeah the one that got away, yesterday . i bought that also.  i thought it was a bit stodgy also, but i played that a few times. i liked a long thing on it with the magic dick bloke on the harmonica, at that time he was the best player, amazing. that was around the last of me buying records. i can't remember songs. i checked out nazareth on the wiki, they give it four stars, there must be something wrong with me, i noticed the ballad of hollis brown, maybe or probably the dylan one, i can't remember it. that album got played 4 times i think.

28july2015
diverting can be beneficial when looking for a future direction. a thing i did on stoned  occasions, was  to tune the fm tv station on the radio , whilst the telly was on . this effect gave a few seconds delay between the two, something i only ever got once from a pink floyd record.

5august2015
it's been awhile since i wrote here, it's hard to get into the flow, mainly due to other things. you've probably figured out that this will end with some eagles thing. among the things that have happened since i last blogged here, was this bloke, who's in one of the ironworkers photos ,has past away. he lived in these block of flats called hotel california, i'll take a photo of them flats, maybe a goggle map. i forgot what street. other than that , i 'll try and get into this and start a new, soon.

6august2015

california  flats wollongong

these flats were probably built in the 60s, today are dwarfed by development. i don't know too much about them, i haven't been round that area for some time now. as for the guy that died there, i don't know too much there either , although i have known him since the eighties. i didn't know he lived there until much later. he wasn't well from hep c for along time, as much as i know is he was found dead. r.i.p.  

12august2015
so it's welcome to the hotel california time. so i bought the tape , as for now , i don't no any songs expecting hotel california, and life in the fast lane. i haven't played or heard that album , probably since 1979. i think i liked, the last resort, but i can't remember it. the hype got me again with, the long run, this time on vinyl, and pretty much it for me with the eagles and fm. 

 

 

 

 

glimpse

30march2015
after doing that nineties blog i needed to put a kink in  between blogs. then came the title, the battle for the soul, though appropriate , didn't really feel right. that was the main reason for the kink, among others.  others being the space in which i'd have to revisit . in actual fact that space hasn't gone anyway it's all relevant, as is the past. it's the strength  of now in which we deal with it. i thought about calling it after the woman that read the book, but that would be a bit of an ego trip on her behalf. like most ideas things come from dreamtime, so that's where the title came from , a dream. i think it fits fine.

1april2015
today was april fools day,  maybe i was being foolish , thinking i could just say a prayer and there wouldn't be any consequence. as things were building up around the place. i can't remember exactly what weird shit happened around the place, but there was a number of strange incidents, as per the usual creepy shit. i'm not quite sure what the initial idea was. even now a lot things have happened, since then say 98 or 99. so i say the prayer , i know somethings gonna happen. i'm gonna push this thing until something does. if not, i'm still gonna know i been through something. a few days later the woman rings up, comes round with a this stuff, the big hippy bag with whatever they believe inside. so i told her there was weird shit happening lately. she seemed undeterred by that. she began reading her belief . it didn't go down to well with what i was about at that time. while she was reading, in my head i was praying. i felt like she was setting me on fire. any other time it probably would have just gone over my head, and just brush it off as bullshit. i think, because i was doing my own thing. there was some kind of reaction.

4april2015
i think we had a smoke, not quite sure about that. i think i just saw that as a setback, as well as the reading stuff. i thought i'd get stoned and start later on the clean up. at the time i thought not a lot  about, the two things , me saying prayers and the woman visiting. there was lust on my part, what's new, excepting she was 10 years older than me. very much the hippy gypsy. after she left , i got some phones calls from her, i should of sussed something out, the power of the pouch, naively blind. after a couple of days the fun really began.

6april2015
so, i woke up ,made coffee and lit up a cig. as soon as i took a drag, i froze . froze? froze like nothing else. the cig just smoldered away in my fingers. after a real struggle i managed to get to my feet. i  looked in the mirror and i saw death. when i say death, i mean spiritless. i thought i'd push the cigs a little too far and long. for some reason i said the prayer , and i started to feel better. i looked in the mirror and seen i was getting back to normal. after a while i lit up another cig, the same thing happened. again i said the prayer and i got normal. i started thinking what the fuck was going on. then i remember the woman reading incident , i thought shes put some kind of spell on me. i was in a state, maybe manic. fell into temptation. don't know. the prayer worked though

7april2015
after thinking for awhile about what was going on, was it some kind of breakdown, maybe the cigs. being a bit of a chain smoker, not that much, but pretty heavy over the years. even without smoking the cigs, the spirit started leaving my body and i'd start to freeze, not cold but motionless . saying the prayer was a life source , it became like a bottle of oxygen. it was weird , even thinking about stuff and the spirit would start leaving. it became smoke a cig , then say the prayer.

8april2015
so there you've had a glimpse. i obviously came good, or i wouldn't be typing this.  good or bad who's to say. all i can say at this point in time, is i came this far, in losing it completely. how far, it doesn't matter, this far, that far. you lost it, you lost it.

 

wollongong

3march2015
you know you gotta be born somewhere, that ain't my fault. the story as i heard it. on my 21st birthday , the old boy told a story about him , my granddad and an aboriginal bloke by the name of bryant, were up kembla bowling club , drinking and playing pokies. they made a tape of the story and gave it to me. it's long gone, i wasn't real interested in it at that time, one or two listens. i don't know what happened to that tape, probably taped over or lost. i found the bit about the club interesting, me and a few friends used to go to that club in the seventies, probably even played them machines. they were the old machines around, not many people knew about that club, kembla heights bowling club. now we're talking 1958, in them days when the pub shut at whatever, on saturdays they could go up the bowling club and drink and whatever they did in them days. i remember the old boy saying they were playing the dinars, dinars was slang term for a shilling, i remember them dodgy old machines still up there. i was born at 5 am, at wollongong.

6march2015
although i was born in wollongong, my recollections are somewhat vague. mainly because i lived in another suburb. i've been thinking a tiny bit about my earliest memories. the earliest probably was going to the dump at night. wollongong had a dump pretty close to the city, although it's still a dump it's since been turn into a refuse dump, whatever that means. back then, early sixties, it was just a free dump. i remember all the rats eyes shining in the lights of the car, that was the highlight. there's probably bits and bits that pop up in thought now and then. like, a shop that sold gifts and things, i got one of them coffin money boxes with the hand that comes out and grabs the coin, and the smoking monkey with them paper cigs. a time that i remember was a, had too be there things. car had flat battery , mother and sister had to push, clutch start, car takes off, had to do a few laps to find them, it was raining and they were on someones porch. my mother said, do i remember that. the old mans reaction was very homeresk, you know homer simpson.

7march2015
i tend not to think to much about them early days, but things pop up as i walk the streets. for instance, i remember we used to line up along this brick fence, waiting to go to the town hall for some estedford  thing. we used to just be able to grab the top and pull yourself up , and peer over at the codgers playing bowls, i don't know what it is with this blog and bowling clubs. now the fence is about chest height. i went to the movie theatre a bit i can't really remember much, a few disney things maybe, they used to stand for God save the Queen, but that was phasing out as i got older. there was the occasional visit someone at the hospital, muck around up and down in the elevators while waiting for visiting hours, beat the elevator run up the steps, shit like that. a favourite shop window where you did the axis of symmetry trick, and other people looked down the glass and laugh. every year there was shows around the place, still is in some places. the wollongong show is now defunct. it used to run from thursday to sunday in october, just a smaller version of the royal easter show in sydney.
 
8march2015
this is mainly just to get away from that other stuff for a time. i got more to say about the show, that'll come later. i thought wollongong meant meeting or market place in an aboriginal language. then i thought it was canberra that meant that. luckily, i got the trusty, the readers digest great encyclopedia dictionary. their got wollongong :- see, the monster comes!.  really? i also looked up canberra :- women's breasts, meeting place. now i know why the place is full of tits. most people know capt. cook stopped at botany bay in 1770, that's 18 years before the first fleet. on the 25th of april, that's anzac day, capt. cook sailed past wollongong. as they sailed up the coast, they named places in their journal. a place that is still called that to this day is red point, among other places. i sometimes think it would be good to have a time machine and travel back to that day and watch them sail past.

