December 14, 2006
October 29, 2006
Friends.
I've not written anything here in a while. I got an email from Aimee over at Intergalactic Hussy - Hi, Aimee - but, I didn't know what to write about. I know I said I was going to, but I just haven't felt like it. Things have been extremely messy, as seems to be the norm around here, but things have also been very good around here. Depending on which day you ask me. Teaching is fun, my business is building slowly, and while my family disintegrates and re-integrates over and over again, stability seems nowhere in sight.
But, that's not what I particularly wanted to talk about. I was just thinking tonight about old friends that I don't see now. Or, at least, that I don't see very often.
It's probably my fault, too. After all, there are things called phones that I'm quite capable of picking up and using - but for some reason this year, I haven't been able to. But, that's not to say that I've not been thinking about people a lot. This year's been my big year of change and growth and all that good stuff. This was the year where I - a lowly caterpillar - disappeared into my cocoon, and emerged 12 months later as... a fatter caterpillar. But, a caterpillar with focus and direction. For some reason, to do that, I had to just be on my own for a while. With a few exceptions, like Ellen and Kathryn, I've not really spoken to or seen anyone since Feburary - I've just sort of been on my own, trying to figure stuff out, without anyone around to laugh at me, or make fun of me, or call me a fat, dorky loser, or any of that stuff. I had a lot of things to sort out in my head - hangovers from years and years of being a confused twentysomething. And, I think I've come a long way, and figured out a lot.
But, I haven't seen a lot of people. The hard part about that is that even though I've not done much phoning - neither has anybody else. And I think I've figured that out, too.
See, as I wandered through the total wilderness of my mid-twenties, everyone grew up around me, and I never really noticed. I figured that we'd all be young forever, and would be friends forever, and life would simply go on as it had in the past. But, that doesn't seem to have happened. I ranted and raved a while ago about people getting girlfriends and disappearing into picket fence-land, and it still kind of annoys me that everyone simultaneously up and got married - but maybe I sort of see why it happened. Everyone grew up and wanted normal lives - but I couldn't do that, for a hundred reasons, and when the dust had settled, everyone had changed. Except me.
There are people I used to know that now don't know me - or don't want to know me. And even though I get told to knock it off and not care, for some reason I still care about them. One old, estranged person I used to know in particular still flickers across my memories from time to time - and I wonder if he's doing well. Even though we parted ways bitterly, I can't help but hope that he's not in any trouble, and whenever I'm out and about, every time I see a pair of purple sunglasses, I wonder if that's him - and I wonder if he'd tell me to drop dead if I spoke to him.
Of course, I shouldn't give a fuck either way. As Kathryn once told me, people rarely stay friends forever. Doesn't work out that way.
Ellen makes a lot of sense. She has friends she doesn't see anymore, and doesn't get all bent out of shape about it. Ellen's a different case, though - she has an almost scary amount of strength.
Things are changing rapidly again - 2006 is almost over, and for the first time in longer than I can remember, I've built something lasting over the last 12 months. I have a career that is slowly beginning to inflate, and things are changing all around me - faster than I'd like. All the things I've spent time doing - all the study, and the nights spent alone drawing and writing - it's all starting to pay off, and the picture that explains what I've been doing, and why, is slipping more sharply into focus as each week passes.
But there are still ghosts hovering around. I feel like I'm living in the morning after a drinking binge. I was a lost soul from the moment I fled from the burning wreckage of my academic career at Deakin - and it's taken a lot of time to rebuild things from scratch. Maybe that's why I haven't blogged, or whatever you want to call the stuff I once wrote here. There comes a point in your life, from time to time, where you just have to hit the reset button. I didn't want to sit here and write about how much I hate Guy Sebastian, or how Roger Waters stole my soul, or how the earth should be destroyed. I had more important fish to fry. Working on my cartoons. Working on my writing. Building a business. Learning a whole new set of disciplines. For the first time, though, I didn't go through the whole process with my usual suspects around.
Maybe it's just the timing. The people I once knew are at the point where they need to build the lives they're going to be living for the next 20 years. They NEED steady partners and dinner parties, and bar-b-ques, and Friday nights in watching the giggle box. Station wagons and joint bank accounts and shepherd's pies, and Meeting The Parents. It probably doesn't work well for me to interrupt them with my chaotic verbiage and somewhat unorthodox lifestyle - I feel like I'm a hundred years old AND three years old at the moment, and it probably doesn't work well for me to be continually judged and condemned by people who Just Don't Get It.
