Metal City - Hai Ina Ia Mai Ana Ka Puana

Happy Day!

Today was a day of drawing happy things. Here's the two I like the most.

Some days...

... life is kinda like this.

Aca-dreamia.

... AND THEN THE BEAVERS CAME...

Day Of The Triffids

Concept art. Boo!

Abandoned Career Ideas.

Say what?

Chairman Of The Bored.

Fever dreams. I'm sick.

Other things.

Today.

I've not been feeling myself lately, because things have been weird here, with stuff and nonsense flying about in every conceiveable direction. Today, the weather was nice - with thick, soggy clouds hanging overhead, and raindrops falling - but only when they really wanted to. So, I sat outside and thought I'd draw for a bit.

I felt a bit sad, so I thought I'd draw something to cheer myself up. Here's a picture of me beating that dickhead from The Cure at a game of Virtua Fighter 4.

I felt much better after that. So, I thought I'd draw another one. Here's Fogerty beating Nick Cave at Tony Hawk 3. Even though Tony Hawk 3 is pretty old, Fogerty still likes it better than the last few that have come out.

That felt better. Then, I drew cartoon of how I look today - but that didn't make me feel so good. Oh well.

Big Day Pout.

So, I went to the Big Day Out. I'm not proud of myself - and you should not be proud of me - but I went, and that's that. Don't go thinking that my actions weren't unpunished, though - as a receipt for my purchase of some Pure Rock Fury, I endured sore feet, sunburn, blisters, dust in the eyes, deafness, and the feeling of my spinal column being slowly transformed into a tubular flesh sack, stuffed with broken glass and missing baby teeth. By the end of the day, I was a mess - jabbering pointlessly in my own mind, while becoming increasingly disturbed by the simple grunting sounds that seemed to be all my mouth was capable of producing. But, that wasn't the greatest pain of all. No, dear reader - the absolute acme of my skyrocketing torment came not via the utter destruction of my body - but by something far more sinister. More disturbing. A moment of realisation that will haunt me to the grave.

I am old. Yesterday, I officially turned Fucking Old. And I can't say I liked it.

Oh? Wipe that smirk off your face. Save your bullshit 'But you're ONLY TWENTY SEVEN' speech. I've heard it before. And, we both know that it's a bunch of shit - so knock it off. I'm sorry, boys and girls, but if you're over 25 - you're old. You're not a kid anymore. You have advanced beyond the JJJ listening demographic - and this aligns you with the colostomy bag and blanket-over-the-legs set. You're no longer represented by Michael Tunn and Miff Whateverhernameis. Your mouthpieces are Neil Mitchel and Stan Zemanek. You're old - you old fucking bastard. And it sucks.

It certainly sucked yesterday, as I cast my eye around the frolicking, devil-may-care inheritors of the Yoof Generation. As SMS's were wildly sent, and cans of Red Bull were gleefully consumed, The Kids truly embraced their Day Of Rock - shirtless young men cavorted at full arousal with firm-breasted jailbait in hotpants, while mirror-shaded females bumped elbows with overweight goth chicks, who tongued their lip piercings feverishly in the hot sun, yanking their AFI and NIN shirts out of their wetly folded bellies, while smiling knowingly at their knee-high leather boots, which only just managed to conceal a glimpse of fishnet, riding high upon grey, veiny thighs.

But, that wasn't all. Fauxhawks sat precariously upon bronzed skulls, glowing proudly in their blonde-tipped glory, while tattoos of chinese symbols adorned lower-back after lower-back. Every conceiveable body part was pierced somewhere on the grounds - organs both external and internal being forced to accomodate loops of silver and gold, while earlobes were stretched to comically exaggerated proportions by black plastic rings, the skin red and shiny. Bubbly blondes stood next to mopey brunettes, and mopey blondes stood next to bubbly brunettes, united by their Green Day shirts and genital-hugging hotpants, as their boyfriends Stevo and Wayne paid an entire month's worth of KFC earnings for a plastic cup full of beer each, which they tapped together in a show of rock and roll solidarity, their winning smiles sitting beneath their oversized sunglasses, shirts tied around their waists, as they chortled devilishly over the sex they were undoubtedly going to enjoy after dark.

And the lower denizens of the freak heirarchy showed their pierced and tattooed faces for their once-yearly trek out of St. Andrews, as wildly oversized plumes of thick, stinky dreadlocks exploded like phallic totems out of the backs of inked and shaven skulls. Beaded and plaitted ropes of tick-infested hair hung over the sweating, pimply shoulders of hemp-loving, VW Microbus driving, Ironically-Captioned-T-Shirt-Sporting advocates of the communal lifestyle, who rode the crest of acid that coursed through their veins, shooting up and down their arms and legs as it marinated their brains in a twisted ocean of colours and sounds, heightened by the cacophony of sound that erupted from the many stages. Eyeliner was thickly applied, encircling eyes that housed pupils that were either extremely dilated or extremely shrunken, floating like marbles in a fishtank over pierced and powdered noses. The ubiquitous Redder-Than-Red lipstick was painted over cracked and dry lips, and would undoubtedly leave telltale smears on the ripely-scented genitals of their dreadlocked partner - a partner that they knew they'd truly love, ever since spying each other at the Vegan Collective, while purchasing that month's mung beans.

And then, there was me. Broken, battered, smelly, ancient me. With my haggard hands - paper-like skin covering nets of blue and purple veins, wrapped around chalky, calcified bone. Pasty bulbs of blubber looped without dignity from my cracked and disjointed ribcage. My spine, long having left the inside of my body, exploded outward from my back, in a hair-lined festival of scratched, chipped bone, pus-filled, reddening flesh, and the occasional dribble of thick, syrupy spinal fluid. Eyes pale, hair awry, legs faltering, penis broken, and from my mouth - nothing but the smell of rotting organs, slowly transforming into sacks of purplish goo, combined with wordless squeaks and squawks - shapeless sounds having long since taken the place of words. I was a shambling, depraved parody of humanity - and on top of all this, it was hot. And I was thirsty.

I want you to cast your mind back ten years ago, and consider a time when I wasn't so bitter and twisted by self-parodying levels of 'Is He Serious'-esque hatred and snotty egocentricity. A time before university. Before 'writing'. Before anything. A time when I was nothing more than a little nobody - a worm writhing helplessly on the belly of the beast known as the Alternative Nation. These were trying days, friends. Kurt Cobain was now nothing more than a headless corpse, a few of his perfect teeth embedded in the wall of his Aberdeen greenhouse, surrounded by a Rorschach-esque splatter of blood, blone, brain, and hair. The Spice Girls were riding high on the charts, with their zippy brand of effervescent, ironic pop propelling a marketing machine modelled largely on the success of KISS. The alt-rock phenomena had come to a close, with the shuddering, heaving bowels of MTV finally managing to excrete a few final lumps of musical effluvia in the form of Angsty-Teen mainstays Nine Inch Nails and the Smashing Pumpkins - both of whom were enjoying mainstream success as they taught middle-class white kids the most important lesson of all - if you have nothing to be miserable about, make something up.

But, I wasn't part of any of it. Not for me, the joys of late-night JJJ sessions around the wireless, in a room covered in posters of Rage Against The Machine and The Crow. No, I was too busy beginning my secondary career as a truly obnoxious musical snob. I spent months practising my perfect 'Tch!' sound in the mirror, and listening to Led Zeppelin. Somewhere over the course of this period, someone took a look at one of the little stories I would write from time to time, and said 'These are pretty good. You should study english.' Of course, to my ears this was nothing but queer shit, and I was going to let nothing put me off my chosen career - that of an international mercenary and soldier of fortune.

My point, presumably bored reader, is that I felt a great amount of self-pity as I stared across the Big Day Out festival grounds. I wished that I was 17 again, and that I'd had that kind of lifestyle. I may have just spent the last few paragraphs taking the piss, and shamelessly making fun of the Yoof, but I can admit that it's only because of complete and total jealousy. There are moments, dear reader, where I think about how awful my time as a late-teen was, and how I knew literally nobody - I never went out anywhere, I had no friends, and I barely left the house. Of course, that all changed a few years later, after I met a sheep-haired A/V technician named Iain - but that's a story for another time.

Sitting with the unstoppably flamboyant KathyrnOh, I felt a sting of jealousy. Looking around at these young boys and girls - with their mobile phones and their band shirts, all hugging each other and pouring water over each other, and getting into typical teen hijinks, I became thoroughly depressed - and unnerved by the fact that as a crusty old coot, I even care. After all, we're talking about ten years ago. I don't really have an excuse. I know that it's sad and pathetic - but, who cares? I found myself lamenting the passing of a youth I never enjoyed. I just hope that these kids can look back fondly on 2006, after they begin their Business Administration degrees.

What? Oh, the music.

Sleater-Kinney were great. Edgy, chick rock - with the guitarist pulling out the leg kicks and other Jimmy Page-inspired tomfoolery. Not being the owner of a vagina, I am incapable of maximising my enjoyment of a band like this - but, dear reader, I assure you that I tried my best.

Henry Rollins was Henry Rollins - and Henry Rollins is great. Although there was a brief spike of idiocy as he explained to us that the Ramones can bring about world peace, I found his set oddly moving. With his clumsy elegance, Rollins speaks from the heart - to the mind. Unfortunately, the crowd were less than accomodating, and I wished that Rollins would jump down and start punching people in the face - but it wasn't to be.

The spirit of Nick Cave used the vessel of Tex Perkins to fill the RRR tent with bluesy, heroin-laced toasts to self-destructive hedonism and degenerate idolatry. The Beasts Of Bourbon are a great band - I'd never seen them live before, and I was amazed at how powerful they were. Their sound is incredibly muscular, and Tex Perkins fills the role of the front man with aplomb, providing a central image to the performance that maximises the sexuality and sense of theatrical danger that his sensually elastic body is capable of generating. He even made fun of the death of Michael Hutchence, which I was hugely appreciative of after spending the last few weeks revisitng the INXS back catalogue and coming to the conclusion that - with the exception of a few tracks - they were uniformly fucking shit. How Tex Perkins never became an intenational star, I'll never know. He is like Jim Morrison with testicles.

It was at this point that my spinal column was sending urgent messages to my brain, informing it that where bone and flesh once sat, there was nothing more than a jigsaw puzzle of shattered body parts, floating in a dirty, diseased sea of gelatine and broken glass. To add insult to injury, I was thirsty like the wolf - so, I sent my faithful Girl Friday KathrynOh to fill up my water bottle while she filled hers, so that I could collapse pathetically against a cyclone fence.

But, I was about to be blessed. For, as I stared up and through the clouds of pain, what did I see grinning down at me?

Why, could it have been Desci? Blogging uber-celebrity and reticent figurehead of the gothic lifestyle?

It absolutely was. And I felt a little bit ashamed of myself. After all, we are talking about a winner of "BEST BLOG EVAR!!1!" or some shit, and I had neither gold doubloons with which to pay homage to her, nor rose petals to sprinkle on the ground beneath her feet, as she observed the 'rock combos' with regal authority.

So, I called her a nerd for winning blog awards, and then KathrynOh returned, and they talked about something or other - by this point, I was barely conscious, and I was busy stocking up my mental and physical energies for the gruelling brutality that I was about to endure.

It was time to bid adieu to Australia's official 'bestest bloggar lolz', and it was time to come face to face with one James Jewel Osterberg - better known to posers like yourself as Iggy Pop.

For those of you who don't know about this most sinewy of rock icons, Iggy Pop and The Stooges are one of those bands that cunts like Thurston Moore really, really like. Their music is loud and primitive, a sort of proto-punk cacophony that sounds very, very good when you're wasted. In recent years, The Stooges have deposed The Velvet Underground as the ultimate in hipster masturbatory icons - and are now enjoying a resurgence as 'Band Most People Own The T-Shirt Of While Never Actually Hearing Any Of The Albums'. The Kids love The Stooges because they are told to, and The Adults love The Stooges because they were told to - years ago.

So it came to pass that the ampitheatre was packed to the gills with rabid, out-of-control Yoof, slavering madly and chomping at the bit to get a glimpse of the one man who can make all their Hip Credential dreams come true. And then, he was there - the man who would be Pop - dancing and shucking and jiving, howling like a reject from the island of Dr. Moreau - a composite beast, with lungs packed full of a catalogue of animal sounds that could be blended into new, terrifying sculptures. He danced. He swore. He did 'I Wanna Be Your Dog' twice. The girl behind me with the large breasts went apeshit, screaming like a maniacal banshee, and pressing her hot, sweaty body against me - causing my penis to rocket back into pathetic life. Fortunately, even at full arousal, I am so unimpressive that even as I ground my pelvis against the back of the guy in front of me, he noticed absolutely nothing. The blood was sucked out of my genitals, however, when the redhead announced that she'd just pissed herself, and I returend to my normal, near-invisible flaccid state.

The White Stripes appeared to play us some music to go home to - but it would only have been appropriate if 'home' was a place that involved by anally raped by a horse. The White Stripes are fucking horrible - a truly incompetent, pretentious joke of a band. Nice tits on the drummer - that much is a given - but from a musical standpoint, they are the sonic equivalent of an overweight drunk holding me down and moving his bowels into my ears after a night of beer and curry. By this point, my pelvis had torn itself free of my body, dashing away across the grass - and was last seen attempting to pick up a chick at the slurpee stand. My feet were nothing more than lacerated chunks of blood and raw meat, gore literally flowing over the lip of my Blundstones, leaving a snail-trail of crimson in my wake. The White Stripes droned on, their bassless drivel causing a latent anureyism in my brain to explode, and I fell to the ground, screaming as blood spewed out of my nostrils. I felt myself losing control of my bladder and bowels, and I howled in shame and agony - yet, still, the band wouldn't stop playing their horrible, horrible music.

And then, it was over. A gaggle of girls were pulled off a stand by security, and were dragged away screaming and clawing the earth. A young bogan ran a hand through his frosted hair, and yanked his wraparound shades from his face, sucking the last few drops of beer from the plastic cup, which he crushed and tossed over his shoulder. A vegan girl threw a heavy dread over her shoulder, her Clockwork Orange-inspired eye makeup having long since been rubbed away, and she took her boyfriend's hand in hers, squeezing the dirt on the skin between them, as he dropped the last few embers of their roach on the ground, grinding it beneath a filthy Converse one-star. A group of teenagers talked about how tired they were going to be when they returned to Box Hill North Secondary on Monday morning, and Mazzy texted Scotty, because the Mars Volta were fully sick.

In the distance, a single, solitary goth girl pulled her black backpack on, as her thick legs sweated inside their black lace stockings, and she fingered her lip piercing nervously, looking over her shoulder, and wondering if Jameo - that surfie looking boy who spent the day with Chrissie and Cindy - could ever see through her thick mascara and black lipstick, and could ever truly love her. She lit an Alpine and headed for the train station. This was a question that only her Livejournal could answer.

And I? I headed back to the Torana with KathrynOh. But, she looked different, somehow. Younger. Happier. A a woman riding on a wave of euphoria, who gushed and jabbered about the virtues of the Stooges, in a voice that made her sound like a teenager again. It was the effect I had desired, so badly, but I couldn't quite grasp. For KathrynOh, the day had energised and reconfirmed her love of live music, and of the spirit of Rawk that so infects us all. I felt it too - particularly when watching Tex Perkins - but, at the same time, there was a sense of melancholy there, as I watched the kids having their minds blown for the first time, and I wished that I could go back in time and be one of them.

But, for KathrynOh - the day had turned her into a teenage girl, effortlessly gushing and gleefully grinning through a sermon on the glory and majesty of Iggy and the Stooges. And it was a nice thing to listen to on the way home.

Goose Rider meets Chainsaw.

Goose Rider, from Marvel Tails #1, meeting Chainsaw. Chainsaw assures the Goose-Creature that he will soon meet his doom.

Photographs And Memories.

Tonight, Bronnie jumped up on the couch and put her head on her paws, looking up at me with her big, sad eyes.

"What are you doing?" she asked, as I pulled the quilt up a little further, covering my feet.

"Nothing." I said. But she knew I was lying.

"Come on, David. There's something wrong. I can always tell when there's something wrong. I sleep under your bed, for chrissake. You can't forge a tighter bond between man and hound."

"Well.. I don't know if I should tell you.. you might think I'm going a little crazy."

Bronnie smiled, twitching her ear softly.

"I already think you're crazy. You might as well tell me."

I shrugged, pointing at the mantlepiece.

"Look at that."

"Look at what?"

"The photo."

Bronnie squinted in the direction of my finger. In the distance, sitting proudly up on the mantlepiece above the fireplace, in our little house in Greensborough, was a photo. It was my mother, sat next to my grandmother, who peered groggily out of the frame.

"Do you see it? Look closely."

"It's a photo." Bronnie said, tilting her head slightly to the side.

"It's faded."

Bronnie rolled her eyes.

"Photos fade, David. There's nothing strange about that."

I rose and took the photo down, bringing it over to where we sat.

"Look closely. It's not just that it's faded. Can't you see?"

Bronnie peered at the picture, then her eyes grew wide.

"Only your grandma is faded." she said quietly. "I can barely see her."

"Exactly. Yet, Mum looks the same as always."

Bronnie gulped.

"It's got to be a freak. I'm sure that it is nothing to worry about. The photo must have been printed badly."

I shook my head.

"I don't think so. It's happening everywhere."

I stood and walked around the house, picking up a bunch of framed photographs. One from the kitchen, hanging on the wall. One from the stand in the hallways. All of them with Grandma.

Bronnie watched me closely as I sat down next to her, and laid the photos out in front of us.

"Look. See? It's the same everywhere."

And, sure enough, it was. A photo of my cousin and my grandma from her last Christmas - with her sad, lost face almost faded from view, leaving nothing on the print but a few wisps of colour, inside a white sihlouette. Our family, standing in their kitchen, were just as they were in 1985 - except for the familiar white sihlouette where my grandma once stood. And, sitting with my Mum in our back room, the same again - my mother's arm was draped around a white apparition, laced with flakes of colour where Grandma once sat.

"I don't know what to say." Bronnie breathed, shaking her head. "I've never seen anything like it."

"Neither have I."

We rose and wandered outside, sitting on the warm, wet grass of the back garden. I looked up, pointing.

"Look at the moon."

Bronnie looked, and smiled.

A beautiful, glistening crescent moon had risen gracefully into the sky over Greensborough, hanging in the cobalt blue background like a hooked jewel. And we sat there, with the flickering of our neighbours party lights behind us, staring quietly into the starless space.

"Grandma died two years ago - today." I said.

"Oh."

We didn't say anything for a while.

"I'm sorry." Bronnie finally muttered, pawing a stick.

"For what? You didn't kill her."

"I know. But, still. I'm sorry."

I shrugged.

"I've noticed it for a while. But, I didn't want to say anything. About the photos."

Bronnie nodded.

"After all," I continued, "I don't want to sound crazy. It's pretty weird, isn't it?"

"Sort of. I guess so."

I wrote about Grandma, on this very site last year, but that was a long time ago. A year is a lifetime, even though it will slip by in a snap of the fingers. Could it be two years already?

"Do you know what's strange about people dying?" I said, leaning back on my hands.

"What's that?"

"You think people only die the once. They don't. They die over and over and over again."

"How do you mean?"

I sighed.

"They die the first time. And then, as time passes, first their voice dies, then their body dies, then their face dies. In the end, it's like they were never born. There's nothing left of them. Just a white space in a photograph where they used to be."

Bronnie sniffled. "I never thought of it like that."

"I can't remember what she looked like with the same clarity. I think about it, and even though I knew her for years and years and years, it is harder and harder these days to conjure up a picture of her in my head. Memories are like icicles - and over time, the heat of your body simply melts them away."

A cloud bobbed gently through the sky, and Bronnie pointed at it.

"Look up there. What do you see in the clouds?" she asked, grinning.

I squinted, rubbing the lenses of my glasses with balled fists.

"I see a dragon. His jaws are open, and he's breathing fire."

Bronnie flinched. "I don't see that at all."

"Well, what do you see?"

"I see a devil, with horns and a fork. Can't you see him? Right there."

It's not that I didn't want to see it. I just couldn't. I saw my dragon, and that was that.

Bronnie shrugged. "It's funny how we can look at the same thing, but see totally different things, isn't it?"

"I guess it is."

We sat for a while.

"It's not fair, is it?" Bronnie exclaimed jarringly.

"What?"

"It's not fair that people leave the way they do. You put so much effort and energy into them, and they just up and vanish. One way or another."

She was right, of course.

"I suppose so, Bronnie. It's funny - I feel like this about a lot of people."

"You do?"

"Uh-huh. I used to have friends from uni that I was close to. They've all gone now, though. I think about them sometimes."

"Where did they go?"

I snorted. "Who knows? I think they just found me difficult to be around, eventually."

Bronnie rolled her eyes. "Surprise, surprise."

"Watch it." I growled, glaring at her. She giggled sheepishly.

"The point is - a lot of photos are fading. Of people I used to know. I can't say I like it very much. I miss people, sometimes."

Bronnie stood up, pawing a bug gently.

"Nothing stops pictures from fading, David. And nothing lasts forever - not friendships, nor relationships, nor people."

"I know that." I said, "I just don't think that it's fair."

"It isn't."

I reached over and began to scratch behind Bronnie's ears. She slumped downward and closed her eyes.

"Mmm. That's nice."

"I just wish there was a way I could fix it, Bronnie. I wish there was something I could do."

"Go and get a photo." Bronnie said dreamily, "Bring it out here."

"What for?"

"Just do it."

I shrugged, walking inside - up the steep, wooden steps, and beneath the decking, wrapped in blinking christmas lights. I returned with a photo of Grandma, faded and blotchy.

"Sit down." Bronnie said.

So, I sat down next to her, with the photo in my hands.

"Two years ago today, huh?"

I nodded.

"I can fix your photo for you."

"You can?" I said.

Bronnie nodded her head, reaching up and resting her chin on my knee.

She closed her eyes, and sighed deeply.

"Tell me about your Grandma."

I looked at her for a moment, opening my mouth to speak. But, I didn't know what to say.

And then, without even thinking, I did as I was told. I told her about what a funny, clever, passionate woman my Grandma was, and how sometimes - late at night - when nobody was around, I really missed her.

And as a beautiful crescent moon hung over Greensborough, in a cobalt sea of blue, we watched the photo being restored to colour.

Scared Single.

Here's another thing that's getting on my nerves lately. Predatory, lizard-lipped women seem to be swooping down left and right and are dragging my soldiers away to new, terrifying picket-fence lives.

Yeah, you know what I'm talking about. I'm talking about the Big R. Relationships.

People in relationships are always smug. There's a completely simple reason for this - and don't you go thinking it has anything to do with 'love' or 'contentment' or any hippie shit like that. The reason that people in relationships suddenly develop the world's broadest shit-eating grins is that when they're sitting in front of the wireless of an evening, and they start to feel that rumble in their trousers when an AAMI commercial plays, they don't have to scuttle away to their lairs like horny sea snakes. They simply have to turn to their significant other, grab their crotch, and yell 'How's about some of this, then?' Invariably, their needs will be serviced, and they won't have to waste time trying to get the damned internet to work properly in their pursuit of pornography - leaving them with plenty of latitude to finish watching T.V.

Smug wankers.

After all, every relationship in the world is phoney. We are not meant to like anyone as much as people profess to. Listen, I know a lot of people in 'relationships' at the moment - and the one thing none of them are willing to admit is that, deep down, they like a whole lot of other things a lot more than their partner. Like their T.V, for instance. Or the unopened bag of Twisties that's in the pantry. The difference is, you can't fuck either of these things.

My mother has been on this rap as of late. Every time I let my guard down and speak to her in a language that doesn't involve grunting, she starts in on me:

'So, when are YOU going to find a nice girl?'

'I don't want a nice girl.'

'Oh, come on. Yes, you do.'

'No, really. I don't. I hate girls.'

'You're not turning queer, are you?'

'No. I hate everybody. I hate you. Fuck off and leave me alone.'

'Aww. Isn't he cute? So, when are you going to meet a nice girl?'

Variations of this take place until I can stand it no more, and I roundhouse kick her in the face with knives strapped to my foot.

People refuse to believe that not being single is disgusting. They freak out and begin to urinate uncontrollably if you tell them that you'd rather eat mule shit than have to listen to someone yammering in your ear all day and all night about your 'feelings'. Jesus. Shut uuuuuuup. I have known the acid bath of the relationship - and every time, it becomes more and more obvious to me that I should dig a moat around my house and fill it with pirahna-infested diarrhea.

You know those movies from the 80's, where they took a bunch of kids from da ghetto, and they sent them to prison for a day so that a huge guy with a pack of cigarettes in his sleeve could yell at them until they cried? They were called 'Scared Straight', and they were designed to teach da yoof that prison is not cool, yo - no matter what Tupac thinks. I'm gonna produce a video along the same lines, and I'm gonna call it 'Scared Single'. Here's what it'll consist of:

The first scene will involve a broken, pasty-skinned shell of a man, lying in a double bed, weeping because he hasn't watched any decent T.V in twenty years. We'll pull the camera back to reveal his wife shouting at him about her feelings through a megaphone. Then, he'll pull out a revolver, and will shoot himself.

Next, there will be a time-lapse sequence of an awesome house being transformed into Girlfriendland. You will see, over a sped-up one year period, as the dirty calendars, inflatable dolls, rotting bits of pizza on the floor, and piled up slasher/porno flicks on top of the T.V are slowly replaced by attractive drapes, reupholstered couches, photos of inanely grinning family members, and copies of 'Beaches' and 'Steel Magnolias'. The final shot will be of the house exploding in slow motion, a'la 'Zabriskie Point', with the burning symbols of emasculation sailing through the air.

Next, there will be a montage of our 'partner', as he wanders the streets, looking at the things life is denying him. To the tune of 'Everybody Hurts', he will walk past the MCG - as a group of young animals drunkenly stumble past him, vomiting on his shoes. He'll walk sadly past a titty bar, and will wipe a tear from his eye. He'll look up at a theatre marquee showing 'BRUTAL DEATH MASSACRE WITH NUDITY PART VII', and will bump into a crew of gnarly men stumbling out drunkenly, who will vomit down his back.

Then, we will see him eating vegetarian food and drinking non-alcoholic wines, while his girlfriend tells him about how Mandy the new girl at work really doesn't look good with her hair that colour, and blah blah, I don't think much of that, blah blah. He will look out the window at his neighbour, who is in his underwear, flipping a pepper steak on the bar-b-que, while a pair of hot lesbians writhe in a pit of jelly. The neighbour will give him the thumbs up, and he will respond by staring past his wife's head, to the bottles of sleeping tablets that sit in front of the knife rack and the clown photos.

A soft-focus montage will follow, set to 'The Way We Were', as he looks back over his life. The shots will include:

1. His girlfriend yelling at him.

2. His girlfriend pointing at the toilet and yelling at him.

3. His girlfriend hitting him with a rolled up newspaper.

4. An elegant night-shot of him standing in front of a burning steel barrel, with tears running down his face, as his girlfriend throws his dirty books into the flames.

5. A time-lapse shot of his skin visibly aging and his hair turning grey and falling out as he spends every weekend being dragged around the shops.

6. His girlfriend yelling at him some more.

7. Him, sitting atop a craggy mountaintop, like the majestic creature of prey that he is - with the rain lashing his face, and a determined look on his brow - until his girlfriend passes a jar of pickles to him from out of frame and yells at him to open it. When he takes more than two nanoseconds, she hits him with a shovel.

8. His tears, pouring from his eyes, as he watches 'Ghost' again. They are both crying - but obviously for different reasons.

9. Him, crawling across the floor to the toilet and vomiting, after selling himself out for the sex that he thought he so desperately craved. When some puke splashes on the floor, his girlfriend throws a brick at him, which bounces off the back of his head.

10. A long shot of the two of them walking down the street, arm in arm. She runs off to press her face against the glass of a jewellery store, while he pauses - looking up. He is standing in front of a gunsmith's. He smiles to the camera, for the first time, and nods.

The final shot will be framed with monolithic simplicity, in the best Kubrickian mode, as we fill the frame with his crazed, penetrating eyes. We hear him being screamed at to come and listen to his girlfriend talk about her feelings, but instead, he places both barrels of a shotgun in his mouth, and pulls the trigger. Blood and brain splatter across the wall behind him. Cut to black.

I do this to help - rather than hinder - the happiness of people everywhere.

Dudes get all lame when they're going out with some broad. It's totally pathetic. How many times have you wanted to cut off some moron's head when he gushes about how he 'loves his girlfriend', and how 'she is so perfect for me'. Jesus, how lame. Do you see me saying shit like "I love my xbox so much. It is modded. It is so perfect. I love it."? Of course you don't. I have too much self-respect for such asinine behaviour.

Chicks get freaky when they find out that some dude is willing to sell-out his wiser principles for a slice of poontang, as well. They start referring to their 'Boyfriend' constantly. Holy shit. It drives me up the fucking wall. Ever had a conversation like this?

"So, I went out the other day, and I threw a brick through this dude's window, and -"

"My boyfriend says that the windows in my house are beautiful."

"Uh - yeah. So, anyway - I jumped inside and pulled out my butterfly knife, and -"

"My boyfriend says that I'm beautiful like a butterfly."

"Right. So, I scream out "Everybody get on the fucking floor, or I'll -"

"My boyfriend says that I floored him the first time we met."

"Yeah. Ahuh. So, this guy gave me attitude, so I punched him in the nuts, and -"

"My boyfriend says that his nuts are for me to play with - and nobody else. Tee hee!"

"I see."

And so on, and so on, and so on. It's like, when someone is in a relationship, they have a deep desire to remind you of that fact every fucking second. Every motherfucking thing they say has to revolve around their insignificant other, as though the fact that you've managed to slap your genitals against another living thing is something we should all give a shit about. Fuck you, and fuck your genitals. Nobody cares.

People think that couples are 'cute'.

'Oh, don't they look cute?'

No, they don't fucking look cute. They look doomed. I hate it when people start waxing romantic every time they see a pair of the walking dead shambling down the street, rubbing armpit sweat all over one another. I see a couple, and I don't think 'Aw, ain't that cute?'
I think 'Single file, you selfish cunts. Other people need to use the fucking footpath - and I'm a big fat fuck, so I need more space than usual. Out of the way.'

What these morons fail to realise is that single life is fucking awesome. Not for the world would I give up being single. I don't care that I don't get to thrust my deformed genitals against anything with a pulse - the multitude of other cool things I get to indulge in far outweighs the benefits of your so-called 'orgasm'. For instance, when I go to bed at night, I don't have to be in total silence - or, at best, listening to new-age relation music. I can crank up the stereo and kick out the jams, unconscious-style, to Blue Oyster Cult and Warrant. I can wander around in my semen-encrusted underpants, blowing my nose on my hands and wiping it on the furniture, and nobody's going to stop me. I can vomit on myself and go to bed without a shower with no complaints. I can drive like a moron on the freeway without some nagging voice going 'You're not impressing anyone, you know.'

Endless, endless pleasures - a dizzying cornucopia of sensual delights which overload the brain. And - best of all - they can all be done alone. Yeah, you heard me. Alone. Alone, with a copy of 'Razzle' and some pumping tunes.

So, for 2006, everyone just shut the fuck up about their 'relationships'. Nobody cares. Don't write about 'your boyfriend', don't talk to me about 'your girlfriend', and if at all possible - do the silly dance at the end of a rope. Nobody cares 'how well it's going'. Nobody cares about your pissy little 'anniversaries'. Nobody gives a wet shit about 'your first fight'. Dear god, nobody cares about your sex life. Basically, nobody cares about you - so shut up.

Fuck your relationships. Single life rules.

New Year's Grieve

Like a drunken farmer squeezing off a load of buckshot into the dying brain of a sick cow that he never particularly liked much anyway, 2005 was put out of its misery last night, with the screaming, afterbirth-encrusted foetus of 2006 emering from between the spread, blood-smeared thighs of Mother Time. Somehow, the little maggot managed to dodge my coathanger, broken bottle, and rubbing alcohol - and instead of the apocalyptic vortex of biblical fire that I have so been praying for, instead, 2006 saw a beery entry into our collective chronology, and I saw myself at the Tote - with the ever-lovely, ever-faithful, ever-dependable Jazzy Kath on one of the hottest days yet recorded - sweating and sweltering and swatting and swearing as I was enveloped in a crowd of nasally pierced, hard rocking freaks.

Because, after all, The Spazzys saw me through 2005 - as Van Halen was my soundtrack for complete and total mental collapse in 2004, The Spazzys chronicled my phoenix-like ascention out of the flames of my own ennui and self-loathing, as I soared across the skies of Greensborough, trailing fire and ice from my razor-sharp talons. Yes, in the post-banged up fender-era, The Spazzys were constantly to be heard wafting from the windows of the old Torana, as I lumbered painfully across the shattered-dreams wasteland of Melbourne, my prow pointed determinedly towards an uncertain future. Yet, despite all common sense suggesting that it is ludicrous for me - beautiful, cosmopolitan, educated, cultured me - to be listening to such trivial nonsense as The Spazzys, I couldn't help but submit to their passionate siren's song of Phil Spector-meets-The Ramones postmodern goodness.

Then again, that's not to say that I don't resent The Spazzys. I remember seeing them, so many years ago, at the Big Day Out - and in my deranged, sunstroke-addled haze of kaleidoscopic delusions, I managed to hobble beneath a table in the very salubrious beer garden at the Melbourne Showgrounds, and in a shaky hand, I wrote very simply on a sheet of notepaper:

I then folded said piece of paper up and hid it in my shoe for many, many months. The Spazzys are one of the finest bands that this loathsome, self-fellating city has ever produced, and 'Aloha! Go Bananas!' is undoubtedly one of the finest albums that this country has ever produced. That being said, I can't help but shake the feeling that the girls would probably be complete and utter bitches.

There's nothing wrong with that. After all, Roger Waters is a complete and total shithead, but that doesn't always detract from my admiration and love of the man.

Oh, fine. I'll come clean, and I'll tell you a story.

So, I ended up at a pub on Brunswick Street one night - I can't remember which one - and The Spazzys were hosting a night of Rawk Trivia. This sounded like the shit, so I scraped old Ellie Mae up off the floor, and bundled her into the Torana. I loved 'Aloha! Go Bananas!', but I was somewhat reticent to get quite as up close and personal with the girls as I was about to. After all, people in bands are almost universally human trash of the worst kind. Exceptions to this rule include Bruce Springsteen, Grace Slick, David Lee Roth, Bruce Dickinson, and that guy from Dokken. Everyone else sucks. And, the odds were certainly stacked against our Spazzy heroes. We entered the pub, waited for the night to begin, and - do you know what? Imagine my complete and total surprise when...

... they really hated me. See, the room was full of hip, swinging, rock and rolling kinds of Brunswick Street cats - who all have seen a member of the opposite sex naked in the last five years, and who all wear Ramones shirts, and who all thought 'The Proposition' was a good movie, instead of a steaming lump of self-indulgent shit. I was completely and totally out of my depth, socially, and my young charge Ellie Mae did as Ellie Mae does, which is to make a beeline for the bar and begin chugging as much red wine as the bar has stocked. The Spazzys, though, couldn't have been less impressed if I'd shown up, taken a dump on the floor, and proceeded to put a leash on it, taking it to the bar for a drink and a bowl of pork rinds. As I crashed about gracelessly in my capped workboots and smelly overcoat, strings of thick, cloudy saliva hanging in ropes from my blubbery, cracked lips, they looked at me as though I was nothing more than an overturned bucket of discarded genetic material, harvested from a sick, cancerous billy goat. The Spazzys wanted me to die with total and complete zest, even after I got an obscure question about P.J Soles' role in 'Rock And Roll High School' right - which I thought would earn me at least a few brownie points. When we won our round, our round simply ceased to come up in the official evening's records - making space for hairier things to come, in the form of bearded, deeply trendy boys in emo glasses, who held court with zippy quips and deft displays of their knowledge of popular culture, while I stood in the corner with a glass of flat coke and tried to look inconspicuous. And then, it was over - and I slinked away into the cold night air, carrying the wildly jabbering Ellen Mae, who blasted me with gusts of boozy breath, and rattled on about her 'sexual needs'.

As each year passes, I can feel it. Can't you? Just beneath the skin. A twinge. An itch. Something you can't scratch - but if you could, you'd scratch it until your fingernails were worn down to the stumps. Do you know what it is? It is your bones slowly calcifying as the days, and months, and years, and decades rack up, leaving their scars on your clock, and bloating your body with a disease - the disease of festering age. And last night, as I stood in front of the stage at the Tote, and I watched The Spazzys playing such a wonderful, potent set - above the din of the crowd, and the slashing guitar chords, and the traffic, and the fireworks, I could still hear it. I could hear the sound of my bones changing. Deep inside each bone, I could hear the crackling sound, as spiderwebs of hairline fissures exploded from the core, spreading their fingers outward, and clawing determinedly to the surface. As I looked around at the pulsating whirlpool of sweat-drenched bodies, I could feel each sliver of bone peeling away from the root, spearing into the soft honeycomb of flesh, causing pinprick rivulets of blood to blossom out into the liquid internals of my body. I could imagine my eyes filling with blood, as the band thrashed away madly - they would eventually explode outward, drenching the punters in front of my in a shower of blood, jelly, and shredded eye matter. I could almost taste the geyser of blood and stomach acid that would vault up my oesophagus, drenching the people in front of me, as the band played, waist-deep in an ever-rising ocean of blood, gore, and fragmented bone - courtesy of my slowly disintegrating body.

I don't want to meet The Spazzys. I don't want to know what they think of me, or how I may or may not repulse them. It is a difficult thing for a lad of my age to acknowledge his age - as I whirl around and around on the ball of my heel, screaming wordlessly with tears in my eyes, I see nothing but doors shutting where they once were opening, and so, I envy the youth and vitality of The Spazzys. The road in front of The Spazzys is one full of sunshine, and the endless expanse of tarmac that allows one to - as Jackson Browne once said - 'look out at the road rushin' beneath my wheels, I don't know how to tell you all just how crazy this life feels'. While I, on the other hand, leave nothing but an endless litter of twisted, rotting corpses in my wake, their flesh shredded by the beaks of the buzzards that swoop down, feasting on rotting, bloated entrails of the fallen and felled.

This year has been a fucking bastard of epic proportions. While not being as laced with insanity and mind-numbing loathing as 2004, it has been a year which sank down, down, downward, like a boulder chained to the feet of Jeff Buckley in deep water - and then, suddenly, at the last moment shot upward. 2005 was truly 'The Empire Strikes Back' of the 2004-2006 trilogy. It was a year that had no end, and it was a year that ended in a squirming nest of cliffhangers. It ended with my hand cut off, rescued by Lando Calrissian, after finding out that Darth Vader was my father, while drawing a lot of pictures of my dog.

I like The Spazzys so much because they're a great band - which is evident to anyone who has seen them play - but, I also like them because there's something unashamedly joyous about them. I am sick of listening to pasty-faced losers whining about how nobody likes them. If I want to hear that shit, I'll record myself talking at any given moment of my life. The Spazzys counteract the noxious bile that I generally like to gargle - both aurally and spiritually - and they do it while managing to sound like a cold winter's day in Melbourne.

So, The Spazzys hate me. That's okay. Roger Waters hates me, too. In this respect, they're in good company. But, I don't hate them - and that is the painful thing about fandom. At some point, the object of your fanlove will reveal themselves to be an autonomous creation, which - in all likelihood - will see you as nothing more than a snivelling sycophant, deserving only of the most fiery and savage death. Again, that's okay. They don't have to like me. From my perspective, I only have to like them - and, last night, I liked them a whole lot.

2005 is no more - the grey flecks of shredded brain matter are now attracting flies in the centre of the Rorschach-esque blood splatter that surrounds them, the farmer having long since swung his shotgun over his shoulder, and wandered drunkenly back to the dairy to see if that bottle of scotch he was given last year is still under the sink. The body won't be cremated - instead, it will rot in the blazing, abnormally potent sun of Melbourne, and the foul, gut-churning stench will permate 2006, just as 2004 did in its following year. But, it is a smell which I'm trying to clear.

So, onward - to 2006, and 'Return Of The Jedi'.

Happy New Year, boys and girls.

I Want To Cut Your Face Off.

Well, 2005 isn't even finished yet, but it has already become shatteringly clear that the revolution that we have all been so desperately praying for isn't even close to coming to fruition. It will be a bloody revolution - a revolution in which the war for the soul of western society will be waged in a savage face-off between the forces of good and evil, leading to a truly apocalyptic finale - the details of which I daren't reveal to you at this point.

