Okay, I lied.
Well, it's not that I lied as such. It isn't that I deliberately set out to mislead the three readers of this site into thinking that I was just going to take a couple of days off to re-energize my flagging levels of brain-cells after my insane eight year sojurn into the wilderness of academia. It wasn't that I was lazy. And it wasn't that I had nothing to say.
I guess I just burned myself out. To cut a long story short, before boring you with a long story, I submitted my MA. Went in there on the Friday, threw it at my supervisor, wrote the abstract with him, and handed it in. Boom. Done. I'm going to make a few notes, more for myself than for you, on the specifics of the day. Yeah. For myself. Screw you.
In the car, I wanted to listen to something appropriately triumphant. Maybe the theme from Chariots Of Fire. Something stirring. But, as I went through my CD collection - no mean feat - I settled on an obscure album by Buffalo. And so it was that as I careened madly through the streets of Doncaster and Box Hill, on my way to meet my destiny, I was blasting 'I'm A Skirt Lifter - Not A Shirt Lifter' and 'Taste it, Don't Waste It' from the windows of the mighty Torana - with the wind in my hair, and a calm smile on my face. This was, however, a ruse. Inside, I was petrified. My entrails hung from my bones in twisted knots, slapping and slithering gracelessly against one another as the box of bound books sat on the seat beside me, jumping in the air as I sailed over the bumps and cracks of the road.
It was too hot. I hate the heat. It was a hot day. Yuck.
It was so anti-climactic!
"Here's my shit." "Ta.".
That was the experience in a nutshell. I didn't want a ticker tape parade featuring drunken sailors, naked women on horseback, firebreathing midgets, and a dragon with a stare that turns people into pillars of clay - but it really shoved it in my face just how much university sucks. It isn't fun. It's a lonely, tedious nightmare. At least, as an english student.
But I wasn't always a master's student. Oh, no. Let me take you back to the chilly winter of 1984.
With what can only be termed 'Orwellian Serendipity', I started primary school in 1984. My inaugral year into the facistic power-trip of the education system saw me constantly in tears, terrified of going to school. My mother would have to drag me inside, because I just didn't want to go. I resisted it, kicking and screaming. Why not? The other kids were a bunch of witless punks, the teachers talked to me like I was retarded, and I sat alone in the yard most days, squeezing a couple of glad-wrapped vita-weet's together, watching the Vegemite and butter worms slithering out of the holes. It was a depressing place. My classes were in these awful tin portables - the only use they seemed to have coming from the myriad sounds that could be made by banging rocks against the outside walls. Star Wars was very big in 1984, so any chance to replicate the sounds frrom the movie was hugely appreciated.
And what a year! Ghostbusters was massive - and the logo was inescapable. My horror movie obsession kicked off in fine style with Greensborough's first video shop opening on Main Street. If you're ever in Greensborough - it was opposite the RACV building on the other side of the road, in the block of shops with the gold-bordered windows. The first one was the video shop. And, 1984 saw the video boom really take off. 'The Incubus'. 'The Intruder Within'. 'Zoltan : Hound Of Dracula'. 'Silent Night, Deadly Night'. 'The Osterman Weekend'. 'The Thing'. 'Friday The 13th'. All found their spiritual home on the shelves of the local independant video shop in 1984 - and all were actually WATCHED. Let's face it, back in those days, we weren't being mentally sodomized by the brutal, slime-dripping penis of Bennifer and Josh Hartnett. Nay, pretty boys knew their place and stayed where they belonged - in catalogues, to be laughed at.
But, I digress. It was also an interesting music. Long before Michael Jackson decided to devote his life to the penetration of little boys, he managed to find his way to a recording studio from time to time, and the result was 'Thriller', an album which probably sounded dated about five seconds after its release. 'Billie Jean', 'Wanna Be Startin' Something', 'Beat It', and the odious title track were painfully ubiquitous - as was Van Halen's 'Jump', from their mighty '1984', an album which both signalls the beginning of their fall from grace, even as it suggests an exciting new reinvention of the band's glitzy metal sound. Prince put his penis back in his purple pants for five minutes, and the result was 'Purple Rain' - an album which ditched the smug, lip-smacking sexuality of 'Dirty Mind' and 'Controversy', and gave us a slice of Prince-style arena rock. The resulting album and film made the dwarf a star - setting the stage for his hilarious career derailment in the early nineties.