12march2015
if you haven't figured out by now, this is more of a before and after, not so much reminiscing, more of a feeling.

16march2015
that was short, i could go on about before, till the cows come home, and after the bull shits. like the show, the first night, thursday, they might have bands, just the opening night some acts or something in the entertainment vein . one i remember, although i was just that bit young to go the thursday night, they had the wrestling on, world championship wrestling, then. people like brute barnard , skull murphy, mario milano, king curtis and so on. a couple of louts  spat at king curtis and he chased them all the way up crown st. i just heard the stories at school. the show had boxing tents and strip tease type tents . i got to go in the strip tease tent with a neighbour , her daughter and my sister , i just tagged along. they were the only girls in the audience. i think they just wanted to see what happened. a woman done the feather bit, when she got down to just panty hose, with the horny vibe from the audience, they left taking me with them, i never got to see the map of tasmania.. there was a couple of them tents one called bubbles as i remember. i was about 10 or 11. a kid reckoned they had them  tents down narooma show too. he said they had a bloke out the front saying see nana in the nude, see nana in the nude. when they went in the bloke peeled  a banana.

25march2015
you get the idea, i think it's time to move on. without repeating what of i've already said previously . today i went into town , 4pm. okay it was raining , but what a fucking ghost town. they fucked the place. no bullshit. any time in the last 45 years you could go into town at 4pm there be some sort of something. 

90's part two

7dec2014,
this is about 95 onwards, that's nearly 20 years ago. it seems like nothings happened, and a lot has happened since. i just glanced through that other 90s blog. i don't know exactly what i wrote, i just thought, did i write that. around that time i picked up the guitar, for the umpteenth time. i sort of got ok there for a bit, a few dodgy chords but you just keep going. around 95, i was interested in solar power. i started a tech course in electrical trades. at that time there was no interest in solar, only old hippies were into that, although there was solar hot water. it was what industry was interested in, and solar wasn't it. there was more interest in coal and hydro. with me i just done about 10 months of tech, before getting a job in the theater .

12dec2014, 
to tell the truth, the nineties, compared them other earlier decades, the nineties had nothing in my opinion. it was the catch up and retro decade. then there was windows 95, at which, at that time, i knew fuck all. it was big on the telly news when it came out. i remember the glad wrap machine pumping them out, on the conveyor belt. at that time i was doing a module called computers in engineering, as part of the electrical trades course. i had no interest in computers at that time, solar, man, on deaf ears. when i look back at that class and time, it was mainly year 12 (6th form in my currency) couldn't get a job,  couldn't get into uni, gen x. the computers in engineering class was pretty much infancy. we all got a floppy disk to muck about with. pre used floppy disks, one had a black white 800kb porn thing called mandy or something, now called a gif, well sort of. i gave them young guys names like girlie, brain wave, cutlet and ball bearing head. girlie got the mandy disk. i flunked the c.i.e. module due to leaving for the theatre job. brain wave was right into the internet outside of tech, them guys sort of grew up with computers at school and what not, i had the bricks. at that time brain waves fav site was kurt cobains body on the net.

13dec2014,
done some thinking about that time, that being 1995. for me it's one of them times when you just want to get on with something, like ideas. with the electrical trades thing, the idea was to learn and do the solar. i stuck it out for 10 months or so, the difference between then and before, before if you had some qualification, like the bit of paper, you could get a job no trouble. but, then around 95, with them gen x or whatever guys. they'd line up for some crummy macdonalds job. actually, i think some did work there. when i left there a few landed apprenticeships, cutlet ended up commuting to sydney to some coil winding thing. brain wave, who i thought quite smart, i seen him not long after i left. he said he was coloured blind and couldn't read the resistor colours. i thought that was a cop out. when i think about a few things happened around that time. i got busted with a small amount of pot, 3.2 grams of shit leaf, what i would call kif, they called it cannabis leaf. that was a real setback at that time. i was doing it tough as it was, then i get hit with this $264 fine and 1 month to pay, that was hard, money ways. it was the old 2 steps forward, it was around this time that i felt karma coming in.

14dec2014,
karma, curse or whatever, what the fuck is that shit, you get the idea, no cunt wants to know. then some other dickhead ... well you know that story. with me, i couldn't care the least about fame and that. it's more about getting out of the rut, normality and self sufficiency. that was the main interest in the solar. the guitar was mainly something i put off, cause of no time. the reason i left the tech, was, i got this, 6 month government funded thing, some electronic thing. you did a month crash course, then you had to go round and get a placement helping out and the government paid a bit extra money, not a full wage though, probably two thirds. the solar thing wasn't happening with the tech thing. i trumped the crash course, just done that shit at tech. with the placement, that was a hassle. that's were the theater comes in.

16dec2014,
with the placement, which i didn't like for several reasons. the main being the pay, you're doing the same job as the other bloke and he's getting a proper wage. your less getting government funded starvation wages. that was the start of the downhill really hitting in, the real downhill started around 1981, it depends on who and where you are really. i meet this guy, through this woman, he worked at the theatre, that's where the idea came from. i got an interview, and got the placement , which was sort of okay, it was and still is day by day existence. like, in my mind was the solar thing. sometime in between the bust and the theatre, i did the move from private to public, housing that is. another public housing tenant.      

29jan2015,
it's been a fair while since i wrote here, it might take a bit to get back into this space, seeing it's one that one trys  to get out of. i'm watching leonard cohen 1970 isle of wight, the relevance is, if i didn't mention before, i got into his stuff in the nineties part one, i actually learnt suzanne from a neighbour's book , before the move into public housing, around 92 something. it was one of the first songs i could play from go to yo, till it got boring. i couldn't play it today, although i play better now. i learnt, that even playing others story well, it wasn't mine. i played that song for a few months in the nineties, i can't remember how the chords went then, but i remember the lyrics ok. that book had different chords to his songbook, but it worked ok. it was strange how i got into that stuff, and the crowd that followed. that crowd were right into lenny, art crowd. before the move, i had learned about 40 songs, mainly dylan. again this didn't feel right. it was turning into a dylan rut, i was trying to get out of it. it was like john lennon said about playing acoustic, everything's mr dylan. there was always burl ives. with the move, the vibe was different, the visitors were reluctant to visit the bad end of church street. with working at the theatre, i came home not really interested in playing guitar. with the theatre, i made a few sets and things, done a few shows. i never really fitted in with those people, it's all learning really.

1feb2015,
moving on from the theatre, which i lasted 6 or so months. i probably could of lasted longer and took it further. i just didn't fit in, although, i did stir it up a bit. after doing 9 years as a platelayer, there is a slight difference. trying to settle in to housing department, had a few sides. i thought if i had it in the 80's, i probably would have saved and still been platelaying. one bloke, reckoned it was like russia, i knew what he meant. the guitar was disappearing, it's true if you don't use it you lose it, ie suzanne. another side, from the first night, i felt some kind of presence. like people walking in the ceiling and it was like the walls were thin. the idea was to stay for a year or so, till things improved. there was definitely some kind of something going on, at night. when i think about it now, before i moved my stuff. me and this girl, i knew from a long time, was hanging out with a neighbour up the other end, where i lived. we checked out the flat, she told me she lived in a house that was there before, dept of housing built the flats in 1986. she said some spooky shit happen there. now, i can't quite remember what she told me about it, but she said it was freaky and they moved out real quick like. i just thought i'll be right and brushed it off. then things started going pop, things went missing only to turn up later, insects appeared in mid air when there was nothing there, hazy thick air. i told her later about that spooky place. she said, i told you, and told me to move.