But, with the year slowly limping to an anticlimactic grand finale, the one thing that becomes painfully apparent to me is that I am truly sick of the one salient constant in the physionomy of all western culture - I am sick and fucking tired of having to see - and hear about - good looking people.

This might sound petty - but, frankly, fuck you. Everywhere I look, I am taunted by sets of perfect, gleaming white teeth, winning smiles, firmly separated abs, enticingly auburn hair, well-defined cheekbones and eyes, and a seemingly endless parade of Frankenstein-esque body parts, which have been surgically altered to fit in with the airbrushed fantasies of the terminally adolescent twentysomething male.

I probably reveal nothing when I admit this to you, loyal reader - I am one ugly fucker. Nobody can ever accuse me of moistening the loins of the fairer sex - at least, not without Rohypnol and a super soaker. I am so hideous to the eye that when I drag my oozing, pustulent carcass out of my sweaty, dank hovel in the northern suburbs, women are heard to scream and drag their children indoors, while grown men - tattooed, bearded, and recently released from prison - fall to their knees, losing control of their bowels and vomiting over themselves in twitching spasms of fear and repulsion. I have rarely had an intimate experience with a woman that hasn't ended with her vomiting uncontrollably through the nearest window, and spending many, many hours in the shower, scrubbing at her skin with steel wool until she is a shredded, bleeding mess of ragged epidermis, hollering at the seemingly uninterested gods about how she will never be clean again.

But, listen up. I come not to seek your sympathy - nor your pity. I have found solace and wisdom in my physical decrepitude. Like Samson, I draw a seemingly endless supply of power and strength from every open, weeping sore and bulbous, misshapen bulb of veiny, glistening fat that hang from my carcass-like body. This power comes in the form of my sheer coolness, but also in the clarity that it provides.

Because, after all, good looking people are total a-holes. You know that, and I know that, and I'm fucking sick of people telling me off for pointing this out loudly in pubs. We're taught from a fairly early age that there is some strange connection to be drawn between having piercing blue eyes and a muscular, sculpted body - and being really cool. The truth is, people who don't look like deformed mutants are almost always boring, annoying turds. You would have to have the balls of a jackass to take a person seriously who has never known the sting of a coke bottle bouncing off the back of his misshapen head. The only people in life who are ever truly cool are laced with skin diseases, and have exposed bones of their spinal column bursting out of the skin of their hairy back. I can categorically state this as something that is irrefutably true. I go out, after all, from time to time. There are those in this life who take pity on the beast, and poke me with a stick until I slither into a car, leaving a shiny trail of thick, propulsive mucus in my wake, at which point, I end up on Brunswick Street, watching the people walking by and trying not to stare or vomit. And, I meet friends of friends of friends. But, the one thing that remains true is this - any of them who are lucky enough to resemble human rather than beast are always screamingly tedious, self-obsessed bastards. If you go through life with a winning smile, and a set of sexy pectoral muscles, doors are opened for you, and the entire planet engulfs your throbbing manhood, with lips covering teeth, staring up at your steely blue eyes with a look that asks sensuously: 'Am I doing it right?'

After all, I was always one hideous fucking bastard. Even as a young boy, before I began the process known in my family as 'The Diseased Chrysalis', I always had to watch other dudes getting by without having to do homework, without having to clean the chewing gum off the undersides of desks, and without having to suffer the punishing indignity of anal rape - simply because their teeth hadn't been stained by the vomit that spurted from their throats at the sight of a reflective surface, and because their bodies weren't jigsaw puzzles of ill-fitting flesh, muscle, and bone. I have documented the kaleidoscope of violence that my younger years saw on other parts of this site, but - I assure you - those who deemed it appropriate to chase me into my swamp, throwing rocks at my gills and white, scaly underbelly were almost always far better looking than I.

Of course, you don't even have to actually BE good looking to THINK that you're good looking - which means that you'll behave like a complete and utter cocksucker anyway. I'll give you an example of what I'm talking about. An old, estranged friend of mine genuinely thought that he was some hot shit - while, in actual fact, he looked like a smelly, beady-eyed weasel - yet, he would stand in the mirror and wax messianic on the subject of how awesome looking he was, and how Tha Chicks were desperate to drain a little love sap out of his throbbing pink sex truncheon. Then, he had the audacity to let me know that I was a fat, sad, sexless creature - borne of a unique fusion of mollusc, cripple, and aborted foetus.

But, he was wrong. For, I rise - like the phoenix - from the ashes of my own status as a shambling, diseased parody of humanity, and I am suddenly aware of one truism - I am cooler than everyone else in the world. I have achieved this level of coolness because of - not in spite of - my total and complete physical deformity. And, that's awesome.

I forsee a future - fuelled by the glorious reality of nuclear assault - in which humanity will have been reduced to an amorphous blob of pulsating flesh, with brains and eyes bobbing along the surface. We will all be a gestalt entity - a sloshing ocean of veiny, sweating flesh that fills the streets and roads and parks like a pink blanket, with the screams and protests of the former physical elites ringing hollow as we feel the soft sprinkle of fallout on what remains of our bodies. We'll be a single beast - molten skin with spine and brain visible beneath the surface of the skin. And, I will be the ruler. I will assert my place as the ultimate conquerer of the galaxy - with humankind having already sacrificed their bodies to me in homage.

There is something satisfying about the thought of violent disfigurement of the attractive and privelaged.

Anakin Skywalker - The Teenage Years.

One day, Anakin Skywalker was walking through the corridors of the Jedi Academy. The sun on Coruscant shone down brightly through the massive windows of the cylindrical building, and Anakin was mindful of his thoughts. He'd caught himself - just the other day - staring at another young boy in his form. The boy's smooth, brown skin and piercing blue eyes were things that Anakin could simply not force out of his mind, and the stirrings that he felt beneath his robes were a constant reminder of the dark destiny that awaited him.

He was thinking about the dreamy young man, imagining him whispering softly in his ear, caressing his broad, hairless chest - raking his fingernails across the smooth expanse of muscle, stopping only to tweak the nipple, drawing a gasp of breath -

- when, out of nowhere, a foot lashed out, tripping Anakin over. He crashed to the ground, skidding across the polished wooden floor, and skinning the palms of his hands. He immediately felt tears stinging his eyes, and he leapt to his feet.

'Who did that?' he demanded angrily, 'Who?'

A group of boys standing to the side shrugged, giggling all the while.

'Which one of you was it? It had to be one of you. Tell me!'

'It wasn't us, dude. You mustn't have been looking where you were going.' a swarthy young Padawan announced, snickering.

'Oh, yeah?'

'Yeah.'

Anakin looked at the ground. He sighed. Maybe they were right.

For the rest of the day, though, he felt troubled. As though everyone was looking at him. Master Yoda chortled to himself - which was something the old Jedi rarely did - but Anakin surely sensed it in the force. Every time he turned his back, he felt Master Yoda's mocking thoughts.

By lunch time, things were simply out of hand. Anakin wandered away to the Jedi Cafeteria to buy a cheese and vegemite roll, a carton of strawberry milk, and he planned to sit - as usual, on his own - and read some Sylvia Plath.

Just as he sat down and pushed his straw into the milk carton, he felt a boot on his back. He flew forward, his face landing next to the glad-wrapped roll which sat on the desk.

Anakin spun around, and saw a chuckling Padawan. He was big - not as big as the young boy from his dreams - but intimidating just the same. Anakin pointed at him angrily, wiping a tear away with his other hand.

'You have just made me very grumpy.' he said.

'I was just doing as I was told, Faggakin.' the boy laughed, picking up Anakin's roll and unwrapping it.

'Give me that!' Anakin snarled, feebly snatching at the roll - which was dangled just out of his reach. 'That's my lunch!'

The boy laughed, and booted the roll across the Jedi Cafeteria - as a hundred pairs of Padawan eyes locked on Anakin, who cringed in shame as their laughter began to swell.

'Why are you calling me Faggakin?' Anakin said gloomily.

'Because.' the boy replied, matter-of-factly. 'Because, you're a great big homo.'

Anakin gulped. Could the boy have been right? He thought back to the previous evening's restless sleep - how he had clutched at the sheets, imagining the feelings surging through him, as he was filled up again and again with the love of his fantasy man. How he had woken Obi-Wan, who ran into his room with worry, because he'd been moaning with such passion and fervor.

'Anyway, Faggakin. I was just trying to help. So, I kicked you.'

'I don't understand.' Anakin said, scrunching up his nose, 'Who told you to kick me?'

The Padawan laughed.

'YOU did.'

He reached over Anakin's shoulder, and peeled a 'Kick Me' sticker off his back, holding it in the air for all to see. The other Padawans burst into spontaneous applause, whooping and jeering wildly.

The boy picked up Anakin's milk, and - calmly - tipped the carton into Anakin's lap, causing an even louder frenzy of applause.

Anakin had simply had enough. He stood up, and picked up his book of Sylvia Plath, his lower lip quivering, tears running down his face.

And, as he walked away, he sensed something. In the force. He whirled around, and faced a thick, pink finger - pointed at his crotch.

'Look!' another young Padawan screamed, 'He's PISSED himself!'

Anakin looked down at the strawberry milk dripping from his crotch. He sighed, and began to brush it away.

'And now he's trying to JERK OFF!'

The force was strong in Anakin, and he closed his eyes - reaching out through the force. His pants slid slowly down, travelling towards his ankles, and sliding out from beneath his feet. They floated in the air in front of him, and he clenched his fist, using the force to wring the milk out onto the floor.

Anakin's eyes were closed, so he had no idea that just as he began to wring out his trousers, his fantasy Padawan - the erotic golem of his dreams - had entered the room with a comically-oversized loaf of french bread. He paused in front of Anakin, and grinned.

'I don't mean to be forward, dude.' the boy said, as Anakin was startled from his trance, the pants dropping from mid-air to the floor, 'But, I'm not sure Master Yoda would approve of pants-free eating. That is.. not the Jedi way.'

Anakin winced, feeling the cold winds of Coruscant whipping around his bare legs.

One day, he would be the most powerful Jedi of all. And they would pay for this indignity.

Merry Christmas, Mr. Plod.

It's just like Jesus Christ to listen to me slagging off His official holiday and respond by requesting the facistic services of The Man to teach me a lesson in biblical justice, courtesy of the Victoria Police. I was innocently driving to Jazzy Kath's place, for an evening of festive pornography, when I suddenly noticed the telltale red and blue lights flashing behind me. I pulled over, and a jackbooted thug shined a flashlight in my car, before tearing the door open, and yanking me out by the throat.

"Freeze, perp!" she screamed, pulling the hammer back on her sidearm and grinning darkly.

I gulped and threw my hands in the air, a tear already beginning to form in the corner of my eye.

"Good evening, officer." I said quietly, "What can I do for you this evening?"

"We're asking the questions here, fatbody." the cop shouted, pulling my head back with a fistful of hair, while her partner swaggered over to where we stood. She punched me in the back of the head, and I heard the two of them laughing.

"Put your FUCKING hands on the roof of the car and spread your fat fucking legs, perpetrator."

I did as I was told, my cheek pressed against the hot steel of the Torana.

"Is something wrong, officer?" I bleated, "I don't think I was speeding, and I -"

My words were cut off as I felt the nightstick being plowed into my kidneys. I fell to my knees, and began to vomit in the gutter, the laughter ringing in my ears.

"Get up, you fat bag of shit." the cop managed to spit out through his laughter, "Get up and face justice."

I was weak. So weak. I wanted to cry - I wanted to call out and tell the world that I was a victim of brutal justice, but I had little time to think about it, as I felt the two cops hauling me to my feet, and slamming me against the side of the car.

"Got something to say now, perp? Got something to say, you fuckin' piece of shit? Give me your fuckin' licence, fat boy."

"It's in my wallet, Sir."

"I don't care where the fuck it is. Just get it."

I reached into the torn, wet fabric of my corduroy pants and began to slip my wallet out - and that's when I felt the cold steel pressed against the back of my neck, and the telltale signs of a hammer being drawn.

"That's the kinda place a fat bloke - a clever fat bloke - could hide a weapon. You got a weapon there, fuckface?"

"No, sir. You just asked me for my licence, and I -"

The butt of the pistol slammed into the back of my head, and I felt a warm trickle of blood coursing down my neck. I howled, falling to the ground.

"Give me your FUCKIN' wallet, you fat sack of donkey shit. Or, I swear by Jesus fuckin' Christ himself, I will blow you so full of fucking holes that it'll take until NEXT Christmas to put the pieces of your fat fuckin' face back together so your ugly mother can look at you before they throw you into your fuckin' grave."

He paused, aiming the gun at me, and drawing a bead on my forehead.

"Now." he said, a thin rope of saliva hanging from his lower lip, his eyes wide and crazed, "Give me... your FUCKING LICENCE."

I reached down and plucked the card from my wallet, and the woman officer snatched it from my hands.

"You still live at this address?"

I nodded.

"Who with?"

"My parents."

They both exploded into laughter.

"Your PARENTS?" the male cop shouted, "You some kinda fuckin' MUMMY'S boy? Huh? Is that what you are?"

"No, sir. It's just that I was at uni for a long time, and I -"

"UNI boy." the woman cried, kicking me savagely in the ribs, "You think you're fuckin' smart? Is that what you think?"

I held up my hands, shaking my head.

"No, ma'am. No, I -"

"You think you're smarter than us, fat boy? Is that what you fuckin' think?"

"No!"

The male cop began to squeeze his crotch, bucking his hips towards me .

"You think you're smart, doncha. You fuckin' piece of shit. You think you're fuckin' smarter than this?" he spat savagely, clutching his obviously aroused crotch.

"No, sir. No, I -"

I was stammering, my eyes locked on the bulge in his pants in fear, as he wiped the drool away from his lips, and the female cop leaned against the bonnet of the Torana, her breath ragged, coming in heavy sheets.

"Do it!" she hissed, "Let's do it. Right now. There's nobody around..."

The cop nodded.

"Get on your fuckin' feet, fat boy. We've got a real sweet Christmas treat for you. You're gonna like it."

"Oh, he's gonna like it." the female chimed in. "Oh, let me watch. Let me watch this time.."

The cop swung around and caught her on the chin with a balled fist.

"YOU shut the fuck up. We do this my way. My way. Go and open the back of the van."

He looked at me, and grinned, loosening his belt with one hand, the other keeping the handgun pointed firmly at my head - shaking imperceptibly with anticipation.

"You're gonna like this, fat boy. Oh, you're gonna love it. You're gonna have a nice Christmas story to tell your Mummy when we let you go. Oh, I bet you can't wait..."

I heard the sound of the van doors being opened, and the crunch of the woman's heavy jackboots on the ground. She pointed her pistol at me.

"Get up!" she screeched, "Get up RIGHT NOW, you fat fuck."

"You heard the lady." the cop chortled, rubbing his crotch, "You'd better do what she says, or we'll blow your fucking brains across the door of your piece of shit car."

"And he's got brains, boss. He's a uni boy."

The cop chuckled, and leaned into my face, so close that I could smell the whiskey and dramamine on his breath, and could feel the droplets of spittle flecking my face as he spoke in a low, husky whisper:

"You're a uni boy, aincha? Oh, we're gonna be good friends before the night is over. You hear me? We're gonna be the best of friends. You're gonna like me, fat boy. You'll do just as I say. And you'll love every minute of it. If you don't, I've got something waiting for you. I'll wipe that fucking smirk off your fat face, and I'll plant it on the wall behind you. Don't think I won't. Don't think I -"

A car roared past us, as I felt the vomit in the back of my mouth. The woman cop raced over to us.

"Did you see that? Did you see that shit?"

"What?"

"That guy just flicked a cigarette out the window."

The cop looked at me. Then at the car that had stopped at a train crossing.

He let me go, and I sank to the floor.

"Let's roll." he muttered quietly, returning to the van and sliding into the driver's seat.

The female cop walked over to me.

"Now, David. We saw you travelling without a seat belt. Do you have a reason for that?"

Ashen faced, I shook my head wordlessly.

"This is for your safety, I'm afraid. You're going to be issued with a $140 fine. If you want to contest it, the details are on the back of the ticket - fill them out, and a summons will be arranged."

She dropped a ticket, which fluttered through the air, and landed in my lap.

Winking, she holstered her pistol.

"And, have a merry Christmas."

I sat, slumped against the Torana - and I wept. I don't know how long it was, but as I sat there, I realised just how annoying it is to be ticketed for what is - essentially - a victimless crime. There are people speeding, and driving drunkenly, and being yahoos out on the roads - yet I get a $140 fine and three demerits because I forgot my seatbelt.

And at Christmas too.

Merry Christmas, everyone.

Christmas is a pile of fucking bullshit.

The noxious stench of the twin evils of modern life - consumerism and religion - are never far away at this time of the year, causing my tongue to clack in my mouth, twisting uncomfortably as it is tickled by lashings of glutinous vomit that piston up and down my oesophagus during the season of giving. To anyone who has ever had a single sentient thought in their head, Christmas is nothing more than a deviant annoyance, geared towards the celebration of sadomasochistic imagery, via the medium of grotesque, obscene consumer gluttony. Every time I see a Christmas tree, I literally have to stop and force myself to fight the urge to light it on fire, and dance around it naked, while carving satanic logos into my naked flesh with some kind of rusty farming implement.

If we're to believe the official story, several thousand years ago, some cunt got born in a stable. Big deal. Happens all the time in south Gippsland. There was a star or something overhead, and that meant that he was the son of god. His tart of a mother got shagged by a ghost, and her moron husband bought it when she told him that she was still a virgin. Then he grew up, and became - basically - Charles Manson. He told everyone that he was the son of God, grew a beard, and probably spent a lot of time with the Beach Boys. Then, a bunch of dudes got sick of this nonsense, and they whacked him. Because of this, I have to spend heaps of money buying people shit they don't fucking want or need.

Christmas stinks like yesterday's sloppy diahhrea. People sing those lame songs all the time, and wander around the shops with these stupid, shit-eating grins on their empty, pale faces, shoving things into trolleys and racking up credit card debt. During Christmas, I listen to nothing but satanic doom metal. I spent last night listening to Mercyful Fate, and swearing my allegiance to the dark lord, because at the end of the day, his music rocks far harder. 'Welcome, Princess Of Hell' shreds like a motherfucker, while 'Silent Night' is for pussies. Only total losers would rather listen to 'Away In A Manger' than 'Sabbath Bloody Sabbath'.

You know what else sucks about Christmas? Christmas humour. I bet, as we speak, there are about a million people with 'humorous websites' who are writing bullshit about 'Santa breaking and entering', or some bullshit like that. Fuck off, you bastards. There's nothing funny about Christmas, except for the amusing sight of people choking on the sarin gas you've just released into a packed shopping mall. People are so fucking stupid. Last night, they had a Christmas special of some music game show on channel two, where a bunch of incredibly unfunny Australian comedians answered hilarious questions about Christmas music. It was about as funny as pissing in my own face. The worst part is that Rove was on it, and he is just as much of a cunt on the ABC as he is on commercial TV. His wife was on it as well, for some fucking reason - for god's sake, will someone just kill her? She looks like she's on her last legs as it is. Surely the Christian thing to do would be to put her out of her misery by bursting a paper bag behind her head, and giving her weak, emaciated heart a quick coronary.

It was really depressing, and really annoying. Australian comedians are for shit. That fat fuck Dave O'Neil showed up, and I started kicking myself for not telling him what a no-talent shitbag he was, back when I used to call him up on RRR in 1994. There was some other slag there called "Miff" or some shit, who is obviously down-diggity with tha yoof, but she was about as funny as cancer of the arsehole, and I vomited on the floor after each of her 'jokes'.

For some reason, Australian comedy involves saying something really moronic and trite, and then having a bunch of other people laugh at it as though someone just blasted them in the face with a hoover full of nitrous oxide. And, it all seems to revolve around what a prick Howard is, how superior and condescending being 'left' allows you to be, and how all Australians are basically fucking stupid. I saw 'The Glass House' a few weeks ago - god, it was a pile of shit. I just wanted to throw my television through the fucking window. That Wil Anderson guy may be the most talentless bastard I have ever seen. Fuck me, what a smarmy cunt he is. I'd like to rip his fucking spine out. And, just to make life even more disgusting, that hag Corinne Grant was there, alongside professional shitkicker Dave Hughes. Talk about your trifecta of evil. Who the fuck decided that these people were talented and funny? Who? Corinne Grant is like a giggling salamander with the brain stem removed, and Dave Hughes is like some kind of SuperBogan, made from the bits of dead bogans.

What was I saying? Oh, right.

Christmas movies are for fucking douchebags, too. What kind of complete arsehole can actually sit through "Miracle On 34th Street"? The only miracle I can imagine would be if 34th Street was nuked from orbit. Anyone remember that 'Santa Claus' movie with Dudley Moore? Jesus, what a pile of steaming shit that was. Then, there's all those artsy Hollywood Christmas movies, like 'Prancer'. If I watch a movie called 'Prancer', it had better open with one guy cleaning some other guy's swimming pool, and end with the two of them licking each other's faces clean. You know. If I was going to watch a movie called 'Prancer'. Which I wouldn't.

The only Christmas movie I can stand is 'Silent Night, Deadly Night' because it involves heaps of people being brutally killed. This kid watches a guy in a Santa Claus suit rape and kill his parents, and then he grows up in an orphanage, where the nuns give him a sound beating on a regular basis. He grows up and works in a toy store, and they make him be Santa Claus that year, and he totally wigs out, grabs an axe, and starts hacking people to pieces. It has heaps of naked chicks getting their tits out, and lots of people being killed. Good. That's what I want to see.

Oh, there's also 'Black Christmas'. That's about what happens when you make dirty phone calls to Margot Kidder, then start killing her friends with a plastic bag. Har! Oh, and it has Olivia Hussey - but she keeps the funbags in her shirt this time, so it doesn't really reach full and complete artistic maturation.

Christmas seriously blows. I hate the whole concept of Santa Claus. What a lame fucking idea. It's just such fucking pussy shit. If real men were designing the holiday, do you know who the kiddies would be drawing pictures of?

Ronnie James Dio. That would be awesome. Kids could leave out a bottle of Jack Daniels and a whore for him, and he could just walk into their room, scream in their faces, and leave in his limo. Dio rules.

Oh, or maybe this would work:

King Diamond is the fucking man. Christmas should be about him. Think about this, you arseholes, have you ever seen Jesus OR Santa with fucking FIRE shooting out of their hands? I bet to fuck you haven't. That's because they're both little girls. Fuck that shit. Gimme the King! King Diamond knows the power of awesome doom metal, and that's cool. There's not even a mention of doom metal in the bible - I did a search on the internet. No mentions of 'King Diamond' or 'Metal City' either. Luke 23:54, however:

"It was Preparation Day, and the Sabbath was about to begin."

Awesome! Dio was in Sabbath! And Sabbath rocks like a whore.

The other awesome thing about the King would be that he hates Christianity, because he serves only the one true ruler - the dark lord Satan. Cool! Satan rules, and so does King Diamond. It's like, kiddies could leave bloodstained rags out for King Diamond, and he could visit them on Christmas night and.. well.. kill them. It would be totally fucking sweet.

The other thing that sucks dick about Christmas is that you have to see your fucking family. I hate my family on the grounds that they are a bunch of polesmokers, and I care not one whit for spending a single second in their company, unless it involves me shovelling dirt onto their coffins while laughing. Fuck them, the bastards. And, to make shit worse, this year they're coming here. Fuck! I begged and pleaded with my father to tell his inbred family to go back to Shitsville, but he laughed at me and told me that since his loser son lives at home still, he has no right to be dictating the nature of the seasonal festivities, so I kicked him right in his fucking ballbag. But, he still wouldn't change his mind.

I hate my fucking family so much that I still haven't decided whether to use a hatchet or a speargun to kill them one by one upon arrival. Do you know what it's like being related to the world's most filthy human trash? Let me tell you something, it isn't fucking pretty. They are gibbering, drooling white trash, and they hate me because I've never raped a family member. They don't understand me because I read books and other elitist things, while they are still trying to master the art of taking a shit in the back garden without tracking mud inside their hut. God, they are depressing. Toothless, hee-hawing motherfuckers. They call me 'Uni Boy' because I went to Uni. See? Get it? That's pretty funny. Nearly as funny as the piss I took on the salad, you fucking bastards.

So, I hope you have a shitty Christmas, just like me. They say that this is the season of giving - I want to give everyone the experience of being a miserable bastard. I bet on Christmas morning, I'll wake up, and I'll unwrap my present, and it'll be an empty box. Then, my Dad will go 'Oh, I forgot to put your present in.' and he'll take it to the toilet. He's a bastard that way. Still, he'll enjoy the jar of vomit and mucus that I've made for him.

Christmas blows the donkey's festering mansword. I can't fucking wait for it to be over.

Friday The Geekteenth.

I've been up to no good.

http://www.metalcity.org/friday/friday.html

Be amazed. Be excited.

Don't Fear The Reaper, Much.

So, I hate. A lot. And, after all, why not? As 2005 slowly vomits up the first staggering moments of 2006, the world seems to be more depressing and irritating with each ticking second of the clock. As a forthright, university educated intellectual, it is difficult not to wake up of a morning, gently ease onesself into blossoming consciousness, and suddenly be struck with the terrible realisation that 99.9% of the population should just be fucking killed. At night, I kneel before my bed in my flimsy, silken nightgown, and I pray for total nuclear armageddon, because I know in my heart that although I'd be incinerated in less time than it takes me to have one off the wrist, I'd be taking a lot of total and complete a-holes with me on the big black choo-choo train to hell.

Unfortunately for us (read: me), total and complete annihiliation of the human race isn't possible - especially without access to large scale weaponry. Hans Blix came to my house last night and stated, categorically, that my parents house poses no clear and present threat to anyone but our neighbours and our postman, so the only viable option is to get cracking, and do the job one person at a time.

But, where to start? After all, there are so many who deserve to feel their flesh being ripped from their faces as I blow the smoke from both barrels of my shotgun - but if I'm going to take a chance on incarceration, or worse, becoming somebody's boyfriend, it had better be for a goldurned good reason.

I know you feel the same, so - with a view to making 2006 the best it can be - here's a brief list of people who should simply fucking die. Using a special scale that I've devised, I will rate each one according to the probability of their death, allowing you to make informed decisions as you load up the stolen Datsun, and head towards the Gulf of Carpenteria, with thoughts of illegally-imported firearms dancing in your sexy little minds.

Rove McManus

Okay, Rove. Now, even channel 10 has acknowledged that you're a no-talent moron, who seems totally oblivious to the fact that everyone in the civilized world knows that you steal every segment of your crummy show from Dave Letterman. Your wife looks like she really DID cark it, and every time you step out in public, it's like 'Weekend At Bernies', only at the end of the night, you bang the corpse.

Likelihood: 2 out of 5.

Doesn't smoke. Doesn't drink. Doesn't do drugs. Probably gets to bed by 10pm every night. Our only hope is an out-of-control driver bisecting him with a speeding Cortina. Failing this, he has generated enough hatred in the wider community for someone crazier than me to take an axe to his grinning, vapid cranium.

The Bali Nine

Oops. Sorry, guys - you snooze, you lose. You should have strapped something else to your bodies - perhaps some kind of plastic explosive. I hear that's very popular in the region.

Likelihood: 5 out of 5.

Tick tock, tick tock.

Big Kev

Guess he got a little bit TOO excited.

Likelihood: Dead.

Your stuff never fucking worked, anyway.

U2

You bastards. You were never any fucking good. Your music attracts only the most utterly worthless members of humanity. Yesterday, because I'm better than everyone in the world, I went to buy my tickets for the Aunty Jack Show, and I had to fight through a line of slavering, mouthbreathing U2 fans. They were all desperate to bathe in the glory and majesty of Bono. Fuck Bono. The man is such a cunt that I almost can't believe it. He wears stupid glasses, prattles mindlessly about the worst kind of pseudo-leftie nonsense, and his music is utter shit, excreted from the bowels of the sonically bereft. Just because you worked with Eno, it don't make you good. Fuck you, and fuck your fucking fans. Go back to Ireland and get blown up, you piece of shit.

Likelihood: 1 out of 5.

Not a chance. He's probably had himself cloned so that when Bono #1 dies, his brain can be implanted in his new body, so that he can terrorize future generations with his vapid, middle-of-the-road shit. Oh, and anyone who calls themselves 'The Edge' is just begging to be shat on. The only thing that guy is on the edge of is Sissy Cliff.

Anyone Who Says Mean Things About Other People's Dogs

Aunty Kathy's coming for you, bitch.

Likelihood: 5 out of 5.

Not gonna be pretty.

Anyone 'Creative'

God, you make me sick. Your stories, your poetry, your 'novels in progress', your short films, and your abstract artwork can all go and get fucked. You have no idea how sick I am of listening to the mindless ravings of 'creative people'. For fuck's sake. You know who I'm talking about, too. I'm talking about those utter arseholes that you see flocking around Brunswick Street and Smith Street, with their fucking pinstripe pants, and their fucking vests, and their fucking ruffled shirts, and their fucking copies of 'Henry Miller's Guide To Batting Off On Your Missus'. Every time I end up there for a bevvie, I find myself surrounded by 10 guys all called Stuart who want to talk about Proust and modernism and Leonard Cohen. Fucking bastards. Just once - just once I'd like to be out in public at one of those places, and I'd like to see someone telling dirty jokes about blowjobs, while wearing a blue singlet and tipping beer over the guy next to them. I'd like to go somewhere and hear a rock band consisting of drunken losers from the suburbs singing about the places they like to empty their balls, instead of the fucking Viennese mandolin trip-hop that I have to put up with every time I want a fucking Melbourne Bitter. And if they LIVE in the inner city, they can get DOUBLY fucked - if you live in the inner city, you are a pervert and an arsehole by definition, and you have already developed an attitude which suggests that just because you sleep in your own piss and shit in a dirty, sweaty shitbox on Gertrude Street, you are somehow more Street and Real than my Dad, who sleeps in his underwear in a weatherboard house in fucking Greensborough. Fuck you, you cunts.

Likelihood: 5 out of 5.

If the drugs don't get them, the influx of hooligans to Brunswick Street will.

Harry Potter

Is there anyone in the world who isn't sick of this fucking shit yet?
Oh, I know. The moving tale of a humble schoolteacher who conquered the literary world with her lyrical tales of a young wizard, and his cheeky monkeyshines is something we heard about roughly every 3 minutes back in 2003, but surely the world has grown up by now, and we know that J.K Rowling is a no-talent hag with a big schnozzola, who writes derivative, hackneyed nonsense? She wouldn't irritate me so much if I didn't have to hear about her and her 'journey' every time I turn on the fucking wireless. Hopefully, her journey will end in 2006 at the most appropriate point of all - beneath the freshly turned dirt of her grave.

Likelihood: 1 out of 5.

It won't happen, but her next book should be 'Harry Potter And The Rotting Corpse Of J.K Rowling'.

Nu-Metal

Look at me! I'm scary! I sing in a sissy death metal voice about how I'm gonna rip that bitches heart out and take a bite from her shit-encrusted ventricles! I jump around and pull intense faces, and sometimes, I sing in a gentle, soft whisper about the pain I feel within.

Shut up, shut up, shut up, shut up, SHUT UP. Take all of them - Slipknot, AFI, Limp Bizkit, Linkin Cunting Park, and anyone else you care to name. They are about as metal as my grandfather. I remember a time when rock bands understood the simple truth that nobody gives a fuck what they have to say, unless they're talking about the pearl necklace they gave to some skanky groupie last night, or about how their rock is the most rocking of all. Somewhere along the line, rock bands decided that they ALL need to be Nick fucking Cave, and need to blather at length about how back in 1987 their Nintendo broke and that's why they can never truly love a woman. Fuck off and die.

Likelihood: 5 out of 5.

Oh, come on. You know it had to happen sooner or later.

Bloggers

"Today, you won't believe it, but Crag SMS'ed me from Poly and told me that he'd been thinking about me. I didn't know what to say, but I SMS'ed him back and told him that I'd been thinking of him too - and we organized to meet up. Well, I just got back from that meeting - and let me tell you all - it was just... amazing. LOL. We sat and really talked, and I think I really got to know him. He's sooooo different when he's not around his mates. He asked to see a copy of the vampire novel I'm working on for my writing course, and I told him I'd send it to him. I'm pretty nervous, tho - LOL - after all, blah blah bullshit bullshit waffle blah blah"

Of all the evils that the internet has spawned, blogging has to be the worst. Suddenly, almost overnight, every web-toed retard in the world decided that they were a 'writer', and initiated their campaign to convince the rest of the world's population that their most asinine thoughts are of deep significance, worthy of study and consideration by the finest minds in the known galaxy.

This is, of course, pure shit. As anyone with even 10% of their brain stem remaining knows, almost every blog in the world is a spouting sewer of unstoppable bullshit. From the mouths of losers, into the ears of retards, the blogging world continues - with blogs falling into two categories:

Fuckwits who write about their stupid, worthless day-to-day lives, trying to convince themselves that anyone gives a shit.

And...

Fuckwits who write 'political' material, whether they either rail against the facist evils of the Bush/Blair/Howard trifecta, or they rail against the relentless lunacy of 'the left', and the hilarious, misguided things that they do and say.

Both are total rubbish. I am hopelessly addicted to blogs, and I read them every day, scoffing at the cornucopia of worthlessness that they provide.

Except for, like, mine.

Likelihood: 1 out of 5.

They are unstoppable, and they are multiplying. And we all think the Muslims are our enemies. Ha! Think again, motherfuckers.

People Who Think They Are Funny, But Just Suck

The next a-hole who yells out some hilarious observational quip about some meaningless bullshit or another is going to get my foot through their fucking pelvis. That horrible, disgusting show 'Seinfeld' made every douchebag in the world think that making hilarious observations about The Man In The Fridge Who Turns The Light on, and Male Nipples, and How Do They Get The Tea In The Teabag is good - nay, great comedy. They think observational humour is funny. I'll tell you what's funny. Observing me shattering their fucking teeth with a spanner is funny. I can't stand it anymore. I saw some DVD the other day in Sanity, with this bald-headed cunt on the front, claiming to be 'The Master Of Observational Humour'. That is much like being The Master Of Taking A Piss Without Ending Up With Wet Shoes. For fuck's sake - it doesn't take a mind that hums with comedy genius to stare at a wall and suddenly shout 'WALLPAPAER! So, what's that all about, huh? There's a wall, and there's paper, but you don't write on it!'

Likelihood: 3 out of 5.

I dunno. K-Mart had lots of unsold copies of the 'Seinfeld' boxed sets today. Hopefully, people shouting out things like 'Potatoes! What's THAT all about? I've never seen a pot with toes before!' is over, and we can return to what we REALLY crave - the comedy stylings of Mr. Andrew 'Dice' Clay.

Australian Idol

Take any of them. Shannon, Casey, Guy, Anthony, the silly bitch who won this year - any of them. They suck the life out of the planet with their very existance. I saw Shannon Noll being interviewed on Bert Newton this morning, and had I been a little less conscious, I surely would have accidentally jumped into the set and bitten out his throat. Listening to that no-talent shitkicker yammering on about his fucking 'journey' was almost more than I could bear at 9 in the morning - and hearing even 10 seconds of his inspirational new track, where he waffles on about 'shining' or some such bullshit really made me want to vomit my own entrails into my lap. My hate for Shannon Noll intensifies with each passing millisecond - although, it is shared amongst the 'winners' of the stupid fucking show. A special seat in the hottest flames of Hades, however, is reserved for that Kyle Sandilands motherfucker. Holy shit - I have never seen such a sad, pathetic loser in my entire life. What a fucking tosser. His idea of a creative and witty insult is telling journalists to 'go suck their own vomit'. What in the fuck is that even supposed to mean? You stupid bastard. Watching him abusing a bunch of stupid 17 year olds made me long for the days of public executions. I want to tear his still-beating heart out of his chest and urinate on it in front of his dying eyes.

TOUCHDOWN!

Likelihood: 5 out of 5.

Ratings and record sales don't lie, sweeties. See you in hell.

Paris Hilton

This vapid, worthless whore is the ultimate celebrity of our time. Completely and totally bereft of any recognizable talent, she absorbs the fibre of western society through her very presence. Every time I see her on television, I just want to hack her stupid head off with an axe. Not only is the loathsome bitch the star of The World's Worst Porno Ever, but she continues to pollute the minds of Mother Earth with her nauseating show 'The Simple Life'. I assume the 'simple' part of the title refers to Ms. Hilton's brain power, since it is clear to me that I could disconnect her brain at the base of the spine with a scalpel, and she would still function at roughly the same level. She has a fucking autobiography out. What in the fuck could POSSIBLY be in that book? The stupid cow hasn't actually DONE anything with her life, except be photographed by every retard in the media. She truly is the world's appendix - a useless, confusing organ, which could be removed on an operating table with absolutely no harmful side effects to the patient. Metaphors aside, I'd like to cut her in half with a shovel.

Likelihood: 0 out of 5.

She ain't going nowhere. Dammit.

Metal City

Oh, look at me! I'm so intense and confrontational! Oooh! I hate! Hate, hate, hate! I threaten people, and talk about killing them - while in REAL life being the biggest pussy who ever lived. There are little girls, currently playing in sandpits in sweet, woolen pullovers knitted by their grandmothers who could kick the shit out of me if I looked at them the wrong way. I'm such a fucking posuer, that you should have covered your monitor with puke roughly halfway though this post. Look back at my archives. Oooh, I'm so artsy and intellectual - yet I rail against fuckwit poets and writers. Aren't I clever? I'm so complex and confusing! I'm just a big question mark! And I'm just so insecure! All I need is the love of a woman! I need to be held! Oh, me! The pain of the brutal childhood! Sob, sob, wah, I got beaten up a lot! I'm such a complete and total sissy boy. But, look at how witty and confrontational I am! Look at those really difficult targets I attack, like Shannon Noll and Rove! How clever! You have no idea what a pose this is - and I can't even use the old 'It's to impress the chicks' ruse, because the chicks ain't impressed. What am I, an arsehole?

Likelihood: ?

I'm Alive.

What? Oh.

No - I know nobody asked. I can't say I blame you. After all, the former greatness of Metal City has slipped in the latter half of this year. I've been working on other things, and I just haven't had the desire to spill my guts on the internet, for the benefit of the zero readers that come here. But, for old time's sake, I thought I'd post something for anyone who still remembers your old pal Dave.

It has been a strange few months. All of my months are strange, and they seem to become progressively stranger, but as the months have lurched onward towards the year's undoubtedly anticlimactic conclusion, things are changing all over the place. Everyone's changing, and all sorts of new rule books are being written.

And, of course, I'm no exception. The firm policy of hiding out in my house like some stinky hermit has meant that I've got a lot of work done. I know that a lot of you out there are interested in 'writing', and that you'll wax philosophical on the subject in hilariously overblown fashion when given even a nanosecond of an unsuspecting victim's attention - but the truth of the matter is this: if you want to be a writer, boys and girls, the berets, the readings, the references to Leonard Cohen, the endless postulations on the nature of creativity, and the relentless 'blog posts' that your shitty little friends suck your dicks over don't amount to a hill of shit. If you want to write, dammit, it is no different to becoming anything else - it takes bucketloads of... what? Work. Forget about this 1000 word bullshit - if you want to write, and I mean really write - do some work for once in your sad, asinine, art-student lives. Bastards.

So, anyway - that's what I did. I can be really, really fucking smug about it, too. I can be reeeeeally fucking smug about it, because - listen up, you fucking turkeys - your old buddy Dave made a breakthrough.

I've had jackasses like the very sensual Kathryn, and the very enticing Ellie Mae giving me all kinds of lectures about all kinds of bullshit that I've been espousing over the fifty years that have passed since some moron told me that my scribbled ramblings were worth more than ten points when launched at a bin.

"Dammit, David!" they would scream at me, their voices shrill and manic, "Get your shit together, you lazy bastard! Quit fartarseing around and talking a load of bullshit about how everybody sucks and nobody loves your Aaaaaaaaaaahrt, and do something about it."

I've got enough bitches in my life who won't stop yelling at me to cut the shit, so I figured that if shutting them up would cost nothing more than a jiffy bag and a print out of my epic cornucopia of childish nonsense, 'Bronnie The Dog And The Horror Of Sleepy Rock' - a book which conclusively proves that chronological age is meaningless when considering the psyche of the idiot manchild - it was more than worth it.

I printed that shit out, then realized that I'm broke. So, like all good mooching losers, I went to my Dad.