I got sick in 1984. See, I never wanted to go to school - and I would always pull the 'I'm sick' line. Unfortunately for me, it turned out that I actually WAS sick, and was hospitalized for appendicitis. Oh, I rememebr the day that they hauled me off to the Bellbird Hospital in Melbourne's eastern suburbs. My parents had to literally pry me from my bedroom - dragging me kicking, screaming, spitting, and biting towards our Chrysler Centura. For what seemed like weeks, but was allegedly only a couple of days, I whimpered ceaselessly about how much I wanted to be home, my brain crazy and numb with raw fear. Remember LCD handheld videogames? I spent some time playing 'Deputy Den', which my parents gave me for my sixth birthday. I read the 1984 Marvel comics 'Incredible Hulk' annual. And, the morning I came home, I went for a wander - and I remember seeing something called 'Family Circle' on the television. Oh, and I threw up on the floor and burst into tears.
But when I got home, my parents rewarded me. Firstly, they hired 'The Empire Strikes Back', so that I could sit and watch it all night while eating beans out of my Bunnikins bowl, in between viewings of Dr. Snuggles and Sesame Street - and my Grandfather, sainted human being that he is, started me on the road to ruin that leads me to type these very words to you - he gave my parents his old Commodore Vic 20.
For those of you who aren't familiar with the history of Commodore Business Machines, and the impact that they had on the personal computer market of the early 1980's, with particular reference to their role in the 1984 video game crash, I envy you. You obviously have a life for some kind. For me, however, I was never even given a chance - as I sat mystified, staring into the screen and playing Gorf, Radar Rat Race, Jupiter Lander, and a billion type-in games. What's a type-in game, I hear you ask, as you look up at me with a half-lidded stare, your face featureless and dry as you feebly attempt to feign interest? I'll tell you. The kids of today have it real easy. Back when I wanted to play a new game, I didn't have the luxury of beating my parents into submission and demanding that they hand over a hundred bucks so that I could go and buy a non-innovative piece of fluff from the shelves of Harvey Norman, bringing it home and slapping it into my PS2. Nay, in 1984 - we were expected to write our own games. How does a six year old program in complex machine code, you ask? The answer is - he doesn't. Back in those days, magazines like 'Compute's! Gazette' would feature program listings in the back - the code was literally reprinted on the pages, and you would sit and type it out. For days on end. For weeks on end. I remember once, I spent an entire summer with my mother trying to type in the code for a game called 'Bonking Barrels' - a title who's comedic significance I wouldn't come to understand for many years.
Again, I digress. This was the foul year of our Lord, 1984 - a year in which I fused with The System, both in body and mind, and slowly felt it begin to gnaw at my insides. Tiny nibblings at this point - but I knew that they would grow to become cavernous mastications that would erode my soul, my heart, and my sanity. I became posessed by a strange kind of existential nausea, as I realised that - for the most part - my child hood was ostensibly over. My first six years had been a blast - but now, I found myself manacled to this alien enviroment, surrounded by scurvy dogs and brigands of all stripes - each one crazy with fear and bloodlust, slavering and twitching as they adjusted to their new pressure cooker enviroment, and began developing their own schemes for conquest of the preteen heirarchy.
Not for me, though. My first year saw my first run in with the authorities - my parents were called down to the school. My teachers, quaint dears that they were, were nonplussed - to say the least - with the artwork I was producing for them. We had to write in a diary - every day. We'd write anything. Kids would draw flowers. Or their families. Or trains. Or random, disconnected kid crap. I would render images that seemed to come from the very bowels of Hades. In my preteen mind, mangled bodies dripped with blood and entrails as they were torn apart by beasts from the underworld. Savage dogs would breath on their victims, as their gleaming incisors tore through flesh and bone. Powerful firearms would display their capacity for maiming the human body, as crayon-on-butchers-paper drawings of savage beatings, brutal shootings, and the unholy uprising of a demon army, determined to wipe the parasitic scourge of humanity from the face of the earth, were offered to my teachers - who, just a few moments ago, had been patting young Mindy on the head because she'd managed to draw 'such a pretty flower'. My parents were called down for a little chat. Because Mater and Pater are so coolo magoolo, they reassured the authorities that it was nothing to be alarmed at, no - we were having no problems at home, and yes - I was a happy, healthy child.
As the years bled into one another, the repulsive stench of primary education made me feel queasier and queasier with nausea. I became more and more distrustful of my fellow students - their foul personalities, and chilling vapidity caused me to dry-retch at the very thought of having to sit in a hot, swamplike classroom for another day, inhaling a kaleidoscopic array of bodily smells, as some buffoon in an ill-fitting cardigan talked drive at me for what seemed like an eternity. By grade three, I fled my original school - the escalating violence driving me out with tears in my eyes, and my hands covered in my own blood. But, rather than leaping from the hot sand into the cool, cool water of a tropical lagoon - it was more like I was a sheep being driven into what appears to be a rolling green pasture, but is actually an unmarked minefield.