2feb2015
strange, i thought about me and that girl checking out the flat. she pops up every now and again, i'll have to ask her about her experience again. you know, i don't really like talking about that stuff much. it says in the Bible not to boast about these things, for they shall return, stronger. one time, this other friend, gave me this pinball top, someone gave to her. actually she gave me two. they were just the board out of the machine. they came from enmore, she said a guy bought them for like $10. i wouldn't have minded the whole machine. anyways, i gave one away and kept the other as an ornament. i was trying to think how the numbers were on the screen of the machine. i started to write the numbers down and strongly thinking how they were lined up. then the presence turned up, like a demon or something  popped out of the board. very strong it was, the tap in the kitchen started running, keys fell on the floor from the table, when i went to look, they were on the table. there was a clicking noise in the ceiling, as i went close, it moved away to the corner and went. i thought it might have been the years of drugs catching up. when i really thought about it, nothing like that had ever happened in many years of getting stoned. up until that point i was skeptical about the pops and noise synchronisms, the trouble here  they happened on a very regular basis.

3feb2015,
the God thing had been pushed upon me since 1963. then from 1971 till 75,76, i couldn't have been farther away from it, but there's always the background or unconscious, sub being below, so the word is unconscious. it will probably  pop up in other blogs passed or future. by 1976, i was in a state of repentance, i just couldn't kick the cigs, man. maybe a few other things aswell, you could say semi repentance. so, with this poltergeist stuff, i had a few defences on my side, or i thought i did. night time seemed to be the main time, also when you were alone, mostly. with my defence, which was my own concoction of prayer, worked okay for a bit. i found the trouble was, when you've got a complex, say lots of flats, the thing just moves on to some other vacant flat, you never really get rid of the thing, for awhile there it had fucked off somewhere else. so, i've put up the john peel world service shows, this would have around this time, as was the little richard thing. i remember having the first tape at the theatre. it's hard figuring out the time period exactly, i did do a few casual things at the theatre, after the placement thing. after the time at the theatre, probably just on the dole, in a rut, depressed  going nowhere. started doing a thing called a job club. it was job hunting thing to get you motivated into getting back into the workforce. it was a 6 month thing as i remember. they're mainly retrenched public servants, given the job to help others get into jobs that didn't really exist.

6feb2015, 
i guess it's pretty obvious, why i didn't really feel like writing this blog. this time from 97 to 2000 , nothing  much happened on the job front. i did think about doing an electronic trades course, i even enrolled as i remember, but didn't feel up to it at that time. the solar thing never happened. the idea was to get into something different by 40. as 40 approached , i reckon i became more reclusive . they changed the dole setup, by closing the c.e.s. (commonwealth  employment service), saying it wasn't functional anymore. with doing that, the unemployed became cash cows for the private government funded employment services. the one i was assigned to, reckon i was suffering depression, more like recession. the town was full of ,to let signs. the rents were just to high and have been. their (the machine) solution is to demolish the shops and build monstrosities and put the rents up or bring in overseas players as a band aid solution. with me, i  just wanted to fuck off from it, it wasn't far to the park bench for some, at least i had a roof over my head. the flat was like a different world, the pops and shit happened still , you just got use to it. but like a dripping tap it could be very annoying.

9feb 2015,
i never seen myself as born again or so called. my view about the subject, was just that, my view. people i hung out with, were basically worldly. i hung out in the arvo, up the shopping mall, with some old foes from a.a. (alcoholics anonymous). after their meeting, we'd meet up and have coffee and yarn. i got to meet a few a.a. old cogders, a few  have since passed on. i never hung at them places much, before. probably just get a milk shake or cigs or whatever, never really hung there much. the place was packed from 12 say, til  2. then it quieted down after. the a.a meetings finished at 3. we'd hang there til 4.30 or more. this became a regular rountine. i got to see all the low lifes and nutters, and hear about them. where are they now? no one gives a fuck. i rarely see any of them nowadays, saying that , i'll probably see someone tomorrow. as i write this, i think about one dude in particular, i dubbed him the paddle pop lion, he used to stand outside a supermarket in the complex eating a can of fish with a paddle pop stick. i don't think these behaviors were drug induced, although some may have been. i knew lots of them type of people when i was young, we just called them backward, although some were just spastics. among the crowd was the born again, so called, assembly of God christians. most of which were on some kind of benefit. i sort of had some respect for them at that time. it was a bit like coming out, something i couldn't do, on the christian front that is. like i said earlier i had my view, i knew not much of their church or that.

10feb2015,
there was a hippy artist who i used to visit some nights, i used to go for night walks, mainly as exercise. that's where the pinball board came from, she was right into cohen. we sort of became friends, although from slightly different scenes. i knew a lot of different scenes around the place since the seventies, you could say every nook and cranny, and i don't mean fanny. she's since past, R.I.P. so have many others. a few of the born agains i knew way back in the seventies. they had me go to a tent meeting once i remember at an oval, like a circus tent, i just went to have a look, a lot of young guys there mainly. one guy that used to visit me and hung with us in the arvo, used to smoke a lot of pot and do mushrooms. i picked him up hitch hiking, maybe late 80s early 90s, he was still doing the same old from the 70's. i told him why doesn't he snap out of it, and get into Jesus or something. then, around 91, something, i seen him in the street, he looked different. i offered him a hit of a joint, he said no. i just thought wow, that's different, he said he found the Lord. i was happy about that. later on into the near future, i asked myself if it was really a good thing. some people can go over the top with it. that's what i meant earlier on.

21feb2015
i think the judgement of them so calleds, their very quick to pass it on others, but can't see themselves. doesn't do them any favours. there's a very fine line on living in the spirit and a worldly existence. as the year 2000 approached, i decided to have a good clean out. a nun in 1968 said the world would end in the year 2000, this played a lot in my mind. i think a lot of other people thought the world would end or something around that time, ie y2k. i asked that guy for a prayer to read, i could use to help with my deliverance. he said you can't do it on your own, blah, blah. i said don't worry then. the main reason, i think, i wasn't happy how things had turned out really, cunts were still running the world, no end, thanks jarvis. so, if the world did end, i would have done a bit of repentance to help out, a bit like the crash course. i had little interest in most people and their worldly existence, deaf ears, i tried. save yourself.

25feb2015
about a week or so, after asking him for the prayer, surprisingly he came up with the goods. a bit of paper with some words, it was called the sinners prayer. i said, i'd  give it a look. i still had the ghost problem, and thought the prayer might came in handy, on them nights. as i remember around that time, there was a bit of weird shit happening around the place. i can't really remember and don't want to, the exact weirdness,  i just remember there was. sometime before all this, i used to go to things, like art openings and things similar, some though the hippy woman. one such thing was at her place, where i met one of her friends, another hippy a few years older than her, i thought she was okay looking for her age. another occasion the three of us went to this do up the mountain, an arty farty exhibition at an artists womens place. so, getting back to the prayer, i decided to give it a go, maybe use it to clean up.

28feb2015
now you can see why i split the nineties into parts. so, i gave the prayer a go, skeptical sort of. after a couple of days, i got a phone call from the hippy woman i met. she wanted to come round with her guitar, i said okay. after a while, she turns up with all this stuff, too much. she was interested in a dylan song, i want you. i played it for her, she couldn't get the b flat chord, although i felt or knew she played much better than me. she just couldn't get that chord, i couldn't believe she couldn't get it. after, she pulls out this book and starts reading this stuff, dark shit. it wasn't a good time to hear that stuff. in my head i was just praying, and started sweating, i didn't like it. witchy woman, after that she picked up all her things and left. i felt like there was some kind of battle there happening. a couple of days after that, i got up and had a cig. i froze like i couldn't move, like my spirit had left my body. and that's where the nineties ends. and so begins the battle for the soul.

1march2015
i was going to end this blog there , but i did a google on that book she read . http://www.goodreads.com/book/show/27243.Dancing_in_the_Flames "click here". now you can see the battle i had.

the bricks

27sept2014
the bricks were a lot things in 72, maybe 73. for me personally, or should i say less personally. probably at that time i was below person. it's not that hurtful to write about that time, as it was different. my home life was miserable, school life was shitfull , very dog eat dog. the big difference then is there was some ways to do okay, without having mummy and daddy. nowadays you inherit their debt. if i wasn't scarred (here i mean scar , the spelling gets me) enough, after the bike thing and earlier, the move from my grandmothers was the big hit.