"Dad!" I said firmly, wrinkling my nose as I noticed that his hand was down the front of his pants as he watched NASCAR. "Gimme a bunch of fucking money, you old bastard."

"What?" he screamed, "What do you want money for? I give you enough money. If it wasn't for me, you little bloodsucker, you wouldn't be kept in videogames and pornography to the level at which you've become accustomed. No, I shall not give you any money. Now, get out of the way before I shove my fist up your anal passage so far that it will be way fucking far up there."

"You old knave." I snarled, stepping forward and seizing the old fool by his blue singlet, his grey chest hairs tickling my muscular knuckles, "Give me the money. It's important. It is imperative that you hand over your Visa card and account details to me. Immediately. Do this thing, and I promise that my repressed memories will surely stay that way. It could mean the difference, Julian, between life in prison - and the chair."

The old swine scoffed and drew back, launching a gob of green phlegm directly at my face. It splattered against my glasses, and he let out a shriek of glee, bringing his leg up and driving his foot squarely into my nuts. I fell to the floor, clutching my crotch, my jaws dripping with foam - pointing angrily at him.

"You dirty old bastard! Give me the money!"

"What do you need it for, anyway?" he laughed, bringing the heel of his shoe down again, crushing my testicles against the cold, wooden floor, "Haven't you downloaded enough pornography? Don't we allow you to spend all day masturbating as it is? What could you possibly need more of my money for?"

"For my art." I wept. "Do it for art. For the future of literature. For the future of this country. I have a gift, father. A gift which I want to share with the people. I want to give the gift of words to the children - to lift their spirits, and elevate them to a place far above this world gone mad. Give me your Visa, father. Give it to me."

He considered this for a moment, and - silently - handed over the card, his face shuddering almost imperceptibly in a most familiar tic.

For all you douchebags who aren't down with the biz, like myself, there's this thing called 'manuscript assessment' which all 'writers' have to go through before anything gets published. See, Allen Unwin, or Doubleday, or whoever - they are wise to your jive, you turkeys. They know how talentless and awful and annoying you are, and rather than having to waste valuable cocaine-lunchbreak time sorting my wheat from your stinky, stinky chaff, they want YOU, the starving artist, to pay for the privelage of having some anonymous stiff read your crazy shit. They'll write a four page report on how much of a loser you are, and how it should be made a crime for you to be let loose near a word processor, and how they sincerely hope that wolverines tear off your balls and spit them into your mouth.

All of this sounded simply awesome to me, so I stuffed a jiffy bag full of this weeks magnum opus, went into stamp-licking overdrift, and shoved that sucker in the nearest post box.

In the meantime, I paced, and I fretted, and I wanted to go wee wee because the whole concept of having some anonymous bastard - some emo-glasses wearing, Nick Cave worshipping, poetry-reading fuckwit - reading my work, and JUDGING it, was almost too irritating to bear. And, as that sand sat in my oyster, the weeks ticked by, and it slowly became a pearl. Hee. That's a 'metaphor'. That's how come I'm so fucking clever.

So, this package shows up one day - the postman shoved it through my door, and I stood there with my balls hanging out of my ill-fitting boxer shorts, breathing my filthy morning breath in his face.

It was the package! Awesome!

I ripped that bastard open, preparing to cover the floor in shit as I lost control at the sight of my career, my hopes, my dreams, and my ego being torn to shreds in the space of four A4 pages.

But, do you know what happened?

Do you?

Those cretins fell for my nasty bullshit, and they gave me a glowing report. They praised me for my 'beautiful imagery' and my 'quirkiness' and my 'wit'. The 'sensitivity' struck them, as did the 'poignant, moving' ending.

Haa, fuckers. I always win.

But, what does this mean?

What it means, turkeys, is that I can now sell the book. Don't you see? I can get out of here! I can escape this prison! I have a positive manuscript assessment. People literally kill and rape each other over positive manuscript assessments - they lie, cheat, and steal from one another to get a simple 'that wasn't total shit' written on a piece of Victorian Writer's Center stationary. I, however, was fellated with both sensuality and genuine love by the mind-rapists who work for the VWC - they lovingly caressed my tumescence, occasionally giving me a little slap on the face for being so cheeky. And then, afterwards, I kissed them on the forehead and told them to fuck off to the bathroom to brush their teeth.

Tossers.

Oh, that's the other thing.

So, I did my TAA cert, which means that I could be raping YOUR mind in the near future, if you're enough of a balls-out retard to want to 'study writing' because you think it would 'enhance your skills', or some such fucking bullshit. Since my addiction to pornography and slasher movies won't pay for itself, I figured that I'd better get motivated and get some kind of motherfucking job. Time to get PAID, mofoz - I want the things that money can buy. Like, pornography and slasher movies.

So, I went for a job interview - and while I was sitting in the office - another dude came up to me and asked me for my backstory. Sheet, homes - I told him a whole litany of ridiculous nonsense, designed to make me sound far better than I actually am. After all, just between you and me, I'm a total suburban knucklehead - and, as we all know, the suburbs FUCKING SUCK. Grr! Down with the suburbs!

The next person I hear bag the suburbs is going to get my fist through their fucking spine. I don't care how cool and hip and leet you think you are, cunt, just because you cruise Brunswick Street looking for some fine canoli and a good prole red. You are a complete arsehole by definition, and I want to cut your balls off. I read a post on one of these so-called 'internet weblogs' that the kids are so fucking in love with these days, and at first I thought the author should be given a kerosene bath followed by a flicked match, then I thought he should have wild mules tear his scrotum away from his worthless body with thick ropes, but now I'm pretty sure that any kind of death is appropriate, as long as it is drawn-out and excruciatingly painful. The post dealt with the author's true sorrow that Brunswick Street is being polluted by people from 'the suburbs' who just aren't cool. They're not cool, y'see. Brunswick Street should be the sole domain of the artsy and blessed - a haven for those who are Special, and who don't play by society's rules and regulations, man. A place where Indonesian trip-hop plays in vegan cafes, while punks, rastas, and poets glide by in a melting pot of creative bliss. A place where a big, shaky 'A' on the back of a stolen leather jacket actually MEANS something. A place, friends, where the sounds of commercial radio are banned, and instead, the encyclopaedia of hip that are 3RRR and PBS fill the streets with their sweet, hip, Leonard Cohen-esque siren song.

Fuck off, you elitist prick. If some guy from Springvale wants to go to a pub on Brunswick Street, just suck it up. Deal with it. Get used to the idea that you're not creative, you're not alternative, you're not underground, and The General Public don't fear you because you're so cool and revolutionary - you're nothing but a self-centered, arrogant, pretentious, miserable pain in the arse, and a large, drunken hooligan from Eltham should corner you in a dark alley, tear your colon out with his bare hands, squeeze the contents into your wrenched-open mouth, before wrapping it around your pencil-thin neck and choking you with it until you shit your pants and die.

So, I'm in this office, and this guy wants to know where I've been and what I've done. I give him my resume, and tell him about what a dude I am, and he offers me a job.

Hell, yeah. I'll take your job, dude.

He told me that I have to register a company - an ACN and an ABN. So, like the fool I am, I've done just that, and I'm now making squillions of your earth doubloons doing editing, and copywriting, and proofreading, and related fun things. It's awesome - I get to stay home, walk the dog, spank the monkey, and rake in the cashola.

So, that's where it am at, you crazy little bastards. My plan for elevating my profile to that of a God is slowly coming to fruition, and I'm getting to enjoy the feeling of laughing at everyone who called me a pathetic, washed-up, overweight, unshaven no-hoper. Suck it up, you fuckers - I am the king. Not you. I am the ruler of this galaxy, and many galaxies beyond.

Yeah. That's right.

Here we go again...

What's that?

Oh. Robot Island is finished. Done. I just have to do a final edit, and that will be that.

But, not for the world would I stop. Nay, this doesn't mean my work is done - indeed, the Bronnie The Dog project is only halfway complete.

So, here - despite the fact that nobody reads this site anymore - is the concept art for Robot Island's sequel. I put these little things together because it amuses me, and it's nice to have a look and style in mind when I'm working.

So, there you go. Back to work.

Fun With Pencils.

I did this today. I like it.

Finished.

Lately, I have been insanely depressed. I don't sleep anymore, and when I do, I'm so tense that I wake up with my entire body aching. I'm sick with worry about what I'm going to do next, and if everything's going to work out, and it's all getting quite out of hand.

But, today the postman knocked on the door and shoved a postpak in my hand. I opened it up, and what was inside?

As if trying to mock me, the Gods chose this - a quagmire of self-doubt and total depression - as the appropriate moment to send me my degree.

So, I took that degree - and I stuck it up on the fridge for all to see.

I'm sure Mum will be proud.

You know, I always thought that this moment would mean a lot more than it actually does. Doesn't seem much different to when I used to put fingerpaintings up on the fridge. Except that fingerpainting was a lot more fun.

Dear Nick.

Dear Nick Cave,

This is just a quick letter to apologise for all the mean, nasty, awful things I've said about you over these years. I'd hope that a guy like yourself, a man who understands darkness and redemption, would know that I didn't mean any of it, and it was wrong of me. I shouldn't have called you an irritating, talentless, jumped-up little private school dickhead, and I shouldn't have said that The Birthday Party were nothing more than a load of shite. I'm sorry when I told people that you were good for nothing these days but pathetic old fart music, and that you were closer to Paul McCartney in the 80's than Lou Reed in the 70's. I'm sorry for all the cruel, nasty, unkind things I said about your forehead - sure, it IS huge, and you ARE going thin on top, but it was wrong of me to mock you because of it. I'm sorry that I said all those rude things about you being a boring member of the God Squad, and I'm sorry that I talked at length about how your relentless need to talk about Christianity proved what an asinine little twerp you really were. I didn't mean it when I agreed with Katherine after she accused you of eking far too much mileage out of your career because you're the guy who did 'The Mercy Seat' - I was just trying to look cool. I'm truly sorry for branding 'Henry's Dream' a pile of pompous, artsy bullshit, and I'm sorry that I called 'The Firstborn Is Dead' an album whose melodies could be counted on Mickey Mouse's fingers. I'm sorry that I keep telling that story about you stepping on my fingers at the Forum in 1997, and I'm sorry about the bootleg t-shirt I bought after the show that robbed you of at least forty bucks.

So, there you have it. I'm sorry, Nick Cave. I'm sorry I doubted you, and I'm sorry I judged you. I probably shouldn't have been listening to you during a particuarly awful period of my life, and that would explain why I've spent the ensuing years calling you a dried up old sourpuss. I now see how wrong I was, and I apologise. The thing you've got to remember, Nick Cave, is that we're the same. You're an angry guy with a bulbous forehead, and I'm an angry guy with a bulbous abdomen - and despite the fact that we've both been through a whole lot of therapy over the years, it just took time before we managed to land on the 'love' side of our 'love/hate' relationship. And that, Nick Cave - that makes me smile.

Sincerely,

David.

(P.S - I won't take back what I said about 'Nocturama'. What WERE you thinking?)

Wheel Of Guilt

Last night, I couldn't sleep because I was too busy throwing chunks'o'Dave at the Wheel'o'Guilt.

My Dad And Me - For His Birthday.

I drew this and put it in a frame for my Dad's birthday.

Feelin' Alone.

So, here's how I felt today...

But, maybe later, I'll chase the clouds away...

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.

Progress.

I've not been blogging lately. I've been busy. With good things. I'm 10,000 words into Robot Island now, which isn't bad for a week and a half.

Writing is nice. Maybe I'm learning to enjoy it again. The final edit of Sleepy Rock is nearly finished and ready to submit - it has been edited so much now, that it is 'tight as a funeral drum'. It's been a fun process. I'm not 100% confident about the material - I think there are points where the seams show. I can see the bits that were stolen from Metal City, versus the original material I wrote. But, then again, maybe I'm the only one who can see that, because I wrote it.

Robot Island is proving to be the most fun I've had with a project. The story and characters have been falling into place better than I could have imagined - and it doesn't look like it's going to need massive amounts of editing. I guess that because it's a sequel to Sleepy Rock, I already know the main characters fairly well - which makes them easier to write for. Although, Fogerty seems to be emerging as the lead. Probably because this one is more anime-inspired - it's a kind of quasi-scifi story. And, as we all know, Fogerty does love his science.

Teacher School is going well. I'll be teaching writing at TAFE next year - or, so my supervisor tells mwe. She's happy with me, and seems positive that I'm going to be okay. And, who am I to argue? Still, it's nice to finally hear something besides the sound of a door slamming in my face.

I don't even know why I'm writing this. Does anyone even read this site anymore? Well, except for the usual suspects. Oh well. I just thought that in case there were any lurkers out there who read but don't TELL me that they're reading - that's where I've been. Writing and Bettering Myself.

By the way, if anyone wants to read bits of Robot Island, you need only email me. I don't bite. Much.

Diediediediediediediedie.

I'm sitting in front of the television right now, and my mind is awash in a sea of hatred. Look, we're all intellectuals, right? We're all forward-thinking, modern, cosmopolitan, cutting edge guys and gals, aren't we? Well, I think I can honestly say on behalf of all of us -

Rebecca Cartwright and Lleyton Hewitt should be fucking killed.

And I don't mean that in a funny, ha-ha, isn't-he-cute-when-he's-mad kind of way. I mean that they should literally be murdered in cold blood.

Extreme?

Shut up, hippie.

Every time I turn on the teev and I have to look at these smirking, smug, drooling fuckheads, I have to fight the urge to kick the fucking screen in and slash my wrists with a piece of the glass. They really are the absolute nadir of humanity. I never fail to laugh until I piss my pants whenever I hear Rebecca Cartwright described as an 'actress'. Here's the fucking truth - Rebecca Cartwright is to 'acting' as my dog's shit is to 'gourmet cuisine'. The stupid, empty-eyed slut cannot simply 'not act' - she is the absolute antithesis of the thespian arts. And there is a very good reason for this - look at her. Look at those cold, dead eyes. Do you seriously think that she's ever had a sentient thought in her entire life? I've never met the bitch, but I can categorically state that there are half-rotten pot plants out there who could defeat her in a match of wits. Look at her! Look harder! Have you ever seen anyone who so CLEARLY has nothing but curdled horse shit living in her cranium? She is fucking brain dead - my only regret is that she doesn't extend that status to the rest of her worthless body.

And Lleyton Hewitt. Taking pot shots at this fuckwit is almost too easy, but who cares. Needless to say, I hate him with a vengeance and I wish him the most painful death imaginable. There's something about him that makes me pray that cancer will devour his bones. Look at him. He is such a bogan that he makes Warwick Capper look like Andy Warhol. Look at his hair! What the fuck is that shit? If I wore my hair like that, everyone I know would say - "Shit, Dave! What the FUCK is up with that hair?" He has a greasy, disgusting mullet. Look at his face. Look at that fucking face. Don't you just want to punch it? Imagine, for just a second, how good it would feel to sink a scalpel into his eyes. Wouldn't that feel good? Think about how sexually aroused you'd be as you plunged it over and over into his chest cavity. Ooooh, that's nice. That's it, Lleyton - scream for me. Scream! Scream, you fucking bogan trash. Scream until you like it, bitch.

Yeah.

And now they've been married, and it's on every fucking news channel in the country. What the fuck is that? Did NOTHING else happen today? What about overseas - what, you don't think shit happens in fucking Bulgaria? You don't think that there was SOMETHING more interesting to report? Shit, a few weeks ago, they passed a law in Sweeden making it LEGAL to look up women's skirts, without their knowledge. LEGAL. They should have reported THAT. Instead - what do we get? Two fucktard bogans getting hitched because he knocked her up. Oh, wonderful. Hey, I have an innumerable number of white trash family members who did the same shit - I don't see THEM on T.V.

She's pregnant. Oh, god. Imagine how THAT happened. The guy always looks slightly unwashed and like he's covered in a thin film of sweat - I almost feel sorry for her. She had to endure the horror of that bony, sweaty, smelly bogan pumping his spindly pelvis at her until he groaned and released a stream of foul-smelling sperm. Imagine the dazed look on his repugnant bogan face during his post coital gloating. Don't you just want to bludgeon him with a golf club? The Orgasm Of Lleyton is something that could cause sexual dysfunction in anyone with a vivid enough imagination.

Imagine what the kid will be like. I bet it will be born, literally, without a brain. Or, perhaps it will be born with the top of its head missing - and the doctor will pluck the brain from the skull and throw it in the bin.

"Don't need that anymore!", he'll chuckle, as Lleyton yells 'Yeah!' a lot.

Imagine how stupid that kid will be. Hot damn. His DNA will stink of moron.

Weirdly, though, these fuckwits have - apparently - had a 'Fairytale Wedding'. Most fairy-tales end with someone being brutally murdered, so hopefully they'll take that metaphor to its logical end.

On the news.com.au site, they have words from a pair of 'fans':

"It's true love," Lisa Edwards, a 32-year-old Sydney sales representative, said.

"It's a bit of a fairytale love story," Mark Schilton, 32, on holiday with his partner from Hewitt's home state of South Australia, said.

What... the... fuck. There are 'fans' of these two morons? Yeah. And I'm a fan of dogshit. What kind of complete and total imbecile publicly declares themself a 'fan of Bec and Lleyton'. Frankly, I'd feel more comfortable declaring myself a 'fan' of Osama Bin Laden. At least his daughter is hot. If you are a 'fan' of these two retards, I hope you die and rot in hell.

So, what are we to learn from all this? Australia still idolizes the absolute dregs of humanity. This can only be rectified through extreme violence. I want them dead. I hope someone blows Lleyton's head off with a shotgun, and dumps his body in an unmarked, watery grave. I hope Bec is kicked in the stomach by a kangaroo with roid rage. Then, I hope she is bound with electrical tape, locked in the boot of a car, and I want said car to be set on fire and pushed off a cliff. I hope Lleyton's penis is bitten off by a drunk alligator, and he slowly bleeds to death, I Spit On Your Grave style. I hope someone nailguns Bec's hands and feet to the ground, and then proceeds to run backwards and forwards over her head in a monster truck.

I... fucking... hate... them.

The Moment Has Been Prepared For.

For those of you out there who spent your teenage years as quiet, shy, unassuming dorks, holed up in your bedrooms in the suburbs, there is a fairly good chance that at some point you found yourselves interested in science fiction. Science fiction is almost always the exclusive territory of the sloppily dressed and thickly bespectacled - a genre that promotes a closeness with your fellow outcasts that often manifests itself in the communal, participatory nature of fandom. After all, who else but sci-fi dorks gather together in dusty, dank scout halls, dressed as their favourite characters, chomping at the bit to discuss the properties of different coloured lightsabres, or whether Picard was the superior commander in comparison to Kirk? Rubber ears, home-made military garb, and copies of 'technical manuals' and 'episode guides' are the tools with which the die-hard acolytes of sci-fi ply their trade - and on Saturday night, during one of the coldest spells Melbourne has had in years, it was our turn to embrace a little piece of sci-fi fanboy glory. For at the Palais in St. Kilda, several hundred sets of chattering dork teeth clustered together to celebrate the glory, the power, and the unabashed joy that is Doctor Who.

My time in the TARDIS began, as with all things, when I was but a wee young boy from Greensborough. My best friend at the time showed up at school one day with a copy of 1981's 'Doctor Who Techincal Manual' - a guide to the inner workings of all things Whovian. I was entranced by the complexity of the drawings, and the seriousness of each backstory - a cross-section of a Dalek, showing exactly how the machine operated, why it operated, and how it was controlled by the Kaled mutant within. A description of how the time travel function of the TARDIS operated. The various configurations of Cybermen - from their first appearance in 1966's The Tenth Planet, through to their then-recent appearance in 1975's Revenge Of The Cybermen. It was all so gloriously earnest - designed to be taken as seriously as possible, and I memorised the entire book - after Mummy bought me a copy - before moving on to the innumerable novelisations of Doctor Who episodes that cluttered school libraries during the 1980's. So enamoured of The Doctor's adventures in time and space, and the ferocity of his enemies, that for a long time I'd read nothing but Doctor Who novelisations - causing a teacher to insist that I put them away, and went back to picture story books, after dragging me from our classroom to the library by an ear. But, despite what I was told, I simply couldn't resist the lure of The Doctor's epic confrontations, and I'd sneak the books into school, and would read them - alone - in the yard, where I couldn't be spotted. And, as time went on, and I devoured every Doctor Who novel I could lay my hands on, I discovered that I was developing a taste for two things that never quite left me - reading and writing.

For those of you who are unfamiliar with the show, The Doctor 'regenerates' when he is - effectively - killed. He transforms into another Doctor, played by a different actor, and usually initiating a new phase in the programme's development. When it was announced that Doctors six and seven were coming to town, I jumped at the chance to attend. After all, these were the two Doctors that I watched during their original broadcasts - rather than on videotape. Colin Baker and Sylvester McCoy's eras present an era of change for the show, with the stories becoming darker, more grotesque, and infinitely more violent. These were stories that had the power to disturb dreams and create nightmares - Doctor Who had always straddled a rather thin line between science fiction and horror, but during the 1980's, the programme was capable of some truly vicious, unpleasant scenes - heavily reminiscent of film directors like Cronenberg, who were unleashing their 'body horror' upon the world. Doctor Who had entered the Cold War era, the era of AIDS, and the era of rampant materialism - and the show's vision of the world turned bleaker and colder, with heroes and villains that were no longer quite as black and white as they'd once been.

And then, it was over - the show's 28 year history was truncated, and it was left to the fans to keep a candle in the window, waiting for The Doctor's return.

Inside The TARDIS was to be held at the Palais in St. Kilda. It was to be a two hour trip through 30 years of the longest running sci-fi programme in history, with three of its most beloved participants. The Doctor was finally coming to Melbourne.

I hate St. Kilda. I hate the place for a truly amazing number of reasons. It's cold. It smells funny. It is populated by the absolute dregs of humanity - half-dead junkies and should-be-dead 'artists', both of whom see some mystical allure to living in an inner-city rathole. But, I faced my fears and drove - alone - onto the Esplanade, parking the car outside the Novotel, and immediately being greeted by a blast of icy wind in my face, which blistered my skin and destroyed the 'do that I spent many hours sculpting with hair mud.

Inside the Palais, the nerd fever was building. The dank whiff of marbled fat rolls grinding against each other, as bearded dorks shuffled through the halls, with ticket stubs grasped in their sweaty hands assaulted my nostrils, and I wiped the tears from my eyes, and swallowed reflexively. Paper-thin guys in Buffy shirts, with their arms draped around the shoulders of their morbidly obese girlfriends loitered excitedly against columns and pillars, as grown men in long scarves and overcoats grinned expectantly - the atmosphere literally ripping the cash from their wallets as they blew their wage as I.T slaves on a seemingly endless litany of merchandise. An occasional gnarly youth in a Tool shirt wiped a palm across his shaven head, and flipped casually through a copy of Starlog, while the inevitable Middle Aged People sauntered through the human zoo with a look of expectancy and derision on their lined, wrinkled faces, their thoughts drifting to babysitters, locked car doors, and the appropriate venue for a post-event cappucino.

And I? I felt nothing but hostility.

I want to tell you a little bit about what it's like to be a fanboy. I'm sure that everyone who is reading this has stuff they like. Why, my beloved Jazzy Kath has a curious obsession with Hole, and the noxious records they produced. The Train Man is more than au fait with the classical music he studied, all those years ago in a galaxy far, far away. And what of the very special Myrr? Her dedication to Marie Antoinette is internationally recognized - she is a woman with a reputation which will live on forever. None of these things, however, come close to the maddening, psycopathic levels of unhealthy obsession that befalls the fanboy of a science fiction T.V show. As I stood in the foyer of the Palais, and looked around at the clusters of chattering, gibbering mutants, all I could think about was how I was a bigger Doctor Who nerd than ANY of them, and that it was I, and I alone who had EARNED the right to be here. The rest of these worthless amateurs weren't fit to lick my boots, and I wanted nothing more than for them to part down the centre, allowing me to saunter towards my seat through a tunnel of whispered awe. That's right. I'm King Of The Nerds, you fuckers - show me some respect, or I'll bludgeon you to death with my copy of 'Doctor Who - The Key To Time'.

So, inflating my chest with a deep, confident breath, I stomped through the crowd of heretics, and found my seat at the front of the stage. Immediately, I crossed my arms over my chest and raised an eyebrow as the rest of the riff raff filed in.

"Hey, man.", a voice said behind me. "Wasn't Colin Baker in another story?"

The guy behind me was talking to his friend. I snorted. Amateur.

"Yeah, man. He was in something else as a guard."

"Was it The Three Doctors?"

"Naw, man. I think it was The Green Death."

I turned around and faced them.

"Actually," I said calmly, a smirk playing on my face, "It was 1983's Arc Of Infinity, starring Peter Davison. Colin Baker played Maxil, a Gallifreyan soldier."

I snapped my head back to the front and smiled darkly. That put them in their place.

They didn't respond. I sniffed, and decided to go and buy a t-shirt. Maybe if I wore attire more suited to an authority on the subject of Doctor Who, these maggots would show me some respect.

I approached the merchandise stand, and cut through the throng of giggling dorks who were busy shovelling cash at the bewildered attendants.

"Can I get a Davros shirt?", I asked the trendy young goatee-wearer who stared at me from behind the counter. I've always loved Davros, ever since I saw him in 1975's Genesis Of The Daleks - in which we get to see Davros creating The Doctor's most notorious enemies.

"What size do you want?", he replied with disinterest.

Looking around to make sure that I had an audience, I leaned over slightly and yelled:

"Oh, I don't know. DO THEY COME IN NERD?"

I thought I had just produced a piece of thigh-slapping comedy, but not only did the laffs not come from the geeks around me, the poor, suffering attendant simply shrugged.

"No. Only small, medium or large."

I sighed. "Large, thanks."

Tough room.

I returned to my seat and sat down. By now, the auditorium was full - and as the house lights dipped, my heart began to race. I was getting ready to lay eyes on two men - Colin Baker and Sylvester McCoy - who had meant everything to me as a young schoolboy. These were my heroes - in a very real sense - and the thought of being in the same room with them was almost too much to bear.

A spotlight turned on. The music dimmed. There was a hushed silence. And then - emerging from the side of the stage - was...

... Tim Ferguson.

I blinked. What the hell was this cretin doing here? Had I come to the wrong theatre? Perhaps there was a convention for washed-up 80's comedians on, and I'd already missed the Doctor Who gig.

"Hey, hey!", Ferguson yelled, doing his best Tony Barber impression, "I hear there's some Doctor Who fans here, tonight!"

Oh, god. No.

"Say! It's GREAT being a Doctor Who fan, isn't it? Everyone - repeat after me - I'm a Doctor Who fan and I'm not going to take it anymore!"

Sounding more like a chorus of re-animated corpses than an audience, a choir of voices repeated the line. Except me.

And then, he sank into a long, laugh-free series of jokes about the show - mostly centered around the usual subjects: Wobbly sets, rubber masks, eerie music. All of which was punctuated with factual inaccuracies, which I was most offended by.

"Anyone here know what the TARDIS stands for?", Ferguson bellowed.

I smirked. Time And Relative Dimensions In Space.

"That's right.", he howled, grinning. "Time And Relative Dimension In Space. Some say it's 'dimensions', but they're wrong."

He hee'd and haww'ed at that, and I felt my fists balling tightly. Wrong, am I? Dimensions, is it? Hey, Tim - check the Technical Manual on page fucking FIVE. It's DIMENSIONS, you fudge packer.

Snarling under my breath, I sank my head into my hands. This was turning into some ghastly nightmare.

"Hey, anyone remember that episode where giant plants took over the earth, and there were giant maggots? Anyone remember that one?", he beamed.

I punched the air with a fist and spat a thick glob of spit towards the stage.

That wasn't 'a story'. It was two stories. The Green Death, and The Seeds Of Doom. I was becoming more and more incensed and enraged with every passing moment.

Eventually, Tim hauled out his first guest for the evening - the third Doctor's beloved companion, Katy Manning.

I have had a crush on Katy Manning for most of my life - she is the plucky, zesty, pert girl friday that we all only wish we had. But, as she bounded out onto the stage, I noticed that something was oddly wrong.

Was this Katy Manning or Loretta Swit?

Several thousand excursions into the farthest realms of plastic surgery had taken their toll on Manning's once beautiful, elfin face - which now resembled nothing more than The Joker. Her plump, overstuffed lips were yanked back to the sides of her head in a brutal rictus, framed by straightened, dyed blonde hair, and a pair of eyes that no longer seemed capable of a relaxed expression; instead, Manning looked as though she was permanently trapped in a wind tunnel.

She's always been an effervescent speaker, and Saturday night was no different - as she fired off volleys of anecdotes and memories, each one gorgeously detailed and fondly textured. She giggled, and she told jokes, and she put on silly voices, and despite the fact that the effects of the surgeon's carving knife had rendered her the occupant of some strange, twisted space between rotting cadaver and Batman villain, I couldn't help but fall in love with the old girl all over again.

Colin Baker was introduced next - the sixth doctor himself - and his entrance made me swoon. He's a little larger, and a little balder - but he is still unmistakably The Doctor, and as he sat down with professional twat Tim Ferguson, I found myself falling under a spell of complete and total awe. Baker was a riot - a huffy, pompous British actor, with a deep, booming voice which has taken on a wonderful richness and resonance as he enters his old age. He discussed the issue of violence during his tenure as The Doctor - and I couldn't help but laugh when he assured us that 'if I had my way, I'd have carried a chainsaw around with me. I wanted MORE violence - I wanted to attack and kill.' The amazing thing about it was that after all those years watching all those episodes - and I have seen them all - it is hard to believe until you see it that these men aren't simply playing the part, they ARE The Doctor. Colin Baker's natural speech patterns, his phrasing, and his sense of humour belonged exclusively to The Doctor - and as I sat in the audience, the very idea of 'Colin Baker' melted away, and it was as though I was watching the character onstage. And that, my friends, was something that honestly warmed my heart.

The stage lit up with kinetic electricity when the short, jerky form of Sylvester McCoy emerged from behind the fan of green laser lights. McCoy is a surprisingly short fellow, and was wearing pinstripe pants, a tweed overcoat, and a brown scarf. The one thing I immediately noticed was that McCoy is incredibly funny - a crackling lightning bolt of unpredictable electricity, McCoy seemed determined to put on a show for the people of Melbourne - and so, he told jokes, rambled through unpredictable tangents of conversation, took a suction plunger from Tim Ferguson and proceeded to use it as a make-believe telescope to stare through while speaking - he was a whirlwind of activity, and seemed genuinely unpredictable and dangerous as a performer. I gained a new respect for McCoy - I think it would be remarkable to see him in a non-Doctor Who role. By this time, I was thoroughly engaged in The Moment - my jaws pumping with excitement, and my salivary glands punched into overdrive, covering my lips in a thick bath of white foam as I howled and jostled with glee.

And then, McCoy took a thoroughly unexpected turn. He started talking about the violence of Doctor Who in the 1980's as a reflection of the political and economic climate of the time. If the show became extreme in depicting carnage and death, it was doing it to illustrate the horror of the Falklands, the original Iraq war, the dark side of excessive monetarism, and Thatcher's rampage across Britain. Ferguson, in one of his more astute moments, asked McCoy what he felt the show would be lensing today - and, quietly, he replied:

"Probably the effects of an illegal war, in which thousands of innocent civilians are killed. And the terrorism that results."

The auditorium went quiet - but, more than at any point, I wanted to applaud.

After all, McCoy's understated elegance had expressed - for many - the very reason that we all fell in love with the show in the first place. Doctor Who was a programme that despite the massive body count, the violence, the gore, and the seemingly endless parade of brutal murders that played across our screens every week - was unabashedly in love with humanity, and promoted an agenda of acceptance, peace, and non-violent resolution. It is very easy to be disappointed by your heroes - but sometimes, it is nice when they live up to your loft moral expectations. And, when Sylvester McCoy proved that he actually lived the politics of the show, and believed in them, all those years of fandom seemed somehow validated.

Sadly, all things had to end - but not until Ferguson sent a jolt through my entire system that I'm still recovering from.

"If you want to stick around, The Doctors and Katy will be signing stuff in the foyer."

Holy shit. Was he serious?

As soon as the house lights went up, I leapt to my feet. Fortunately, I had copies of Baker's The Two Doctors and McCoy's Remembrance Of The Daleks with me - just in case this happened - and I sped out to the foyer, cutting through the waves of dork with superhuman agility, and managed to camp out a spot that was relatively close to the front of the line.

In front of me, a group of bogans were cracking wise about the nerd contingent of the evening. I scrunched up my nose. The typical bogan funk invaded my sinuses - you know the stench I'm talking about. An uncomfortable blend of Dencorub, Brut 33, crushed Rohypnol, beer, and an especially noxious breed of underarm and crotch sweat. God only knows what it must be like when those boys remove their pants - I imagine the heat haze alone would kill anything within a five metre radius of their genitals. I knew I was going to get no interesting conversation out of them, so I turned around and almost immediately butted double-chins with another nerd.

This one was a little more typical - a large, ginger beard, a black overcoat, a protruding, veiny gut, and a pair of oversized, sweaty hands - palms resembling a bucket of shattered crockery due to excessive adolescent masturbation.

"Hey, dude.", I said cheerfully.

"Hey."

"Great show, eh?"

He nodded. We began trading off our favourite episodes - and that's when the fanboys began to butt heads.

"I really like the one where Davros creates the Daleks. Resurrection Of The Daleks.", he announced proudly.

"That was Genesis Of The Daleks.", I said, smirking.

"Oh. Yeah - I know. I just got mixed up.", he stammered, his jowls quivering.

"Sure."

"I really like that other one. Planet Of Evil, where Tom Baker has to fight the red stuff..."

I turned to face him.

"The antimatter?", I asked, sinking a hand into my pocket.

"I know what it is.", he spat.

He was beaten, and he knew it. His skin, once a beery crimson had become pale and waxy. His eyes were slightly yellow, with elongated sacks of greying flesh hanging limply beneath. He had broken a sweat - dark patches were smearing themselves outward from his armpits, chest, and crotch - and his breath came in heated, staccato sobs.

I smiled and turned away. Sure, loser. You knew what it was. So, why didn't you SAY WHAT IT WAS? I squeezed my DVD's a little tighter in my hand, and as I turned, a flap of my long, black overcoat waved out from behind me like a cape. I was Super Nerd - God Of The Nerds, and I had just disciplined one of my acolytes. The best part was that he knew it, and so rather than continue talking to him, I figured I'd let him stew in his own juices for a while, contemplating his failure.

But then, I noticed that something alien and unfamiliar was happening inside me. My heart was pounding, and I felt dizzy and nauseous. I raised a pudgy hand to my face, and ran the tip of a finger through a bead of sweat that was sliding down one of my temples. What was this? What was happening to me?

I could see the signing table, with the three guests sat behind it. And I was moving closer - shuffling a centimetre a minute towards my goal. And the closer I came, the more anxious I became. I was afraid. For some reason, I didn't want to do this.

The inside of my head came crashing down, and I was assaulted by a kaleidoscopic array of images - the first books I'd ever read, the first television I'd ever seen, the first things I'd ever been truly passionate about, the endless procession of essays and book reports and stories and drawings and computer games, a lifetime spent following a television show, which had somehow insinuated itself into every fibre of who I was, and where I'd come from. And here, sitting in front of me, were the people who created it - in some ways, people who created me, although they'd never know it.

"SUPERMAN!", Colin Baker boomed at me as I approached the table. "How are you?"

I looked at him. Then I looked down. Dammit. I was wearing my stupid Superman t-shirt. I really have to stop wearing it in public. For some reason, if you wear a blue shirt with the Superman logo on it, everyone feels a deep desire to refer to you as 'Superman'. I should wear a t-shirt with John Holmes's face on it instead.

"Hi, Doctor!", I screamed nervously, fumbling with my DVD's. Eventually, I yanked the paper insert from The Two Doctors out of the clamshell case and shoved it at him.

He took it from my shaking hands, and looked up at me.

"And, who am I signing this to?"

"Uh, David, Doctor."

"To David...", he muttered, signing the cover, "From Colin Baker."

He handed it up to me, and I gibbered something about him being wonderful. Then, I shook his hand, and shuffled to the right.

Sylvester McCoy stared up at me and nodded.

"Hi, Doctor!", I yelled.

"Hello.", he said, quietly.

I hauled out the Remembrance Of The Daleks cover and he grabbed it from me.

"Who is this for?", he hissed.

"Uh. It's for David, Doctor. For, uh - for David."

There was a brief silence.

"Hey!", I shouted, "You were great! I mean - out there. Wonderful! What a great show! You were, uh. You were great. Great, I mean. Um. You were really -"

His head snapped upward.

"You liked that?", he snarled.

I nodded violently and grinned.

"Oh, yes.", I gushed. "Oh, you were wonderful."

"Thank you. Thank you, David.", he said.

And there, at the end of the table, was little Katy Manning. My boyhood crush. My little pixie. My plastic surgery disaster. She looked up at me and grinned.

I didn't know what to do - I didn't have a copy of any of her stories with me, but I figured that I'd never have the chance to talk to her again, so I knelt down next to her at the side of the table.

"Um, Miss Manning?", I breathed, staring up at her with big, wet eyes.

She smiled down at me.

"I just wanted to, you know. To thank you. For, uh. For everything."

Her face melted, and her eyes become soft and gentle. She reached out and took a hold of my hand, and pulled it across the table.

"Oh, Darling.", she said softly.

"It's just that, you know. When I was a kid - I used to watch you for hours and hours, and I really loved you so much. You were just wonderful as Jo. And I guess I just wanted to say thank you for that. Without you, being a kid would have been a lot different."

She looked at me for a second, and then reached over with her free hand and stroked my skin. Then she squeezed my fingers.

"Oh, Darling.", she said sadly. She looked geninely touched.

And then, she said one of the greatest things anyone has ever said to me.

Katy Manning held my hand, and I looked up at her amongst the noise and chatter of the foyer, and I felt her fingertips moving, and all I could see was Jo Grant, The Doctor's companion.

And she leant over to me, and softly whispered in my ear:

"I hope I wasn't a disappointment."

I shook my head and lingered on her for a second, and then I started to walk away.

"Darling?", she called after me.

I turned around. She was still smiling.

"What's your name?"

"I'm, uh. I'm David."

She brushed a lock of hair of her eyes and waved at me.

"Nice to meet you, David."

Sometimes...

... good friends aren't hard to find.

Kathryn, Timothinos, Clare, Ellen, Iain, Jo, and Jon -

You guys is alright.

My Mum and Dad.

My Mum hurt herself at work this week - I'm not entirely sure what happened, but somehow, she slipped and banged her side on a railing. She's in terrible pain - she comes home, and has to sit down with her eyes closed and her head tilted upward, clutching at her side - and I bring her a cup of tea, and sit down to talk to her about her day. And her day seems the same - she's not happy, because the people at work don't treat her very nicely, but she doesn't know what to do. She seems very sad, and when Mum gets sad, it has a poetic, melancholy quality: she doesn't cry or scream or shout - she just sort of finds a space to sit in, and sometimes she talks, or sometimes she doesn't.

She came home from work today at lunchtime, after her x-ray, and ate a pot of yoghurt on the couch. I was microwaving a disgusting roast chicken roll that seemed like a good idea when I was wandering around Coles with a red plastic basket, but on hindsight was the gastronomic equivalent of roadkill. And she sighed and became wet-eyed, and I gave her a hug - but she had to go back to work, and so I walked her out to her car and promised that I'd cook something great for dinner, and that everything would be fine, and that things always work out. Then she drove away, and I went back inside and gave Bronnie half of my lunch.

But I felt like I wanted to cheer her up, because there seems to be so few people who are interested in cheering her up - and since I'm a pretentious, artsy, limp-wristed kind of creature, I gathered up my pens and pencils, snatched up a drawing pad, and went outside. But - what to draw?

Then, I had a good idea. I went outside, and unlocked the garage. Inside, I found a bunch of dusty old photo albums that hadn't been opened since David Bowie last put out a decent record - and I took them up to our newly-furnished chateu'/shangri-la/decking thing. I found a couple of pictures of Mum and Dad from many years ago - before things all went horribly, terribly wrong - and I sat down to render them both as silly pen-and-ink cartoons.

I thought I'd post them here, and I'd tell you a bit about my Mum and Dad.