At my new school, I lived quite a way away in kid-terms from where the rest of the students were - so I never saw them outside of school. So, I wasn't terribly popular again - leading to my first bout of intense psychotherapy. Interestingly, this was 1988 - and my first foray into the thrashing waters of insanity was tied into three things :- The solitary nature of the primary school experience, my fear that maybe childhood ISN'T forever, and a 1969 urban myth focusing on the possibilty that Paul McCartney was killed in a 1966 car accident, with his fellow Beatles letting the world know through clues on their post-Revolver output. If you think that this last one is a joke - I assure you that I am deadly serious. I'll write about it in greater detail at another time.
Primary school ended - and I was asked to write a poem 'celebrating' the students of the graduating class. The students, teachers, and staff were mindless cretins - and as I stood before them, reeling off a three page litany of brutal, yet veiled insults, tearing my classmates to shreds with a stunning display of verbal acumen, the assembled peons clapped politely, not knowing that just the day before, their son's fist had seen my teeth embedded in the knuckle, as his knee forced the wind out of my lungs, and my eyes bulged in fear.
High school was like Auschwitz - without the good-natured hijinks and laid-back atmosphere. It was a rollercoaster ride into the darkest recesses of total insanity - as the atmosphere of vicious savagery and crazed violence began to escalate, my brain literally swelling with hatred - a hatred that was thick and viscous by the end, warping my every thought as my mind focused on my only goal - escape. I became more and more deranged, spending my time drawing crazy, hideous cartoons and writing horrible stories of carnage and mayhem - before slithering back to my bedroom in Greensborough and staring blankly into the screen of my 386, my upper lip twitching spasmodically, as my oversized pupils swam atop a sea of thick, bloodshot webbings of arteries. My skin was pale and waxy, as my emotional sickness transferred itself to my body - which began to contort and crumple, like an empty coke can crushed beneath the Reeboks of a snotty-nosed, basketball-loving adolescent punk. My mind felt as though it was full of rats, which ran in all directions, chewing at the grey meat - gorging themselves as they consumed what little sanity remained. My eyes were half-lidded most of the time, as I stayed focus on my ultimate goal - univeristy. The promised land, where pretentious intellectuals, foppish 'artists', and other overeducated riff-raff could congregate and pretend that they weren't a bunch of dorks, trying to negate the fact that they couldn't get laid by wearing all black and smoking really shitty cigarettes. My dream.
And, eventually, the dream became a reality - I found myself in an arts course, surrounded by cagey fiends of all stripes of pretention - each one having been through 'hard times', that they 'didn't want to talk about'. They were all deep, they were all damaged, and they were all fucking annoying.
I was no fool. As a first year arts student, I realised quite early that it was my duty to stay as drunk as possible for as often as possible - and, largely in response to my years of hell at the hands of the public education system - I drank ceaselessly, and gobbled down fistsfulls of drugs, embarking on my own romantic death drip, as my painted nails and ebony eyeliner weaved and danced beneath the strobe lights of the shitty nightclubs that I was obsessed with wasting my time at. My marks plummeted, but my Doc Martens retained their glossy high-buff, as I chainsmoked my way into second year. And third. By the time Honours rolled around, I was behaving myself - substituting the life of a hardened degenerate for a more sedate mode of operation - The Arteest. Van Morrison's 'Astral Weeks' was my constant companion during these heady period, as I talked for hours with my drunken little friends. All good things must come to an end, though - and I fled uni with an honours degree in English. I was offered my master's shortly after - and I spent two years trapped in my house, writing a novel, cooking, cleaning, looking after my grandma, and getting to know my dog. And now - that's over. And here I am.
So, I'm sorry I haven't written. My brain's been bent out of shape. I've been put down, shut up, beaten up, beaten down, broken down, and messed up - I've gone crazy, gone sane, dropped out, worked like a maniac - and escaped with my head relatively unscrambled and my body in need of some panel beating, yet still reasonably functional. So, for the last week and a half or so - I've just tried to relax. It didn't work, admittedly - I started obsessing about my next move on the second day. I'm just so tired. It's been a long, long, long time spent working - and I just want to sleep for a year. But that's no good - I have to keep moving. And I am starting to work out where to go from here.
But that's probably a story for another time.