1oct2014
the move from the grandmothers, to a place i didn't like to start with. now, when i look back, i think i was very wild. i think about it , you can't really blame anything really. i never had no proper home for a long time. my parents never had no proper home. the old boys gambling and drinking was atrocious. i could never understand it. to put it plainly he was a prick, when he'd come home pissed. i wasn't no goody goody either, but there's a time for discipline and that's not when you're pissed. i think i  was strong, even though i was a scared little chicken when he came home. the move , was just the parents and me at that time. he came home and beat me up pretty bad, ripped hair out of my head. said i smoked marijuana , which at that time i would never. i could go into it more. that's basically it really.

9oct2014
hurt you at home , hit you at school, i hadn't heard that yet, but i sure did know it already. i was just a defeated low nobody. when you're like that, you're so easily lead. i'm talking 1972 here, as if anythings changed, probably worse. the bricks were already happening, with a crowd that i was not part of. even back then, savland was far from normality, not too many could relate to me, no one like me as far as home life. the bricks as they became known, were a pile of bricks next to the school. i never knew anything about them then. apparently students of a different higher class, hollowed out a pile and threw in some p.e mats. not surprisingly, the culprits or part of, were old primary school friends. they would ride their bikes to school early , steal flavoured milk and have it over the bricks, then wag periods over there. eventually they got caught out, some spent weeks or months in a boys home.

25oct2014
it became known about the goings on of the upper class follies, with us lower class plebs it was just follow the rules , morning assembly , roll call and class, maybe share a drag of a fag (cig) or some other nonsensical prank, like the infamous dead leg, or the stomp on a empty milk carton, making a big bang, sliding down the hand rail slide saddle . the games of knuckles, and slaps, and hand ball. so where does one fit into this world of real world preparation .

2nov2014
nowhere really, i never really fitted into any class. the school had only been built for 2 and half years before i went there. the first 6 months  it shared another high school until work had finished, so they could open it. as i remember, the shoddy workmanship, seen a wall collapse, a worker injured. when i started, there was all the no hopers under the sun there, waiting for the 15 year birthday so they didn't have to go to school no more. after a time they left , and some sort of school structure started to form. i knew some or most of the no hopers  from the pinny shop, the 1st year i hung around them until they fizzled out .

3nov2014
my attendance was pretty good really. sometime after the old boy episode, i got invited by some foes from a lower class, to wag a period. we sneaked through some bushes near the pushbikes, some bicycle racks, then bolted across the paddock. it reminded me of hogan's heroes or some tv crap. i remember it was a sort of rainy day. the old hype of the bricks had died down. we went through some bushes and they had hollowed out a pile, bit of corrugated iron and timber for a roof. they just stacked bricks on it to make it look like a pile. they just sat there blowing smoke rings with the cold air, wishing for real cigs. for me it was an adventure, but i thought you'd be better off in the classroom with the heater. i think the whole thing was just you could do want you want, and not be confined to a chair and table, and listen to bullshit.

4nov2014
the bricks wasn't the only spot to hang , but it was the safest, just getting there was a hassle. i'm not quite sure whether i started smoking seriously after or before the bricks. it became the place to go during lunch or wag a period and have a smoke in peace. no jerk coming up and dragging the guts out of your fag. i remember one incident . one lunch , me and smiddy, snuffy smith now deceased,  he was one of the foes which took me over there.we were over there probably smoking. i remember it was lunch time. the bell went, and we started going back, then i seen the other foe on the other side of the paddock, with what i thought was a prefect . i told smiddy quick bolt a prefect. he took off the other way like a flash. then i realised it wasn't a prefect it was some bird with a blazer that look like a prefects. i tried to run a get smiddy , but he was long gone. when i went back, i couldn't find them, then i saw his bum rotating up and down unusually in the grass. they were having a fuck, this sight stuck in my head. since the bell had gone i went to the next class, on the way i saw smiddy and told him what had happened .

8nov2014
as i remember we had an easy to wag period in the arvy, so the 3 of us wagged that period, over the bricks. i thought, this is what happens over there. at that time i had never seen the map of tasmania, only the baldy badgers of primary school. tv and movies rarely had them in them, just boobs and bums at best. i remember someone found a  picture out of some mag , it had a photo showing the bearded clam , everybody was lined up to see it. it was just a one lucky fucky, he just asked her and she said yes. they asked me if i wanted go with them on the capers on friday night, just say you are going to some fellowship thing in a different suburb. that was the start of me going out friday nights. we met up, on the way raided a few chicken coupes and threw the eggs at cars from the over pass. i thought, is this fun. eventually we got to the fellowship, we didn't stay long. then, we went an hot wired a steam roller , dickhead drive it on the new highway they were building, i couldn't drive at all.

9nov2014
that probably was the start of the going out friday nights, which went on every friday night there after. not the juvenile behavior , just going out and whatever. word soon got out about the push in the bush, and there was 1 less going over the bricks. he got expelled from the school , he was a trouble maker, though.me and smiddy still went over there, but we were in mostly different classes. i had a pushbike , i brought it for $2, i used to ride to the school on weekends . i knew a few younger guys, who lived close. they had motor bikes. as the school was still being built, what became sports fields, was a motor bike track. i'd ride there and watch them ride and that. there was sometimes a lot of activity with different bikes . things like old bsa and villiers, even bridgestone and lambretta, there was the mini bike thing, but it was mainly old shitboxes . there was no motocross much at that time. scrambling was the word.

11nov2014
with living close to the school them young guys knew that area quite well. i started hanging around them , the bricks was part of that. the bricks were there for quite a while apparently. they were going to build a church there. it was strange that the main period to wag was scripture, over the bricks. scripture was the easiest because the whole form was there in the hall. me and smiddy and whoever went to the bricks and smoked cigs and told yarns.  on weekends we'd hang at the track, over the bricks, or a someones place fixing bikes or other stuff.  we'd catch eels from the creek and put them in bins half full of water or hang them on the goal post.. one guy used to take them home to eat.

15nov2014
 probably around august 1973, there was a few bikes and about 10 older type people at the track. it's not easy to remember the exactness of it all. the word was, there was crowd up the quarry, out unanderra. if you read earlier blogs , that quarry. anyways the relevance here, smoking pot. the guys on bikes had to go over the highway being built. there were tracks going to different places were you didn't go on main roads, compared to nowadays. i rode the push bike straight over cobblers hill and actually beat them, that blew them out a bit. up at the quarry there was a few older hippy type people. they passed round a joint, the first time i'd seen that thing. i thought of the old boy , and when it was passed to me i had a drag, thinking  i was gonna get hooked . it tasted different , like something i tasted before but couldn't quite figure it out. even after all these years i've never really had that taste from other pot . a few times it had that taste, not many. i only had one drag and never got stoned, more of a guilt trip really.