This is my Mum, sometime in the late 1970's. She used to work at Myer's in Doncaster, in the record department. Once, she told me that the biggest selling album she ever saw was Neil Diamond's 'Hot August Night'. Apparently, they couldn't open the boxes fast enough to get them into the customer's hands. Cherry, Cherry indeed. She met my Dad at Myer - he worked in the sporting department. Somewhere, at Nonna's place, is a photo of him in a shirt and tie taken from a newspaper article - which reads 'Come and see Metal Jules for all your fishing and camping needs!'. It's a great picture. They got married when Mum was 22. In all the photos, she looks kind of like a Susan Fey-esque character. All arms and legs and overalls. There's photos of Mum and Dad camping - I've never known them to do that. And there's photos of them in the country with their friends, feeding kangaroos and pulling silly faces. You know the kind of stuff. Mum looks incredibly happy - she's smiling in every photo. So does Dad - which is odd, since Dad never smiles. But, apparently, he was once a chirpy twentysomething. He had a Torana, too - it's not the same as mine, but very similar. It's nice to look at those photos, and see them both so pleased with life. There's photos of them with their new record player - putting on albums that I used to detest and mock, but now that I'm a crotchety old man, I love with pride. You know the kind of stuff - The Carpenters, Paul Williams, Pete Seeger. Actually, The Carpenters were my Mum's favourite band at the time. I like to think that they were listening to those old records in those photos. Mum quit work to look after me when I was born - and after I was grown up and reasonably mentally stable, she decided that she wanted more out of life than playing nursemaid to her Boo Radley-esque progeny. So, she volunteered at the M.S society, and worked her way through years of the most godawful things imaginable, studying the whole time. And now, she works with disabled people full-time. I admire her deeply for that. It's taken a toll on her, though. She doesn't smile the way she used to.

But, you know something? Looking at the album was horrible, too. Because, I'm looking at those photos from 2005 - and I know what's coming around the corner. I know exactly what is about to wipe the smiles off their faces.

This is my Dad in the late 70's. Nice turtleneck, Jules. Dad had big, Man About The House sideburns - but you can't see them in this picture, because they are covered up by his boofy 70's hair. After living with the man, my Dad is still as utterly confusing and dumbfounding to me as he's ever been. He's capable of being kind and generous to the point of self-sacrifice, but at the same time - he can be the most emotionally remote, isolated creature in the world. He doesn't say - he prefers to show, which is something we've had a lot of arguments with over the years. Dad wanted to be a motor car racer - he raced cars with his brothers, and later was a very good go-kart racer. But now, he just watches the sport on T.V. You have no idea how much I hate the sound of those bloody cars - nyyyyyyrang.... nyyyyyyrang.... nyyyyyyyyrang - over and over again, every weekend of my life. But, what can I do? It's his big thing in life. I think Dad was a little bit nonplussed after he'd pat Mum's pregnant belly, and dream of a little petrol-head with a need for speed, and instead, out plopped a frumpy dork who kept nicking his E.L.O records and drawing pictures of talking ducks. I've had that out with him many, many times over the years - usually when we've been screaming at one another - and he denies it up and down, but to be honest, I wouldn't blame him. It'd be like if hell froze over and I had Metal Dave Jnr., and it turned out that all he wanted out of life was a polyester suit and a phat ride to take down Chapel Street while pumping out the doof. The curious thing about looking at those old photos of my Dad is that he smiles a lot. This wide, toothy grin that shows off the gap in his front teeth. He's acting wacky, too - pulling crazy faces, and wearing aprons, and in one particularly frightening shot, emerging from the ocean with a boogie board. Even in Summer when I was a kid and they'd take me to the pool, Dad would usually sit under a tree and read some godawful shit like... oh, I don't know. Raymond Feist or somebody. Wild horses couldn't get him in the water. Yet, here he is - grinning like a drunken seal, with his hair plastered to his scalp, and the foam of the sea rising up behind him. Dad worked at Ford for years, as a components buyer. During the recession in '92, he was retrenched. I still remember him coming home, looking terrified, and telling us that things were going to be difficult. And, they were. He got back up on his feet, though - and eventually became the purchasing manager at a company in South Melbourne. But then, he trusted the wrong people, and he found himself back at square one again. What do you say to a 51 year old man who has been betrayed by a friend, and who may never work again? I certainly had no idea, and I'll never forget answering the phone, with my Dad nearly in tears, telling me that he didn't know what he was going to do.

But, you know something? Looking at the album was horrible, too. Because, I'm looking at those photos from 2005 - and I know what's coming around the corner. I know exactly what is about to wipe the smiles off their faces.

I've been thinking about this a lot, today. I emailed Kathryn this morning and told her that I was in an incredibly odd mood - but I couldn't put my finger on why. And, I went to see her tonight - we had a drink at Ye Olde' Nancy, and I think I figured it out on the way home. I'm a touchy, snarly kind of beast - and Kathryn made a joke about me still living at home. I shouldn't have taken it as anything more than one of my best friends taking a swipe at me because it's funny, and that's what we do. But instead, it got me thinking. And here's what I thought.

I don't want to get too heavy, or to sound like some kind of cliche' - but when I was looking over those photos, I felt incredibly sad. I got a lump in my throat, and I clenched my hands into balls, and I coughed and spluttered a litle more than I should have. I wasn't sure what the problem was - but now, I think I do. I feel horribly, insufferably, burningly guilty for the impact that I had on their lives. I look back at the photos of two happy, normal, well-adjusted young people - living out some kind of dreamy suburban lifestyle - and then I realise that within the space of a few years, things were about to be turned upside down, because of me. On the last page is a photo of me, as a six year old, sitting on a carousel with my mother - and I can't help but realise that in a year or so from then, I'm going to come home with bruises. Then missing teeth. Then broken bones. Sandy and Julian's little boy is going to be sent away, and is going to be decimated by the people he encounters - and they are, for better or worse, going to have to pick up the pieces. I hate myself for having put them through that - even though, logically, it wasn't my fault - I hate myself for not being stronger. I was never a strong kid - I was weak, and I used to cry a lot, and I was absolutely terrified of leaving my house. I'd never stay with anyone - I always had to be on my own, at home. And as the years dragged on, and things became worse and worse, I needed it more and more.

There's a look that a mother gives a child which has the power to tear your soul to pieces. It's the tear-filled look she gives you, when you come home with another broken bone, or another slice, or stab, or bruise - and you have to explain to her exactly what happened, yet you can't explain why. The confusion and hurt in her eyes is something you never forget - and the guilt you feel at making her go through that is something that is incredibly hard to shake. How do you tell someone who unconditionally loves you that during the day, someone pushed you down a flight of stairs and spat on you for no conceiveable reason? You can't. There are words you string together to illustrate the situation - but there's no way you can really tell her. But, somehow, she seems to know anyway - and that's what is making her so sad.

And Dad? What father wants to think of his son as a weakling? You could write forever about the relationships between fathers and sons and never move even a millimetre closer to finding the truth - yet, I do know this: It must be impossible to see your little boy's shattered fingers, or bloody mouth - and not wish, just a little, that he was a little more male, and was able to do something. Where's the dignity in a fist to the face without any reason? There is none. And so, I feel awfully guilty that I had to put my father through that - that he had to go to work wondering if I was going to come home safe that night, and wishing just a little, even if he'd never admit it, that I was a little better at self-defense.

But, time marches on. I'm 27 years old, now - and that little boy is dead. But, a few weeks ago - I saw that look again. I was sitting on the couch and talking to my mother about how I'm scared because I don't know what I'm going to do, and I don't know how to survive, and I don't know where my life is headed, and I'm ashamed of the fact that I still live with them, and I'm just so damn scared of what I've become and where I'm going - and she gave me that look. A bloated-eye glance, heavy with tears, which says that she feels empty, and sick, and sorrowful at what is happening to her little boy.

But, I'll be okay. Because, I have to be okay. I don't have the luxury of losing my marbles anymore - and there is no psychotherapy on earth that can fix what is wrong. I just have to listen to Kathryn, and Ellen, and all the rest - and do what I have to do.

And, why? Because I don't know what's coming around the corner that will wipe the smiles from their faces. I just know that I don't want it to be me again.

Old Age.

Today's my birthday. I turned 27.

Oh, shut up. It's a horrible, horrible thing. It's like something out of my worst nightmares.

To make things worse, I've been sick. My throat feels like an army of small goblins are taking turns swinging on my epiglottis. I've been asleep, and awake, and asleep - over and over again - for the last 48 hours. Sleeping when sick is unbelieveably strange. I kept on having wild, manic, apocalyptic dreams - yet I had no idea what they meant, and I didn't seem to be a part of them. I kept waking up, hour after hour, covered in sweat - my head spinning and my tongue clacking drily in my mouth. I'd consider what was running through my head, decide that it was incoherent rubbish, and go back to sleep. Repeat. Over and over.

It's horrible being this old. I have done absolutely nothing with my life. Nothing! Do you know what that feels like? I bet you don't. I bet you live a life of consistent accomplishment and achievement. I, on the other hand, know nothing but the bitter taste of mediocrity.

And now, just to make things even worse, I've become a geriatric.

I knew it would happen. And, today, it was proved to me.

It started out as a fairly ordinary day. I crawled out of bed, throwing my legs over the side, and letting my feet hit the floor. There was a noise, though. A noise that I hadn't heard before. It was a creaking noise - a long, whining groan, and it seemed to escape from all of my joints. I blinked, and stood - pulling on my dressing gown, and walking out to the kitchen.

I reached into the cupboard and grabbed a jar of coffee. Without even looking, I boiled the kettle - but just as I raised the mug to my lips, I noticed something.

I was using decafe!

I dropped the mug, which shattered on the ground. What was happening to me? The room span crazily, and I staggered into the bathroom - resting my hands on the sink and staring into the mirror.

It was happening - right before my eyes.

My eyes... which were turning yellow. Around the edges, the skin was crumpling and folding, tightening itself and releasing. And, as it released, large, floppy bags of drooping flesh remained.

I opened my mouth to scream, but no sound came out. Instead - a tooth slid out of my gum and plopped into the sink. I looked down, my eyes wide with fear.

Tooth after tooth began to follow. They rained down in the sink, followed by thick streams of treacley blood. I reached up to catch one, but what I saw caused me to reel in shock. Liver spots - great, thick, brown ones - were exploding on the backs of my hands, and were travelling up my arms.

"My hands...", I hissed soundlessly, "My hands.."

Outside, lightning lit up the sky - accompanied by the loud boom of thunder.

I heard Bronnie's nails clattering against the floorboards, as she zoomed beneath my bed, her paws cupped over her eyes in fear.

I gasped, falling foward. Something was itchy. On my head. I reached up to scratch it, and pulled a ball of thick, wiry hair out of my head. It was grey and greasy, and it slid out with no resistance. I threw it in the sink, where it bobbed next to my teeth.

"Oh, God... no...", I rattled, "My hair.."

The seam up the back of my pajama shirt began to shake and strain, and I bent over, checking it out in the mirror. A thick, chitonous length of bone exploded outward from the back - bristling with thick, black hairs. I reached behind me, and touched them. They recoiled at my finger tips, dancing reflexively atop a crest of yellowish bone.

"My spine.."

I began to vomit, then - filling the sink with the contents of my stomach, as tears rolled down my face. But, it didn't stop. The skin around my fingers and hands began to retract - leaving nothing but the bony imprint of my skeleton, peeking outward from beneath the thinnest veneer of spotted, paper-like skin.

My belly, never the tighest part of my anatomy, began to inflate - and a wave of flaccid, yellow blubber rolled over the crest of my waistband - where it hung, like a wide, hair-covered necktie, obscuring the ground beneath me. I reached down and hefted it, trying to put it back in my trousers - but my hands impotently sank into it.

And my legs began to fail - the muscles becoming weak and doughy, and the bone morphing before my eyes. Soon, I was a whole foot shorter - with large, flabby buttocks that hung beneath my broken, jutting pelvis - and a pair of shattered legs which served as centrepieces for a mess of flapping skin and hair.

And then, the fluids came. As my breath began to increase, and I felt my stomach rise, my eyes became wet with conjunctivitis - the rims of my eyelids were thickly encrusted with a hard shell of yellow mucus. I felt my nose running, and I reached up with a shaking, bony hand to wipe it from my upper lip - but I only succeeded in smearing it around. Looking up, my mouth hanging open and revealing a mess of thick, stringly blood and a few shards of tooth embedded in my slashed, gutted gums, I cringed as wide, straw-like ear hairs began to erupt from inside my head. They were long and coarse, each one matted with a thin layer of clear fluid - and they bowed out of each each ear, pointing towards the ground.

"Please, no... no...", I spat - spray of blood hitting the mirror and running down the glass.

Hair began to erupt from my nose in large, matted clumps, as the rest of my hair fell out of my head.

And then, it was over. I turned my crippled, 27-year old body towards the door and shuffled into the lounge.

It was raining outside. The dark clouds had come.

I sat down in an armchair, and pulled a blanket over my legs. Then, I picked up the remote and turned on the radio, tuning it to A.M talkback. I pulled the blankets up over my legs, and hugged them to my chest. And then, I began to weep. I wept for all the friends who were gone - the ones who didn't make it. I wept for the world that had changed so suddenly. I cried as I thought about those times, so long ago, where I held the hand of a pretty girl as we walked through a field of sunflowers on a warm, warm day. And I thought of all the things I'd never had - all the dreams that I'd never fulfilled. I thought about myself - and how the dream was truly over.

I was 27, alright.

Shine On, You Crusty Bastards.

There is no more important, profound, life-changing, and metamorphic rite-of-passage for the angry, adolescent loner than his inevitable obsession with Pink Floyd. The words and music of Roger Waters, and the friendless, knuckle-dragging nerds of the world will always find one another - and will spend many years living together, crying together, sighing together, and going through the dilapidated emotional milieu that is the domain of the disposessed.

For me, the Pink Floyd odyssey starts not during the halcyon days of the acid-drenched late 1960's, but instead commences during the foul gust of nauseating flatus that was the late 1980's. It was the summer of heaven in '67 - but it was the summer of hate in '88, and I was a young man about to enter his second bout of psychotherapy, pushed beyond the brink of madness via a lifestyle that combined brutal, punishing violence and sickening spiritual malaise. My first attempt at losing my shit had a soundtrack - and that soundtrack was, despairingly, Pink Floyd's 1981 salute to their bank accounts - the ironically titled 'A Collection Of Great Dance Songs'. Disregarding the Floyd's original incarnation as purveyors of prog-rock-for-imbeciles, the album focused on the commercial years - from Dark Side Of The Moon through to The Wall. Looking back, the album is an idiot's guide to a band who embody the idiot's guide to their genre. After all, if we're really honest - Pink Floyd were never any good. Their bass player couldn't play bass, their drummer couldn't drum, their keyboard player may as well have disappeared somewhere around 1972, and their guitarist - the legendary Dave Gilmour - is the only man capable of draining every drop of emotion and power out of every solo he ever played via his mathematical obsession with studio perfection.

But, for me - in 1988 - Pink Floyd was some heavy fucking shit. I was coming out of my Beatles obsession, and I was searching for something new. Something soulful. Something with a lyrical power that could counterpoint the emotional intensity of the music. I required an intelligence, and an ethos - I needed a band that stood for something greater than themselves. A band that stood outside of their own shadow, and determinedly connected themselves to the world around them.

Pink Floyd's connection was, as we all now know, art students.

If you are a swinging, hip, cosmopolitan twentysomething with a shelf full of Kafka and a head full of shit, there is a very good chance that your training wheels in the art of being a pretentious jerkoff came in the form of your Pink Floyd records. If you're reading this webpage, the chances are that you consider yourself a literate, cutting-edge lover of the written word in all its confounding, maddening, wonderful configurations. This makes you a no-balls, lifeless bullshit artist by definition - and so, Pink Floyd is very likely the band for you. Falling into that category myself, Pink Floyd was more than certainly the band for me - and so, I fell in love with their boneheaded iconography, ludicrous 'concepts', and aloof posing. Roger Waters became my hero, and I hung on every bile-dripping word that he spoke.

But, wait! We're getting ahead of ourselves, aren't we?

So, I'm losing my effing marbles for an almost unbelieveable number of reasons, and I am getting heavily into Pink Floyd. By this point in my life, I was already deranged, paranoid, twisted, and deeply unhinged - and so it was that The Wall certainly did me more harm than good. The Wall is an autobiographical psychodrama about how it sucks when you're rich as hell, but your wife still leaves you because you're such a prick. Over the course of the double album, every self-important, masturbatory, self-pitying thought that every wannabe 'artist' has ever had is validated through the whimpering, whining prose of Roger Waters - a man who is almost incapable of going an entire day without finding something that has added further layers of ebony carbon to his disfigured, scorched soul. And, for me, The Wall taught me that even though I was happily ensconsed in the loving bosom of middle-class Melbourne, with a pair of parents who loved me, a Commodore 64, and a future position as the fountainhead of modern literature, I was not only justified - it was my fucking duty to whine about how nobody understood me. Who cares if there are starving millions dying in the third world, and who cares if The A-Team has been cancelled, and who cares that Steely Dan have broken up - nobody wants to listen to my endless, whining bullshit. And that's just not fair.

This is what The Wall communicates to its core audience - an audience that consists almost totally of sweaty, pudgy-fingered nerds who demand to be taken far more seriously than they deserve.

So, my masturbatory emotions took flight, held aloft on the wings of The Floyd. Here is a concise list of creepy Pink Floyd related things I did between the ages of 12 and 16:

1. Carried my Roger Waters scrapbook around with me for two years, collecting press clippings, interviews, photos, and photocopying encyclopaedia articles about my favourite pasty-faced whinge rockers.

2. Wrote, and distributed, now-legendary Melbourne based Pink Floyd fanzine, 'Behind The Wall' - a form for me to rant partially about my love of Pink Floyd, and partially to ask the burning question: "But, WHY do they keep beating me up?"

3. Transcribed, in loving detail, every Pink Floyd lyric from 1967 - 1983 into Word For DOS, and carried around with me in my 'special bag'.

4. Spent many hours reading choice selections from said guide aloud to my Grandmother.

5. Queued up outside CC Music in Greensborough to be the first in the northern suburbs to buy 1994's 'Pink Floyd With Only Half The Band' album, 'The Division Bell'. I was the only one there. I was back home by 9:01 a.m.

6. Trekked into the city, many times, to buy Pink Floyd related rarities. Syd Barrett's boxed set. The Barrett 'Peel Sessions' E.P. The 'Works' album. 'Tonite Let's All Make Love In London'. The soundtrack from 'Zabriskie Point'.

7. Hunted down a videotape copy of 'Zabriskie Point'. Watched it. Repeatedly. Lifelong obsession with pretentious 'art' cinema ensues.

8. Sketched portraits of Syd Barrett in art class. Hung them up.

9. Subscribed to and regularly posted to both the 'Eclipse' and 'Echoes' Pink Floyd mailing lists.

10. Amassed enough bootleg Pink Floyd records to embarass me for life.

Fandom is a strange thing. It occupies some kind of no-man's land between love and crime. And, as I lived my days and slept my nights in a constant frenzy of near-stalking, Pink Floyd meant more and more to me than I'd ever thought possible. They unlocked a world of art and colour and sound that I never knew existed - their pompous, symphonic epics drew me in with their intricate structures and mysterious, confusing symbolism.

And, since I was but a wee ankle biter, I was pretty sure that what I was hearing was the voice of the everyman. 1972's grotesquely overrated paen to madness, The Dark Side Of The Moon, positioned itself as an ultimately human work - a piece of plastic so beloved by the masses because it managed to connect to the issues that plagued the everyday lives of people everywhere. An album that moved, lyrically, across racial, cultural, and economic borders with ease - and cut to the heart of the obsessions that drive us all to the brink. My mistake was believing that a rock star knows shit about anything except being a rock star - and under close inspection, the album began to become more and more laughable as I became older and more cynical and hate-filled.

Nice tunes, though.

As I grew up, my need to listen to Pink Floyd ebbed and waned - and eventually, was replaced. The truly Godlike Bruce Springsteen replaced Roger Waters in my mind, since he actually did all the things he set out to do with his music, and really was talking from the perspective of someone who has more in his life than chardonnay and blowjobs. As university life commenced, and I found out that I had no IDEA what it was like to truly lose one's shit - but was about to - my obsessions changed again, and fruity boys in black lipstick became the order of the day. And then, maturity - and the snide, sneering, teeth-bared sarcasm that only Steely Dan can truly provide because the centrepiece of my musical platter. But, while Pink Floyd had disappeared into the background - they never truly disappeared. They just kind of hung around in the background, waiting for me to take them out of the cupboard and play with them again.

Which I always intended to do. After all, how can something that had been such a massive part of your life ever really disappear? It can't - and from time to time, I'd slap Ummagumma, or Meddle, or Obscured By Clouds on the stereo - and I'd be immediately transported back to the early 1990's - the decade where Everything Went Wrong.

And then, everything did go wrong - and I learned a bitter, life-changing lesson in what happens when one gets too close to one's idols. Like Icarus, I flew too close to the sun - and my Floydian wings melted. Then, I crashed. That sun was a certain surly bass player named Roger Waters.

Many of you have already heard this story. Bad luck. You're hearing it again. This will serve as the definitive version.

Fast-foward your soggy, art-fogged little minds to 2002. An exciting year, I was in the first year of my master's degree, and hadn't yet had every last drop of self-confidence sucked out of me by the vampiric sodomites that make up Deakin University's english department. The foul, unshaven face of Clemens hadn't yet filled my heart with betrayal, and the leering, grinning rictus of Sudesh hadn't yet caused me to wrestle with thoughts so murderous that they present the eternal question Prince asked on the Batman soundtrack: if a man can be considered guilty for what goes on in his mind, then give me the electric chair for all my future crimes. I was a grown-up. Virile and strong, with lively adrenals and a sense of achievement in my heart. Every day was a new adventure in confidence and empowerment, as I relished my newfound status as a postgraduate student. Then, I discovered, I was about to be haunted by a ghost. The ghost of pretention past.

Roger Waters was comin' to town.

The predictably titled Roger Waters - In The Flesh tour was rolling into Melbourne in March, and was bringing with it a sizeable chunk of my misspent youth. As I'm sure you're all aware, I'm not exactly unfamiliar with the joys of mindless nostalgia, and the chance to fulfill my boyhood dreams of seeing my favourite big-nosed bass player churning out his odes to himself was too good to resist. Tickets were bought, and I was set.

But, things were about to get complicated. Gold 104, champions of radio advertising everywhere, were running a competiton. A competition with a prize that was so desirable that I practically started salivating over my stereo:

Call up and answer a single cement-headed question about Pink Floyd, and you will win...

Holy dog shit! Could anything be better? Could anything be more wonderful than that? Is there a SINGLE thing on God's green earth that could be more wonderful, glorious, zip-zap-zooprious than the chance to have a little mano-a-mano bull session with The Most Miserable Human Being Ever? Good grief! Even as I write these words, I get a chill up and down my spine. This wasn't dinner at the Doncaster Pub and a voucher for The Lobster Cave - this was the chance to meet Roger Waters?

The buddah of my youth.

The guardian of my childhood.

My hero. My idol. My teacher. My friend. My confessor.

An angry, angry man.

I called every night. Crash dialled the damn phone lines. And on the third night, it rang.

My teeth ground together, as the I listened to it ring.

And then..

Someone picked it up. And asked me the question. It was something utterly idiotic. Something on the lines of...

"What colour... is The Floyd?"

"Uh. Pink?"

"KEERECT!"

Woah. I won. I was going. I was going! I was going to meet Roger Waters!

And so, I showed up at Rod Laver Arena, with my tickets pressed into my greasy, sweaty hand. After being ushered inside by security drones, the cowboy hat-wearing manager of the Rog confronted our group, and immediately launched into an off-kilter spiel, intended to address our fears for the evening.

"LISTEN UP!", he drawled. "The band you're about to see... is BETTER than Pink Floyd!"

Wow. Better than Pink Floyd? Admittedly, that's not exactly hard - but should we really come right out and SAY it?

"Pink Floyd were a bunch of kids who met at art school. This is a band of PROFESSIONALS who will perform Roger's music AS IT SHOULD BE HEARD."

Crikey!

"This guy here - at the back. This is Chip Douglas. Chip engineered Madonna's albums. Say 'hi', Chip!"

Some know Chip Douglas from his work with Madonna. Others know him from his work with Nile Rogers. More still remember him from his time spent with David Bowie.

But I remember him from the bonus track on The Monkees' Headquarters album, where he is ordered by Mickey Dolenz to go and buy 'hamburgers... fries... lotsa stuff... all kindsa things....'

Awesome! Chip Douglas! The dude from the Monkees records! This is gonna rule!

We were lined up, execution style, in some seats towards the front of the ampitheatre, and awaited the arrival of The Dark One. Yessir - Captain Intensity was in the building. Was this really happening? Was this some wild, teasing dream? After all - of my many rock fantasies, there are only a few that could compare to this:

1. Playing drunken soccer with Iron Maiden.

2. Holding hands with Suzanne Vega and whispering enigmatic, yet sensuous phrases in her ear.

3. Meeting Hate Filled Madman Roger Waters of Pink Floyd.

4. Having Bruce Springsteen fix my car.

5. Being publicly ridiculed by Steely Dan's Donald Fagen and Walter Becker.

Tough competition, as you can see. And so, practically salivating, I sat patiently and waited for Roger to make his grand appearance.

And, appear he did.

With purpose and vigor, he strode past me - never once daring to make anything that might be construed as eye contact. Sauntering up to my main Monkee Chip Douglas, Roger began barking indecipherable orders at him. It was here, that my heart sunk - and I knew that everything I had been told was true.

But, what had I been told? The backstory of Pink Floyd's enigmatic bass player is one riddled with hatred and anger. Roger ruled Pink Floyd with an iron fist - his leadership style combining one part Hitler and two parts General Schwarzkopf. Not a man known for taking shit, Roger led his bandmates into higher and higher stratospheres of success, using his patented 'Do As I Say Or I'll Kill You' method of fostering artistic growth. Eventually, in 1983, either he left Pink Floyd or Pink Floyd left him - depending on who's story you believe - and he went onto a solo career. Either version tells roughly the same tale, though - Roger left Pink Floyd because he's a prick, or Pink Floyd left Roger because he's a prick. In short, then, a man for whom common decency seems to have eluded him during much of his adult life - a man who is unquestionably a complete and utter arsehole.

"GET IT RIGHT!", boomed Roger from the stage - pointing a bony finger at his shattered keyboardist, who blubbered and whimpered incomprehensibly.

And then... Roger picked up his bass. And started playing those famous 7/8 notes from 'Money'.

Ahhhh. Aww. Lookit that! It's Roger Waters, and he's playing money!

And then, a bit of 'Shine On, You Crazy Diamond'. Oh, lordy!

Fancy a slice of 'Every Strangers Eyes'? Nothin' could be finer!

And then...

"WHAT THE FUCK ARE YOU DOING?", Roger bellowed, beating his chest. His lips were peeled back, showing a pair of long, ivory incisors - each carved into pointed blades. His forked tongue flickered between them, and his eyes glowed crimson.

Chip shrugged and pushed something on the mixing desk.

"I SAID..", Roger howled, punching the air with a balled claw, "WHAT THE FUCK ARE YOU DOING?"

I sat back in my chair. Was I gonna get to meet Roger soon, or what? And besides, what the hell was this - no hors d'ouvres? No refreshments? No wonder your wife left you, Roger.

Chip blabbered incoherently and stabbed at the mixing desk impotently with a liver spot-coated finger.

"FUCK IT!", screamed Roger, a set of leathery wings exploding from the back of his grey shirt. He flapped once, then twice - then ascended into the air of the arena, his sharp claws slashing at the air, and his pointed tail stretched out behind him. He landed behind Chip, and immediately clamped down on the engineer's neck, draining him of his life essence, while raking his chest with his yellow talons - leaving long, ragged scratches in their wake.

"ONE OF YOU PLAY ME A FUCKING E CHORD!", he howled demonically - holding out his hand. A column of fire spurt upwards from his palm, before wrapping itself into a ball. He held the ball of flame, and pointed at his keyboard player.

"YOU! AN E CHORD!"

The keyboardist vomited quietly behind his instrument, and then - his face pallid and waxy - a trembling finger pressed down on the keys.

It was the wrong note.

Roger hissed, and launched the ball of flame - incinerating the keyboardist, who screamed in abject fear, as his body immolated.

And then, Roger was gone. Nothing but a wisp of sulphorous air remained.

A grinning publicist approached our group.

"Hi, guys! Roger's not going to be able to meet you, today. If you leave me your name and address, we'll post your CD's out to you. Now, get out of the arena."

And that was it. Ejected, and dejected, I sat out on the grass of Rod Laver, feeling thoroughly depressed. All I wanted was to tell my hero how much he'd meant to me when I was a young boy. That's all - but he couldn't even stomach making eye contact with his fans.

We often hear about rock stars who hate their fans - but when one actually experiences one, it can be an unnerving experience. Roger broke my heart that day - I had invested literally years, and countless hours, in worshipping and idolizing someone who was utterly undeserving of it. Of course, Roger will never know this - and even if he did, he couldn't care less.

Which is why now I only worship cartoon characters. Coming soon - my Transformers scrapbook.

But, where is this leading? What's the point of this post?

Today, Pink Floyd reformed - with Roger Waters - to perform at Bob Geldof's Live8 Hyde Park show.

I downloaded the full set, which was four songs: "Breathe", "Money", "Wish You Were Here", & "Comfortably Numb".

I expected to trash it gleefully, pointing out what a bunch of decreptit, worthless old men The Floyd have turned into. I desperately wanted to savage them heartlessly, stating categorically that they are a spent force who looked utterly ridiculous moping about onstage, trying to recapture the sombre glory of their early years. And more than anything, I wanted to eviscerate that big-schozzed jerkoff Roger Waters, constructing a tirade of bile and cruelty so massive and merciless that it would become a thing of legend.

Pink Floyd were a bunch of sad old men, shuffling about the stage, reminding us that their glory years are way past them, and the hefty-proboscis of Roger Waters has learned nothing about stage presence in the 20 years since his bandmates unceremoniously told him to get effed.

But, do you know something? Sitting there, watching the set, I just couldn't do it. Couldn't find anything bad to say. Maybe I didn't want to find anything bad to say. Either way, I sat and watched the reformed Floyd - the icons of my teen years - stagger through a grab-bag of their best known hits, and instead of provoking an outpouring of barely-coherent anger, I felt nothing more than a sense of finality.

After all, when I was 13, I wrote in my fanzine that I hoped to live to see a day where Roger rejoined Pink Floyd and played the old songs one more time. I wanted nothing more than to see Roger Waters - the man who understood me, and gave me comfort and solace as a beaten up, bruised, black-and-blue, half-insane teenager - to be reunited with the band that provided the music to the words that meant so much to me. I didn't care where, or when, or how - I just thought that the music that had touched me so deeply deserved to be heard one last time.

And now, I have.

There's A Riot Goin' On.

For reasons that I'm not completely sure of, I'm not in bed. It's not that I can't sleep, it's just that I'm not asleep - and rather than sit out and thrash away at Dynasty Warriors for hours, I thought I'd do something slightly more productive.

Because, after all, I feel bad that I've not been writing as much as usual, latey. Writing is an odd thing - and from where I'm standing, with it straddling a lot of fences in my life, from hobby to career to biggest regret to biggest accomplishment, at times I feel like I should have a break. I've written two books since 2003 - and the third is about to be started - yet, I've not had the testicular steel to submit them. That period's about to end, now that I'm about a week off completing the proposal for 'Sleepy Rock' and commencing the proposal for 'Nowhere'. And, of course, I'm at NMIT for a few months to get my Cert IV so that I can teach writing - so, everywhere I look, it seems that I'm not going to be able to kick my old habit just yet.

But, maybe I shouldn't. Maybe it isn't necessary just yet.

Weirdly enough, I didn't actually sit down tonight to gab about writing. I just wanted to talk about a few records.

After all, I used to spend an inordinate amount of time posting on ye olde Metal City about my near-fanatical obsession with old records. Why don't we try that again - just for a little while?

I find that when I look back over the chronology of my 26 years on earth, the only way I can accurately gauge where I was at any given moment is through the music I was listening to at the time. I'm sure I've talked about this in an earlier post - but I can't remember what is on here, so I'll go over it again. Which may not even be necessary, since I'm sure that this is no different to anybody else. I've always been inclined to take music far more seriously than is healthy, though - and to substitute it for actual lived experience. I spend a stupid amount of time living in my own head, and music has - somehow - managed to take on a kind of vehicular quality in terms of how I'm thinking, or feeling, or responding on any given day. As I'm sure we've discussed previously, my sick little life involves a continual series of leapfrogging simulacra and primary experience; I pin this down to being a poor, innocent child of postmodernism. My life is a constant race between simulacra and primary experience, simulacra and primary - endlessly trying to catch up with one another. I experience something last week, and try to recreate it throug media the following week. Which involves negating the primary of that week. But you can never completely escape the primary - not without a shotgun blast to the face - and so, it creeps in around the edges of the simulacra, and eventually is assimilated into the simulacra. And then, it becomes recreated - over and over again - forever.

And, my warped version of personal, chronological simulacra is hinged on media. Whether I'm in 1982 this week, or I'm in 1994, or I'm desperately trying to find a way to live in 2005 - it all rests on the auditory and the visual.

One of the benefits of being here for literally days on end without seeing anybody except the same two people is that it is amazingly difficult to lose track of where you are, and when you are. It is no effort for the very idea of what it means to live in the year 2005 to be melted away, and replaced with something else. Something far more enjoyable - something controllable.

But, other times, re-living and re-contextualising the same things over and over again can be boring. And so, I need new fuel for the fire - and the hunt for new music, or film, or whatever, begins.

And what is it, then, that 2005 has offered?

Last year was 60's and 70's psychedelia - We All Together, Coven, Peppermint Rainbow, Marmalade, and anything from Nuggets. It was all I listened to for months and months on end - and, ironically, became a strange kind of soundtrack for last year's complete and utter mental collapse. I was reading back over some of what I was writing during that period of 2004 - some of it is even on here. Good grief, it is amazing how out of my mind with fear and betrayal and anger I was.

But this year, things are different. They have to be, don't they? After all, you can't go on indefinately with gnashed teeth - eventually, they'll all shatter and fall out, and you'll never eat corn on the cob again.

This year, however, is the year of Sly And The Family Stone.

Things aren't exactly wonderful this year, either - but a lot of the mind-searing brain damage that was delivered in 2004 has started to float away. So, I need something appropriate.

Stand! certainly fits the bill. It's a stunning set of songs - many of which formed the bedrock of Sly's famously scene-stealing set at the original Woodstock festival. His multiracial, multigender band put forth a philosophy that could only have existed in 1969 - calling for an end to the race wars that were threatening to destroy America in "Don't Call Me Nigger, Whitey", asserting themselves as determinedly reticent to observe any kind of class, gender, or race distinctions in "Everday People", and presenting a violent, rousing call-to-arms in "Stand!".

The music is late 1960's funk-rock - before the term existed - with the star being Sly Stone's incredible ear for melody. The man really knew how to drag every last drop of soul out of a guitar line or a vocal harmony - and with "Stand!", he is attempting to make an openly populist work. The political message is tightly entwined with the accessibility of the music - which makes the fact that the record doesn't sound even remotely dated all the more remarkable.

The flip side of this, though, is the OTHER record that is currently not leaving my side: Sly's 1971 masterpiece There's A Riot Goin' On.

A perfect contender for Most Depressing Album Ever Made - taking on stiff competition like Neil Young's 'Tonight's The Night', John Lennon's 'Plastic Ono Band', and Steely Dan's 'Gaucho' - There's A Riot Goin' On is one of the most remarkable listening experiences I've ever had. Being the smug little fuckwit that I am, I was pretty sure that at this point - having plowed though literally thousands and thousands of records in my pursuit of Absolute Perfection - I was pretty sure that there was very little left to stun me. After all, after you've plowed through the Springsteen back catalogue, had your fling with Prince, and snored your way through Bowie - what is left?

For me, There's A Riot Goin' On managed to do what no album has managed for a great many years: give me that disturbing, unsettling feeling down my spine that only comes out when you're in the presence of something wonderful AND horrible. For, while Stand! is an album of triumph and optimism, There's A Riot Goin' On is the sound of Sly Stone's mind being broken open through a mixture of drugs, the failed promise of hippie idealism, the bloodstained carnage of Altamont, and the sad realisation that music couldn't change the world. By 1971, the cynicism and self-loathing that still grips western culture had taken hold, but as the first and second generation of rock musicians began to slowly make way for the younger people, Sly Stone managed to vomit up everything that he hated about himself and the world and capture it on vinyl.

The original cover says it all - the U.S flag with bullet holes for stars. A counterpart to Thompson's Fear And Loathing In Las Vegas, There's A Riot Goin' On is the sound of the American Dream's death throes. Gone are the blaring horn lines, swooping gospel vocals, divebomber basslines, and lyrics that dealt with acceptance and love - in their place is a dead, lifeless ennui. So badly scorched by the collapse of the hippie dream is Sly, that he seems barely capable of coalescing - instead, we have a series of long, druggy funk-rock tracks that are as unpredictable and incoherent as their creator.

So, it's an album about failure - but it isn't a failure as an album. Whether by architecture or accident, Sly managed to avoid taking the easy way out by deciding that "Volume = Rage", as so many modern bands do, but instead - through the understatedness, and creeping, sinewy production of the album, he captured the sound of a period of time that wasn't revolution or suicide - it was simply collapse. And, as America collapsed around him, Sly Stone collapsed with it - and never recovered.

It's not an easy listen; it is one of the few albums that I'm almost afraid of. It has such a power, and comes from such an honest, bleak, damaged place, that listening to it - alone - and really absorbing what it says, how it works, and where its creator is at is a genuinely terrifying experience. There's A Riot Goin' On can never happen again - for many reasons - but the album remains, immortal in its mutilated, fractured glory.

So, those are the two albums that are my soundtrack for this - the winter of 2005. And they'll ALWAYS be the winter of 2005 - whenever I need to come back and visit it.

Fixed.

Comments are fixed. The very lovely Myrr, over at the very lovely Curious Fancies updated Movable Type for me, and because I'm a total idiot, I didn't realise that comments had to be approved - and then, I didn't realise that they were piling up on the metalcity mailbox, so things will be sorted and answered shortly. Thanks for being patient, you gorgeous creatures, you.

Stuff That Makes No Sense At Two In The Morning.

* It makes no sense that I loved Pink Floyd as a kid, and always swore that the day they reformed would be the happiest of my life, yet now that it's happened I'm curiously unimpressed. Maybe it's because they're so far past their prime. Maybe it's because I don't need Pink Floyd the way I used to. Or, maybe, I'm still bitter of the 2002 incident with Mr. Waters. Either way, this makes no sense.

* It makes no sense that I spent my entire life studying writing and illustration, yet I'm too much of a chicken to submit my work. I still don't really believe that it's any good - and for some reason, I can't shake myself out of that mindset. I've just spent too long convincing myself that I'm crap, I have no talent, and I'm better off doing anything else. This makes no sense.

* It makes no sense that I'm always going on about how I am the one last beacon of honesty and truth left in a world built on lies and horseshit, yet I relentlessly lie about myself because I just don't want to talk about it. This makes no sense.

* It makes no sense that although I love the Torana and the fact that I can get in it, start the engine, and it will take me wherever I want to go - I'm always aware that wherever I go, the Torana will take me home. And I'm far, far, far more comfortable with the latter. Driving somewhere makes me feel hesitant and uncomfortable. Driving home makes me relax. This makes no sense.

* It makes no sense that I'm so desperate to avoid getting too far away from what I used to be as a younger person, and that I don't want to forget what it was like to be two, or five, or eighteen - yet, for the most part, I was incredibly miserable all the time, and put up with all manner of godawful shit for years on end. This makes no sense.

* It makes no sense that I rue the day I ever put on The Cure and decided that I'd be cool if I wore really shitty makeup and danced drunkenly at goth nightclubs, yet I'm rarely seen without the same long, black overcoat that I wore at the time. This makes no sense.

* It makes no sense that as time goes on, I tend to identify the narrative of my parents life with any number of Harry Chapin songs - yet Chapin's lyrics are almost all incredibly depressing and unsettling, with nary a happy ending in sight - despite the fact that I want nothing more than for my parents to be happy. Especially after all that's happened. But, for some reason, every time I hear one of those records, they remind me so strongly of the photos I've seen of J.E and Sands in their youth - back when they had things to smile about. This makes no sense.

* It makes no sense that I put so much stock in music and film - when , if I'm totally honest, 99% of musicians and filmmakers are narcissistic, self-important scum who would sooner take a dump in my mailbox than say hello to me. Even though I know that these people I idolise are horribly pretentious and arrogant, I can't help but look up to them. This makes no sense.