No matter how much I may miss 'em.
March 25, 2004
A Brief History Of School, and an apology.
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.
March 04, 2004
I am slack. But not THAT slack. I am Righteously Slack.
I'm not really slack. It's 37 degrees here, which has melted me to the core. I haven't updated in the last few days because it is crunch time. My master's thesis and exegesis were green-lit for submission today - so the next week will be format, format, print, print, bind, bind, submit, collapse.
Sorry, to all three of my regular readers. I'll do some substantial stuff over the weekend. Promise.
February 28, 2004
Technology is against me.
I just wrote up a heap of stuff on Bowie. Then my brower crashed and I lost it all. I'll retype it tomorrow. For now, I shall go to bed and cry.
February 24, 2004
February 19, 2004
Was I cool before anyone even knew what cool was - or have I simply always been a sad, tragic figure?
WARNING: This is not an 'article', as such. I noticed something weird and something amusing tonight, and felt like writing about it. I promised myself that this wouldn't turn into those 'I had a glass of water today, isn't that fascinating?'-type pages, but I can't resist the opportunity to share this with whoever is listening. Regularly scheduled observations strangely revolving around music and film will resume tomorrow.
I came home from Puppy's place tonight, and found my mother in fits of riotous laughter. She was perched upon the couch in our back room, surrounded by wallets of photos, and was going through them, snorting and sputtering with unhinged comic fury at the sight of her dyed-blonde mullet, giant earrings, and tragically eighties clothes. Not being one to avoid a bit of 'Hah! You suck!', I sat down and began going through the photos with her, guffawing mightily at the ridiculous eighties clothes, the horrible hairstyles, and - in my father's case - the mere existance of hair. One thing we noticed, going through the pictures, was that since I was a young child - I am a complete and total moron.
Hey. Wait a second. That's not what I meant - leave my ego out of this.
In almost EVERY photo taken of me from the ages of one to fifteen, when I started avoiding cameras all together, I am doing something inane.
"There's a nice sheep standing in the field, David - go stand next to it and I'll take a photo."
What's my immediate response?
I pull some hideous face. I scrunch my eyes up, tilt my head back, and open my jaw as wide as it will go. Or maybe I'll make kissing faces at it. Or perhaps, I'll simply pose with one hand on my hip, and the other pointing at the heavens, as though I have just conquered the mighty beast through sheer force of my awesome physical strength.
I was a knucklehead - a genuine, one hundred percent freak of nature. And the best part about it is that I didn't need to put on eyeliner and start listening to Ministry to do it. THAT came much later.
A mutant child, yes - forged in some primordial place where the fundamental laws of human behaviour simply do not apply. If there was a camera around, my body would suddenly become jelly-like as I twisted and contorted myself into odd shapes, kicking my legs in the air and baring my teeth - which, by eight had grown to quite an imposing length in the incisor region.
The creepiest thing is that as I went through the photos and traced my wretched physical development from the glittering, porcelain perfection of the first few years, through to the slow disfigurement, and eventual development of an abberant structuring of my body, which seemed to cruelly mock the standard conventions of the physical form, I realised that I slowly turned into my grandfather - my grandfather at age 70. Very disturbing.
Yes, my spine began to slowly liberate itself from the established protocol of the upright, my cruel inability to play sports rendered me incapable of becoming the buff, diamond-cut machine that was to be my destiny - and I became dorky. So dorky that Anthony Michael Hall himself, even at the height of his Sixteen Candles dorkiness, would stare at, guffaw awkwardly, and prounce: "That is a DORK."
But not in the way you're thinking. A young turd like you probably thinks that I'm talking about double chins, pens clipped to the pockets of tartan shirts which are tucked into the far-too-high corduroy slacks. You couldn't be further from the truth. My mother paraded me in the choicest of garish 80's fashions - from the humble joys of the Hypercolour t-shirt, to the sleek cool of Fido Dido. My bubblegummers, complete with the logo from the first Batman movie, were wrapped comfortably around my young foot - as I snacked on a Bubble O'Bill, read 2000AD, and went home to watch Voltron.