16nov2015
again the time of this next bit are sketchy at best, not the story but when. i say not long after the quarry , maybe weeks or months. one of the young guys had a sister, who hang around us from time to time. like a lot of sisters around that time, they had elder hippy boy friends with records and that. she was the first person to tell me about pink floyd, before dark side of the moon. it was through her that i bought the album pretty much not long after it's release. one afternoon i was invited over the bricks after school, i had my pushbike which seems strange seeing i'd catch the bus to school and only ride there weekends, anyways, there was about 5 or 6 of us in the bricks and she light up some joints. there was no getting away from it, we were whacked. i was blanking out in that claustrophobic atmosphere, i had to get out. it was like slow motion. i remember riding the bike it seem like slow motion. in them days , when you got stoned you'd get a dry mouth and your spit was white. what happened to that. i had to have a drink, after having a drink. i was fucked, i decided to ride home and not worry about them others. i started riding and got halfway up cobblers hill and fell over. i sat there for a bit, stoned, thinking i can't go home like this.  i decided to go back and see the others. they were still there, i just said i was riding round the place. i'd came down a bit, when i finally got home. i just lied on my bed til i'd came down , or there abouts  

23nov2014
one school holidays , i told the olds me and a few were going camping up the mountain, like me and a different crowd had done sometime before. instead it was planned , i'd camp over the bricks and the younger guys would sneek out and come over the bricks. it was scary as fuck there at night on your own. the first time i had really been on my own all night before. i used milk creates for firewood they'd burn longer than wood and brighter, heat the bricks up outside and inside would be warm after they went out. you didn't think much about the toxic smoke, like you do today. even with copper wire you'd burn the plastic off the wire. i was hoping that the guy would bring his sister , so i could crack on to her. that didn't happen. after the fire had gone out i crashed out. sometime in the very early hours of the morning, the guy woke me up, no sister though . apparently they were coming and she got busted by their old boy , he hid behind a door and sneaked  out later. then another guy turned up. maybe one or two more. we decided to go and pinch milk money, we didn't get much a few dollars at best. while we were out walking the streets , the sister and her old man had came looking for the guy, busted. we got back to the bricks not knowing nothing. i can't really remember what happened next, the young guys just went home. we never saw that guy , and the word got out he was grounded for a bit.

27nov2014
i could go on about other stuff at the bricks, but i think you get the basic picture. besides wagging periods not a lot, others may have used them for whatever. it did grow though, them younger guys had other friends in their form , maybe they went there, whilst i was in class. like i said before, the bricks was just one place, it was whatever was easiest at the time, mainly the creek. near the end of the year, not long before the final exam . a whole bunch of us wagged scripture as per usual , more than usual though.what next, i never knew what for, i think it had to do with job interviews or something. i knew i had done a test for a apprentice brick layer at the steelworks, i don't know. but for some reason my name was called out, i wasn't there . neither was a few others, the big search was on. we didn't know nothing. the next thing we was raided by teachers. rounded up , no use running , we were all busted.

29nov2014
the whole lot of us were suspended pending. being an important time, a lot were scared . i was more scared of the old boy flying off the handle, when he found out. there is a blank in my thinking about this. i know i was out . i had a few clothes and a sleeping bag, i still had the school locker to keep the books in. i just stayed over the bricks and slept there, i remember it started to rain there wasn't much of a roof in them bricks. i ended up sleeping under the portable classroom. i remember that. i don't know what happen after that, i think i ended up just going home and facing the music. the final result was we all had to come to school in full school uniform for the remainder of the year which was the final exam , whilst the rest of the form just wore casual gear. it was strange , cause usually i just wore levi's . now at assembly we had the full uniform and everyone else had just the casual look. it felt like a curse.

30nov2014
before i go on with this, i was a bit troubled about the baldy badger thing. in england if somethings mickey mouse it's shite, in australia if somethings mickey mouse it's alright. i checked out the online urban dictionary , they reckon a bald badger is a penis, to me a baldy badger is just some bald headed bloke ,cunt whatever. i think you got that. getting back to the curse of the saveloi , that was pretty much the end of the bricks. this next bit may have been before the bricks. i never really thought about it much at the time , but over the years i have on occasions. there is some relevance. i remember having to see this bloke, some straight looking dude. even then i didn't trust no one , even with the home life. the bloke just asked me these questions about shit. when i look back my behavior was outrageous to say the least, for that time. the questions that i remember the most was embarrassed . he kept asking me about  embarrassed, like what it meant. i just said when you do something and you get a red face. he kept going on about it. i didn't realise, until years later, that he was some kind of shrink, sussing me out. that bloke knew jack shit about me, or the fucking miserable life i had. even i didn't know who i was at that time. he also asked me if i believed in God.

1dec2014
in 1973 or when ever it was, god was dead. a concept. the reason i went to that school was , i'd had 7 years of catholic school and never thought my life was for the better. well was it . in 1973 i thought god had had its day, i pretty much believed in worldly stuff, like tv shows and records and materialism . so the answer was no.  it's easy to say no, or have it turn into a philosophy session of never ending dribble. not long after that he left. i never really thought about that time , until  years later. never saw the dude again. probably somewhere someone who has interest in me reads his report . i've still got some old school books from that time , and have a laugh sometimes when i come across them.

3dec2014
i'm pretty much bored with the bricks as much as you are. sav of the bricks. the curse is, the powers that be,  reaction and answer to such folie. at first it seemed like an achievement, but as time went on and things change it turned into a curse. their answer was to delete scripture from the curriculum (hey, i spelt a word with getting it wrong, achievement or curse). so, maybe still every tuesday finished 40 minutes earlier than every other day. i know i used to see them going home earlier on tuesdays when i drove pass there in the 80s and 90s. i often thought if they knew why they were going home early on tuesdays. thank the bricks. 

wayne

20august2014
those couple of usual spy eyes, who read the bit about my cousin in the other blog. i decided to write a bit of a blog about him. i tend to let the dead bury the dead, but with this i'll make some kind of  exception. i think it has an underlining piece of  importance of understanding life and death. his was the last funeral i've attended. it was a strange affair, in that there was no coffin. the service was held at a small chapel at the hospital. things had changed.

23august2014
i'm in a few minds about writing this. probably wayne was the closest  thing i had to a brother, by blood. i had closer friends, even cousins that were more like brothers, but not by blood, blood is thicker than water, like they say. as you may or may not have read it the other blog, i only knew him about 70 times, as if. things like christmas at my grandmothers place, that's about it really. most of my cousins around here are mostly younger than me. i think wayne was born in 1970 , so he was 10 or so years younger than me, 10 years was a long time then, time seemed different.

24august2014
just trying to think when i first meet them. although his old boy, my uncle, was wayward, they were pretty much brought up clean cut, as i remember. i would have seen them on occasional weekends, when i lived at my grandmothers. they were just little kids. i would have gone over to the bush, or gone up the pinny shop. when i moved from there i would have seen them less. i remember one christmas they turned up for christmas lunch dinner thingy tradition at the grandmothers, they would come every year. they used to say jokes and things and make the oldies laugh. the story that year, was wayne had a pet lizard, he took it to school . the teacher confiscated it. he told the teacher , give me back my lizard you bastard. that got a laugh around the dinner table. they still had that clean cut barber shop hairdo though. probably 1977 something like that. i thought how the fuck are these guys gonna fit in. wayne had 2 brothers

25august2014
i never seen them until years later, their old boy got good money in the mines. i think he joined the masons or something, and pretty much turned his back on the family. my old boy had to teach him maths and shit, so he could get a deputy ticket in the mines. it only took him 86 goes at trying, i remember that, among other things. them times i was on the street  , out riding or working or just out. so i didn't know much of home. actually i used to get a lift home with him in 1975 , we worked in the same mine. eventually he got over the mason thing and was back to christmas dinner in the 80's. that's when i seen wayne and his brothers had grown. they sort of made me feel a bit low. here they were talking about jobs this and that, money la la. poor old rob just slogging it out on the railways. and per usual i didn't fit in. i done things though. when i look back , they were fitting in and i was struggling. but if i really look back i chucked it in years before. so who gave a fuck, i never thought about that shit much . i'm just a happy bloke, really. i think them mine guys lost the plot years ago, long before arthur scargill.

 26august2014
i never really had much to do with them. some time around 1989, i think, their mother died of cancer. at the funeral wake thing, the youngest  didn't even know who i was. i hadn't see them in years , and he was young then. after leaving my grandmothers place, in the early seventies , i only went there a few times, other than christmas. i was probably out there somewhere, sleep in the day , roam til 12 o'clock train , so i didn't see them much. i remember i seen wayne over at the uni around 1992, i was friggin around with them little macintosh box things in computer lab, making a book about nintendo codes. he was walking to the pool there to do some laps. he said hi and that, he said he was doing okay. i never thought i'd see him over there. that's all really. i never really seen him much. the nineties seem hazy. compared to post 2000, i smoked pot a bit then. it's hard to say whether i smoked more in the 70's 80's or 90's. i can say i drunk more in the 80's, but pot ??. i thought wayne was straight clean cut, that's the way i seen it.