* It makes no sense that even though Cameron has metamorphosed into a brain-damaged yahoo who is incapable of stringing a sentence together without interrupting it with a bong hit, and who hasn't called me in many years, I can't help but miss the stupid bastard - and feel horribly disappointed every time I see him. This makes no sense.

* It makes no sense that the world grows up, while I stay the same - and every time I try to grow up, I slip into the same old paranoia.

* It makes no senes that I've built such a total dependance on a weatherboard house in the northern suburbs of Melbourne.

* It makes no sense that I absolutely cannot stand people looking at me - at all.

* It makes no sense that I've filled this house, our garage, and our shed with acres of objects which are designed to recreate moments that occurred years ago. Things die - and then they're gone, and you can't bring them back, but for some reason, I can't stop trying. I don't want things to end - I want to put the world in a freezer and leave it there. And somehow, I've convinced myself that through this house, I can do that. I've convinced myself that once I move into a certain zone, time fades away and all that's left is the recycling of chronology. This makes no sense.

* It makes no sense that I miss a lot of my old friends from university days, despite the fact that many have revealed themselves to be disgusting, selfish, evil motherfuckers who basically deserve to have their balls kicked in. I guess beer and ennui can bond you faster than glue. Can't help but miss some people, despite the fact that they think I'm a human disaster area who is too much trouble. This makes no sense.

* It makes no sense that I'm so deathly afraid of getting very close to people, still. I don't know what's wrong with me. Maybe Kathryn's right, and I'm petrified of people. Well, you would be too. If you were me. Of course, it's wrong and it makes no sense - but it's a terribly hard habit to break. Curiously enough, in a lot of ways, I don't want to break it. Is it wrong to still have that urge to just close the blinds, take the phone off the hook, and cease to exist? Maybe that's what Nowhere was about in the end - I'm not so sure that I was looking down on that character, so much as glorifying him. But, I made him incredibly unhappy - so, does that mean that I secretly want to be unhappy? That can't be right, because I hate being unhappy. I don't want to be unhappy. So, what was I saying? This makes no sense.

* It makes no sense that I look back fondly on times that were horrible. I hated being 13. I hated being 16. I was out of my mind most of the time with deranged anger, and was in and out of therapy. But, now, I look back and wish more than anything that I was back there. This could mean two things - either I feel like I'm lost with nothing to whine about, which isn't very likely - or, it's that I've found myself in a serious mess as my twenties drag on. Does this mean that if I look back at 36 and wish I was back at 26, I'm destined for some awful, horrible stuff?

* It makes no sense that I find it so hard to sleep, but I nod off during the day.

* It makes no sense that I'm so terrified about next week. I have to go and see a neurosurgeon. My back has become so bad that I've fallen over a few times, and it's getting harder and harder to sleep - so, I went to a new doctor, and the new doctor gave me a referral to the neurosurgeon. I talked to the doctor for a while, and he said that I have the spine of an 80 year old and that what they might do is cut me open and stick a metal rod in my back to straighten me up. What a horrible thought. If they do have to do it, I'll have to learn to walk properly again. It's all very daunting. Apparently, the cause of it was 'severe trauma during adolescence'. You know what I keep thinking about when I'm lying awake at night? If I went in for the operation, and I died on the operating table, you could almost say that they killed me years ago but I didn't even realise it. That'd be an ironic way to go out. The doctor said there are 'risks' involved. Imagine waking up paralysed. Good grief. It's almost too horrifying to contemplate. And, judging by my family's history with disasters of all kinds, it'd be just my luck that the doctor would slip and screw me up for life. None of this makes any sense.

* It makes no sense that I take such completely perverse pleasure in the feeling of escape and retreat. I'm never happier than I am when I've confronted a situation that I'm challenged by, I've considered it from all angles, and I've decided to run a mile as fast as possible. This makes no sense.

* It makes no sense that I know NMIT will be good for me, and that teaching writing isn't so bad, and that it'll be a way to pay the bills while I get my creative career together, but the one thing that makes my heart sink just to consider is the fact that it's one night a week. One night a week. Night. What is it about the segmented borders that I've placed throughout the 24 hours of the day? Waking u p to twelve is reading news, coffee, shopping, and starting work. 12 to 5 is solid writing, editing, or whatever else I need to do. 5 - 7:30 is cooking, cleaning, eating, and talking with the rents. 7:30 - 9 is time to do stuff - watching teev, or playing some Halo or whatever. From 9 onwards, I can go out - but not too late. I need to get back before my brain splits open and my mind falls out. And when I get home, more news reading, ten minutes to find music for sleep, and ten minutes to get Bronnie out of the lounge, and get her to go to sleep either on my bed, under my bed, or on her mat. Any deviation from the rules knocks me around and makes me feel like the entire world is falling to pieces. It's incredibly crazy and strange. It makes no sense.

* It makes no sense that I take the failure of every new Star Wars movie as some kind of personal attack on my person by George Lucas. I feel violated in some strange way - as though he's got me drunk and interfered with me while I'm half-passed out. This makes no sense.

* It makes no sense that the Bundoora/Mill Park border is a place that I'm sure the real Australia lives - yet I wouldn't be caught dead living there. Nonetheless, for reasons that I just don't understand, Cold Chisel records permanently remind me of that place.

* It makes no sense that I've never managed to get over anything, ever, at any time in my entire life. I'm still grieving/lamenting/am embarassed by/am angered by/am affected by things that happened when I was 5. Seriously, I can still remember crying my eyes out one day when my mother brought me to school - and I didn't want to go inside - and eventually, the teacher grabbed me and dragged me in, and all the other kids were staring at me. I was thinking about it the other night, and it wasn't just a silly memory from years ago - I could still remember exactly what it felt like, and I felt horribly, cringingly embarassed by it. Maybe trying to eradicate chronological personal narratives have a downside, in that you might be able to continually, relentlessly relive what it was like to run your hands on the carpet while watching cartoons - yet you also have to remember how it felt to have your face smashed into a wall until it broke open when you were 10. None of this makes any sense.

* It makes no sense that I should ever expect anyone to want to hear about this stuff, let alone be able to forgive me for it.

* It makes no sense that I'm still awake.

* It makes no sense that I swore I'd avoid writing profound, soul-baring entries on this cockamamie webpage, yet here I am doing it. I wonder what triggered this off.

* It makes no sense that I'm so threatened by all of your success.

* It makes no sense that I'm so nonchalant and disinterested in my own.

* It makes no sense that the rules I'm so terrified of breaking are rules I made up for myself.

* It makes no sense that I'm still writing.

* It makes no sense that you're still reading.

Been sick.

Been hideously ill. Had family trauma after family trauma. Life has been shit. Did these today.

Sooky La La's Comin' To Town.

After all these years, it's finally happening. We've all been crying out in desperation, flooding Rolling Stone and Kerrang with our letters which beg and plead and wheedle and whine - and, at last, our prayers have been answered. For today, tickets to the first solo concert in Melbourne by professional crybaby Trent Reznor's 'industrial metal' pop combo Nine Inch Nails went onsale, prompting a mass exodus of black-clad goths from their inner-city homes, flocking to the local Ticketek with their dole/arts grant held out proudly. The voice of an entire generation of self-obsessed teenagers, I was no stranger to the charms of Trentical myself - having spent many a year as an overpriveleged, drunken 'goth', myself - and, even now as I grow into an even more and more curdmudgeonly old man, I can't help but slap the old knees in time with the music when I hear a NIN classic like 'Wish' or 'Happiness In Slavery', or the immortal 'Fist Fuck'. Kathryn, a bad influence if ever there was one, has been engaged in deep discussion with me today over whether we shall be gracing the old Rod Laver Arena with our presence. After all, the prospect of seeing one of the icons of one's youth is not something to be sneezed at. Back in the good old days when I was self-obsessed, morbid, immature, permanently horny, and relentlessly drunk at nightclubs, a slice of the old Rez would set my soul alight. For he, and only he, understood the TRUE suffering that can befall those of us who are simply CANNOT be understood. Only Trentilla could truly articulate my pain and my rage. Only his albums - his 'halos' - could accurately send a message out the world that said 'I'm here! I'm here, and I'm angry! I'm being sucked into the machine! Help! Help me! I'm being pulled inside! Argh! I feel like a machine! My heart is a machine! Gggh!'

Of course, taking even ONE of these thoughts seriously is grounds for execution - and I was thinking all of them, all the time. Not a recipe for mental, emotional, or social wellbeing - and once I came to my senses and realised there really is no excuse for men in makeup that doesn't end with gay sex, I began to feel much better, and NIN's usefulness diminished. To the point where, if I'm honest, every time I hear one of their lame tunes, I fall about laughing. I laugh at Trent, I laugh at myself, and I laugh at you if you were also stupid enough to take such crappy, mindless, idiotic music seriously. Nine Inch Nails are, very possibly, THE worst band of all time. Well, excluding all - and I do mean ALL - rap/hip-hop/associated effluvia. They embody everything that sucks about being a teenager in the 1990's - they are vain, empty, clueless, unoriginal, inarticulate, their lead singer thinks he's Jesus/Hitler/Jim Morrison, and they wield irony with all the subtlety of Alanis Morrisette - covering Queen's 'Get Down, Make Love' ain't impressing anyone, boys. Admittedly, whilst Nine Inch Nails are the worst band of all time, they may have the coolest name of all time. Nearly as cool as 'REO Speedwagon' or 'Scraping Foetus Off The Wheel' - and that's saying something.

But, nevertheless, a part of me wants to go and see them so that I can make fun of Nine Inch Nails with Trent Reznor in the room. My main fear lies with their fans. Have you ever seen a group of NIN fans together? Oh, man. A suburban, middle-class mudsucker like you probably thinks they are intense and confronting and dark. Pah. No.

Here is a quick run-down of the fuckwits who will be at the NIN gig:

Is there anything more depressing than an old goth? Oh, yeah. A young goth. But, nevertheless - there will be plenty of THESE motherfuckers. You know the type - late 20's/early 30's, slightly receeding, still wearing the stupid clothes and the pissweak makeup, and desperately clinging to the belief that they're still cool and alternative. Listen up, people - just so that we're all CRYSTALLINE on this point - once you hit 25 or 26, it is IMPOSSIBLE for you to continue to be cool. You're not cool. You're old. Sorry. That's just the way it is. You cannot live the vacuous life of the trend-hopping culture-vulture whilst engaged in the detection of your first grey pubic hair. It just doesn't work. Being cool is a game for the young kiddies, and going to shitty nightclubs in the inner-city isn't gonna change the rules. You have to be over 18 to get into most nightclubs - but you should also have to be UNDER 21. There is nothing sadder than watching someone with a greasy, exposed, hairless scalp and a filthy grey pony-tail attempting to talk about 'postmodernism' or 'Buffy' or 'The time I saw Died Pretty at the Tote' to a 22 year old girl with big norks. Buddy, kill yourself. End it all.

These animals will be out in force for Trenteeza's Melbourne debut, attemping to infuse the crowd with their own brand of 'feeling it' face-pulling, and timid mosh power. They will smell, they will be on the dole, they will never have done anything with their lives outside of a nightclub, and they'll think their drug stories are really interesting. And, without exception, they'll ALL WRITE FUCKING POETRY, which they think is 'deep' and 'confronting' because it deals with either A. Their Catholic upbringing, B. Their lost faith in God, or C. Their sex lives. So far, so normal. The difference is that this cocksucker has it all memorized, and will recite it without needing visual aids. Ugh.

NIN Fans: Generation Two will, naturally, be out in force. The more contemporary acolytes of Trentistica are much like their Generation-Y brethren, with one exception: They all have Livejournals, and they all watch Buffy. I would feel so old standing next to one of these creatures, that I break into a cold sweat just thinking about it. As they stomp about in their big boots, holding their metal lunch boxes and trying to look intense and threatening and scary, I would almost shed a little tear for my lost youth. I remember the days when I thought there was nothing that would strike fear into the hearts of even the most resilient of men like the sight of a teenager in a dog collar. Of course, the truth is that there is no joy like laughing at someone who dresses like this. Do you, dear reader, know that joy? Do you know the joy of pointing at the next generation of poseurs, with their skirts-over-pants look, and their fishnet stockings on their arms, and their 'bisexuality', and meeting each one with legs-kicking-in-the-air-style, tear-flooding laughter?

If not, I pity you.

Twentysomethings who run under-appreciated websites and really should know better.

So - should we go, or what?

Schappele Corby - Postmodern Porn Star.

The most interesting thing about the Schappele Corby trial is the fact that the least interesting thing about the Schappele Corby trial is the Schappele Corby trial. Guilty, innocent - who really cares? There was only one way out of that courtroom for everyone's favourite beauty student, and that was in the back of a paddy wagon on her way to break rocks at the stripey home for the duration of the best years of her life. You knew she was going to prison, and so did I - there was only one other possibility - and that was a firing squad. Which, considering where she's going, might have been preferable. But, despite the open sewer that is the Indonesian legal system, and the skullduggery that has robbed Corby of her youth, nothing could top the unsettling sickness that contines to fester at the heart of Western culture, as it was brought to the fore during the media's coverage of the trial. It has produced a new phenomenon which, I'm sure, is sure to be a hit with viewers the world over. Schappele Corby is the world's first emotional porn star.

Hey, don't look at me like that. I don't think I'm going out of my way to say that at long last, we can all finally agree with David Cronenberg - sex IS dead. But pornography lives on. And despite the crowing of the far right to the contrary, it has finally completed its transition into the mainstream - in a form that nobody could have predicted. For, in channel nine and seven's coverage of Schappele Corby's judgement, we saw a disquietingly similar mode of narrative and camerawork to your traditional pornographic film. Only, instead of the film's climax (as it were) being gouts of semen splashing across the pumped-up breasts of Zona Q. Harlot, the climax rests in the emotional collapse of our protagonist.

There was the build up - the judges listing the naughty things Ms. Corby may or may not have done on her way to Bali. A way of setting the scene. Not unlike the pool man coming over unexpectedly because 'you need your filters checked'.

There was the vague, one dimensional attempts at characterisation - Corby is Bad, Cops are Good. Corby is a Liar, cops are Not Liars. Judges Are Always Right.

There was the foreplay - letting Corby know ahead of time that she was guilty. The first few hints of the fun to come, as Scappele stammered and gasped on the stand, her eyes darting from side to side.

There was the intercourse - as the judge let her know just HOW naughty she has been, and told her that she would be spending the next twenty years chowing down on rotten gruel while being raped in a vile, inhuman Indonesian prison.

And then - the glorious, sweet release of orgasm. Schappelle breaks down on the stand - her head sinks forward, her face scrunches up in a grimace of terror, disbelief, anger, and unbridled sorrow. We even get our bodily fluid-related money shot, as tears stream down her cheeks.

And, the whole time, it was shot in a style which is custom built for the most brute, clinical, base visual reporting imaginable. Like a gynaecological shot of pornographic intercourse, our camera zoomed in on Schappelle as her verdict was read - and rather than giving us the narrative of the courtroom via images of the judges, defendant, and the gallery - the moment was boiled down into heavily fetishized visual components. Just as, in pornography, the idea is to depict sexual intercourse in as much context-free detail as possible, Seven and Nine decided that we needed to see Schappele's heartbreak, confusion, and terror in as much context-free detail as possible. So, sitting on a tight shot for the rest of the coverage, we got to bask in the afterglow of a young woman's destruction - we could watch every tear, every sob, and every gasp. We could watch her call out to her Mum and Dad that it was going to be okay, and not to worry about her. We got to watch her flinch as the M.P's grabbed her roughly, and bundled her outside into a waiting car - speeding her away to her new life as a convict. A sick, savage mode of reporting - Corby was denied any sort of dignity or respect, and instead was transformed into an empty vessel which was used to store the components that win ratings - drama, sadness, destruction, and sorrow. In purely cultural terms, Schappele Corby was executed today - and only her ghost remains. A ghost that will forever be young, broken, and scarred with fear - this is the image that will, from this moment on, define her. It's a potent image, and a powerful image - but it's a lying image. As with Mulvey and the masculine gaze - we're not seeing Corby's sadness, we're seeing a camera seeing Corby's sadness. And, as we're all aware, the camera isn't the most truthful beast in the world.

So, perhaps this really is something new. A new way for us to think about image, and the emotions that are attached to it. The pornographic form isn't quite as useless as everyone suspected - it makes it easy for us to chop away the indulgence of narrative or context or even form and meaning. It allows us to enjoy the luxury of images which are all gravy and no meat - the most obvious, superficial configurations of human response, be they intellectual, emotional, tactile, or sexual, become validated simply by virtue of the fact that we are denied the information to respond in any kind of textured, three-dimensional fashion. The image is the image - and in this case, the image was focused with laserlike intensity on the 'money shot' of the situation. And that's it.

Ironically, as the cameras zoomed in and captured every heartbreaking moment of Corby's collapse, we were afforded the opportunity to tsk-tsk in patronizing indignance, scolding those damn Indonesians for their inability to respect human life and human dignity. I don't know if the girl was guilty or innocent - and to be honest, I don't really care. It just makes me sad when I see such brazen hypocrisy - and it makes me sad when we can't afford another human being the dignity and decency that we'd demand for ourselves in our moments of grieving.

Before I go to bed.

The delectable sarni from the momentous Infernality sent me a little quiz to do tonight. A 'meme', they're called. I thought I'd fill it out and post the results.

Oh, and painting went fine. Davena is the greatest. And her partner is about as fine a man as one could imagine. He even understands the damaging effects that too much exposure to Crowded House can have on a young man's heterosexuality. Now, that's what I call wisdom.

1. You're stuck inside Fahrenheit 451. Which book do you want to be?

Norman Mailer's 'Advertisements For Myself'. Mailer is an out-of-control egomaniac, and a dose of his mammoth self-confidence would probably do me some good.

2. Have you ever had a crush on a fictional character?

Well, I was going to say that I kinda had a thing for the girl in the bear suit from John Irving's 'The Hotel New Hampshire", but Kathryn will laugh at me. So, instead, I'll go with Ali Tanner from Robert Ludlum's 'The Osterman Weekend'. I'm not gonna say why, though - but it has something to do with a girl, a crossbow, and a job she's just gotta do.

3. The last book you bought was...?

Ordeal by Linda Lovelace. It's out of print, so I had to hit Ebay. Linda, crazed with paranoid thoughts implanted in her admittedly weak mind by Gloria Steinem and Susan Brownmiller, unleashes a dizzying collection of reminisces that veer between fact, half-truths, and flat-out bullshit. The question is - what really happened? Was she forced into performing in 'Deep Throat'? Did Chuck Traynor use hypnosis to encourage her remarkable oral sex technique? Does Hugh Hefner REALLY have the world's largest collection of 8mm animal pornography?

I guess we'll never know.

4. The last book you read was...?

Well, the aforementioned Ordeal. Failing that, the ever-cheery Killing For Culture - An Illustrated History Of The Death Film From Mondo To Snuff. This is a really fantastic textbook that looks at the history of real death on film from the early 20th century, through to the televised executions and 'Faces Of Death' compilation films that emerged in the 1970's and 1980's. It also takes a detour into narrative films that deal with snuff - such as Videodrome, The Last House On Dead End Street, and Snuff. Actually, with regards to the last one, there's a chapter devoted to the way Slaughter, an Argentinian riff on the Manson Murders by Michael and Roberta "Touch Of Her Flesh" Findlay was transformed using obviously fake footage into exploitation legend Snuff. Fascinating stuff, if you're that way inclined. It disturbs me that I have nearly every film mentioned in the book. Amazingly appropriate reading in light of the Nick Berg tape.

6. Five books you would take to a desert island...

Psychotic Reactions And Carburetor Dung, by Lester Bangs.

Remember back to the time before your brain was turned into an open sewer due to the toilet-flushings of what passes for modern culture polluted it beyond repair? Lester Bangs lived that time every day of his life, and lived to tell the tale. Ostensibly a collection of record reviews published in Creem and Rolling Stone in the 1970's, the hopelessly doomed Bangs avoided writing about the music per se, and instead wrote about how the music made him feel - resulting in 6,000 words on how Van Morrison's 'Astral Weeks' was a perfect soundtrack to his mental collapse, as 'bugs and spiders were crawling across the mind'. 5,000 words on The Stooges' 'Funhouse' results in Lester laying down the iconography and aesthetic of the moribund 'punk' movement, nearly 7 years before it actually happened. And, just for you art students, there's a selection of Lester's famous interviews with Lou Reed, in which Lester goes from telling US how much of a genius Lou Reed is, to him telling Lou that he is a cocksucker who sold out. Read it - even if only to find the answer to the question: "Is Lou Reed's Metal Machine Music the greatest album ever recorded?"

Any Peanuts Collection - Charles M. Schulz.

We aren't even equipped to BEGIN to fathom the genius of the Peanuts cartoon strip that run from the late 1950's to the untimely death of Charles Schulz. Each three panel strip was a meticulous, gentle, heartbreaking examination of the human condition - visually rendered in the open, bleeding melancholy of Schulz's simple shapes. Each Peanuts character was a microcosm of human personalities - and human failings - and they interacted with an honesty and a sense of the nobility in the failings of the ordinary that will see them live on forever.

The two that I love the most, though...

This is the funniest cartoon strip ever. Every time I read it, I cannot stop laughing.

1. Charlie brown is in his room, looking through a cupboard. "Where is my handkerchief?"

3. Snoopy is outside, standing on his doghouse, with the handkerchief wrapped around his head, Leigonaire-style. "There it is, men! Fort Zinderneuf!"

And the second one... which basically describes my relationship with everyone I've ever met.

1. Patty and Violet are yelling to the right of frame. "Go home! We don't want any little kids following us!"

4. Charlie Brown standing alone. "Actually, I'm older than both of them. What they're referring to is my emotional immaturity."

Ordinary People, by Judith Guest.

Keeps me honest. Reminds me that maybe there isn't anything to be gained from pretending that the only things worthy of literary inquiry are Deep and Artsy and Inner City. It's just a story about a family which disintegrates after their son dies in a boating accident, and their other son attempts to kill himself from the guilt. Powerful to the point of being uncomfortable, despite its soap opera-ish veneer, this is truly great writing.

Amusing Anecdote: During the first draft of 'Nowhere' - the novel which became my master's thesis - I had to sit my colloquium at the start of my second year. In a colloquium, you basically sit opposite your supervisor, the head of the department, and the head of the school, and you tell them why they shouldn't throw your lazy bones out of the fucking university. My secondary supervisor at the time was narcissistic, pretentious shitbag Justin Clemens - a poet and one-time male model who amused me to no end with the temerity he had to show up for my colluqium without having read a single word of my material on account of being 'too busy'. Too busy for a year and a half, apparently. Anyway, I mentioned that one of my inspirations for the clinical prose that made up the first draft of 'Nowhere' was Judith Guest's 'Ordinary People', and when he heard that, he pulled a face, gave me a bit of 'Oh, you silly, silly boy' head-shaking, and immediately went back to nattering on about Proust or Camus or whatever shit it is that douches like him are into. True story. Fuckin' academics. Fuckin' poets. I hate them all.

The Great Shark Hunt - Hunter S. Thompson

Embodies the great strengths and great failings of my guru and mentor Dr. Hunter Stockton Thompson, this is a wonderful, flailing, formless, angry, broken, tired, drunken mess of a book which veers from straightforward political commentary, to recollections of Hunter's encounter with an aging Mohammed Ali. What else is there to say? Hunter in his prime - and it doesn't carry the baggage of several generations of art students thinking that they're the first ones to be able to recite the whole 'It was somewhere outside Barstow when the drugs began to take hold...' monologue from Fear And Loathing In Las Vegas. NEW RULE: Anyone who thinks they are funny, hip, witty, or cool by rattling off that particular piece of prose can LEGALLY be beaten to death with a piece of lead pipe.

And, finally...

The Shining or Carrie - Stephen King.

Yeah, I know. You hate Stephen King. What use does a trendy, cosmopolitan, emo-glasses wearing shitheel like yourself have for one of humanity's biggest sell-outs? Surely, Stephen King is nothing but a noxious, unscrupulous schill for The Man. A no-talent hack who appeals to the lowest common denominator, with his laughable everyman posturing and his bland, featureless prose? Surely, Stephen King is nothing but a brand-name, used to shove another fistful of crowd-pleasing, Hollywood excrement down the throats of an adoring audience of sycophants who wouldn't know good horror - let alone good writing - if Edgar Allen Poe, Clive Barker, and Mario Bava took turns gangbanging them while making them watch 'Carnival Of Souls'?

Fuck off, hippie. Stephen King might have more money than God, but the man rules. Or, at least, he did.

Yeah, I know. So, Big Steve's not been looking so crash hot since he tried his best to defy the laws of quantum physics by occupying the same space as a speeding truck. Yeah, so what if his reputation has more to do with button-pushing bullshit like The Shawshank Redemption and The Green Mile? Hey - what the fuck do YOU care, hippie, if he was involved in 'Dreamcatcher' - surely THE most inept, incoherent, pretentious, worthless piece of laughable arse-bangery to be foisted upon an undeserving audience by a ruthless, sadistic major American studio?

Once upon a time, he was good. In fact, he was better than good. He was fucking great.

The Shining isn't a horror novel in the traditional sense - it has the trappings of a haunted house story, but it's really about the horror that erupts at the points of fusion between members of a family. And, more importantly, it is one of the most detailed, revealing, and sorrowful examinations of just how the relationships between fathers and sons actually work. Forget the film - Kubrick's a genius, and the film is brilliant... but the film and the book are two completely different beasts. Kubrick is obsessed with the hotel, and with his curious need for perfect symmetry in his set-design and shot construction. King wants you to know what it feels like to say 'I love you, Daddy', and get nothing but a blank stare in return.

And, well - isn't Carrie a rite of passage for all disaffected, adolescent miscreants? Carrie is "The Breakfast Club" for people with an I.Q above 20. Forget the zany telekenetic hijinks that the book is famous for, and think - instead - about the poignant elegance of the central character. Carrie, the novel, is the high school experience - diffused through the prism of the title character's slow degeneration. The beauty = death metaphors that are strewn through the novel could fuel a thousand Dark Nights Of The Soul for wannabe angst poets, and - yet - it works. It works for the same reason that 'The Grapes Of Wrath' works. Or a Springsteen record works. The writer doesn't think that BEING a writer makes him special - he's just reporting from the front lines on how people are existing, day by day. This is King's great strength - the whole 'master of the macabre' bullshit aside.

Or, to quote a great scribe and modern thinker, T-Rex's Marc Bolan: "Book after book, I get hooked every time the writer talks to me like a friend."

7. Who are you passing this stick on to and why?

Tim Train - from Will Type For Food.

To cook your own Tim Train, take one teaspoon of Batman's 'The Riddler', one tablespoon of Anne Coulter, and simmer in a large pot filled with the room-temperature bile and paranoia of Andrew Bolt. Add a dash of Karl Rove to taste. To be served in an unwashed pair of Tim Blair's underpants.

Should make for something interesting.

And, of course.. my beloved Kathryn from jazzyhands.

Because, Kathryn keeps me from killing you, killing me, killing Roger Waters, killing poets, and killing time. You should all want to hear her thoughts, for they glitter like sapphires when all around is pus.

Revenge Of The Stiff

It's that time again. We all knew it was coming - the levels of pride that Nerd Melbourne usually is able to keep under control suddenly surged into the red as the date became closer and closer. You know what I'm talking about: Look out childhood, you're about to be raped! There's a new Star Wars movie coming to town, and it's lookin' for love in ALL the wrong places!

Yes, the cinematic bowels of George Lucas have once again opened wide, releasing their payload onto the faces and down the throats of yet another unsuspecting, middle-class audience. For, 'the circle is now complete', as everyone is fond of yammering - and his 30 year Star Wars saga is finally over. And, with bittersweet tears, nerds from across the nation are emerging - broken hearted and deeply moved - by the plight of Anakin Skywalker, and his savage journey into the dark heart of man, which will leave him disfigured, dismembered, and reborn as seminal film villain Darth Vader. This film, the sixth and final in the series, is as black as ebony, and features scenes that are disturbing and upsetting - elevating the tone of the Star Wars saga to a new level of emotional realism, resulting in a gut-punch of a film.

At least, that's what everyone who wants this piece of shit to be good is saying - after reading it ad-nauseum in the pre-release reviews.

Let's be honest - and let's not lose our heads, boys and girls. George Lucas could release a film of himself taking a big, steaming dump onto the face of a bound, naked cub-scout, and the dorks of the world would proclaim it epochal and timeless. He could make a film called 'Star Wars 7: I Beat My Wife Because The Bitch Wouldn't Shut Up', and it could be ninety minutes of him whipping his wife in the face and breasts with a power cord, and the apologists would declare that it is evocative, cutting-edge, and if you don't like it, 'you don't get it'.

I get it just fine. But, I am not so brainless as to proclaim something that is clearly an emotionless, vapid piece of shit as anything but that. Let's be real, you little bastards - 'Revenge Of The Sith' isn't a triumph of filmmaking; it's a triumph of economics. Over the film's interminable two and a half hours, there is nothing that even remotely approaches competent writing, let alone any kind of complex filmmaking - from the non-existant mis-en-scene, to Lucas's hard-on for CGI, the film SCREAMS at you, demanding that you try to guess how many gazillion dollars it cost.

Here's the plot.

Once upon a time, there was a whining guy called Anakin Skywalker who whined a lot. He was training to be a Jedi Knight. Jedi Knights use 'The Force' to 'defend the galaxy' and 'maintain peace' - although, their definition of 'maintaining peace' seems to involve killing people all the time. When last we left Anakin, the 'Clone War' was about to start. This is a war in which thousands of robots fight an army cloned from the DNA of Temuera Morrison - and if you're gonna clone somebody, it might as well be him. Both sides are fighting, but nobody knows why. They just are. The robots need a leader who can dish out the biff, so they choose Christopher Lee. They may as well have chosen Christopher Reeve, considering that Lee dies about three seconds into this stupid movie - but, whatever. Anakin hacks off his head, because Chancellor Palpatine thinks it's a good idea. Apparently, if you're a good Jedi, you're not supposed to cut people's heads off - just their hands. And legs. Anyway, Anakin gets over it pretty quickly and runs off to Natalie Portman's house. See, in the period between the last film and this one, they've been playing hide the sausage, and apparently there's no contraception in a galaxy far away, and Anakin has knocked her up. Jedi aren't supposed to get naked with ladies, so they must keep it a secret. Weirdly, there seems to be countless people queueing up to become Jedi, despite the fact that once it happens, you can no longer have a shag. This speaks volumes to me about how Star Wars fans really identify with the characters in the films - most of them don't have sex, either.

Anyway, George throws in a new character called General Grievous, who is like a robot crab and he holds four lightsabers and only Ewan McGregor can take him out, and he must have really cleaned up since 'Trainspotting' because he does it pretty quickly. Much CGI abounds, as Ewan rides a giant lizard and looks all dashing and dreamy. While this is happening, Anakin is being all pouty and upset - his buddy, Chancellor Palpatine, is all evil and stuff. The fact that he wears nothing but black robes while everyone else wears colours didn't tip Anakin off, so Palpatine has to pretty much sit him down and say 'Listen, I am evil.' Eventually, Anakin gets it - and he wants to get back into his head-chopping ways, but he's too much of a sissy, so he gets Samuel Jackson to do it. Awesome! Samuel shows up and gets beaten up and zapped with lightning and thrown through a window - and I guess that shows you what happens when you try to look intense and hard without using the word 'motherfucker'. Palpatine becomes The Emperor from that other Star Wars movie with the Ewoks, and now that he's been revealed to be all evil and stuff, he has to LOOK evil as well, so he pulls on a hooded robe - a robe which seems to be laced with nitrous oxide, since for the rest of the film, he doesn't stop laughing to himself in an eeeeeevil fashion. Just in case you're STILL too fucking stupid to figure out what's happening, his eyes go all yellow like he's a hepatitis-infected Brian May on the '71 Queen tour, and he stops talking properly and starts growling between his giggles. The long struggle for Anakin Skywalker's soul ends with this moving scene - after two and a half films where we see Anakin resisting the temptation of power, and fighting against the corruption of his soul, The Emperor figures out a far more straightforward way of turning him to the dark side:

The Emperor: "Turn to the dark side."

Anakin: "Okay."

So, Anakin decides that if he's going to be a bad guy, he needs a scary hood as well. Apparently, in a galaxy far, far away, there are shops that sell Bad Guy Apparel - including all-black coats and capes with hoods. Anakin gets into his awesome new clothes, but they look pretty heavy - because, all of a sudden, he has his head bowed to the ground and he spends the rest of the film looking up at us in an evil, nasty way. Of course, this might just be Anakin trying to look like a sadistic killer, but surely nobody could be that simple. The Emperor tells him to go and kill every Jedi, so Anakin goes back to the Jedi temple and hacks up a bunch of kids with his lightsabre - which makes George Lucas really sad because if he keeps wasting kids, who will buy the stupid merchandise from the films? Ewan McGregor hears that his old buddy has started going crazy and cutting people up into bar-b-que, so he quickly goes to see Natalie Portman, since she is clearly a fountain of wisdom. They have an exchange which highlights George's impeccable skills as a writer of dialogue:

Ewan: "Anakin has killed younglings."

Natalie: "Anakin has killed younglings?"

Ewan: "Yes, Anakin has killed younglings."

Ewan flies away to a planet covered in lava to take out Anakin - and if you're going to have a Final Duel, I guess it makes perfect sense to do it in the most inhospitable terrain imaginable. If I was going to have a Final Duel, I'd have it in an electrical storm while holding a golf club over my head. Anyway, Natalie Portman stows away and - since she's now Anakin's wife - she has to go and start nag, nag, nagging him. So, they have this stupid, lame-o conversation where she says typical wife shit:

Natalie: "We don't spend enough time together."

Anakin: "But look at my DARK POWER! I shall RULE THE GALAXY. YOU AND I."

Natalie: "We just don't talk enough anymore. You're always out with your friends."

Anakin: "I HAVE BROUGHT PEACE... DEMOCRACY... ORDER... THROUGH MY NEW EMPIRE."

Natalie: "You never have enough time for me."

Anakin gets pissed at this, and does what we all wish we could do - he force chokes the biatch and throws her across the floor, then rants about justice. If Gary Oldman was in this picture, there'd be some applause - but instead, we get boring old Ewan McGregor who lays a rap about being naughty down on Anakin. Anakin has had enough of this shit, so they have a lightsabre duel that goes for roughly seven hours, and ends with Ewan hacking off Anakin's arms and legs and leaving him to die a horrible, excruciating death in a pit of oozing lava - because this is the way of the light Jedi. He also screams 'You were the chosen one!' in a fashion that is so hilariously overwrought and cheesy, that it is hard to know what to laugh at first - the delivery, or the shittiness of the writing. The Emperor shows up and puts Anakin in The Suit - and Anakin promptly screams "MENDOZAAAAAAAAAAAA!" at the heavens. Natalie Portman, apparently, 'loses the will to live' and carks it. I am only guessing here, but I think that she loses the will to live because her daughter is going to be raised by Jimmy Smits, but hey - what do I know? Jimmy takes the sprog and flees, while Ewan has to decide where to take the OTHER kid. He decides, quite brilliantly, that only a cast member from 'The Secret Life Of Us' will do, and so - the other kid is sent to live with Joel Edgerton. The end.

The movie is a piece of shit. Yet, I can't help but be fascinated by the response to it.

Everyone makes note of how worthless the script is, and how horrible the acting is, and how lame the effects are, and how it is mostly an incomprehensible mess, and how they laughed uproariously at most parts - yet it is 'great' and 'amazing' and 'one of the best ones'.

Here's a hint for you, boys and girls - it isn't 'amazing'. It's better than the last two, sure - but that's like saying that a hamburger covered in vomit is tastier than a hamburger covered in shit. If it didn't say 'Star Wars', and it didn't have those overused music queues every three seconds, you wouldn't be rabbiting on about how 'intense' it is - you'd be saying that it is a CGI-infested piece of underwritten garbage, directed by a retard with a subhuman I.Q. Why do people lie to themselves? Why?

And furthermore, everybody - can we get a moratorium on fuckwits repeating the shit they read in T.V Week reviews? The film isn't 'dark', it isn't 'fucking dark', it isn't 'disturbing'. If you think that tripe like 'Revenge Of The Sith' is 'dark', may you rot in hell. It might be time to take the thumb out of your arse and start watching real movies. 'Hellraiser' is dark. 'Maniac' is dark. 'Blade Runner' is dark. 'Ms. 45' is dark. 'Revenge Of The Sith' is a kid's movie. And a shitty one at that.

When I staggered out of the film, I must admit that I felt deflated and unclean. I loved Star Wars as much as everyone else when I was a kid - 'The Empire Strikes Back' is still one of the best American films of all time. But, try as I might, I just can't get into the love-fest that everyone else is so determined to partake in - just because it has 'Star Wars' written on it does not make it good, you fuckers.

But, if we're serious - the film has serious flaws. There is almost no dramatic tension - Lucas fumbles the ball with his characters backstories, and when he loses his way narratively, he throws another badly-choreographed CGI sequence at us to dazzle our glazzies. The CGI itself is a monumental failure - with the typical problems ascribed to the CGI generation, a weightlessness and lack of depth to the images which renders them sterile when they should be alive. Apparently, Lucas sees the galaxy as a hospital ward - a smooth, clinical, antiseptic place with no need for texture or chiaroscuro. The acting is uniformly atrocious - with only Ian McDiarmid and Ewan McGregor rising above the efforts of the others to simply give some kind of focus to Lucas's massive, overwhelming sets. Indeed, with the infinate array of universes that Lucas is capable of generating artificially, he seems simply overwhelmed and frightened by ILM's technical prowess - retreating to incredibly cliched character and vehicle designs that recall the sci-fi art of the late 1950's, rather than anything post-Blade Runner. Which, you could argue, is the point - since Star Wars has always been a pastiche. I disagree, though - the original trilogy is a pastiche, the prequels are far different creatures, spawned from a wannabe-auteur who is so insular and ineffectual as an artist that he can only create from within the vacuum of his own sphere: Star Wars has never been less relevant - or interesting - than it is at this point, because Star Wars is only capable of drawing from, being influenced by, and commenting on... itself. The Star Wars universe may be the ultimate in self-referential circle-jerking - and by trying to generate its own mythology from WITHIN its own mythology, it falls flat on its face. This was my main problem with the film - it was climax without context, repeated for two hours and thirty minutes. Every half an hour or so, there was another sequence which was SUPPOSED to be chilling and moving, and was supposed to make my spine tingle and my eyes water - all the signs were there. Swelling, dramatic music, anguish-gripped faces, soggy, waterlogged camera shots that suggest all the mopey resignation of a dog who's bone has just been stolen. But, in the end, what was I actually watching? Who is Anakin Skywalker? Who is Padme? What is a Jedi - really? Who ARE these people, and just WHAT am I watching? Oh, that's right. I'm watching 'Star Wars' - except that 'Star Wars' ceased to be a cycle of films in 1983, and has since been a vehicle to self-propogate its own mystique, fuelled by a multi-billion dollar marketing empire, at the expense of any semblance of artistry or soul.

Frankly, I don't CARE if you liked the film. Sit back, eat your popcorn, and drink your premix cola - but don't be so shallow and desperate as to suggest that this is in any way 'good filmmaking'. Just wallow in nostalgia - and follow George's orders as he barks at you to bend and spread 'em.

Here, so that we're very clear, are my top 15 reasons why 'Revenge Of The Sith' is a festering pile of shit. For an extended, detailed list - email me.

1. Not another Something of the Something film please, George. A little originality. Come on.

2. No, Hayden Christiansen hasn't 'learned to act', you fools. He's just as much of a dickless airhead as he was in the last one.

3. Natalie Portman. Good grief - the only thing more wooden than Natalie Portman is my penis when I look at Natalie Portman.

4. For a film that's so 'dark', The Emperor sure does a lot of laughing. Someone please shut him up. Thank you.

5. Talk like this all the time, Yoda never did. Only sometimes talk like this, did he. Unneccessary to talk like this constantly, it is. Bad writing, it is.

6. General Grevious. Blink and you'll miss the intro - and exit - of a character that is on all the posters and is apparently an integral part of the plot. Apparently, Lucas hasn't learned since Darth Maul - you need more than 15 minutes of screen time to create a character, George. You fat-necked freak.

7. Airbrushing Christopher Lee's face onto a stunt double doesn't make it any more ridiculous to think that a 100 year old dude can do backflips.