No, I was dorky in a far cooler way. And, thanks to foresight on the part of my mother, I have photographic evidence which I'm going to share with you. So, I turn 8, and suddenly decide that The Beatles are The Greatest Thing Ever - in addition to being The Creepiest Thing Ever, leading to my first bout of overpriced psychotherapy, which is definately a story for another time. If ever.
I'm inundated with books on The Beatles, and copies of their albums, and tapes of their movies. The most excited I can ever remember being was walking into the Doncaster K-Mart at age 11, and finding a copy of 'Magical Mystery Tour', their horribly pretentious home movie (with a great soundtrack), and whining to my mother to buy it for me. She did, because as she stared into the sea-blue swirl of my young, wide eyes - and saw the thick, bowed lips which protruded from my face shivering and trembling - almost imperceptibly - in anticipation, she knew that there was simply no other alternative. Could she truly deny her son of his access to art? To some of the finest music of the modern era? To one of the most pretentious pieces of drivel ever to not be a 1990's David Lynch film?
Of course she couldn't. But all of this is beside the point. The point is that after spending a while obsessing over The Beatles, and pondering an alternative future in which John Lennon isn't assassinated, and records one last superlative album of brutal, confessional songwriting, I needed a new set of symphonic, overproduced pop music to chew on. Clearly, the music of the day wasn't going to fit the bill - The Proclaimers? Milli Vanilli? Bananarama? Fuck that shit. Even at 11, I could smell bullshit.
So, when you want to listen to The Beatles, but you're sick of listening to The Beatles - who do you listen to? That's right. The Electric Light Orchestra.
I imagine some of you turkeys are snickering down your sleeves right now, conjuring up images of aviator goggles, wide lapels, and bombasic prog-for-imbeciles music which has polluted the airwaves for nearly three decades. This is because you are ignorant scum - I shall now school you.
See - we SHOULDN'T pick on E.L.O. They wrote some of the finest pop music you'll ever hear. How can you not groove along with Sweet Talkin' Woman whenever you hear it in Safeway? You don't like Livin' Thing? What's the matter with you? You think Can't Get It Out Of My Head is sub-Pink Floyd wankery? Shows how much you know about how much of a bastard Roger Waters is.
I loved E.L.O. Of course, being a young, broke punk - I had no money to go otu and buy their albums. So, I did what all good suburban children did - I nicked it. Now, I'm man enough to admit that I broke one of the ten commandments of life as a young, urban intellectual - "Thou Shalt Not Covet Thy Parent's Records" - but when my mother whipped out her copy of 'The Best Of E.L.O", I just couldn't stop playing the damned thing. Those gooey, marshmallow harmonies, creamy slide guitar solos, and completely meaningless lyrics had me entranced. Sure, they weren't The Beatles - but they were as good as I was going to get. And, as the future would have it, they BECAME The Beatles, so I was pretty much on the money.
I'm going somewhere with this. Just hang in there.
So, I'm going through these photos, and tracing my slow development from a fresh faced, porcelain skinned cherub into a buck-toothed mutant who listens to 70's rock - and I stumbled upon a photo which both disturbed and amused me.
Will you fucking look at that? It's a birthday cake from my 12th birthday - and it has the bloody E.L.O logo on it. I really don't know what to say about this - but I'm going to try and figure out exactly what is going on here, because when I asked Mum about it, she basically pointed at me and screamed with laughter for ten minutes - then went outside to meditate.
I think I am responsible for this desecration of a traditional birthday gesture - I must have got it into my head to warp the idea of the birthday cake by injecting it with the nefarious cancer of my ceaceless dorkiness, recording the whole decadent display with a camera so that future generations - such as yourselves - may react with a mixture of stunned fear and horrified revulsion. An E.L.O cake. Holy shit.
The other explanation that I can offer is that I was cool. I was so cool, and so confident that my love of good 70's power-pop was so right and pure that I decided to express it through the medium of icing. I decided that I'd make a COMMITMENT to the cause of preserving the legacy of Mr. Jeff Lynne - and afterwards, I would EAT that commitment. Probably with a mug of warm milk, after tea, while watching 'Hey, Dad!'.
Both of these are probably correct. If anyone has any thoughts on the issue, email me at the usual address.