28august2014
after his mother died, his old man was on the loose, chasing birds, as if he ever stopped. he ended up buying a brothel in the Philippines, or something. i remember he won some money in the lottery , lottery again. third prize or a large prize, not first. that was in the sixties , when money was something. he went to japan, and was gonna bring back one of those geisha girls, but my grandmother wouldn't have it. he stayed at my grandmothers til he was about 32. so in the nineties he was back and forth to philippines . then, one day he brought back a wife and her five kids. everybody said what the fuck, he's off his rocker. i used to go to my olds for sunday lunch, he turned up with his wife, who was a year or so older than me. he wanted my mother to teach her english. i remember going to my grandmothers for Christmas or some do, around 1993 , and seeing all these asian kids running around the backyard. i seen wayne , and said what's this, he said yeah i know.

31august2014
the events after that point are a bit sketchy , at best. it must have been sometime before august 97. i was up town , i seen some bloke walking down the street, spaced out. then a couple of days i seen him again. then i got close , it was wayne. after talking for a bit, i gave him my address. he came round a few days later. he told me he didn't get along with his step mother, it was either him or her. he lived somewhere i can't remember. he and a mate went to england and amsterdam . he done a bit of travelling. he reckoned his mate flipped out on the drugs and killed his mother , then tried to kill him. i sort of remembered that on the news, but i wasn't really into the local news. he had a flat in some suburb, the guy killed his mother then  came round to the flat to kill him , but he couldn't get in and left. he said he was into the doors, he said his old boy, told him that music goes right through me. the doors seemed to be popular for that generation. on me, he said he remembered my 21st birthday party and a girl i had. i got the photo album out and showed him my party and the girl , and in the photo was wayne, must of been 8 or 9.

1sept2014
 with the before august 97 bit, thats when my grandmother died, so he had to have told me about the doors before then. cause i remember calling him the lizard king then. in reference to his lizard story and jimbo. he came to my place a few times, he was living at the illawarra pub. his brother was stabbed by a stranger there. apparently he was staying there , answered the door and some bloke stabbed him. in one of me and waynes conversations , he said there was some trouble at  nannas. i can't remember exactly, but my grandmother told them not to open the back door, cause the dogs will get out. waynes brother open the door and let the dogs out. she blamed wayne and that's the last time they were there. not long after my grandmothers death is when he got stabbed.

4sept2014
here's the photo of wayne on the back left at my 21st, i been working 2 days in the hot sun and my face is sunburned . the other photo is me late 75 it should go in the 1975 blog, i was only 7 and a half stone, street boy song.

6sept2014
them photos tend to put me off track a bit. they reckon a picture tells a thousand stories. but i think the thousand stories are the time that's in between those photos. wayne? ,if it wasn't for wayne these photos would not be there. so, getting back to 1997, wayne turned up from time to time. people on the gear have this strange attitude to those who aren't. i'd put it this way, they're fucking liars. we talked more about this and that,  he reckoned he was living at the illawarra pub and had a job doing some electrical work out port kembla. on the news was a story about a transformer blowing up, he was working 20 feet away . i'm not to sure about the time. around this time i was bumping into him regularly. i thought this blokes got no life skills. i asked him, didn't his mother tell him any thing. he said she'd tell him when he got older. i didn't see him for some time after that. at a sunday lunch at the olds , i learned his old boy was in hospital, getting some cancers removed. i visited him , after a bit i asked , what's with wayne, he just looked at me. i felt this time was like some kind of karma. the whole time was like some kind of build up. i really felt that .

9sept2014
again i'm not to sure of the time, it was either before or after . he turned up to my place all soaking wet  from the rain . i had the heater on , he just put his wet shoes still on his feet next to the heater. i told him to take his shoes off and let them dry out. i told him he'll get sick if he leaves them on. for some reason he took offense, and took off. i never seen him for quite a while after that. it must of been after 2000. when i did see him , i had been through  my own thing. he'd been to Thailand, he reckon he had a kid over there. he had a tiger tattoo, and was wearing some Buddhist thing on a necklace . a little square clear plastic thing with a picture inside. i told him he was fucked in the head, you've got your own spirit stuff. getting into eastern philosophies would only upset the balance. he just went , yeah yeah.

11sept2014
he ended up having a girl friend, according to a friend,she wasn't that stable, and with a  substance problem, the writing was , not on the the wall but somewhere. they lasted a fair while, long enough to have a kid. a bit sad really. how many like that? i seen them around town over them few years. i think that whole generation has been pretty much decimated by very harsh drugs and poison . i think lots of generations have their tragedies , whether it be war, drugs , drink , disease or whatever. then, one day my mother said wayne was dead. i can't remember now, how i felt at that time. i know i thought , what most teenagers think, they wont live long. i thought if it had been me , they would have had some kind of understanding, but wayne. i think it upset my mother greatly. the guy had the world at his feet, had a trade, traveled the world. and chose the noose. i sort of think he ,just couldn't cope, i don't know.

19sept2014
the funeral was a low key affair, like i said before. the chapel at the hospital . no coffin or body, this puzzled a few people there. it wasn't until some years later, that i found out. if you  suicide then you lose control of your body. so who knows what happened to waynes. as for the spirit, that's a different story. there was this constant wind at a particular spot outside the hospital. my mother said she thought of wayne every time she walked past that windy spot. since i started writing this blog , i walked past the hospital a few times, and noticed that the wind had died down in that spot. maybe this blog has finally buried wayne, R.I.P.

oxford hotel

22june2014
sort of hard trying not to think about the 1990s, and think of other things. i thought i write something about the oxford hotel. i'd been going there, probably since about 76, 77, around then. they're just about to pull it down, that's been on the cards for about 6 or 7 years now. around here their pretty good at pulling things down and jack hammering all fucking night. they've nearly pulled down the whole fucking town. then forever to build a shithouse, with rents that are so unrealistic, that makes things bullshit. they build these arcade things with the same shops as anywhere, people go there for a week that's it. they've been doing that shit for years in the name of progress, it just kills everything.

6july2014
i was going to put a photo up, but i may have left it to late, the scaffold is up. my earliest memories was just a dive of a pub in 1975. i used to walk past it when walking the street, as you did back then. i remember looking in there, the ladies lounge was just that old outdoor wooden furniture. like most old pubs, not really old, there just not the same anymore. back then most pubs had a public bar, a saloon bar and a ladies lounge. in the early days women weren't allowed in the public or saloon bar. the saloon bar the beer was a penny dearer  than the public bar to keep the riff raff out, mainly business people drank in the saloon.

19july2014
it's sort of hard figuring the year of the first time i went there. this is mainly because a lot of things happen in such a short space of time. i can remember the day and how, but year is difficult. the day would have been a saturday. me and a mate had been riding down a place called oilies , a name given to parts of the beach, south beach. surfies have nick names for such parts of beaches. other names along the beach are shitpipe, where they used to just pump the sewer in the sea. oilies was an industrial part, where they pumped sand in and built on it, and there was a large flat and small tracks to ride bikes. it was my first time there. i bought my first bike off a bloke i worked with for $260, a dt 175 yamaha trail bike. i was pretty hopeless at riding. i remember the day i bought it. after learning and crashing a few times, i got around here and there. an old friend said we should ride to tracks down near the beach. looking back now it's strange how certain people pop into your life from the past. he was another kindergarten friend from way back. i had been an urchin, and now i had a bike, and so did others, he took me down to the oilies track. down there was this big group of old friends with their bikes, doing really good riding things. there was a couple of toffs with good bikes, bragging. i went there a week or two later, and one of the guys said we should ride up town to the oxford, apparently they just done it up. we rode up along the beach and i nearly rode into the shitpipe channel, luckily i hit the skids and the front wheel just went in a bit, i remember that.