8. So, Anakin becomes a Sith to 'stop people from dying'. Apparently, he'll stop people from dying by killing all of them. So, Darth Vader's a republican?

9. Anakin wastes kids, but Lucas is too much of a wussy loser to show it. Oh, yeah. Real dark. And don't give me any shit about 'the imagination being more powerful' - we both know that is a bunch of crap that pussies use an excuse for when they can't hack it.

10. George Lucas has a really fat neck.

11. Oh, by the way George - you might want to consider this: The multi-squillion dollars you spent on the endless, ENDLESS CGI effects for this film were utterly, utterly wasted. "Revenge Of The Sith" STILL looks about a zillion times less convincing than when the ILM workshop was a bunch of guys with socks on their hands pretending to be aliens.

12. Anyone who seriously thinks he 'had it all worked out before he made the first one' has shit for brains. Fatso has obviously been making it up as he goes along, and - unfortunately - he is too much of an incompetent writer to tie it up in anything but the most obvious fashion. It's just so fucking awkwardly, ham-fistedly done that it is laughable.

13. Catchphrases aren't funny, George. In fact, the only catchphrase in human history that was ever funny was 'I'll buy that for a dollar!' from Robocop - a film that you are too stupid to have seen. We don't need characters telling us that they have a bad feeling about this in every fucking movie.

14. C-3PO is still the most irritating character ever invented. Who the fuck would ever think to themselves: "You know what I need to build? A really talkative robot with a personality modelled on a cross between John Inman from 'Are You Being Served?' and Jasper Carrott." C-3P0 was never funny. In fact, the only scene he was ever good in was in 'Empire Strikes Back' where he is shot into tiny pieces.

15. It was shit. You know it, and I know it. Let's stop lying to ourselves.

Fuck you, George Lucas - you fat-necked motherfucker.

Zero stars. Uncle Dave says check it out.

Rot in Hell, George Orwell.

I'm a stupid person. A stupid person, who - through diligence and practice - has developed a unique brand of stupidity that is all but invisible to the naked eye. To look at me, and to listen to me, you may feel that you're dealing with a superior creature, effortlessly well-rounded in both mind and body - but beneath the glittering facade of intellectual and physical perfection there beats the erratic heart of a total moron. For, last night, I thought I'd watch the first episode of this year's fiesta of egomania, tasteless exhibitionism, and no-holds-barred mental deficiency that is channel Ten's Big Brother. I'd seen the programme on and off for the last five years at different intervals, never being especially interested enough to bother watching a whole episode on account of the fact that even viewing even a nanosecond of the show caused my brain to pulsate with agony, and my bowels to churn and groan - threatening to release their payload into my long-unwashed trousers.

But, last night, I was feeling kind of zany - so I sat down to watch the extra-special Big Brother '05 premiere. And by the end, I felt so utterly depressed, unclean, and violated that I may have to check into some kind of crisis center for some warm tea and a long chat about my feelings. Of course, I never expected the show to be anything more than the televisual equivalent of an overweight truck driver wrenching my mouth open and taking a dump down my throat while making me listen to Maroon 5 - but I didn't realise that three of his friends would be sodomising me while he did it. The show is not only an insult to intelligence, it is some kind of opening salvo in a neo-Tet Offensive against humanity itself. Gretel Kileen, that snivelling, skeletal harpie, was dressed in some kind of corset - presumably intended to emphasise her non-existant cleavage - and with her hair pulled back to scalp-bleeding tightness, her crows feet and sunken eyeballs twitching beneath the studio lights, she looked little like the hip, happening voice of the Menstrual Gender - and more like some old slapper who has done one too many eight millimetre beastiality loops to support her crack habit. Death is too good for Gretel Kileen - and as she pranced about the stage like a weasel on a spanish fly and speed bender, I was transfixed by the intensity of the murderous thoughts that I was directing at her. The show couldn't get any worse - surely.

Oh, I was so wrong.

Last night, they introduced the thirteen subhuman animals that are going to be incarcerated in the Big Brother House (tm), and as each one was wheeled out, I felt myself vomiting into my mouth - a little more each time. By number 13, I had to go and spit my dinner into the sink, and run the tap for a while - hunched over and gasping, as the viscous brown liquid swirled down the drain, and I felt my throat reflexively opening and closing. I wanted to die. I wanted God himself to descend from the heavens, so that he could tear my still-beating heart out of my chest, and hold it in front of my dying eyes. I just wanted the pain to stop.

And it will. But before the show triggers my union with the Reaper, let me explain myself. Here, for your amusement, is my review of Big Brother 2005's list of housemates. I hope you'll understand what I'm trying to say.

ANGELA - 29, Vic.

Angela has a face that has probably gone a few rounds with Ali. Despite the fact that she feels that she's hot and stuff, and that the boys want her, she looks like Angela Bishop in a pair of cheap flares. Prattling nonsensically about how happening she is, and how she 'loves life', and how she's a 'company director', she apparently doesn't care 'what people think of her'. This is a motif for this year's gallery of scum - they care not one whit for the thoughts of others, and care only about the wild party that is their life. A 'company director'. Here's a hint, honey - it takes nothing to be a 'company director'. I can start 'Dave's Insult Machine', where we send anonymous letters to whores like you, detailing the locations that your mother's dismembered body parts will be buried across Melbourne after we slice her to bits in a murderous rage, and I can call myself 'the company director'. I can run a mail-order business selling pencils to drunks from the western suburbs, and I can be the 'company director'. You're not impressing anyone, you stupid bitch.

SHE SHOULD BE KILLED... using a sockful of gravel to the back of her ugly head.

CHRISTIE - 19, NSW

Christie thinks she has 'the total package' and 'is perfect'. She has the looks, she has the personality, and she creates fun wherever she goes. Unfortunately, she doesn't have the brains - her skull is lined with only the stinkiest dog excrement, and the only remotely sentient thoughts she seems capable of enjoying revolve around her feeble attempts to be 'sexy', and - well - herself. I fucking hate 'fun' people. Life isn't fun, you fucking dirty bitch. It's a long, painful march to the morgue - and no matter how blonde you are, the only jewellery that you'll wear that will truly last is a fucking toe-tag. I despise this vapid, vacuous whore in almost more ways than I dreamed possible. "Girls are often intimidated by my openness as it may not be 'lady-like'. Men simply love it.", Christie claims. Christie's openness! I'm assuming that she's referring to the openness of her thighs. I would like to take a scalpel to Christie's vital organs.

SHE SHOULD BE KILLED... in the most brutal, degrading way imaginable.

CONSTANCE - 21, VIC

Constance is so dull and lightweight that she may as well not even exist. The word 'generic' was created for her. She wants to 'be famous'. She's 'very open'. She's 'always confident'. She feels that she's 'attractive and funny'. Smashing her in the teeth with a lead pipe is attractive to me because it would be funny. She believes in 'sex at first sight'. I really have nothing to say about this dumb bitch. Whatever. Next.

SHE SHOULD BE KILLED... by being bored to death after having to listen to herself for an hour.

DEAN - 24, QLD

Saddle up the death machine, because here's Big Deano! Dean is some kind of hot, studly man - and he also cares nothing for 'what people think of him'. That's handy, since I think he should die in brain-searing agony. He likes to 'mess with people's minds', and feels that it would be funny to 'make them his puppets'. I'd like to mess with Dean's mind using a chainsaw. He wants some 'loving' in the house - Dean is a hit with the laydeez, apparently. I'd like to hack off Dean's penis and testicles so that I could ram them down his stupid throat. Hopefully it would shut him up for a nanosecond. Dean is human excrement, shat out of the bowels of a culture that promotes hedonism and apathy over anything else - he is symptomatic of just how deserving we are of atomic war. I would sacrifice myself in a nuclear holocaust just to know that I was taking Dean with me.

HE SHOULD BE KILLED... after having a nailgun fired through his nutsack. Die, you fucker.

GENEVA - 19, NSW

Woah! The whore train has arrived! Feast upon the moving thoughts of Geneva, a vacuous slut who should have been drowned at birth. Geneva is "one of those crazy people who smile when they walk down the street because they're thinking how fun and enjoyable their life is." Really, bitch? I'm one of those crazy people who snarl when they walk down the street because they're fighting the urge to hunt you down and bury you alive in a nest of fire ants. "I'm a character. I was made for me. I think I can tell people what I think without giving a s**t if they judge me or not." Another one who doesn't care what people think of them. What is up with these morons? Even as I write these kind words about channel ten's newest reality T.V stars, I sure as fuck want you to LOVE me for them. What kind of narcissistic pigfucker genuinely doesn't care what people think of them? Who has the luxury of that? Oh, that's right. Hot people.

"I think that I might say something that will hurt someone's feelings outside the house, but who cares really?"

Yes, Geneva. Good point. Who cares? You stupid slag. I hope that while you're in the house, your entire family is butchered by Scandinavian metal fans. After all - who cares, really? Not fucking me.

SHE SHOULD BE KILLED... by tieing piano wire around her tits and kicking her off a bridge.

GIANNA - 24, SA

Gianna thinks she's 'Lara Croft'. Hopefully, that means that we can drop her in a pit full of hungry tigers and unplug the controller. Her theme song is 'Beautiful Soul'. I'd like her to see the 'beautiful sole' of my Blundstones as I boot her off a cliff. Gianna wants you to know that despite all the things she's done, and despite her immeasurable beauty, she is 'just another person'. Shit, bitch. Thanks for pointing that out. For a second, I feeling deeply intimidated by a woman who claims that people refer to her as 'Cheeky G'. Mmm, yes. "I'm an attention seeker and therefore I love the thought of having cameras on me all the time." Sounds like she'd be a good candidate for a snuff movie. Apparently, chicks from the four corners of the earth hate her because she is so hot that men can't help but be attracted to her. She's had four... no wait - tee hee!... five marriage proposals. Words cannot express how deeply I crave this woman's bloody demise.

SHE SHOULD BE KILLED... when the five guys that proposed to her come to their fucking senses and dismember her using a range of edged weapons. Lara Croft this, bitch.

GLENN, 21 VIC

Duh. Glenn is a white trash redneck who calls everyone 'mate'. He was calling Gretel Kileen 'mate' last night. Mate, here's a hint, mate - Gretel Kileen wouldn't call out to you if you stepped in front of a speeding train unless there was money/a corporate blowjob in it for her. She's not your 'mate'. Nobody's your 'mate', mate. How did Glenno get roped into the postmodern shenanigans of Big Brother? "I was sitting on the toilet, reading one of mum's Woman's Day magazines and thought it would be good to see myself on the cover. I think I want to be famous." Mm. That's fucking nice, Glenn. Were you filling in the crosswords in crayon, you fucking imbecile? The only magazine you'll ever get on the cover of is 'Drunken Date Rapist Monthly', or 'Blue Singlet Gazette'. "I really want to be famous. Australia has given me so much, so it's time for me to give something back. Good or bad, I'll give it everything I've got and then some." You want to give something back to Australia, Glenn? How about your life. Literally.

Glenno 'loves life'. Colour me fucking amazed. How this shitkicker could 'love life' when he spends his time groping sheep speaks volumes to me. "I am actually very interested to look back on it and check out what little habits, or little quirks I have but don't realise." Do you think Glenn will watch the tapes, raise his eyebrows, and proclaim: "Hey! I didn't realise it before... but one of my little quirks is that... I'm a retard."

Glenn's hero is 'Ned Kelly'. Jesus fucking christ. Enough said.

HE SHOULD BE KILLED... by being chained to that stupid animatronic Ned Kelly display at Glenrowan, and he shoots himself after the 900th chorus of 'Such Is Life, Ned Kelly, Such Is Life'.

HOTDOGS, 27 WA

Okay. Take a deep breath.

I admit it - I hate a lot. I hate people far and wide. My hate spans cities and continents. It is blind to caste, race, religion, or politics - it is a pure hatred that spans the globe like a pulsating network of gnashed teeth and bitter, flowing bile. My hatred is intergalactic in scope - I hate alien beings that I haven't even met yet. There are plants on alien worlds that I hate. Alien T.V shows that are shit - I already hate before any of you have had the chance. I hate the ends of the universe and all points in between.

And yet, despite all of this, I don't think I've ever hated anyone quite as much as I hate this fucking cunt.

"Hotdogs" is the biggest fuckwit I have ever encountered. He's a bigger fuckwit, even, than myself. Here's a checklist of reasons to hate someone you haven't met yet. See how high he scores.

A) Is he hot?
B) Does he have stupid hair?
C) Does he think he's funny?
D) Does he talk about the chicks he's boned?
E) Does he have a fucking stupid name?
F) Does he 'not care what people think of him'?
G) Does he 'love life'?
H) Does he think he's funny?
I) Does he think he's funny?

If you answered 'yes' to all of these, then you might be worthy of reading this site. Yes, Hotdogs is loathsome in every conceiveable aspect - an oily motherfucker that is so deserving of death that I seriously won't rest until I feel the erection in my pants while his blood splashes across my face and chest.

"I love women and have found it hard to find my match (however that is just something I tell myself to justify why I am a b**tard)" Baw-haw-haw! That crazy Hotdogs! He just can't keep his greasy pindick in his pants! Hee! Zany! On the show, he admited that he's 'never had a girlfriend that he hasn't cheated on'. Wahey! The boyz! Hotdogs is a stud! Hopefully, the girlfriend that Hotdogs will be faithful to will be named 'AIDS', and she will take him to his life's logical conclusion.

"I am aware of my flaws, however I live in Hotdog's land where I am the king and the sun shines and the birds sing and when people say: "How you doin'?", I reply: "UNBELIEVABLE!" He lives in Hotdog's land. Wanna know where I live? I live in Dave's Hell, where we take people like Hotdogs and cut them open slowly with blunt knives, peeling back the flesh and exposing their rotting internal organs. Then, we fill their bowels, spleen, and liver with kerosene and set them alight. And then, when asked what we thought of the experience - we reply: "UNBELIEVEABLE!" What a fuckhead this guy is. He speaks in the third person.

"What makes me happy is having fun and not having rules and regulations imposed on me. " Yeah! Damn you, society - stop imposing your RULES and your REGULATIONS on a FREE SPIRIT like Hotdogs! Poor Hotdogs - you're suffocating him! I'd like to suffocate him with a fucking plastic bag.

"I'm like an animal, let me out in the wild and I will go mad!" Yes, Hotdogs. And like an animal, I am going to hunt you down, pump a load of buckshot into your belly, cut off your head, and trophy it on my wall. It'll sit next to the heads of Roger Waters, Rove McManus, Shannon Noll, and that bastard who cut me off on the eastern freeway last Saturday night.

"But the biggest thing that makes me happy is making other people happy (corny I know, but very true)." Awww, sensitive Hotdogs. Do you want to make me happy? THEN KILL YOURSELF. KILL YOURSELF FOR ME, HOTDOGS. TAKE A SHOTGUN AND BLOW YOUR FUCKING BRAINS OUT OF THE BACK OF YOUR STUPID, UGLY, ARROGANT, WORTHLESS SKULL.

HE SHOULD BE KILLED... as soon as possible.

KATE - 21, WA

"Hi! I'm Kate and I'm completely boring! I have nothing to say, and every time I open my mouth, there is absolutely no response from anyone! I may as well not even be here! Tee hee! I don't even have the lucky break to be a plastic-looking whore! Hee! Haa! Umm... heee! I'm sorry, I can't think of anythin g to say! Oh, wait a second - I'm a 'nice' person! I'm really nice! I'm 'nice'! Isn't that nice? It's so nice to be so nice! Hee!"

SHE SHOULD BE KILLED... just in case.

LOGAN - 23, NSW

The machiavellian genius of Ten executives rears its ugly head in the form of composite beast Logan - two identical twins, one identical loser. Logan likes to 'party hard'. This dumb bitch had nothing to say on the website - I guess the fact that he's two people is supposed to be so interesting that his feeble words weren't needed. Whatever. He's some generic looking douchebag who loves to 'party'. I don't know. Shut up.

THEY SHOULD BE KILLED... by being forced to eat each other alive at gunpoint. The two, truly, will become one.

MICHAEL - 27, NSW

Check out this fucking dickweed! He's got a ring through his nose! Woohoo! Party train's here! He's one of the 'funny' dudes this year. He's funny and non-threatening and stuff. I would like to break this shithead's fingers, just for being so fucking bland. Apparently, he is 'loud' - as evidenced by his crazy laugh. Frankly, the only laugh I want to hear from him is an involuntary one after I tell him that the nitrous oxide I just gave him was laced with cyanide. I watched that stupid webcam thing they have running this afternoon, and he was sitting in the spa still prattling on about how loud his laugh is. This is his trademark? The annoying-laugh dude? Fuck off, you punk.

HE SHOULD BE KILLED... by having a car battery attached to that stupid nose-ring.

MICHELLE - 24, QLD

Ah, now THIS is more like it! Be still, my beating heart - for it is Michelle, a near-braindead slut who - surprisingly - 'doesn't care what people think of her'.

"As a young girl, I always oozed confidence and was always told I should be an actress and so on." Really? Perhaps you could star in to-the-letter re-enactments of the Nick Berg or Budd Dwyer stories.

"For a long time I believed that I would grow up and be famous, but as I grew up, things changed a bit and certain circumstances...." Blah, blah, blah - shut up, bitch. Remember when infamous fudge-packer Andy Warhol informed the world that 'everyone would have 15 minutes of fame?' Because shit-eaters like you took him literally, he had to be terminally punished for his crime - and you are next. You're not going to be famous. None of us are. We're going to die in obscurity, floating in our own bodily wastes. Get used to it - no set of fake tits is going to save you from your own decomposing body.

"There are so many things I would love to do and accomplish, but the biggest of them is simply to achieve happiness and contentment with my own family and my own children (if fame comes on the way, that will be a bonus)." Gee, how fascinating. Thank god you're here to shake things up. Shut up with this crap about 'fame', you stupid slapper! I could sink an axe into Michelle's head and I doubt it would make any difference to her mental capabilities.

SHE SHOULD BE KILLED... 'famously'.

NELSON - 23, QLD

"I want my five minutes of fame! I know it's meant to be fifteen, but I only need five." That's handy, Nelson - because you're going to be pushing it at five as it is. Nelson is another stupid shitbag who 'doesn't care what people think of him', and wants to be 'famous'.

"My ex called me "The Whirlwind"; I would swoosh in, f**k everything, then leave." Oh, how nice. You and Hotdogs should get a flat together. You could 'f**k' everything, all the time. You could high-five each other while you're spitroasting Michelle. And I could lock the three of you inside and light the house on fire, thus eliminating the need of having to hunt you down separately.

"I always seem to fall out with my best friends. If you are my best friend, watch out because you have a very limited shelf life. We usually fall out over girls. What else?" What else, indeed? Listen up, Nelson's best friends - he is a self-confessed cunt who will fuck you over for a piece of stinky, substandard poontang. But, it's okay - he has a cheeky smile. After all... "I make people feel comfortable... I use my best quality as a subversive tactic to get what I want or to catch someone off guard." What a dude! It's amazing how far you can go if you have a really thick, meaty neck. I have no neck, so I don't get the breaks that the Nel-man does. If I sat down with Kathryn or Ellen or whoever - and I said.. 'Listen.. you have a really limited shelf life. I know I've tried to make you feel comfortable, but it's only so that I can get what I want.' - I would find myself without friends, and with a gaping, bleeding hole where my ballsack used to be. Which is what I wish for Nelson. I hope someone tears out his colon and throttles him to death with it.

"I am not afraid of letting Australia see all of me, body or mind." - Gee. Sounds like this season's going to be very brief.

HE SHOULD BE KILLED... because I always get what I want.

TIM - 27, NSW

Tim is a 'journalist' - which probably means that he does record reviews for Queer Athiests Monthly. Timbo thinks he's quite ze inter-leckshool. I think he's a fuckhead. I had to deal with cunts like this guy when I was at uni - smarmy, self-obsessed 'clever people', who won't shut up about the political situation in outer Zambia. Tim thinks he's FUNNY - which, of course, means that his death must be particularly brutal. He finds 'big frontal lobes' attractive in the opposite sex. You mean you like smart chicks, Tim? Why don't you just SAY that then, you fucking dipshit! Anyway, if you like smart broads - you're in for three months of disappointment, motherfucker. The only girls you're going to be seeing bleed horse shit from head wounds.

"I find reality TV fascinating, especially with the stuff I know from studying anthropology at university." Ahuh. An anthropology student. Say no more.

"I'm into ideas, debate, history, popular culture, politics, social issues, news. I thrive on vigorous discussion and lively conversation." Really, Tim? I'm into sexualised violence and ritual dismemberment. Shut up, you babbling fuckwit - or we'll be debating whether to cut out your eyes or your tongue first. I fucking HATE people like this. I met one a few weeks ago. Clare tore him a new arsehole just for being such a douche. Amused, I was. Shitbags like this need to be silenced. Shove your 'vigorous discussion' up your stinking, self-opinionated arse, you bastard.

"I love to make people laugh, to create that moment when you think the same thing at the same time." What's that? You mean YOU want you dead, too?

"I hate banal people. I hate people who block you. I love it when people talk freely without put-downs, with the simple aim of enjoying an interaction." Without put-downs? As if Tim has ever had a conversation WITHOUT people putting him down. May I talk freely, Timbo? I hate you. I hope you die.

"I hate apathy, right wing bulls**t, ridiculing others, and aggressive stupidity." Timbo hates ridiculing others and aggressive stupidity? What a fucking homo. What kind of loser doesn't love ridiculing others and aggressive stupidity? Aggressive stupidity is awesome! Check it out - TIT BOLLOCKS SHITBAG TIMBO IS A FAIRY I WANNA STICK MY FOOT UP HIS JACKSIE BASTARD FAGPENIS.

HE SHOULD BE KILLED... in a stupidly aggressive fashion.

So, George Orwell - you were wrong. I don't love Big Brother.

In fact... I HATE it.

Biscuits.

Nothing, really. Just another draft illustration. Whatever.

Theives! Liars! Thieves! Liars!

When I'm accosted on the street by one of my legion of minions - and, believe me, it happens far more frequently than you'd think - the one thing that most of them tend to ask me is: "David, why are you such an irritable, angry, miserable, woman-hating, depressing bastard?"

The answer is a complex one, but if I could pinpoint the exact moment that initiated my complete and total mental collapse - it would be when I realised that other people were making literally millions of dollars out of my hard work and ingenuity.

The next time you go to your local multiplex to check out some of the latest cinematic effluvia to be excreted from Hollywood's cancerous anus, I want you to remember that the source of all effluvia is your very own Uncle David. Back in the good old days, I dreamed of carving out a career in the cinema - but, living in Melbourne, I figured that I had little chance of success in my hometown. So, I gathered up some of my favourite ideas - which I'd sketched out loosely - and sent them to Mike Ovitz. The snakey bastard never replied to me, but - lo and behold - my ideas began to surface over the years in a number of the largest grossing films of all time. Here, I attempt to set the record straight by showing you the original concept drawings that have become - unheralded - the bedrock of modern film.

We learned from a three-minute record, baby, than we ever learned in school.

Because nobody even reads this site anymore - except my friends, who read more out of morbid curiosity and are, I'm sure, waiting for me to splatter my next psychological meltdown across the web - I can basically do whatever the hell I want here, with no regard for any audience. Not that I ever cared especially in the past - but, I must admit, I did a little. Now, no such considerations come into play - everyone abandoned me when they realised that instead of reading the witty, meticulously constructed hilarity of Metal City, they could be off reading empty-headed, chicken-brained idiocy by twentysomething girls about how much they love giving head, or what colour their nipples are.

Fine! See if I care, you motherfuckers. Go off and crank up the hit counters of morons who can't write, but are very good at talking about the joys of the pearl necklace they recieved on the weekend. Your loss.

But, at the same time, I can't help but care about you. And love you. Like Christ before me, I love you unconditionally- and despite the fact that you have turned on me, and crucified me through your neglect, that doesn't stop the fact that my heart radiates pure love. And, as such, I can't help but offer you this next piece of writing - a piece which will hopefully guide you through the stormy waters of your own failed lives.

You don't have to tell me, because I already know. Life is a piece of shit - a slow, decaying shuffle towards the grave, punctuated only by extended bouts of abject lonliness, savage self-destruction, and the creeping, gnawing realisation that you are going to be as big a failure as your parents were - except that you won't get to watch anything decent on T.V to take your mind off it, the way they could. For the attactive, modern swinger living in this decadent year of our lord, 2005, we have not the simple pleasures of The A-Team, Knight Rider, V, Miami Vice, Magnum P.I, Transformers: Generation One, M*A*S*H, nor even something as innocuous and elegant as Star Blazers to take our minds off the cancer that is - even now - tearing into our lungs and brains. I know what you're thinking, young hipster - T.V is for shit. It is a brainless medium for imbeciles who should never have passed the third grade. Fie! You say this because you are, simply put, a cocksucker. 99.9999% of the world's population don't simply enjoy T.V - they LOVE it with a passion. They love it more than their spouse. They love it more than their dog. They love it more than themselves. And when they turn it on, and see nothing but endless, interminable repeats of CSI: Jerkwater, and another fucking detective show about a zany private eye with tourettes, they're thinking less about Must See T.V, and more about Must Open Wrists.

But, wait! While television may have failed us, there is something else out there to keep us from tasting the sweet, sweet steel of the shotgun. Your record play may be That Thing That You Listen To Maroon 5 On Before You Go Clubbing, but - in actuality - it can be so much more. I live my life at the mercy of the stylus - the sharp, crisp stab of the needle being my constant companion, as it burrows deeper into my brain, pushing aside my most vital organs on its slow, silky ride to the very depths of my being. I am a slave - not to the rhythm, you unimaginative fool - but to the sound. It is the SONG, not the SINGER that causes me to melt into jelly as the fluttering heartbeat of the music begins to emanate from the speakers. The music ceased, long ago, to simply be heard - it is entwined with my personal narrative and mythology. And, chances are, it is much the same with you.

Unfortunately, you are stupid - and you require someone like me to sit you down and explain to you exactly how these things work. So, please - relax, and let me take you on a guided tour through your life, your soul, and your records.

Birth - Age 5

Somewhere, somehow, a drunken scumbag with fear in his heart managed to slice your mother open with his stinking, steaming turd of a penis - and after a few moments of savage, teeth-grinding thrustage, he unloaded a torrent of life-giving slime deep within the rotting walls of your mother's reproductive organs. Nine months later, amid a flood of greasy fluid and thick, pulsing blood - you were born, and the first thing you did was to start making life hell for all around you. Not content with evacuating your bowels, bladder, and stomach into the faces and laps of all you come into contact with, you screamed wordlessly - your eyes bulging out and your fists balled so tightly that your palms bled. All around you wished that you'd ended up as nothing more than a stain on the floor of the abortion bucket and a series of angsty journal entries, but you're here, you're queer, and it's illegal to cut off your head with an electric knife and call it a day

During this period, you don't even OWN a fucking stereo - so you listen to whatever your parents are listening to. After people have reproduced, it goes one of two ways - they start listening to The Bellamy Brothers : Their Greatest Hits, because they realise that they are now officially Old and Praying For Death, or they get that second wind of teenage-hood, and they start listening to really shitty trance. Either way, these seminal (ha) experiences will sow the seeds of uncompromising hatred that will later lead to those endless fights when you're 16, where you threaten to leave home because your Dad's a cunt and your Mum's a bitch.

But, eventually, all parents convince themselves that their shit-stained progeny is a genius of some kind. Of course, this is total bullshit - and one of the mainstays of self-delusion that form the cornerstones of our cultural psyche - but, nonetheless, they will decide quite defiantly that since you managed to take a dump in an empty tin can rather than in Grandpa's face, you're Stephen Hawking. So, they'll try to encourage your worthless personal development by offering you educational recordings.

Sesame Street's 25th Birthday : A Musical Celebration will fit the bill nicely, and you will scream out in agony as giddy, psychotic Muppets howl their songs of learning at you. 'I Love Trash', 'Sing!', 'Rubber Duckie', and other anthems of the incontinent will fill your days and haunt your nights - the leering, crazed faces of Big Bird and The Cookie Monster driving you to the very brink of insanity.

For some, though, this kind of psychological warfare simply ain't enough to get the job done, and so - they have to resort to more direct methods. For the parent with the truly perverse taste in torture, nothing will suffice quite like the Read-Along-Record series of books, designed to take your youngster from amoeba-esque sack of worthless, drooling flesh, to a mental colossus of Norman Mailer-esque proportions. As a young boy, my parents loved to subject me to these records -
I would sit for hours with my book of 'The Story Of The Empire Strikes Back', and would listen to the sick pederast on the record, as he moaned out the plot of hit 80's movies with a voice that brought to mind an image of the living dead.

Age 5 - 10

During these formative years, your constant companion will be the sound of snapping bone as you are carted off to the military installation known as Primary School, where you will be incarcerated with several hundred criminally insane children who will torment you to levels that make Dachau look like Pina Colada night at the Chevron. Your fingers, wrists, legs, ribs, spine, ankles, and skull will all be fractured into tiny, sharp-edged pieces - and your sanity will continue to fray, your healthy, pink, fresh brain being slowly ripped apart like so much crepe' paper by the slashing, bloodstained claws of your peers.

Bruce Springsteen's Greetings From Asbury Park, N.J is, of course, the only soundtrack to this period that counts - a sly, intricate treatise on youth and growing. Through 'Growin' Up', you'll see yourself - a creature of joy and effervescence, poised on the precipice of utter failure and bitter self-loathing. You're 'Blinded By The Light', as the seemingly endless summer of your childhood gives way to the infinite winter of your decay. You'll find out that 'It's Hard To Be A Saint In The City' - but, at this point, pre-misery, you'll actually bother trying.

Of course, you'll also start listening to such trite shit as Bowie's 'Space Oddity' and 'Ziggy Stardust' albums, because - basically - you're an unimaginative shitkicker, and only the most obvious things will do. The ubiquitous Beatles will, naturally, rear their heads - but since you're living in the modern era, you'll only listen to anything post-1966.

Enjoy it while it lasts. Soon, you'll be listening to Pink Floyd.

Age 10-16

Ah, who didn't enjoy adolescence?

What? Nobody?

Exactly. Being a teenager is horrible - in two ways. Being a teenager is horrible because it is horrible TO BE a teenager, but being a teenager is also horrible because teenagers ARE horrible. At this stage in your worthless life, everyone hates you. Your parents hate you, your teachers hate you, your friends hate you, and - best of all - you hate you. And why not? After all, you are an ugly, spotty, smelly shithead who suddenly thinks that they're the first one ever to keep a little notebook full of really horrible poetry. At this point, your constant companion is the suicidal impulse which you vainly try to reign in at every oppurtnity. Fortunately, many of you fail in this endeavour - thinning out the population, and progressively causing a drop in the need for new Cure records.

At this point, you're one of two things - you're either a stupid nerd with big, ugly glasses and a hilarious-sounding half-broken voice, or you're a big, dumb lummox with beer on his breath and vagina on his fingers. Either way, the world would be better off if you were both killed in a freak train accident. You think you're SO fucking different - the nerd thinks he's so superior because he's so sensitive and articulate and headed for Great Things due to his academic diligence, while the jock thinks he's superior because he gets to empty his nuts into a fresh slut's guts every weekend, and he can drink a bottle of Beam without puking. You're both wrong, of course - the game of life has set a trap for you, and no matter how cool and radical you think you are, you're both going to end up in the same place - sitting on a stained, sperm-encrusted sofa, staring at The Wheel Of Fortune while your wife slowly loses her looks, your kids piss in your face, and you cry alone at night, thinking 'Oh God, kill me now, what the fuck happened to my life?'

Of course, adolescence causes us to do all manner of stupid, shitty things. First and foremost amongst them is that we start taking really lame music very seriously. As an acne-scarred youth, you will suddenly realise that The Cure, Joy Division, and Nine Inch Nails are some very heavy shit indeed, because they speak to you and your inner isolation. Your isolation that you love. Your isolation that you crave. Nobody understands you like Trent Reznor. NOBODY. Nobody can see through the masks you wear the way Robert Smith can. When he sang 'As flicky as lips, as licky as chips' - he wasn't talking about chips, he was talking about the chips of THE SOUL. When Trent Reznor said 'Erase me! Erase me! Erase me!', he wasn't talking about an eraser - he was talking about erasing ME. Or him. But, ME TOO.

Of course, there is no greater testament to arrested development and the idiocy of the adolescent mind than Pink Floyd's ode to over-groped penis and self-absorbed stupidity - The Wall.

For those who haven't heard The Wall, or seen the moronic film, here is the plot. Once upon a time, there was this guy called Pink, who sucked. After his father killed himself because his kid was such a loser, Pink went to school and his teachers laughed at him because he sucked. Then he became a rock star, probably in a really shitty band like... oh, I don't know. Pink Floyd, or something. His wife left him because he's hung like a three year old, and he 'cannot communicate emotionally'. He sits in a hotel room and gets really pissed off, because he's supposed to be a big rock star - but they only have black and white T.V. So, he throws that motherfucker out the window and demands colour. A groupie shows up, but because he's a member of Pink Floyd, he cannot achieve an erection - so he throws a bottle at her. She leaves because he's boring and he's throwing shit around, and if she's going to be around dudes who do that shit, she may as well go next door and visit Ace Frehley - at least he has cool make-up. Then, Pink gets all boo-hoo and takes off his clothes and goes swimming, but he can't stop thinking about his wife and how she's probably knobbing Robert Plant. The central metaphor of the film is a brick wall - an EMOTIONAL wall, if you will - but, really.. who cares. In the end, Pink takes a bunch of drugs, but because he's not in Motorhead or Ministry, he can't handle them - so Bob Hoskins shows up and he immediately turns into Cereal-Man. Then, he has to go and give a concert - but, unfortunately, he's in Pink Floyd, so he starts abusing the audience because they have such shitty taste. He starts calling them niggers and queers and coons, all while wondering why his wife left him. Then, he turns into Hitler for no reason, and a bunch of skinheads go on a raping and killing spree, because he decides that there are too many damn nig-nogs in Lady Britannia, and he starts goose-stepping and generally carrying on like a moron. Then he puts himself on an EMOTIONAL TRIAL, where his wife and teachers get shitty with him because they're suddenly not on a rock album and have been transferred to an Anthony Lloyd Webber play. They decide that he sucks, and this lame music is giving them the shits, so they decide that the wall must be torn down so that they can escape and go to a Black Flag album or something - and the wall is torn down, and every teenager in the world simultaneously goes "Aaaaah, art.".

Then, of course, there's Springsteen's 'The Wild, The Innocent, and The E-Street Shuffle' - an album which celebrates your vibrance and youth, but which points to things to come - the crushing lows, and the anticlimatic highs that come with the onset of age and maturity. You will weep as Bruce tells you of the 'Incident On 54th Street', you will pump your fist in honour of the glory of being in love with 'Rosality', and you will cry yourself to sleep to 'The New York City Serenade'. The storm clouds are brewing - and you cannot escape them.

Age 16-26

Oh, boy. It's at this point that the crushing realisation that your entire life is a lie and you were probably better off becoming a suicide statistic at 15 finally sinks in. All the promise of your youth - the dreams of success and achievement, of love, of fame, or being Someone or Something finally come crashing down around your ears, and the only thing that keeps you comfort is the perpetual regurgitation of your hatred, impotence, and unfocused rage on your shitty website.

School will climax in an orgy of unadulterated, completely legal violence - and your body will be literally rebuilt as a scarified, organic monument to the ravages of physical abuse, and their impact on the already fragile, bleeding mind of the adolescent. You'll never recover from the kaleidoscopic nightmare of brutal beatings and savage lashings that your teen years have brought, and although you'll initially see your wounds as badges of honour that you have Been Through Shit, Man - eventually, they'll simply become absorbed into the patterns of self-loathing and sickening shame that are the songs that adulthood sings to you, softly in your sleep as you toss and turn with tears in your eyes.

University will, of course, lead you nowhere - since you know nobody, and cannot call on nepotism to save your worthless bones from a life shackled to the mediocrity that you always swore you'd fight against. Eventually, the system will break you - and you'll either stare at a terminal in an office in a building in Nowhereland for the rest of your life, or your mind will split open and you'll simply become an overweight, unshaven basket-case, incapable of any kind of normal, sane, rational thoughts. You'll be crippled by paranoia, insecurity, and you'll simply drift off into inertia - unable to progress or develop, instead simply waiting for the warm, welcoming face of the Reaper to slowly drift into view. As his scythe swings through the air, you'll sigh and smile - the sweet release that you've so long craved finally coming to you.

Bruce Springsteen's 'Born To Run' and "Darkness On The Edge Of Town' will illustrate both sides of your late-teen/twentysomething experience. While you always thought you were 'Born To Run', you'll find that you can only run so long before you're Born To Pay - and that's when you work at the 'Factory'. You'll contemplate those long, crazy days of your youth when you ran with your friends on the 'Backstreets' - and you'll cry when you realise that they are exactly the same kind of failures that you are, and they never escaped the 'Darkness On The Edge Of Town'. You'll want more than anything to ride the 'Thunder Road' - but instead, you'll end up 'Racing In The Streets', consumed by your own self-pity. And, ultimately, as in Springsteen's 'Adam Raised A Cain', your life will be the same as your father's: "Daddy worked his whole life for nothin' but the pain, and now he walks these empty rooms looking for something to blame."

Of course, your tastes will mature - where 'The Wall' once brought you solace and legitimised your nauseating self-absorption, your Pink Floyd experience will revolve around 'The Final Cut', where you'll stop whining about how you hate yourself, and you'll start whining about how your kids hate you, Thatcher would have hated you, 'the nips' took your job, and there's nothing left for you but to 'hold the blade in trembling hands, prepared to make it - but... just then the phone rang, I never had the nerve to make the final cut." Yes, you'll even fail at suicide.

And you'll still listen to shit like The Cure - but it'll be the poppier stuff. After all, isn't 'The Lovecats' cute? Like shit it is, but you're an idiot - so bouncing about at the office Christmas party while you babble about cagey tigers will be the high point of your otherwise bleak existance.

But, then again, you're getting older - so it's time to start listening to old people's music. You'll realise that The Eagles really could write proper tunes, and that you prefer McCartney to Lennon, and that Bowie was just super once he stopped all that weird nonsense in Berlin with Brian Eno and got back to fabby hits like 'Modern Love' and 'Let's Dance'.

Death is closing in.

Age 26-40

Eventually, you'll end up having sex with the one she-beast that doesn't make last night's dinner tickle your epiglottis every time she takes her bra off, and in a moment of complete and total insanity, you'll allow her to commandeer your sperm-bloated testicles in order for her to satiate her debased, twisted biological urges. Nine months later, you'll be plastering your best fake smile across your suicide-fogged face as you stare between her veiny thighs and into her gnarled, twitching genitalia as her loins spit out a wormlike slug that will immediately proceed to piss in your face, vomit on you, and steal your wallet. You'll be talking a load of bullshit about 'the miracle of birth' - when in actual fact, the only miracle taking place is that you haven't taken a load of buckshot in the cerebral cortex, with a note that reads 'I DIE AS I LIVED - ALONE'.

You'll sell your awesome Torana for some sensible station wagon, and you'll cart your nagging, howling bitch of a wife around the country so that you can look at an almost incalculable number of incredibly boring things, while your bastard kid spits and shits and vomits and tears stuff up, and you have to pretend that you don't want to park the car in the garage with a hose running from the exhaust to the window. You will have ugly sex with your revolting wife, and as you thrust and pump emotionlessly into her cold, cold body - a tear will form in your eye. She'll wipe it away, thinking that you're overcome with sensual joy - but, in reality, you'll be weeping for the corpse of your life, that seems to dance with re-animated glee. You have become the walking dead. And, as you watch Nightline with a cup of peppermint tea - staring over at the flabby, distended body of wifey, it will be all you can do to avoid simply vomiting in your lap, and crying uncontrollably at just how much of a mercy death would be.

And it is at moments like this that Bruce Springsteen's 'The River' and 'Nebraska' seem to speak to you. Albums about what happens when the money has run out, the fun has gone, and there's nothing left but the withered husk of what you used to call your hopes and dreams. You'll do anything to find another life - gambling what little money you have left in 'Atlantic City', 'Johnny 99's plan of murder, and you'll despair at the realization that 'Mister, the day when my number comes in, I'm never gonna ride a used car again'. Hope turns to crime, and you'll find yourself 'driving a stolen car, on Eldritch avenue. Each night I wait to get caught, but I never do.' Everyone has left you - 'Independance Day' was a long time ago, and you'll weep because there 'ain't no difference what nobody says, ain't nobody like to be alone'. And then, finally, you'll hear about the 'Wreck On The Highway' - and you'll realise that it doesn't matter what you do, there is only one possibly end to the story: painful, tragic death.

