Metal City - Hai Ina Ia Mai Ana Ka Puana

The Winter Of Our No Content.

I love my laptop profoundly. If I were to take the time to sit and list ALL of the reasons why I love it, we'd all be old and grey by the time I'd made it halfway through the list. The reason that offers itself to me this evening, though, is the fact that I can lie here - in my lovely, warm bed, with my faithful dog sleeping on my feet, and I can write. Why, I can even listen to the soothing hits of Chris DeBurgh, if I so desire - and, let's face it, who DOESN'T desire a slice of de DeBurgh from time to time?

But, as Chris reminds us, one mustn't pay the ferryman until he gets us to the other side - and as the bitterly cold winter of my beloved Melbourne begins to melt away into the rainbow-painted chrome of the Spring months, I get the feeling that it is time to pay. Time to pay all of you, since I've kept quiet for a while - it's time I gave the old site a good, old-fashioned spray of random, midnight tomfoolery. Just like the good old days.

I'm immersed in teaching at the moment - going to classes like a good boy, with each one seeming to unlock a door in a new direction. Honestly, I can't believe I didn't do this from the beginning - I would have saved myself all the hassle of completely losing it last year. But, then again, perhaps that would have happened anyway - it seems that every few years, I need to have a paranoid meltdown so that I have an excuse to hide under the bed for a few months and blow all the bad shit out of my brain. Nevertheless, despite the dry, often dull nature of learning to be a good 'trainer and facilitator', the promise of adventures keeps me hanging on. The other day, I cornered my trainer during our break and demanded to know what was to become of me. She told me that because of my background, teaching work would be no problem - and there was an incredible array of possibilities open to me. She'd even act as a referee for me. What a lady.

I was chuffed, to say the least. This was the first time in years that I heard the sound of a door opening instead of the sound of one shutting when I asked somebody about my future. The endless hours spent pounding nails into the floorboards with my head seem to be coming to a close, as the pawns slowly move into place. I promised everyone around me that I knew what I was doing, and I just needed to be left alone to figure out my own direction, and to find out for myself where I needed to be - and because I was given that time, it is starting to happen. It's an amazing thing - I feel like there's hope for me, and that's something I haven't felt in literally years and years.

Because, with the combined forces of my Honours degree in English, my Master's degree in writing, my Cert IV in publishing, and my Cert IV - now - in teaching... I'm starting to unlock the doors to some fascinating places. Let me get you hip to what I'm talking about.

Right out of the gate, I'll be qualified to teach English and writing at any RTO in Australia. So, any TAFE, community college, youth home, adult education center, and so on, and so on. I went out with Ellen on the weekend, and we ended up at Yak Bar in Melbourne, with a friend of hers - Paulie. Nice guy - I like him. Anyway, we were sitting and drinking some refreshing lager, and the subject of Everyone's Future's came up. To bring you up to speed, Paulie is at Deakin - the old alma mater - doing... postgrad professional writing. He is a lost little chimp, going through the same crap as I did last year. He looked at me with sad, droopy eyes, and asked me what he should do when he finishes. He's considering doing another writing course. Naturally, I called him a no-balls knucklehead, and told him to get a grip. He asked me what I was doing, and I thought about it for a second. And, here's what I told him.

See, when I fled the noxious, pus-filled herpes sore that is contemporary academia, one of the things that made my stomach crimp with nausea was the fact that I had lost all faith in the entire university system. This was, after all, a system that I'd believed in for my entire adult life - it was something I'd put a lot of time in, and that I'd defended to the hilt. But, after postgrad, I knew something that was more than true - the teachers are, generally, a bunch of soulless poseurs, who are in it for the freebies and the holidays, rather than actually working with people. And, for the most part, the students are posing, preening, drunken knuckle-draggers, who honestly believe that Bukowski has talent, and who are obsessed with their own pretentious, worthless 'art'. The modern creative arts student honestly seems to believe that every single thing they do is worthy as an art-object - whether it is a badly-written poem scribbled down on a napkin in an inner-city vegan diner, or whether it is a digicam photo, in sepia, of their girlfriend's lactating nipple. It's all good, it's all real, it's all powerful, and it's all profound art.

Well, I call bullshit on that. I think it's a pose, a dodge, and I want no part of it.

And, so, perhaps I can find at least some of what I'm looking for in the notoriously dilapidated TAFE system. I like the idea that maybe some delinquent fuckup in a torn Misfits shirt will come to my class because he thought he'd give writing a shot - and that I'll be able to help him to produce something really worthwhile, and beautiful, and honest. And, maybe it'll do him - or her - some good. Maybe it'll do for them what it did for me. I know this sounds sickeningly idealistic - believe me, even writing this, I have the theme from 'Welcome Back, Kotter' playing in my head - but, there it is. I think that my time, energy, and effort would be better served being directed at some jerky screwball who fell through the cracks, than at some rich kid who read too much Milan Kundera as a teenager.

And, since I can work three days a week - and earn a very, very good wage, certainly enough to live on - it will leave me with four days to work on my own stuff. After all, how could I abandon the tales of Bronnie The Dog and her frog sidekick? And, indeed, how could I leave my first novel to collect dust in a drawer, when it is simply begging to be re-edited and submitted?

See, I tried RMIT last year - but that failed me, because I felt like I was running on the spot. But, now, I've been given a kick in the pants. If writing isn't simply a road to nowhere, then maybe writing isn't something worth abandoning. And - if that's true - then it is something that I have to learn to take far more seriously than I ever have. I never really got used to the idea that I could be any kind of writing professional - even though I was a very successful creative arts student. It always seemed like I was trying to take what should be nothing more than a hobby, and turn it into something that it simply couldn't be. Like I was trying to be a Professional Stamp Collector, or a Highly Paid Guy Who Walks His Dog. Writing, and drawing, always seemed too enjoyable - and seemed to come to me far too easily - for them to be considered 'work', using my father's definition. But now, being at NMIT has started to show me that perhaps all those years weren't completely worthless - and maybe I'm not the victim of a grotesque tactical miscalculation, but rather, I've been a victim of my own insecurity, stubbornness, and blind anger.

So, I'm gonna keep going the way I am for a while. I'm not sure, but I think I see a way out of the mess I've been living in - and, from what I can anticipate, it seems like I might be able to escape into something far more interesting, and exciting, than I could have possibly imagined. And, since I've worked for all this literary currency that I keep sloshing about my house, the time to cash in seems to be looming closer and closer.

Posted by David at August 16, 2005 01:52 AM | TrackBack