22july2014
i remember riding up to the pub and parking the bikes out the back car park. i'd never really been there before that. my local was unanderra pub or morwarra as it used to be called. i didn't mention before, that there was also beer gardens, just an outdoor drinking area really. it was late in the arvy, when we got there . we just checked it out , at that time they where still doing refurbishments . we were pretty grubby from riding , i think we just had a beer , a cig and something from the snack bar. oh yeah , pubs used to have good snack bars them days. we decided to go there later that night and check it out. that's when i started hanging with some old friends and/or enemies from high school. certain nights were certain places with that crowd. nothing was on that night so it was the oxford.

1august2014
 with the refurbishments came the new trading hours. i'm not to sure, but i'm pretty much sure, trading hours used to be 12 hours a bar. so some pubs had bars opened at different hours. in the early days , some early openers were 6am to 6pm, some were 7.30am to 7.30pm. most pubs up to that time opened 10am to 10pm. as a child , i dreaded 10.30pm , you'd hear the old boy coming home pissed as a nit. the oxford was the first around here to open at 11am to 11pm, with a small corner public bar that opened and closed early for the old pisspots. you could just move into the new part after it closed. us young crowd mainly turned up thursday night was the main, friday and saturday nights. saturday could be a dead night if something else was on. they decked it out okay, mainly to sell more grog. there was no bands at that time . mainly just drinking and conversation , there may have been a jukebox, there was one later . the wollongong hotel was where the jukebox was then. most pubs had jukeboxes and pool tables and maybe a pinball , although they came later.

3august2014
me writing about a pub, you'd think i like them. i never really liked pubs to tell you the truth, although they did have an air about them. some say the oxford had a ghost. ghost ain't uncommon to such places. you could rent out rooms and live there , as we all know. one lived there in the 90's , and died there upstairs. they closed the top part  up for that reason apparently.  but even before that there was trouble. in the fifties some hungarians stab the bar manger to death, a woman. i didn't know that until the 2000s and somethings. before that incident ,there was some kind of harmony between the races. that changed after that, as well as the hungarian bloke who kidnapped a lottery winners kid and held him for ransom, and eventually killing him.although not related to the oxford, here is the lottery story. the oxford was a dive after that. that end of town always had a bad vibe.

4august2014
so did the top end called piccadilly , but that's another story. hey , i could easily go on type this oxford hotel crap and any other blog nonsense. at this point in time , i could n't give two fucks either way. two fucks, two minds who gives a shit. at this point in time , i feel it's not really going anywhere. i've said a few things. i feel like just not doing it anymore, let things pass. maybe if i'm still around i'll come back to it, the truth about the oxford hotel is it was a fucking dive , just like any of them places. if they were any good people wouldn't let them go.

nineteen ninties part one

24may2014
before i go on with this, it's happy birthday to b.d. it's also the birthday of an old kindy classmate, one of the pot thieves, reds mate. we used to celebrate cracker night on 24th of may (org. empire day), the guy was an orphan, and/or adapted, and he loved that his birthday was on cracker night, that's all he had. then they moved it to june for the queens birthday weekend, which isn't her birthday anyway. then they banned crackers in favour of fireworks. now they let off fireworks every other day, except queens birthday weekend, they might remember some years for a political purpose. that pretty much sums up the 1990's.

26may2014
i'm not surprised no one as yet has viewed this blog, excepting for the usual spy eyes, all 3 of them. what a fucked decade that was, maybe it was just my age at that time. i would not have liked to be born, or have grown up, or done anything i had done before in that decade. thinking about the year 1990. firstly my lifestyle had changed dramatically.  i was now living in a car, well a van actually, more than less in a state of depression. i still had a few possessions scattered about the place. it was drive here, crash out there, shower where. gypsy? not relating to many people. there's one incident that stands out, among a few, that year. i had driven halfway round australia, 3 states and a territory, the year before. the van was playing up. every time you'd get to a certain speed or a hill, it would die in the arse. i took it to one bloke, he reckoned i needed a tune up, so i paid $128 to get a tune up, ripped off. the fucking van was sitting there for 2 days , he changed the spark plugs, i could have done that. the problem was still there. next, i went to this other bloke. he put all this testing equipment on things, he reckoned the carby was sucking air or some bullshit, so i went and got a carby kit , gaskets and such, $30 something. i remember trying to get up this steep hill and the van clagged out halfway. i put the hand brake on and changed the carby  gaskets there. the motor was under the front seat. i got up the hill okay, but the problem still returned. after talking to a no hoper, he reckoned i should change the fuel filter, a $6 part. that fixed the problem . since then i've known a least 4 people who have had that same problem. i've told them the fuel filter , most think what's he know, one guy said yes that fixed it.

27may2014
living like that was taking a toll. i had a cb radio in the van, which i used and made some new friends, that was okay. the so called girlfriend's father, suggested i put some of this coolant in my radiator, very good he said, being greek. i said no worries. driving round over the next couple of weeks, i noticed the temperature was  high on the dash  gauge. i went to one bloke at a garage, he said, you've blown a head gasket. i said how much, he said $1600, i thought, wtf. i decided to fix it myself. i worked it out at around $160. the gasket kit $90 and a head shave $70. i had the tools necessary. it took me two days to fix. parked outside the girlfriends parents house. after fixing it, the problem was still there. when i changed the gasket, i thought the old one wasn't that bad. i had to take out the radiator, water pump , hoses , tapids rockers a lot of shit. i got it going again , but the temperature problem was still there. a no hoper suggested thermostat. the thermostat is used for heating, when at a certain temperature it opens , the water is at a temperature and can be used to heat the interior, keep you warm like. i took it out and the high temperature problem was fixed. so what happened, the coolant had stopped the thermostat from opening, stopping the circulation of water. i thought fuck it. i never put the thermostat back, come winter not much of a heater. while i was fixing the head gasket i walked into town one night, a few miles, i was noticing change then.

28may2014
i could go on about life in a car, stuff like paying for petrol, then the cops trying to track me down for not paying, cause the jerk at the garage didn't like the look of me. or driving to canberra to see public image, or other ditties. i had had enough. i knew some people who had a small farm, they said i could stay there and help fix up the place. there was trouble there , they were on a methadone program. the trouble there is one day their okay, then when they got their done fix, their personality changed to up themselves. i had to get away. i think i stay there a few weeks or months. i was pushed into selling my motor bike and trailer to get bond for a flat in wollongong. i eventually did just that. things still weren't right though. it was like a game of how low can you go.

7june2014
 once in the flat, i had to get rid of the van. i sold it for $300, i bought it for $3200. i was just glad to be done with that life in the van stuff. the van would have been handy for some moving things type of stuff. i was glad to let it go.the shithouse girl friend moved in also, i don't know if that was a good idea. i had friends all over at that time, but time at being down, didn't help me none. this is where fate had came in, very much so at this time. i got into playing the lotto, i had played before, but now i was putting all energies into these same numbers which i thought would pop up. i also had an nintendo addiction at this time, just playing and wasting time, i thought someone should have a song called no time for nintendo. actually, some of the money from the van sale went on nintendo games. i had a friend in sydney, who had a screen printing business. he was moving shop, i was asked if i could give a hand. i said i would. on the train up i meet an old unanderra friend, i had a couple of cans of beer for the journey, i said do you want one? he said he'd given up and was sober. i told him i was trying to win the lotto, and i was doing it tough.