You're old now, so you'll start listening to shit like Michael Crawford. You'll also listen to early Neil Young - before he got all weird and depressing - namely 'Harvest'. You won't listen to Bowie anymore - even this powerful, muscular rock and roll of 'Blue Jean' will be too much for you - you're more interested in Sting or Peter Gabriel. You need to connect to your youth somehow, so the old man music of Pink Floyd's "Dark Side Of The Moon' will allow you to feel like a rebel at least once a month.

Soon, though - death will come to claim you.

Age 40-Death

And so, the twilight years. You've waited so long for them - an ache in your soul that can only be satisfied by the total erasure of your blood pressure, and the non-dilation of your pupils. As you race towards the finish line with both arms outstretched, you can smell death coming. Hopefully, your spouse goes first so that you can get in a few fun years before it's Morgue Time, but if not - you'll have a lot of fun trying to get her to kick off. Bursting paper bags behind her head, over-salting her dinner, and the good old-fashioned pushing her wheelchair over a cliff will fill you with the joy that you've been denied for so long. Your body, once youthful and virile, is now nothing more than a sagging, liver-spotted parody of a normal human being. You look more like a hessian sack full of smashed up bones and half-dead entrails than a living, breathing entity - and your great joy in live will come through your ability to produce a solid bowel movement. Your days will be spent watching the television, and the clock - praying for death to come swiftly and painlessly, but it won't. Due to so-called 'doctors' and 'the medical profession', they'll stretch your failed, worthless existance out as long as it will go - laughing at the tears in your eyes as they dangle death in front of you like a carrot on a stick. Eventually, you will be dragged to some anonymous isolation-tank in a faceless suburban hospital, surrounded by machines designed to stop you from achieving your one true dream. Your kids and their kids will show up to 'pay their respects' - and as you look into their sick, sad eyes, you'll see yourself: the cycle has commenced anew, and another generation will know the crushing, brutal inanity that is life. That is the one thing that will send you to the grave with a smile on your lips - the fact that although your life has been nothing more than a sick experiment in pain endurance, your kids are going to suffer the exact same thing.

Springsteen's 'Ghost Of Tom Joad' will be your send-off into the infinite, summing up your life with a succinct-yet-knowing understanding of just how futile your every move has been. 'The highway is alive, tonight...', Springsteen will sing, 'But nobody's kiddin' nobody about where it goes. And I'm sittin' here in the campfire light... searchin' for the ghost of Tom Joad.' The lonely call of the owl in the night air, singing out his song of sorrow and emptiness will carry you to the grave, accompanied by Springsteen's reminder of how every pore of your being was filled with biting despair and bitter defeat. You'll 'come home in the evenin', can't get the smell off my hands - lay my head down on the pillow and drift off into foreign lands...'

And he'll sum it up for you. Because, at the end of the day, you need an epitapth - something that explains it all. Explains where you came from, and exactly how you got here. And apologises.

Get Down With The Sickness!

So, I'm supposed to be editing today but my effing printer decides that I'm not only unloved, but I am unlovable - and when I command it to print out the Sleepy Rock manuscript so that I can go through it with a red pen, it simply stares blankly at me. It didn't say anything, but I could tell that it was mocking me on the inside. Because I am still tied to my mother using thick, knotted apron strings, I begged her to print it for me at work. And, being the kind soul that she is, she decided that she'd indulge her immature, idiot-manchild progeny - and would bring home a printed copy so that I can edit it and, hopefully, be out of her house before I'm old enough to require an annual prostate check.

Rather than simply while the hours away staring at the wall and masturbating, I decided to do some drawing. Here are three of my favourites.

Farewell, Sleepy Rock.

Sleepy Rock - the Metal City version - has been removed from the site. Sorry to anyone who wanted to know how it ended, but if it is going to become a commercial product, I can't have it here. If anyone wants to read the finished novel, email me.

Green Is Blue.

So, I bet you've just been DYING to know where I've been. Truth is, I haven't been anywhere. I just haven't felt like writing anything on here for a while. I still don't, really - but I thought I would anyway, even if only because it's the middle of the night, and I feel like having a bit of chat. And since you're here, it may as well be you.

The revolution is going slowly, but I guess you already surmised that from my lack of gloating and hand-wringing. Sleepy Rock is entering a final draft phase - thanks to the editorial efforts and sound creative advice of your very own Kathryn and Lara - but, for some reason, I feel like a failure rather than a conquering hero. And I don't really know why. I guess I'm just sick of this place - I'm really sick of my entire life being on hiatus. I feel pathetic, worthless, and like I'm smashing my face through a window every morning. I'm so sick of working so hard for so little. Writing is not easy - and writing with any kind of discipline is extremely difficult. I decided a long, long time ago to dedicate my life to my craft - and I guess I'm just getting really sick of seeing no results. Of course, results will only come once I have followed the plan. To wit:

1. Finish final drafts of 'Nowhere' and 'Sleepy Rock'
2. Follow - to the letter - the instructions in the 'how to submit a book' book.
3. Cert IV - start teaching writing.

But, first thing's first. Right? Am I right?

So, I trudge onward - limping lazily into the sun as the inky pages of Sleepy Rock are written and re-written, and I spend every day attempting to keep my confidence up and my spirits high.

Which isn't easy. Believe me. Nobody seems to get this - they think that my life is a glorious wonderland of magical fun and gleeful abandon. Fucking bullshit. There's no up at 11, followed by brekkie-bongs and a few hours of Foxtel for me. No, if I get up late - it is because I was working into the wee-small hours. If I wake up at a normal time - I eat breakfast, get dressed, run all the household errands that need to be taken care of, and then I WORK, Mister. I draw for hours and hours - and I write for hours and hours. Without breaks. I go and go and go until I flop down at the end of the day. And that's how it has to be - but people don't seem to be able to grasp this. They don't understand that I'm quite aware of how pitiful and shameful my home situation is - but I'm doing everything I can to turn things around.

Belle chucked me, but I guess we could all see that one coming. Hey, what can I say - I'm a jerkoff. This isn't the place to go getting heavy and intense on the subject, but she was a swell gal - one of the best. But, these things happen. Especially when you have poison for blood, as I do.

I wish I was black. How many times have you heard fat, middle-class white guys say shit like that? Admittedly, they usually have bandanas on, and are listening to 50 Cent or something equally revolting at the time, but this week - I've been thinking about this in some detail.

And, for your amusement - I'm going to explain my mental processes, and the relentless leapfrogging that is their calling card. All things must begin somewhere, and for me - as with most facets of my life - we can trace our source back to hardcore pornography.

I'd heard that a documentary in America called 'Inside Deep Throat' was being released, and I also knew that it wouldn't take a long time before it was bootlegged. I do like the thrills and excitement that downloading shit off the internet grant me - I feel all gangsta as I boot up Newzbin, and this was no exception, as I traced a copy of the film to an obscure newsgroup and began to leech it. The following morning, I poured myself an extra large bowl of cornflakes, made myself a delicate-yet-robust coffee, and settled down to watch a documentary on 'Deep Throat', and its ubiquitous star, Linda Lovelace. The film was fascinating, with everyone from John Waters (yay!), to Norman Mailer (yay!), to Roy Cohn (boo!), to Al Goldstein (yay! boo!) giving their opinion on our favourite fellatrix and her celluloid ambitions. I remember seeing Deep Throat, a long time ago during a class on pornography from when I was a spry young undergraduate. Actually, my viewing the film was more of a piece of extra-curricular research - the sad part about that statement being that it is actually true, but I'm not going to even bother to try and wipe the disbelieving smirk from your face. I thought that while the film was, clearly, a piece of utter shit - it certainly had something. And that something was what Norman Mailer described as the occupancy of a buffer zone 'between crime and art'. Deep Throat looks like a snuff film, sounds like it was written by someone with brain damage, and has little to reccomend it except the swirling controversy that still surrounds it - even to this day. And, for me, that's good enough.

To cut a long, boring story short - I went to bed that night listening to the Deep Throat sound track, so taken by the tragic story of Lovelace's life - not to mention the cycle of sin and redemption that seemed embodied in her co-star, Harry Reems. Transfixed, I was, by the dramatic impact of the film's history, and the turbulence of the stars. I'm a sucker for a good, disturbing tale of culture-shaking shenanigans, and Deep Throat's backstory is one of the best that money can buy. I hit ebay and found a copy of Lovelace's autobiography - 'Ordeal' - in which she tells us that it was all rape, and she was forced into it, and had a gun held to her head, and all manner of other linguistic jiggery pokery designed to shift our attention away from the penis that is bumping against Lovelace's pancreas onscreen, and onto the odd sight of her unholy union with Gloria Steinem - a proto-Faludi angry bitch of obscene proportions. 'Ordeal' was, though, a great book - not because Lovelace's story has any kind of moral authenticity, but because she does paint a fantastic picture of the seamier side of late 1960's-early 1970's living. You can smell the emerald grass and crisp, moist air of her rural home foaming up into the cloying pollution of the inner-city, as she transforms from mild-mannered Linda Boreman, into bawdy porno queen Lovelace. It's all embossed wallpaper, TAB softdrinks, open shirts, and gun-toting mobsters set against the backdrop of Miami in 1971 - and it has a remarkable atmosphere. An atmosphere which I found myself becoming increasingly fascinated by, and obsessed with. Unfortunately, I can't travel back in time - and even if it were possible, I doubt that anyone who could send me back to 1971 would do it after I told them that I wanted to hang out with pornographers so that I can touch their wallpaper. What I CAN do, though, is try and replicate the sonic quality of the era - and so, I started looking for things that sounded like they might be heard in a titty bar circa 1971. It had to be urban. Decadent - without being the androgynous British decadence that was chic at the time. No, this had to be a ghetto experience - decadence on the poverty line. Soundtracks for desperate men in desperate times. The sound of America, locked in a war in Vietnam, with a cabinet full of theives and murderers in the White House - the sound of America tearing itself to pieces.

But, rather than look to the predictable mainstream of the day, there seemed to be something more appropriate in soul and funk records. There is something dangerous about Al Green or Sly Stone or even early Kool & The Gang - the records are slinky and sad and bitter and damaged. They're political and sexual - simultaneously - and that is what makes them far more dangerous and potent than... say... Slade. Or Grand Funk Railroad. Or Lynyrd Skynyrd. These are sonic pipe bombs, which are applied to cause maximum damage on the already scarred American psyche, be it through their embracing of their sexuality, or their political extremism (particularly with Gil Scott-Heron), or even simply as unabashed celebrations of their overarching blackness. No white man could ever sound like Al Green - nor could he ever give a performance like that. The closest we've ever come has been John Fogerty, screaming out beneath that wonderful aural soup that was Creedence Clearwater Revival.

So, I rounded up a swathe of choice soul, funk, r'n'b (back when it actually meant rhythm and blues), and went on a week-long binge, attempting to evoke a sense of porno industry, circa 1971 - and angry Black Panther. Preferably at the same time.

And then, it hit me - what these records have, and what the world at the time had which we don't now, is a sense of drama. Life was dramatic back then. There was ground to be broken, and things to fight for. There was a sense of freshness and newness in the air - a progressive mentality that seemed to be channeling hundreds of years of disaffection with ruling elites and cultural conservatism/imperialism. There was a point. As I watched Harry Reems defending his right to get a blowjob in a movie as Roy Cohn looked on with abject disgust, I thought that maybe there was something noble in Harry's testimony - and that the struggle to have his film legally exist was ennobling, even as it - arguably - dehumanised.

Which brings us neatly back to being black. After all of this, I was left with the music - the hours of glorious, wonderful, glad-about-it, mad-about-it music. I've still got that third Kool & The Gang album going - and I don't think I'm going to get sick of it. The albums are so charged with politics and sex and death and cultural mayhem that it becomes impossible to shy away from their potency - and instead, I stare at Sugarfoot as he looks out at me from the cover of the Ohio Players 'Honey' album, and I think...

Damn. I wish I was black.

The other big thing in my life at the moment is The A-Team. I'm gonna leave you with something that's gonna sound a little strange to you - but I think you can take it. My love for The A-Team has absolutely no bounds - I will defend the show, quite literally, to the death if necessary. Never have I been so utterly transfixed by a cathode ray tube as I am by The A-Team (with the exception of Miami Vice, which shares an equal place). I remember watching the show on its initial run in Australia. On Tuesday night, it was The A-Team on channel ten from 7:30 to 8:30, 'Who's The Boss?' and 'Growing Pains' from 7:30 to 8:30 on nine, and 'A Country Practice' on seven. I'd always watch The A-Team, and flip onto Who's The Boss? during the ad-breaks. My favourite member of the team was - and still is - Hannibal. George Peppard is a god among men, and if I could be reincarnated as anyone except Don Johnson, it would be George Peppard.

This is going to sound crazy to you, but I'll tell you anyway. My big moment during each and every broadcast of The A-Team really had little to do with the show, and more to do with my already creeping sense of nostalgia. Was it wrong to be nostalgic for one's childhood at age 7? I'd say so, on reflection - but what do I know. I'm a moron. I don't know anything.

I was reflective over this, dear reader: At the end of every episode of The A-Team, the production company jingle is played. Stephen J. Cannell productions - and there is a tiny piece of music that plays over an image of Cannell pulling a sheet of paper from a typewriter. It's just a little eight note riff, with the seventh note bent into the eighth. But, for some reason, it reminded me of being VERY young. As in, being threshold-of-speech young. And, one night, I remember getting up from the television and going into the bathroom to talk to my mother. I told her that we needed to go to the produce section of the Greensborough Safeway the next day, just like we used to back in those glory days of 1982. She looked at me and asked me why - and I swear to you, I can still remember this moment:

"Because, Stephen Cannell reminds me of being young."

Ahhh. To be eight again.

If A Man's Considered Guilty For What Goes On In His Mind, Then Give Me The Electric Chair For All My Future Crimes.

I know. I've neglected you, my darling, gorgeous public.

But you mustn't blame me. Hard at work on Sleepy Rock, I have been - forging it in the fires of my own genius, quenching it with the waters of my creativity, and pounding it with my mallet of sensitivity. Yes, work progresses slowly but surely - and so tired out by the endless, gruelling days of writing and drawing that I've found myself a little reticent to update the old Metal City for you all, despite the fact that I have been receiving literally thousands of emails every hour begging for an update.

By way of apology, I've decided to give something back to you. A gift from me to you - the public - not only so that you understand the difficult, treacherous place that I'm currently in, but so that you can go there yourself. A guide, dear, sweet people. A guide called...

So, you're sitting there staring at a blank screen on your father's iMac, and you've suddenly realised that all your dreams an aspirations to ascend to the very pinnacle of respect and admiration within the notoriously fickle world of cutting-edge, contemporary letters are - basically - for shit. You don't have a creative bone in your body, do you? Of course you don't. You're basically brain-damaged, all your friends laugh at you, you can't dress yourself, yet you think that if you constantly remind everyone that you drink lots of coffee, smoke cigarettes, and read books by Henry Miller or some shit, it will transform you from a blind sheep being raped by The System into a bohemian genius with a beret on your head and lipstick on your penis.

See? I'm so good at this that I just offered you the best piece of poetry you'll see on the web for the rest of your life. And I fucking HATE poetry.

But, don't worry. You can be like me. In the topsy-turvy world of modern living, we are taught - quite rightly - that the efforts of the creative artist are essentially wasted space, and the creative arts are a place where no-hopers can gather together in smelly, inner-city pubs and coffee houses to 'perform' their poetry, and can nod sagely and jerk each other off with frantic abandon. In the domain of the creative artist, your sex life becomes unbelieveably fascinating to all around you - and your writing takes shine and lustre as it is breathily praised for its 'honesty' and 'naked eroticism'. Of course, you don't know your fucking arsehole from a hole in the wall, and if expected to create anything with substance, you'll simply giggle to yourself and ask someone to buy you a gin and tonic.

But, it doesn't have to be like that! Through a series of improvisation sessions conducted with the participation of various Metal City alumni, this handy guide has been constructed for you - shithead nobody - so that you can speed up the rungs of the creative ladder, bypassing such intangibles as 'discipline' and 'education', and taking on your true role - that of The Artiste' Supreme.

Our angry friend is, of course, quite right. Stop thinking that just because you have a patched suede jacket and a copy of 'Daydream Nation' you qualify as a risk-taking genius. You're not. You're still nothing but some cheesedick from the suburbs - you're just a cheesedick with a jacket and a record.

Inspiration can strike at any time. Unless you want the entire world laughing at you to your face, don't start thinking you're impressing anybody by carrying around a 'Notebook Of Thoughts'. Like everyone else, your thoughts are 70% bullshit, 30% porno fantasies. Neither of these things are worthy of your time. But, if you're going to create a piece of work that will resonate through the ages, you do need SOME kind of structure. You need an idea.

STEP ONE:

Now that you know WHAT you're going to write, you obviously need some soulful, powerful art to go along with it. Every no-balls retard from every university in the world can justify every stupid scribble that they produce. If you really wanted to, you could dip your nutsack in blue paint, slap it against a canvas and receive grants, firm handshakes, and awed silences from it - as long as you manage to prattle on at length about how it is a deconstructionist essay on man's intrinsic lust for violence, and the dichotomy between our civilized and beastial natures. This kind of fucking bullshit goes on all the time, and morons in berets and pinstripe pants eat it up. Doesn't make you special. In modern art, if what you produce actually LOOKS like something, you are a gormless sellout with no originality, no soul, and no spine. Keep doing it, though, and you will be a gormless sellout with a fat wallet and a strike team of whores primed to do your every bidding.

So, you're going to write about talking animals, eh? That's nice, Mr. Artist. But what do they LOOK like? How are you gonna sell shit unless it appeals to the most braindead members of society?

With PICTURES.

STEP TWO:

STEP THREE:

Now, write the motherfucker. It isn't hard - just think of a bunch of stuff and type it on a computer. Print it out, and - voila! You will be the toast of the underground.

What's that? You want to see these simple steps put into practice?

That joke wasn't mine. I fucking stole it. Which is your final lesson - steal as much as you can, if you think the source material is so obscure that you can get away with it. If you find something in some obscure comic book/porno mag/toilet wall that you're sure nobody except for the people who are as cool as you will have seen, tax it in the name of your art.

Follow the steps closely. And you too can be a groundbreaking, visionary artist.

(Oh, and don't forget to erase your pencil lines or people get cross with you. I omitted to do it for this piece, to show YOU just how AWFUL your art looks when you're SLACK and you don't ERASE.)

!?

My dog has dark secrets.

Found while looking through her things for my copy of 'Helter Skelter'.

Frog Dreaming.

More artwork from Sleepy Rock - this time, a few random sketches of Fogerty, and an early Bronnie - Bronnie will change by the final, this was more of a placemarker, and a draft drawing of the David character.

Chris Cross'll Make Ya... Jump, Jump. Ah-huh. Ah-huh. Jump. Jump.

So, the rusty wheels have begun turning again. I've finished a draft manuscript of Bronnie The Dog And The Horror Of Sleepy Rock, heavily edited from its original Metal City incarnation, which is designed to be submitted. I'm gonna do it, this time - the artwork has been turning out better than I'd expected, and the draft reads surprisingly well. It's been turned into a kid's book. But I like it anyways. If anyone out there wants to read the end of Sleepy Rock, email me.

But that's not what I'm here to talk about. I'm here to talk about Christopher Cross. Amongst other things.

Haunted, I have been. Lately, in particular. I've calmed down, and decided to actually take my writing seriously - and, as such, I've found myself sitting inside for extended periods of time, with either a keyboard beneath my fingers of a pencil in my hand. And you know what THAT is a recipie for, turkeys - especially when you throw dark clouds and chilly into the mix. I've been thinking a lot about things that aren't around anymore. My Grandmother, again. I'm not entirely sure why. I just am.

And I've been thinking about A.M radio. Back in the good old days, you used to get a lot of music on the A.M band. My Grandma drove a cyan-coloured Corona, with a white vinyl interior and an A.M radio. And when I'd sit in the back, as I always did, I would listen to the A.M stations - and one of the people you always heard was Christopher Cross.

Christopher Cross sucks. At least, that's what I want to say, because I know in my heart, that he is the blandest thing this side of dry toast and vegetarian cuisine. The man may have had testicles once, but they were obviously ripped from his body by some unnameable force, judging by his music. You remember him, surely. He was the purveyor of such reviled soft-rock slop as 'Arthur's Theme', 'Sailing', and 'Ride Like The Wind'. He was like a fatter version of Al Stewart. He was like Air Supply stuffed into one body. He was, in short, fairly horrible - with a sound that is one part schmaltz and one part coked-out El Lay ennui. I should detest his records for the same reason I should detest Seals And Crofts or England Dan or The Starland Vocal Band.

But, for silly reasons, at the moment I find myself needing the work of Messr. Cross more than anything else.

I think I've detailed my reticense to let go of anything on this site in about as much detail as you turkeys can stomach, so I won't wax lyrical on the subject again - but at the moment, I've been thinking a lot about moments. Not large slabs of chronology, or dormant traces of The Way It Felt, but - rather - a matrix of tiny, nondescript moments which seem to be taking on far greater resonance than they did when I first experienced them. None of them are especially salient or life-altering - or even particularly interesting, but as I go about my day to day grind of working on Sleepy Rock, they seem to keep coming up. My brain has been reduced - or perhaps elevated - to this, and I endlessly go back and forth, and zig-zag endlessly through the oceans of moments in time that I can remember, in a vain attempt to reconstruct them.

Maybe that's part of what grieving is. When Grandma died, I decided quite firmly that grieving was for pussies, tears were for losers with no balls, and I was far too intense and well-grounded for such namby-pamby girly nonsense. As I sped madly through the backstreets of Warrandyte on the way to my Grandmother's funeral, revving the Torana's engine with manly pumps of my foot, I blared Van Halen's 'Runnin' With The Devil' out of the windows of the car. Nothing was going to affect me, because I am too cool for school. I was going to deliver her eulogy and be back in front of the PS2 before dinner. Yeah. Right on. Peace.

And it did work, certainly. I got through that horrid, wretched day with nary a scratch - no tears were shed, no voices cracked, and I hugged no-one. Except my mother, who was in too many pieces for me to ignore. Apart from that, though, it was all manly handshakes and slacker nonchalance. I refused to let anything affect me - and I was pretty sure that through the sheer force of will, I'd be fine.

We're now a long way from that day now, and I'm still talking about it - which indicates to me that maybe there was a fissure in my plan that I hadn't anticipated. Instead of a massive influx of memories and moments and grief and sadness, everything I felt about the death of my Grandmother has been oozing out slowly, dripping out of the cracks in my memory.

I go on about music far more than is healthy. I know it - you don't have to tell me. I talk endlessly about bands and records and rock stars and never-were-rock-stars, and all points in between - because amongst all of thouse hours of sound, I've stretched conduits that connect every note to every second that I've been alive. And, sometimes, it seems that the only way I can go back is to move through the sound. I know how pretentious and artsy that sounds, and you'd be right to point your finger at me and accuse me of devolving into exactly the kind of self-important clown that I spend my life ragging on, and you'd be right. That doesn't invalidate what I'm saying, though. In this case, though, I'm talking about a long-forgotten purveyor of smooth A.M soft rock.

So, I was discussing Christopher Cross with my mother for absolutely no reason at all, and the following day, I sang 'Ride Like The Wind' to Bronnie - just to see what would happen. She went wild, quite literally running like the wind through the house. I knew I was onto something. So, I 'acquired' Cross's entire back catalogue and began to listen sequentially. And I was transfixed by how well I remembered every song from his debut. And how well I remembered the times when I heard every song from his debut. Some things should only be listened to on a crackly A.M stereo.

And it stirred up a lot of stuff. Cross's not-inconsiderably large gumboot splashed firmly down into my brain's previously-settled mud puddle, and the dust and dirt began to immediately float to the top, swirling gently around and causing me to go back to another time.

I've also been watching a lot of Doctor Who. Patrick Troughton's accent was almost exactly the same as Grandma's. It's nice to just listen to him speak. I have audio recordings of 'The Fury From The Deep' and 'The Power Of The Daleks', and I lie in bed and just listen to Troughton talking. It's good to hear that accent one more time.

The other person who has her accent is Wilfrid Brambell from Steptoe And Son. Steptoe is my favourite comedy of all time - by far the funniest thing I've ever heard, but also, by far the saddest, most upsetting thing I've ever heard. Albert Steptoe talks like her. The same British in-jokes and common phrases and the same politics and worldview. The rhyming slang, and the double entendre, and the allegiance to the monarchy, and the endless, frightening war stories. I have the audio tracks from all eight seasons of the Steptoe And Son television show, and I just play them and play them.

By now, most people will have stopped reading. That's okay - most of you stopped reading a long time ago. This is really incoherent, undisciplined nonsense - but I felt like writing something about it tonight, and I may as well post it.

So, here are some moments. They're just a few things I've been thinking about. None of them are especially revelatory, or important, or even interesting. But they're there, and they won't go away.

There was a swimming pool. Years ago. Blue and metal and wet - out in the back garden, with a thing called 'the octopus', which was some kind of pump with eight hoses. I hated the pool. There was an old tree that hung over it - one of those red trees that you see in the eastern suburbs, and the leaves would fall in the water. And I didn't like stepping on the piles of leaves - I would jump around and climb out. And at night, as the sun went down, and you sat out in the garden, all you could hear was the swimming pool pump humming and buzzing - as Grandpa poured chlorine into the water in his singlet, with a fag hanging out of his mouth.

And the trees! I talked to Belle about this one night. The trees in the eastern suburbs of Melbourne have a strange quality. They are red, you see. There are red trees everywhere. There aren't any red trees in Greensborough, but once you hit Templestowe, you can see streets lined with brilliant crimson trees - stretching up towards the sky with leaves the colour of blood and wine. But the thing is - if you're very careful, and you look hard enough, at exactly the right time, from exactly the right position - those trees become an absolutely perfect black as they sihlouette against the starlight of the night sky. Normally, trees become all kinds of colours at night - they are green and black and grey and white, with moonlight and starlight refracting from them in all directions. But in the east - and in my Grandma's garden - the red was dark, and when set against the cobalt fabric of the night sky, they turned the darkest shade of black that you could ever imagine, and they would move and shake softly with a timeless, ageless beauty.

Grandma drank sherry. Always in her sherry glass. Hunched over in her chair.

'GlAh-ses'. 'Dahr-ling'. 'Treash-ure'. '848373... won'. And an elegant, spindly, ornate handwriting that became shakier over the years.

And that blue cardigan with the pearl buttons. And those polished boards, and that big sticker with a picture of the sun.

Hey! Tomorrow I'll post some of the drafts for the Sleepy Rock illustrations. Would you like that?

You know, I wish she could have met you. She would have liked you.

Rock And Roll, I Gave You All The Best Years As My Wife.

If you're like me, there is a very good chance that when it is mentioned to one of the plebian creatures in your miniscule social circle that you have been invited to join them on an evening's outing, there is at least one or two who groan and slap their foreheads in frustration. Not simply because of your uncomfortable aromas and disturbing habit of leaving food stuck in your teeth, but because they know that through your pompous arrogance and desperate need to prove your intellectual superiority - you are a rock snob. You are a feeble, insecure, hand-wringing little goblin, armed with a mouthful of obscure facts on popular music's plethora of artists and artisans - and you take delight in proving to all of those around you that it is, in fact, you who possesses the supreme knowledge of our musical history - and all others are uninformed, toothless, philistine cretins, who probably think Eminem is a groundbreaking genius. Yes, you are a rock snob - a venomous loser with ego to burn and shit to talk.

But are you? Are you really?

The test you are about to take has been crafed through a painstaking series of experiments, and a staggering level of research in the field - and it has been designed to help you unlock, or verfiy, your inner rock snob. Finally, you - cosmpolitan, urbane, impotent you - will know, with absolute certainty, that you have the mental toughness necessary to impress your friends and terrify your enemies with your flabbergastingly exhaustive knowledge of the minutia of rock and roll trivia. You will know that you aren't simply a poseur - but you are a bona fide, 100%, authentic rock snob - and your opinion is the only one that counts.

RULES: Choose the answer that you feel best demonstrates your feelings towards the statement above. Tally up your results at the end to discover your inner rock snob.

Good luck!

Question #:

1. KISS are...

A) Shit.

B) The shit.

C) Shit.

D) The shit.

_______________________

2. The best rock movie of all time is...

A) 200 Motels.

B) The Wall.

C) The Rocky Horror Picture Show.

D) 8 Mile.

_______________________

3. Lou Reed is...

A) A visionary genius, cursed by his own ambitions - yet gifted by an innate ability to crystallise the very essence of human suffering, channeling it into disturbing tales of urban life and characters on the fringes of society.

B) A pompous fool who used to be in The Velvet Underground.

C) The guy who did 'Walk On The Wild Side'.

D) Dead.

_______________________

4. The gayest guy in rock history is...

A) Jobriath.

B) David Bowie.

C) Elton John.

D) Brian Molko.

_______________________

5. The Band are...

A) A collective of brilliant ensemble players, each of whom contributed in a musical legacy that outgrew their humble beginnings as Dylan's backing band, and eventually took them on a path that would see them taking on a role as the sonic myth-makers of the deep south, culminating in their triumphant swan-song, 'The Last Waltz'.

B) The guys who did 'The Weight'.

C) People who are too lazy to think of a proper name for their band.

D) Never heard in our house.

_______________________

6. If Henry Rollins wasn't a musician/spoken word artist, he'd be...

A) A troubled, tortured genius - at the mercy of his own demons.

B) Heavily tattooed.

C) In the next Jerry Bruckheimer movie.

D) Funny.

_______________________

7. To be a Huey Lewis And The News fan, one needs...

A) A healthy sense of irony.

B) To be Patrick Bateman.

C) Gold 104 F.M

D) To remember who Huey Lewis And The News were.

_______________________

8. The Velvet Underground...

A) While being the bedrock of modern music, are overrated poseurs - no matter what Lester Bangs claimed.

B) Are Thurston Moore's favourite band, and that makes them cool - no matter what Greil Marcus claimed.

C) Weren't as good as The Guess Who - which is what I claim.

D) Probably don't wear velvet, unlike Janet Jackson.

_______________________

9. Michael Jackson is...

A) Beyond comedy.

B) Beyond irony.

C) Beyond the law.

D) Beyond hope.

_______________________

10. Jethro Tull's 'Thick As A Brick'...

A) Requires a master's degree in theology to be even remotely understood, thus making it a fascinating, complex, and challenging work.

B) Requires a master's degree in theology to be even remotely understood, thus making it a pretentious, overblown waste of time. Nice cover, though.

C) Is something I have never heard. Got any Stones?

D) Is owned by my dad, I think.

_______________________

11. If Robert Smith and Ian Curtis had a fight, who would win?

A) Who cares.

B) Robert Smith, since he is energised by the darkness within him.

C) Robert Smith, since Ian Curtis is already dead.

D) I have no idea what you're talking about.

_______________________

12. 10CC's name...

A) Refers to the average amount of ejaculate per orgasm in a healthy male, and dovetails nicely with the band's M.O - which was to generate highly intelligent, satirical rock in a Beatles-inspired pop vein.

B) Is pretty fucking funny.

C) Probably has nothing to do with inflating a tyre.

D) Means nothing to me.

_______________________

13. If I was to buy every Frank Zappa album...

A) I'd need to buy a bigger house.

B) I'd need to get a better life.

C) I'd get bored past the first three hundred releases.

D) My friends would disown me.

_______________________

14. The Beatles..

A) Were the consumate rock band, but their near-mythical status tends to be slightly over-inflated. They simply weren't the only progressive rock band during the 1960's, and their legacy tends to overshadow the groundbreaking work completed by lesser contemporaries such as The Kinks and The Chocolate Watchband. Pity everyone blames their breakup on Yoko Ono.

B) Were brilliant, with a driving rhythm section, a fascinatingly creative bass player, a slide-guitarist of no compare, and a savage, frustrated, madcap genius. Pity that stupid Jap slut broke them up.

C) Are what I sing to when I take the kids to school. Those red and blue albums are ace!

D) Won't get off my fucking radio.

_______________________

15. David Bowie...

A) Is a mercurial artist, wrongly credited with some of the most strident developments in popular music. As a self-confessed eclectician (thief), Bowie has always had to employ the talents of lesser-known artists, such as Eno, Iggy Pop, Reeves Gabriel, and - sickeningly - Trent Reznor, to keep his sound relevant and contemporary.

B) Is God.

C) Made really great 80's music!

D) Did that 'Major Tom' thing.

_______________________

16. Australian rock..

A) Is sadly underrated on the global stage, relegated to either AC/DC on the rock front, or Kylie Minogue on the pop - a tragedy, considering the plethora of brilliant Australian bands that have never been given their due, such as Tamum Shud and The Coloured Balls.

B) Gave us Silverchair - thank god for that.

C) Gave us Silverchair - I want to smash their ugly, smug little faces in.

D) Is best displayed on Australian Idol.

_______________________

17. My favourite band...

A) Hasn't even formed yet. But when they do, I'll be their first fan.

B) Gets heavy airplay on JJJ.

C) Are doing a reunion tour this year, at $200 a ticket.

D) Is Maroon 5.

_______________________

18. Nine Inch Nails...

A) Irritate the shit out of me.

B) Remind me of my youth, when I was doing nitrous bulbs outside Subculture.

C) Have those yucky film clips.

D) Hold my house up.

_______________________

19. If I was going to bang a rock star, it would be...

A) That guy from Rush.

B) That guy from Powderfinger.

C) That guy from REO Speedwagon.

D) Shannon Noll.

_______________________

20. G.G Allin is...

A) The only true punk rocker there ever was, taking the ethos, the look, and the sound to the absolute extreme in an orgy of brutal, inflammatory, often sickening performance art.

B) That guy who ate his own shit.

C) Scary.

D) Something I will never, ever, ever be in contact with.

_______________________

21. The last time I went to buy a record...

A) The girl at the shop told me that she'd never heard of the band or the album, and I complained extremely loudly before storming out in a huff.

B) I managed to track it down in the city after searching for a year.

C) It reminded me of the summer of 1975. The summer I became a man.

D) Sanity gave me two albums for $50. Awesome!

_______________________

22. Queen...

A) Took the worst excesses of 70's hard rock, and married them to the wost excesses of opera, creating a sound that is sickeningly commercial and sickeningly self-important. 'Bohemian Rhapsody' is a joke, with lyrics that sound more like the babblings of a retard than the profundities that they were intended - and when Queen sold out in the 1980's, they only increased in their power to make me vomit. Thank god Freddie's dead.

B) Took the best elements of 70's hard rock, and married them to the sheer power of opera, creating a sound that appeals to everyone, while retaining an experimental edge. 'Sheer Heart Attack' is, clearly, their masterpiece - although 'A Night At The Opera' comes close. Thank god Freddie's dead.

C) Are the best band ever.

D) Did that song from 'Wayne's World'.

_______________________

23. Complete this sentence: "Radiohead are _______ _______."

A) Unbearably overrated.

B) Master craftsmen.

C) Really white.

D) Kinda gay.

_______________________

24. The Smashing Pumpkins are...

A) The worst band ever.

B) The best band ever. Hee! Only kidding. The worst band ever.

C) The worst band ever.

D) The worst band ever.

_______________________

25. The only style of music Neil Young hasn't played is...

A) Non-existant.

B) Death metal.

C) Something I don't want to hear, since it isn't 'Harvest'.

D) Probably just as boring as his other shit.

_______________________

26. T-Rex...

A) Did glam rock earlier - and better - than Bowie. Their early accoustic period is especially rewarding - no band on earth has ever sounded like the embryonic T-Rex - before, or since. Although, Bolan really was a bit of a tosser.

B) Were nowhere near as good as Bowie - all of their songs sounded exactly the same. They weren't even cool enough to be mentioned in 'Velvet Goldmine'. I laugh heartily whenever I hear 'Get It On (Bang A Gong)'. Bolan really was a bit of a tosser.

C) Featured Marc Bolan, who I was convinced - in 1971 - that I'd marry one day. He was just so dreamy.

D) Was the name of that thing from Jurassic Park.

_______________________

27. The first time I heard Steely Dan's 'Gaucho', I...

A) Was struck by just how seamless their jazz/rock alloy had become, yet was deeply disturbed by the coked-out ennui and unadulterated decadence that they had descended into. Becker and Fagen captured an atmosphere of total burned-out collapse on the record that is unmatched.

B) Turned it off. I fucking hate Steely Dan. Boring bastards.

C) Thought I'd never get 'Hey, Nineteen' out of my head.

D) Fell asleep.

_______________________

28. At a rock show, I generally...

A) Stand just off to the side, at the front, with my arms folded across my chest - nodding as I try to listen to every little note that the band is playing, in order to gauge their professionalism, soul, and connection with the audience.

B) Go apeshit in the front rows, jumping around, headbutting people, and looking for every chance I can to crowd surf.

C) Clap politely between songs, sitting in my chair. Except for when the band get a little bit raucous - then I stand and clap politely between songs.

D) Tell everyone that I know the D.J

_______________________

29. Elvis..

A) Is sadly remembered as a pop-culture footnote. It is easy to forget about the not-inconsiderable musical achievements that The King made during his brief, troubled life - and it is high time that a serious retrospective of his later work was made available to the public, as it was during his so-called 'Fat' period that his voice attained a rich baritone and he produced some of the most heartfelt, fascinating work of his entire career.

B) Was fat.

C) Made some really, really shitty movies.

D) Was fat.

_______________________

30. I am a rock snob because...

A) I know more about music than you, I can back up my opinions with facts, and I'm not afraid to let you know just how mediocre your favourite bands really are. I don't care what you think of me. You think I'm a prick? Fine. I'm a prick. At least I'm right.

B) It makes me look cool in front of my indie-rock girlfriend. When I name drop The Grateful Dead and Television, she goes all gooey-eyed with admiration, and I just know I'm gonna get some that night.

C) It gives me something to talk about at the dinner table as I stare vacuously at my disinterested family.

D) It'll get me laid, mate. It'll get me laid. Especially next Friday night when I'm cruising Chapel.

If you scored...

MOSTLY A's...

You are a rock snob. Your friends all hate you. When they hear your car coming up the driveway, they cringe because they know that whatever they're playing on the stereo is about to be taken off by you, and replaced with something far more 'worthy'. Your own mother once called you an arrogant, sadistic shithead. Your girlfriend makes excuses for your behaviour, like: "He's not like that when we're alone!", but she knows that if she puts on her Spice Girls album, she'll hear about it for the next month. You're human scum. You are a rock snob.

MOSTLY B's...

You THINK you know about rock - but you actually know jack shit. You're probably a staff writer for Rolling Stone. You can talk the talk - making yourself sound important and informed, but you're just bluffing. You have no idea what you're talking about. Unless Thurston Moore or Kevin Shields or Wayne Coyne or Nick Cave said that it is cool, you don't know about it. You're no rock snob - you're a pretender to the throne.

MOSTLY C's...

You're like my Uncle Frank - or as I like to call him, The Pigfucker. You think that just because you own copies of 'The Who By Numbers' and 'Klaatu 3:47PST', it makes you somehow knowledgable on the subject of rock. You know absolutely nothing - you listen to Gold 104, and you think that Todd Rundgren is an obscure artist. Your friends entertain your fantasies by saying 'Oh, that's interesting' when you relay obvious, common-knowledge 'facts' like 'The last RECORDED Beatles album was 'Abbey Road' - the last RELEASED Beatles album was 'Let It Be'". They smile sadly, wishing that you wouldn't embarass yourself. You're no rock snob - you're barely able to feed yourself without assistance. Moron.

MOSTLY D's...

You are human waste. If I hacked your skull open with a sharp knife, the first thing I would notice is the rank smell of excrement in the air, as I uncovered the liquified cow shit that is your brain. You listen to whatever garbage BMG is shoving up your anus on any given week, and you love it. You scream out as Sony anally rapes you, crying out 'More! More, Daddy! Harder!'. You know absolutely nothing about music - so stop pretending that you do. Face it, you don't know your CCR from your KLF. You don't know your Chicago from your Kansas. You don't know your Tower Of Power from your Power Of Love. You think Shannon Noll is good. I hate you. I hope you die. I hope your children die. I hope your parents have to watch you writhing in agony - and I hope that the laugh I give out when I switch off your life-support machines haunt them to their dying breath. You are no rock snob. You are the living dead.