8june2014
it was a strange time, this being between late 1990 and 1992. i've mention parts in former blogs, jester. with the fuckwit girlfriend, things were drifting. she was going out to these fucked out discoie type places, i was never into that shit. i liked live bands. i could go on about her, these short paras are too much for that speck. a nut from the start, no more said. so, i helped out with the moving the screen printing gear. i had a strange relationship with them artie type people. they helped me in life, but their politics was somewhat different. i think art has a connection between the top and the bottom. it's a ladder. the trouble is there's a lot of fakers. while sorting through some old bits of clothes, we came across the clash t shirt. so that's how i got it. i helped out a few weeks, staying over some nights, others times catching the early trains up. i was  getting better with myself. then i felt i was being taken for granted, not used, cause i was happy helping out. we had a fall out  over trivia, silly really. i was in a fragile state, sometimes you'd catch the early train up, and hang around til 10 or 11 from someone to turn up. i ended up parting from that with a few dollars. i bought nintendo games. not long after that, the witch fucked off. with the key, things went missing. it was hard to trust people at that time.

9june2014
been thinking about that time lately, things you forget about. when i was fixing the head gasket, i thought about asking the girls mother if she'd like from me to put her lotto on. i didn't  worry about it, i thought mind my own business. a couple of days later, she was spewing. she didn't put her ticket in with the same numbers. she would have won a million, no one won it that week. when i think about it now , i'm sort of lucky in a way, i didn't ask her. when the fuckwit left the flat she took most of the blankets and stuff. i tossed all the crappy bed in the van out. all i had was a woolen blanket i stole years ago, out of a car. it was freezing the middle of winter. i often see them type of blankets on tv shows, maybe it was karma. i thought that, i was just happy she was gone. it was hard, paying rent and living without work. i was slowly getting better. i was visiting a bloke, simon, and jester lived not far. simon reckoned she was fucking with my spirit. maybe there is some truth in that. her old man was having some medical problem, test after test they couldn't find nothing wrong. he even forked out a large sum of money to a greek witch doctor, he had to throw some things in the ocean. he took some pictures to the witch doctor, and they said there was trouble with that one, the girl friend. years later i was watching this tv program about the golden fleece, jason and the argonauts. they landed on this island, lemnos. there was no men on the island, apparently the men wouldn't have nothing to do with the women cause they had smelly feet. the fuckwit was from that island and she had smelly feet. around this time there was phonecards just coming out. i liked the pictures on them and started collecting them.

10june 2014
tonight i switched on the telly, and there was the blanket, big bang theory, on the lounge. i don't watch that show at all, it was just on when i switched it on. i've seen them type of blankets on other shows, i can't explain them, it's like all coloured squares joined together. maybe i should throw it away and then i'll win lotto, probably had that blanket for about 35 years or more. i thought about the golden fleece and that blanket, there's no real connection excepting it's wool. anyways, getting back to this, when i said about fate at that time, it was like things were coming to a head, or some shit. maybe i should split this blog into parts, it might end up being long, compared to the earlier decades there was a lot more stay home. the phonecard thing caught on, all over the place. i started collecting the cards cause i liked the pictures. they were in phone boxes in like a little card disposable bin, you put your hand behind and grab the cards if there was any there. i didn't know it was happening at lots of places and they were worth money, i just wanted to have a small collection of the things for later on. at first i only kept the ones i didn't have. you know you'd go to the pub and check out the band and on the way home check for cards. them first ones were starting to be worth a bit of money. i thought i should have kept some of them first ones. then i found a shop that actually gave you 10% of the face value, so that helped support my tobacco habit. for a time it was getting crazy the prices of the things went up and up. people were actually keeping used phonecards in safe deposit boxes.

11june2014
i am sort of all over the place with this blog. with this, it's just a thought and build on it, it's not a boast. you can't really mention 1990 without the iraq build up, and eventual wars, talk about never ending story. still going on isn't it some 24 years later. we had an end of peace party back in 1991 just before the big secret invasion. it was a strange time, all glued to the t.v., seems like that 's all people do. gulf war til you're long sick of it, o.j til you're long sick of it... etc, etc. new world order. i tried to think where to go from here. i had a bit of time to do stuff i couldn't really do before when working the railway job. i started buying cds, that became cheaper. things i never really listen to before, chuck berry for instance. i never really heard much of his stuff til i bought this cheap cd. i knew things like johnny be goode, but the promise land, i thought was dave edmonds and rock and roll music was the beatles, and roll over beethoven. el cheapo cds had a lot of good songs, original studio. although you had to be careful of chuck and the different versions. another was leonard cohen. i had these unanderra friends around 1975, they said i should hear leonard cohen. i remember we went to town and the record shops and no leonard cohen. so i never really heard him. i bought the songs of leonard cohen on a el cheapo cd, just to hear it, from back then. i played that a bit around 1992. i even started playing songs on guitar, i just wanted to play one song. a neighbour had a song book with leonard cohen song, suzanne. i played that song. it made me happy i could sort of play one song.

14june2014
 with the guitar, maybe other instruments or anything really, it becomes work. and with that work comes uniformity. and once uniformity is achieved, what happens then? boredom. i couldn't just keep playing suzanne. i had a few song books with songs i liked as well as easy chord changes, that kept me occupied . it's not like i just picked up the guitar, i never really persisted with it. i had a few guys around me and they helped me a bit. with transposing and shit like that, sometimes it made it harder than the book. with the nintendo, i meet this art student through another art student i knew. he said he had 100 games on one cartridge, i didn't believe him . he showed me and lent me the thing, just early games. around this time, probably 92, seemed like a lot was happening. maybe 93, 94 as well. i found out bozo won the lotto. bozo, the guy on the train. apparently around the time of seeing him on the train, he played lotto and won a million. i thought the cunts stole me luck. my grandmother won a lottery in the 50's, 3000 pounds. my old man won the lottery in the early 60's. i thought i was destined to won the fucker. i caught up with boz . he was back on the piss, he drive me to his posh house in mt posho. he had a $7000 rolex watch, he threw it against the wall, indestructible he'd say. he told me he won not long after seeing me on the train. they had a big party everyone was getting pissed except him. then he busted and got back on the piss. he used to come and visit me around that time a lot, even just crash on my lounge. i used to think, here i am trying to win the fucking thing. a mate won it and was happy just crash on the paupers crappy old lounge. i thought about that.

15june2014
i got bitten by the lotto bug, around 88. i'd played before when it first started, but soon didn't bother after a while. so, i had this little note book , i had it for a couple of years. i decided to play the lotto and keep the results in the book. i'm looking at the book now. i drew up a nice chart, with boxes for the results , money in, money out. i had selected certain numbers, as i remember it was more of a coupon type of thing, with carbon paper sort of thing you kept that bit, not like todays type of ticket. it cost me $5.20 a week. i never won diddly squat until week 19. i won $8.50, but money in was $98.80. by week 25 i'd had a couple of more drops, up to that point, in $129.80 out $36.30. then week 26 i got 5 numbers, $862.60. i had to wait 2 weeks for the check, then a week for the check to clear, in which time i had to think about what to spend it on. i ended up buying the first nintendo games machine. at week 52, in  $271.20, out $950.60, so i made a profit, but take the 5 numbers win away and it's a different story. in 1991 i picked 6 numbers, thinking they would all come out. i've played them same numbers for 23 years and i'm still waiting, had a few drops. nothing to write about. with the nintendo i'm pretty much over, it's just a waste of time, as you get older time gets shorter, no time for nintendo

18june2014
i thought it should end there. i decided to have a part two. there wont be nintendo or lotto. if you wandering what happened to bozo, last i seen him, was about 3 years ago , he was living in a caravan park behind figgy pub. you know them things ain't cheap to live in anymore, i think they call them trailer trash in america. you know australia is a big country with not that large population and rents and property is bullshit. even if you own it's bullshit. during the nineties i seen  a bit of an x file episode about this bloke , he saw peoples death but couldn't figure the lottery. i never watched that show much, i never liked that grizzly shit or fucking ads. the twilight zone was much better, in that it made you think. the x files and them type of tv shows had a bit of that, but the grizzly shit seemed to overtake it and stick.

28aug2024

i noticed i've had a few views lately, surprised. i read through this, and fixed missing words and a few spaces. makes it a little bit more decipherable. after reading this some years later, i get the feeling nothing much has changed.