Mahalo.

And so, the end has come. We all knew it had to, eventually, but who would have thought that it would be quite so tragic - such a broken, misshapen, inexplicably flawed thing. Who could have dreamed that after so long, after a life spent beneath a shroud of every imaginable abuse, the last of the true outlaws - Dr. Hunter S. Thompson - would meet his demise by his own hand. It is so crazy - carrying with it the fractured, illogical implications of a fever dream, and even as I sit here on a warm, sultry Melbourne evening, I find myself stumbling to accurately describe what I'm feeling. There is loss, yes - and the hearbreaking reality that we will never have the chance to read any new material from Hunter, but it is also more than that. This tragedy carries with it a weight that transcends the bonds of the heart, coming from some kind of emotional Escher painting, where nothing is what it seems, and nothing makes sense.

After all, when my father called me this afternoon and told me in his inimitably blase' way...

"Hey, David. You hero's dead. Hunter Thompson shot himself last night."

... the one thing that struck me above all else, even as my chest contracted and my heart spasmed almost imperceptbly in a flex of sorrow, was that this simply made no sense. How on earth could someone so wonderfully, inimitably, and totally alive meet such an ignomious, undignified end? How could the Hunter I fell in love with - not the Gonzo maniac of Fear And Loathing In Las Vegas - but, the passionate humanitarian who used his effortlessly muscular prose to expose the dark heart that beats at the centre of Western culture - meet such a lonely, savage end?

Why? It doesn't make sense.

The last shreds of truth in writing died tonight, friends. Without Hunter, we should all be very, very afraid of the future. There's nothing left - no honesty, no bravery, and certainly no dignity in modern letters. Hunter was a man who spoke from his heart, spoke from his mind, and had the uncanny ability to crystallise the most primal matter of popular culture, injecting his writing with the flavour, the passion, and the rhythms of the decaying West. His work sprang from the savage realities of the political, social, and economic monster that we created in our arrogance and greed, and it sought to unravel ties that bound it together - holding them up in the light and letting us see them for what they are. And it breaks my heart to think that Hunter's body of work, a canon of almost Herculean potency, will now forever be entwined with the sadness of his passing.

When I was a second year arts student at Latrobe University, here in beautiful Melbourne, Australia, my dear friend Iain - a creature that drives me to the absolute edge of madness, even as he proves his worth time and time again - leant me a copy of 'Songs Of The Doomed'. And it was an absolutely revelatory experience. I'd never read anything like it - I was always a reasonably well-read kind of guy, but 'Songs Of The Doomed' was the first book I can remember that blew away the limitations of what writing could and couldn't be, and did it with an effortless sense of grace, style, and honesty. He was so funny, and warm - and he wrote with a fluidity that suggested that he was no simple stylist, but a master of technique. And he had a total disinterest in following any logical rules of narrative or context - but he didn't need to devolve into Burroughs-esque stream-of-consciousness. He was like Faulkner - able to harness the shambolic drumbeat of the human experience, and could channel it into seamless prose.

And he was so funny. The man could make you laugh and laugh, with his tales of decadence, drugs, violence, madness, and the brutality of modern life. He could immerse himself in the absolute nadir of humanity - be it the ghetto or Congress - and could return with a fistful of new tales that were profound, moving, heartbreaking, and - above all - desperately funny.
Hunter's wit was not simply a bunch of gags strung together, though - it was a meticulously constructed blend of self-mythology, pathos, and biblical imagery, tied together using the propulsive, muscular language that served as the engine room of his body of work.

Of course, as with all artists that reach the stature of Hunter, his legend eclipsed the man a long time ago - and Fear And Loathing In Las Vegas became an albatross around his neck - a twenty-stone canary which loomed over the rest of his work. Fear And Loathing was less a novel, and more a moment - never to be repeated, and forever young. I remember being so angry at university, when I'd see people reading copies of it, and guffawing loudly simply because of the level of drug abuse in it. And, when the film was released, it became a totemic symbol of the youth's love of antiheroes with drug problems. Hunter wasn't being appreciated for the sublety, or the pathos, or the humanity in his writing - he was transformed into the literary equivalent of a 'HIGH LIFE' poster. Fear And Loathing was 'fuckin' funny shit, man! When he does adrenochrome! That's fuckin' crazy!', and it left me feeling confused and defeated.

Because, after all, Fear And Loathing In Las Vegas is not a novel about drug abuse - and if that is how you read it, you are missing the entire point. It is a very personal vision of the apocalypse - a novel which takes on a kind of biblical resonance as Hunter and Oscar Acosta travel into the the maelstrom of a dying empire, reeling from the horrors of Vietnam, bitterly polarized by the massive social upheaval of the 1960's, and on the verge of slipping almost completely into the raging seas of its own depravity and self-directed violence. It is a vicious novel, condemnatory of authority and leaders, while at the same time lamenting the passing of an era where people actually stood for something, politics wasn't completely corrupt, and it seemed as though through little changes, larger ones could take effect. The novel howls and rages at its own impotence, and Hunter's relentless appetite for drugs and alcohol take on a sinister bent when we realise that this isn't a novel depicting the joys of hedonism, but is a novel which illustrates how the sickness at the core of Western culture manifests itself in the burned out miasma of the one who records it.

The film was a horrendous failure - appealing to those grinning simpletons who guffaw and chuckle at Hunter's relentless descriptions of his drug taking, and which utterly failed to capture the hopelessness and spiritual decay of the novel's protagonists. Unfortunately, for many, it will be their primary source of contact with Hunter's work - and now, we've been robbed of any chance to rectify that.

Fear And Loathing In Las Vegas was the big one, yes - but it certainly wasn't the best. Surprisingly, for a reputation built on an endless sea of writing that is obsessed with the writer's chemical intake, the large part of his body of work leaves his drug intake for his public mythology and focuses, instead, on a curious blendnig of odd slice-of-life tales from his day-to-day adventures in Colorado, and angry, raging polemics built around politics, culture, social and economic injustice, and his beloved sportswriting. Sometimes, he blended them all - and it is there that you find the true Thompson: Read a novel like 'The Great Shark Hunt', and you find a man who is so painfully conscious of the frenzied mosaic of modern communication that he has no choice but to descend into rage, fury, and a barely-controlled sense of narrative discord. The atonal drone of contemporary media informs all of Thompson's writing, and when it is at its best, he is able to look beyond his self-constructed mythology as a gun-toting drug addict, and is able to use the one organ that was instrumental above all others in his life and work - his heart.

It may seem preposterous to try and claim that Hunter was some kind of sentimental creature - but if you look beyond the image presented by the Fear And Loathing film, and actually bother to read the books, you'll find that even if Hunter didn't necessarily have a great love for people - he was able to show them an extraordinary level of empathy and dignity. When he wrote about the tragic murder of Ruben Salazar, he was able to imbue the man with such life and nobility - and was able to capture both the nightmarish vortex of violence, and the underlying madness of racism and marginalized cultures. Who else was able to portray, with such devastating accuracy, the gloating, sadistic evil of Richard Nixon, Kissinger, and G. Gordon Liddy? Nixon wasn't simply a naughty boy in Thompson's parlance, as he had been in the media, he was Satan himself - a figurehead that was representative of everything rotten and murderous and putrid in the American psyche.

And what of the Brown Buffalo? Who else but Hunter could have created Dr. Gonzo - in real life Oscar Acosta, a drunken Samoan lawyer with a questionable legal record, and a professional life which saw him flit from one courtroom disaster to another - yet allow us to see him as a tragic, broken, near-suicidal figure? Hunter's prediction was right - the melancholy, sadness, and lonliness of his rendering of Acosta seems particularly apt in light of his later death, under 'dubious' circumstances.

Hunter's celebrity encounters are legendary - from Margot Kidder to Bob Dylan to Johnny Depp. My favourite, though, is a piece from 'The Great Shark Hunt' in which he interviews Muhammed Ali, just before his doomed comback fight against Leon Spinks. Despite Hunter's crazy, alcohol-fuelled behaviour - which shocks Pat Robertson and Earl Hebner - when the two men settle down, there is an interlocking quality to their personalities that bring out the best in both. Hunter becomes a child, fascinated at the words and images that Ali conjured with his voice and presence, and he is clearly aware of the broken, desperate taste that Ali's battle-scarred persona leaves in the mouth. Ali, an intelligent, eloquent, fiercely passionate man, is aware of Hunter's ability to distill the humanity of a fighter, and to accurately understand and represent the dichonomy of such a gentle, poetic soul being capable of such punishing violence.

I wanted to write like him. More than anything. It wasn't that I wanted to ape his construction, or steal his ideas - I wanted, more than anything, to be able to stare into the blazing inferno of a culture fuelled by hatred, greed, dishonesty, arrogance, violence, inhumanity, colonialism, bloodshed, and empty, hollow self-loathing, and I wanted to be able to find a way to make sense of it. And if I couldn't do that, the least I could do was to find a way to laugh at it. I wanted his strength, his guts, his fearlessness, and his unwavering dedication to shearing away the barnacles of deception that cling to every facet of modern humanity - revealing the truth for what it is: the truth. And, more than anything, I wanted to do it - as Hunter did - without forgetting about the underlying nobility of the attacked and brutalized.

But, he's gone. I don't know why. Somewhere, for some reason, Hunter decided that life was no longer worth living. Maybe he smelled the oncoming deluge of viciousness and savagery that is currently engulfing the earth, as conservatism and intolerance become culturally legitimized, and the drive and vision of generations of humanitarians and progressive thinkers is cast aside in a blaze of gunfire and the all-encompassing fist of the mass-media. Perhaps he simply gave, and gave, and gave - until he had nothing left to give. And then, there was nothing left to live for.

So, goodbye, Hunter. You taught me more than any academic, or scholar, or writer ever did. Your writing changed my life, set me on the road to wherever it is that I am, and became the building blocks of the craft that I became determined to learn. It was all your doing - your drive, your passion, your verve, and your unwavering dedication to the truth. Tonight, I am going to sit here, listen to your beloved Bob Dylan as he sings 'I Shall Be Released', and I'll lament the fact that I never got to tell you just how much you meant to me - and how you showed me exactly what I had to do with my life. For that, no words can ever thank you. I will never, ever forget you - you were a warrior.

Mahalo, Hunter.

Vale Doc.

Hunter Thompson commits suicide

Thompson's books include "Hell's Angels," "The Proud Highway" and his most recent effort, "Hey Rube: Blood Sport, the Bush Doctrine, and The Downward Spiral of Dumbness."

I'll write about this tonight. A lot. Hunter is the reason I wanted to write in the first place. Now he's gone.

I just can't believe it.

Pop Goes The Weasel.

On a website that is far, far, far more successful and beloved than mine, the subject of manufactured, insipid, corporate pop music reared its ugly head over the last week, provoking a cascade of comments focused on the current hate-object of the terminally underground - Ashlee Simpson.

I knew nothing about the girl, because I am too busy watching Vice to waste my time with Rage, and I am too broke to have MTV anymore - but, by all reports, of the current cycle of Mouseketeer-inspired teenage pop stars, she is by far the most loathsome, irritating, self-important, and talentless. The girl, apparently, has made a habit of disgracing herself in public - whether disgracing herself with an utterly worthless performance at some American sporting event which ended in an entire stadium of drunken Americans booing her, or disgracing herself with an utterly worthless performance on Saturday Night Live in which she was busted lip synching after an error with the guide track, her infamy has less to do with the fact that she is a shameless product of record company greed, and more to do with the fact that in terms of her status as media icon/postmodern fetish object, she is a walking disaster area with a really shitty dye job.

But, let's not get ahead of ourselves. There'll be plenty of time to lay the boot into young Ashlee. First, let's talk about art.

Because I am intellectually liberated, and socially isolated, I just don't care what people think of my choices regarding media consumption. Fortunately, I don't have to 'like' something to enjoy it - and so, I go through periods where I am utterly transfixed and fascinated by whatever is most obviously floating around in the mainstream. Whether it is Australian Idol, or The Matrix, or MTV - media objects that are designed for mass consumption, and actually ACHIEVE mass consumption, are inherently fascinating, simply because of the volume at which they are consumed, and the psychology behind the process. Since you are a pretentious shitbag, you scoff at the notion that there could be ANYTHING worthwhile in taking a serious look at how someone like Delta Goodrem functions in terms of media delivery and consumption, but fortunately - I am secure enough in my collection of Velvet Underground bootlegs and vinyl copies of Getz/Gilberto 1963 that I can look objectively at what people who don't give a shit about 'art' are interested in - and try to understand what it is that they are responding to without sliding into condescending, smirking, overbearing cliches, and half-baked assertions of my own cultural superiority.

Because, after all, if we're honest with ourselves - there is nothing more boring and tasteless than a music snob. A REAL music snob. The next time one of your poet friends tells you about how much he hates 'pop music', I implore you to stab him in the ballbag with a pair of scissors. Poseurs are repulsed by the thought of 'pop', without realising that 'pop' music basically covers 90% of everything ever released on a global scale. The Beatles were pop music. The Rolling Stones. Led Zeppelin. Shit, even the hallowed Velvet Underground were a fucking pop band. What is 'Sweet Jane' if not a pop song? You don't think 'Stairway To Heaven' is four or five pop songs bolted together? Isn't Black Sabbath simply the pop formula played several octaves lower? What are you, an idiot? Every band ever who wasn't Throbbing Gristle is a pop band. Get over it. Nine Inch Nails are a pop band. Maiden. Even the hallowed Nirvana - you think Kurt Cobain wasn't intimately acquainted with the entire Carpenters back catalogue? Have you even LISTENED to 'Unplugged In New York'? Picture Richard and Karen Carpenter singing 'All Apologies'. How would that sound?

Fucking awesome is the answer. And if you disagree, you need to go back to school - you don't know your history.

After all, what were Nirvana but a pop band that bought distortion pedals? Does any sentient creature honestly think that The Sex Pistols were anything but a pop band that used technology to distort their sound? They were a heavily politicised band, certainly - but from a purely sonic standpoint, they were no more threatening than E.L.O.

But, somewhere along the way, things have changed. 'Nevermind' was an important album, in that it sent seisimic shock waves through the entire world, and split music into 'mainstream' and 'alternative', where previously, there weren't really any such cultural divisions. Albums either sold, or they didn't - and it didn't matter whether it was The Cure or Katrina And The Waves. In the decade-or-so since the debut of 'Nevermind', those distinctions have become cemented in stone - with the 'alternative' revolution spearheaded by such worthless piffle as The Smashing Pumpkins and Green Day on the alternative side, and the openly-manufactured industry model that was kicked off by The Spice Girls and their various clones acting as the flipside. Somewhere, though, the distinctions became blurred - and as the very concept of the 'manufactured pop star' reached its arguable zenith with the loathsome, repugnant Britney Spears, mainstream pop began to implode, self-destructing as the fans screamed out for something 'real', and resulting in the death of the boy/girl-band phenomenon. The aftermath of this, of course, was the rise of the currently-fashionable crop of manufactured teen idols who PRETEND that they are alternative leaders.

Which is what makes Ashlee Simpson a particularly fascinating case. She's probably a sweet kid - I wouldn't know, since I doubt she hangs out with fat nerds from the northern suburbs of Melbourne, but I'm sure she's never stabbed an old lady or sodomised a horse with a breadstick. This doesn't stop her from being almost spectacularly bereft of talent - her laughable live appearances aside, she is obviously such a meticulously constructed media animal that any traces of the girl herself have been erased by the army of producers and songwriters that are the engine room behind her success.

She has been crafted as an alternative 'rocker' in the Avril Lavigne model - but Simpson is so clearly a marionette that her posing and pouting passes the point of being simply embarassing, and ends up squarely in 'disturbing' territory. Sporting a shock of dyed black hair, an endless series of shirts with hip, edgy phrases splashed across them ('Punk', 'Rock Star', etc.), and the requisite 'punk' accoutrements such as spiked wristbands and low-slung, studded belts - she is the absolute vision of consumerism masquerading as rebellion. Nobody with half a brain cell can possibly take her ruse seriously - this girl is as edgy as Wheel Of Fortune, and no amount of weak screams and pogo dances can rectify the situation.

How interesting, then, that for a girl who is almost total artifice, the conceptual hook that her marketing team uses to appeal to the Livejournal generation is that she is 'real'. Her album is called 'Autobiography', see? She's Carol King for SMS junkies. She is Joni Mitchell, but BETTER, since she's packed to the gills with XTREME, IN YOUR FACE ATTITUDE. She isn't Britney - what's on the record is who she is, and who she is is real. Her lyrics are confessionals, see? Like her most obvious rival, the noxious Avril Lavigne, we are supposed to buy the concept that this girl actually has feelings, and has the capacity to articulate them through words and sound.

So, in the interest of art and my need to kick a dog when it is down, I downloaded her album and listened to it.

It was shit. Really, really horrible. Possibly the absolute nadir of humanity in general. The album is all pose - walls of 'rock guitar' adorn Simpson's screeching, trying-way-too-hard-to-be-intimidating vocals, as she rambles on and on about how the world should 'love her for her', and other Amway-commercial-esque dross. Attempting to capture the feeling of a sensitive songwriter, ala my beloved Suzanne Vega, we have song titles like 'Pieces Of Me', 'Unreachable', 'Giving It All Away', and the hysterically-titled 'Love Makes The World Go Round'. They all sound the same - they are vapid, vacuous, made-for-MTV fiddlesticks, and if the world was a fair and just place, they never would have been written, let alone recorded.

But, somehow, the girl succeeds. She's a multimillion dollar industry, with a multimedia career that encompasses live performances, record albums, and a T.V show - 'The Ashlee Simpson Show' - which I would be fascinated to see. The question that begs to be asked is - how? If the music is generic bullshit, the girl's pose is ridiculous, her show is a piece of shit, her live performances are the stuff of urban legend, and she is generally percieved as being signs that we are bottoming out as a cultural animal - how is it that she lives in a mansion with cable, while I spend my time masturbating in my parents ferns while contemplating the butterflies that are nesting in my wallet?

Point that self-satisfied smirk someplace else, mister. Pretentious blowhards such as academics, poets, 'artists', and the denizens of the non-existant circle-jerk that people convince themselves is 'the underground' like to put the success of manufactured pop stars down to stupidity. How many times have you heard this inane discussion amongst your turtleneck-sweater-wearing friends:

"Hey, Warfish! I was at my girlfriend's mother's place the other day.", says Halfpipe.

"Where does she live?"

"Montmorency."

Warfish pauses. "Where the fuck is that?"

"Not in the inner city."

"Oh.", Warfish responds, taking a long drag from his wet, slimy, dripping self-rolled cigarette. "In the suburbs. I'm so glad I escaped. I just couldn't take it anymore out there. It was just so.. so.."

"Limiting?"

"Limiting."

They pause.

"You won't believe what I heard coming from my sister's bedroom.", Halfpipe remarks, grinning.

Warfish chuckles. "My Bloody Valentine?"

"Nope."

"My Life With The Thrill Kill Kult?"

"Nope."

"KMFDM?"

Halfpipe smirks. "Hardly."

"The Dead Kennedys? Fugazi? Sebadoh? And You Shall Know Us By The Trail Of Dead? Godspeed, You Black Emperor? Negativland? Mudhoney?"

"Nope, nope, nope.", Halfpipe replies, rubbing at his eyebrow ring with the single black-painted fingernail that he wears on his right hand. He pauses, reaching into his pinstripe trousers, and fishing out some hemp-flavoured breath mints, and straightening the amulet he bought on Smith St. in the shape of an ancient Celtic symbol for 'vision' - smiling as it clatters against his white, bony ribs.

"She was listening to - get this. Ashlee Simpson."

Warchild bursts into riotous laughter.

"You're KIDDING?"

"No, I'm not. Seriously. I was telling Mum about the Rwandan child I'm sponsoring, and borrowing some money off her to buy more weed - and I heard it coming from her bedroom. God, what a fucking idiot."

Warchild chuckles. "She sounds like it. That's so weird. You don't seem the type to come from such a... dumb family. I mean, they can't be too bright. You know what I mean?"

"They're not. Fucking suburbanites. God, I hate ordinary people. With their stupid music and their stupid rules. Society is run by squares. And morons."

"Damn right.", Warchild snarls - lifting up an arm. "Punch it in!"

They lock arms in a gesture of bonding and affirmation.

"Say," Halfpipe muses, as the rain falls softly on Brunswick St., "Want to go and get some goat's cheese polenta? Maybe a short black?"

"That sounds like a good idea. I'm starving. I haven't eaten in a few days. The rent on my loft is, you know, expensive. But at least I have plenty of time to paint abstract art and listen to Tito Puente."

"Well, Warchild," Halfpipe sighs, tracing a finger across one of his new tattoos and throwing a thick, aromatic dreadlock over his shoulder, "When you have serious culture - what else do you need?"

"Too true.", Warchild nods, before looking his friend in the eye. "Can I borrow taxi fare off you?"

We all know these people, and - unless you, yourself, are a poet/writer/fuckwit - you probably hate them and pray for the day when their life functions cease and they can be used as landfill. They feel that since you listen to Robbie Williams for non-ironic purposes, you are a gutter-class peon with the aesthetic taste of a sewer rat on a 'shroom bender. What they fail to notice, though, is that the process that separates them from their money in the pursuit of the latest album by Primus or Corrosion Of Conformity is - largely - the same process that causes Cindy McPigtails to hand over her Maccas pay for a copy of Ashlee Simpson's powerful art.

Since rock died in the late 1970's and was replaced with an endless string of corporate media figures, we have become accustomed to the empty vessel phenomenon. The days of someone like my sainted Bruce Springsteen sitting down, thinking about his childhood, or the people around him, or his parents, or the things that life handed out to his friends and family - and attempting to reflect them in his music - are over. The songwriter-as-auteur is a dead concept, and to claim otherwise is to be a grinning simpleton. Instead, we are offered categorized sets of cultural nodal points - embodied in our heirarchical star system - which we wear and remove like masks. We look into our musicians and we don't see them - we see ourselves. We project what WE want into the music and the persona, and the rest is ignored. Whether you are a 16 year old girl who wants to be pretty and popular, or whether you are a worthless poet who just wants to be Thurston Moore, the music that we are offered is, for the most part, a tabula rasa upon which we construct our own context and relevance.

When one listens to John Lennon's 'Plastic Ono Band' album - it is very difficult to see ourselves vicariously experiencing the life of the artist. 'Plastic Ono Band' is an album which is - very, very specifically - a detailed account of the life of a 31 year old rock star with some deep, deep, deep-rooted issues concerning his wealth, his past, his family, and his future. The presence of the artist permeates the words and the sound, and we are never allowed to forget that this is his story - not ours. Likewise, Springsteen's 'Nebraska' is - very much - a work that is so deeply personal and idiosyncratic that it becomes almost impossible to separate the art from the artist. When you listen to Ashlee Simpson's 'Autobiography', do you know ANYTHING more about her than you did before you started? When you listen to Zwan, do you actually learn anything about what William thinks - not as a rock star, but as a person? You don't. You're not supposed to.

So, artifice is as artifice does - and we absorb canvas after canvas, using our buying power to present us with an endless array of possibilities for us to project our own insecurities, longings, fears, and desires into the body politic of the media. It doesn't matter whether you're a 14 year old girl, or a 26 year old unemployed scumbag, or a 35 year old failure - there is an empty vessel for you to disappear inside.

Ashlee Simpson doesn't exist. At least, not in the way that we understand her to exist. Neither does Eddie Vedder. Or Trent Reznor. They are empty shells that give us hooks upon which to hang our own projections of our personalities. The days of the artist that appeals across the spectrum of caste, gender, race, age, and subculture have ended - and instead of a unified sense of humanity as the bedrock of art and culture, we have a deeply fragmented, divisive, and disposable sense of the relationship between who we are and how we represent ourselves. The Serious Music Fan listens to Serious Music, The Kids Listen To Pop, The Skaters Listen To Good Charlotte, The Dorks Listen To Metal, and so on - and they both define and are defined according to how much of themselves they can project into the music. Rather than, as it was thirty years ago, defining ourselves - our values, our fears, and our sense of who we are and where we are going as a culture - by the way in which another human was able to express his vision of a shared, communally-experienced 'mainstream'.

So, Ashlee Simpson sucks. She is talentless, insipid, utterly plastic, devoid of any serious meaning, bereft of innovation - be it musical, lyrical, or contextual, and looks really stupid onstage. But, when you think about it - is the sight of some 12 year old staring up at her with awe in her eyes and different to some goatee'd, snivelling, emo-glasses-wearing poet nodding his head soulfully as he watches Billy Bragg? If you believe Poet McBallsack - it is flat out offensive to compare the two reactions.

But, they are doing exactly the same thing - they are becoming their heroes. I hate Ashlee Simpson's music with a passion - but I can't condemn you if you like it. Because, after all, one man's Ashlee Simpson is another man's Daryl Hall.

Moribund Media Of The 1980's.

Welcome, turkeys, to your very own handy guide to negotiating the pitfalls and traps of collecting games for that seminal (hee!) machine of the 1980's - your Uncle David's most beloved Commodore 64. And, indeed, in a feature that nobody asked for, nobody will read, and nobody will get any pleasure from - Gone, But Not Yet Rotten - I shall be asking the hard questions regarding the C64's expansive, yet disturbingly patchy, library of most excellent, highly-collectible software. As we've previously discussed, my life is an absolute abyss of self-loathing, existential nausea, and crippling self-pity - and, as such, I find it necessary to indulge my asinine passion for self-mythology and infantilism through the moribund technologies of my worthless childhood. As such, I find myself standing tall upon the nexus of all that is not-worth-much-money - Ebay, and I become a lone sentinel keeping watch over the virtual marketplace, intent on snapping up anything that says both 'Commodore 64' and '99 cents'. I spend my little bits of money - no more than $3 or $5 at a time - yet the pleasure that I recieve when the package appears in my mailbox could be valued in the billions. As I tear open the jiffy bag, and my eyes lock onto the glittering plastic of the scuffed, scratched up 1980's game case, I feel my eyes filling with tears, and the blood beating loudly in my neck. It is for this purpose that I am here. This is my time. Nous somme du soleil. We are of the sun.

So, enjoy this first in an ongoing series of articles promising you only the finest in dead entertainment. Promsing you, the discerning Metal City reader, the absolute acme of retro entertainment. Come with me on a journey into your past - yours and mine. Take my hand, child - I have things to show you. And know that I love you.

BATMAN: THE CAPED CRUSADER (Data East/Ocean, 1988)

In 1988, the world was obsessed with Batman. I remember, I was there. I remember my mother came home one day and presented me with the coolest things I had ever seen - a pair of Bat-Shoes. They were ordinary Bubblegummers, but dammit if they didn't have the Batsymbol on the side in moulded plastic. I still remember wearing those things with pride as I schlepped my way around the schoolyard, and I can still remember the feeling of hot fists knocking my teeth out of my head as my peers expressed their disgust at the fact that I wasn't wearing Nike or Reeboks. In 1988, not only was the world Batman-obsessed, it was also basketball-obsessed, and I didn't realise that only one of these obsessions was fit to support via the aesthetics of my footwear.

The bloodstained Batsymbol that adorned my shoes aside, this fabulous arcade adventure was offered to us by Data East in 1988 - and rather than being an adaption of the film that was doing the rounds, it was instead an adaption of the comic books. Featuring the Penguin and The Joker in separate adventures, depending on which side of the tape you played, you took control of Batman and guided him through a series of homoerotic shenanigans, attempting to halt your foe's plans for domination of Gotham City. This, of course, involves lots of running around, picking up random objects and looking for places to 'use' them, and fighting about 900 guys all called 'ninja'. Sounds like my cup of tea, and it sure ain't turkey flavoured!

And speaking of being turkey flavoured, here's an amusing anecdote for you. I remember buying this game for roughly $10 at some point in 1988, and as I walked proudly through K-Mart, clutching it to my breast, some retarded employee who probably now smokes a lot of crack had forgotten to dry the floor - and I slipped over, crashing into a wall of wine bottles. Glass went everywhere, but since I was a Commodore 64 user, none of the glass hurt me. I simply stood up, and shuffled away. Then I went home and played the game. It ruled. Damn you, K-Mart! Damn you!

So, it's a great game. Not as good as Ocean's later licensed film tie in - but a groovy arcade adventure in its own right.

Expect to pay at least 0.99GBP on the Bay. Or, if you're feeling cheap, email me for the disk image.

MIAMI VICE (Ocean, 1985)

My! This HAS been a good week for tie-ins. The C64 was no stranger to the joys of Officially Licensed Product, and nowhere was this more contentious than in the curious case of Ocean's official game of my beloved Miami Vice - a T.V show that ceased to have any kind of rational meaning in my life a long time ago, and has since joined the pantheon of esteemed broadcast materials such as The A-Team, Star Blazers, Dr. Who, and V: The Series upon which I have built my entire personal philosophy, and in whose teachings I turn to for guidance through my life. Suffice to say, a combination of the Commodore 64 and Miami Vice is enough to fill my pants with viscous, rancid ejaculate - as my eyes roll back in my head, and my hands ball into fists, so tightly that half-moons of blood are slashed into my palms.

Was I disappointed?

Nay. The C64 version of Miami Vice is a fine blending of genres. Opening in the Ferrari, Crockett and Tubbs speed through the 8-bit streets of Miami, meeting dealers as instructed in the tape inlay. I thrilled to Galway's fabulous music for this sequence, and I could practically feel the 8-bit wind in my hair as I raced down streets and alleyways. The second game section, once you bring the Ferrari to a screeching halt, involves you taking control of Crockett or Tubbs as you wander across a horizontally-scrolling rendering of your environment, blowing away scum. It rules more than God himself. Being given the chance to BE Crockett reaffirms my faith in humanity, and fills me with a light of pure love. Later followed by an XBox version of Vice in 2005 which was, basically, crap - but which I can't stop playing. It has Crockett in it. Crockett is my God. I want to be Crockett so badly that the thought of having to spend the rest of my life as David Q. Fuckface instead is almost enough to have me scrabbling for the sleeping pills.

Expect to pay upwards of 2GBP on the Bay. It's getting rare.

MERMAID MADNESS (Electric Dreams/Firebird, 1986)

Everyone knows that fat people are really fucking funny. Part of the reason that this very site is one of the leading lights of Australian mirth is that I am some kind of fat bastard - and if you want further evidence that there is a correlation between the tyres around your gut and the volume of the laughs you recieve with your comic stylings, you need look no further than Firebird's 1986 offering, Mermaid Madness. Being the adventures of a fat mermaid, who has developed an unrequited crush on Diver Dan, it us up to you - the joystick-wielding section of the partnership, to guide her through an undersea world where random, everyday objects are simply scattered about in completely random places - yet somehow, they can all be used to free Diver Dan from the rather sticky predicament he has found himself in. See, since you are fat, you are unlovable - and as he fled from you, leaping into the ocean as you shamble after him, naked, with your blubber bouncing and your arms outstretched, he managed to get himself trapped behind a large boat propellor. Can you win his heart by rescuing him? Can he forgive you for being a fat half-fish person? Can he?

I have fond memories of this game. It probably isn't very good, but I remember buying Firebird's reissue in the winter of 1987. I remember driving in my mother's blue Honda Civic and listening to Prefab Spout on the way. 'Cars And Girls' is a piece of shit, yes - but it's MY piece of shit. And it's the mermaid's piece of shit.

The sounds are nice, with a cute SID rendition of 'The Nutcracker Suite' playing as you steer your obese mermaid through a netherworld of clams, seahorses, and - naturally - unrequited love. It looks like pretty much every other C64 game of the era - lots of bright, cartoonish sprites, Jet Set Willy-inspired map designs, and puzzles that make - for the most part - no sense.

Expect to pay 0.99GBP on the Bay. Pretty common - and it was a Firebird 0.99GBP game in the first place.

RASTAN SAGA (Imagine, 1988)

As the gays dropped like flies all around us in '88, victims of the then-nascent AIDS crisis, Imagine offered us this slice of homoerotica - a simulation of an oiled up, beefcake warrior swinging axes and shaking his mane of thick, sexy hair.

Rastan Saga has developed somewhat of a reputation as some kind of forgotten masterpiece, but I'm here to tell you that anyone who says that deserves to have their penis sliced off with a ripsaw. The game is nothing more than a bland platformer featuring a beefy dude with a bevy of weapons that all look different but handle exactly the same. You see that lizard guy on the cover? Yes, well - you'll be seeing him a lot during the game. You have to fight him over and over again, since he seems to be one of the few character designes that Imagine have included.

Of course, it also reinforces the C64's strange obsession with gay fetish objects. Who can forget the oiled bod of Psygnosis's 'Barbarian', as he preened and flexed in the promotional art. What about their adaption of the flamingly homosexual Schwarzenegger vehicle Red Heat - a game, and film, that opens with a bunch of oiled, naked dudes TOUCHING EACH OTHER IN A SAUNA. What about 'Green Beret', or 'Yie Ar Kung Fu', games with cover art that seemed to depict manly alpha-males locked in an open-mouthed homosexual orgasm? Shit, in 1986, there was even a game simply entitled 'Fist'! Good grief! I don't need to rub Germolene into an anal fissure to know when someone's been having a few naughty encounters of the John Inman kind, if you know what I'm saying. And it seems that in the era of gay liberation that was the 1980's, the chaste landscape of the Commodore was, indeed, seen as fertile ground to build a men's toilet - complete with glory hole.

What? Oh. Right. Rastan Saga.

Yeah, you're a big barbarian dude and you run around killing shit with your sword, and it's really pretty fucking boring. Whatever.

Expect to pay 0.99GBP for the Kixx reissue, and upwards of 5GBP for the original Imagine longbox. Or don't. Save your money for the next time you visit your local beat.

THE RUNNING MAN (Grandslam, 1989)

Originally written by Stephen King under his pretentious pen-name of Richard Bachman, 'The Running Man' tells the story of Ben Richards, a guy with very little personality, who is hunted throughout America as a part of a violent game show. In the end, there's lots of scenes where King deems it necessary to have Richards fondling his exposed intestinal tract prior to his making the Ultimate Sacrifice. It's really quite a good book, and I have fond memories of it from my Stephen King phase - a phase which gets resurrected from time to time, primarily because it really annoys the shit out of pretentious 'artists' and 'academics'. Fuckwits like you hate Stephen King because he makes the money that YOU should be receiving for your 'performance poetry' or your 'interpretive dance' or your 'experimental hip-hop', or whatever ghastly inner-city bullshit you came up with while hopped up on mescaline and ecstasy. Fuck you. Fuck you, you bastards. Fuck you like you've never been fucked before. Stephen King couldn't give a fuck what you think, so laugh it up. Make fun of the fact that he was hurt in a car accident. Make fun of his movies. Then look in your wallet, hippie. You wanna know what Big Steve sees when he looks in his wallet? Big fat wads of green cash, that's what. Who's laughing now, poetboy?

Grandslam Entertainment's officially licensed Commodore 64 game of 'The Running Man' is NOT based on the Stephen King/Richard Bachman novel of the same name, but rather on the homoerotic Schwarzenegger film, in which Arnie waves his massive Austrian phallus around while beating up people and wasting 'stalkers'. There's a bunch of attempts at developing some kind of subtext which lampoons the media, media consumption, and America's lust for violence, but - whatever. Like I watch this crap to think. Bring on the explosions, gunplay, and nudity and leave the fancy talk for the classroom, professor.

Still, the film does provoke a certain level of intellectual engagement - but not in the way that the filmmakers intended. For 'The Running Man' is not an action film about a violent, futuristic game show run by a decaying, facistic police state. It is, however, the story of one man's struggle to accept his own status as a gay man, and the responsibilities - and pitfalls - that come along with it. Gay motifs spurt out of the screen like so much delicious, pearly sperm at a Scissor Sisters concert. Who can forget when Arnie has another man 'turn around' so that he can 'sign on the dotted line' on his 'back' - and then stabs him with the pen. Think about it. Think about the sly metaphor in that scene. Think about Arnold penetrating another man from behind with something longer than it is wide. What is Arnold REALLY signing? Subtextually, he is agreeing to live his life as a gay man. And, as he stabs his lover in the spine with the pen, he is telling us - he'll GIVE it, but he sure as hell won't TAKE it.

Who can forget Arnold slicing a dude in half with the guy's chainsaw? Remember how he does it? He does it VIA THE GUY'S CROTCH. Get it? Arnold has to REMOVE Buzzsaw of his REAL weapon. It isn't a CHAINSAW, my friends - it is a DRIPPING, LUBED UP, HILLYBILLY WANGDOODLE. And why? Because Arnold doesn't RECEIVE gay sex - he GIVES IT. And, as we noted before, he has a CONTRACT STATING AS MUCH.

There's a character called 'Fireball'. I don't know how he fits into this, but the word 'ball' is in his name, so I bet there's something there.

Hang on. I've got it. Fireball's weapon is a flamethrower. Another phallic symbol. A phallic symbol that spurts fire. A fire-breathing penis. And his name is 'Fireball'. As in.. 'Balls filled with fire'. Another symbol indicating Arnold's reticence to be giving with his male lovers? Could it be that the Ejaculate Of Fire is a reference to Arnold's fear of being sexually penetrated due to the pain?

The film's name is The Running Man. But what is Arnold REALLY running from? The stalkers? Violence?

No. He's running from his own flaming homosexuality.

Look at that box art. It has him grabbing onto a woman and fleeing. Fleeing his old life - the life of the gay man. And trying to take a woman - as proof of his new-found status as a straight male. As a still of himself, his face a mask of sweat-smeared intensity, looms overhead - he flees from himself, his true identity as a devout homosexual, in a frenzy of self-loathing and kinetic violence.

The game, however, eschews the brazen homosexuality of the film - and concentrates on giving us a late 1980's platform game. You do a bunch of stupid shit that ties in, roughly, with the film - but it has all the gay sex edited out, leaving you with Arnie in yellow lycra. It's okay. It's nothing special. It's just kinda there. You run around doing platformy things, and occasionally going the biff with a Stalker. It's all very boring - it came as the flickering embers of the C64's life-cycle were being blown(har) on by quite a few companies, but they couldn't all manage to release Quality Product. Good try, Grandslam - but not quite. One warning, though - emulators seem to have a problem with this one. Maybe I should turn 'true drive emulation' on in Vice64x. I don't know. Screw you.

Expect to pay 0.99GBP on the Bay. That's for the reissue. The original probably goes for a bit more. This wasn't a big hit, so nobody really cares. Neither should you.

I can't go for that. No can do.

The Top Thirty Forty Reasons Why I Idolize Daryl Hall And John Oates, As Of 3:29 P.M on 11/02/05.

1. I want to be Daryl Hall.

2. Daryl Hall is far better looking than me.

3. If I could get away with it, I would have a moustache like Oates.

4. 'Abandoned Luncheonette' is one of THE great debut albums of all time, and fuck you if you disagree, hippie.

5. 'She's Gone' is great in ways that the human mind will probably never be able to grasp.

6. Everybody hates them, which - in the eyes of a poseur like me - makes them immediately cool.

7. Daryl Hall did an album with Robert Fripp, rather than an album with Robert Fripp and Robert Fripp's ego - a feat that not even Bowie could pull off.

8. 'Rich Girl' is one of the great blue-eyed soul classics of the rock era. If you disagree, you are clearly stupid.

9. Todd Rundgren produced their second album, 'War Babies', and Todd Rundgren is cool. If I had his big boots, I'd be a happy man.

10. Daryl Hall's hair rules.

11. They did video clips where they did nothing but bounce about while staring directly at the camera. They, and only they, can do this without looking retarded.

12. Their version of 'Every Time You Go Away' is beautiful. Paul Young's version of 'Every Time You Go Away' makes me vomit blood.

13. They are cooler than you.

14. They are cooler than me.

15. Idiots hate them because they wrote pop songs. Fuck you. The Velvet Underground wrote pop songs, too - I don't hear you complaining about them, you spineless, turtleneck-sweater-wearing fuckstain.

16. In the early 1980's, you couldn't turn on a radio without hearing one of their songs. This saved us from having to listen to The Human League, New Order, and Echo And The Bunnymen all fucking day.

17. They are the highest selling due in rock history. Hah. God, that makes me laugh. An arrogant, spineless turd like you mocks Hall and Oates because they never got invited to Lollapalooza, and Trent Reznor doesn't name drop them with smirking, self-satisfied irony. They are the overlords of your entire world - of all the duos in rock history, it is THEY who rule supreme. Not The White Stripes. Not The Captain And Tennile. Not Milli Vanilli. Not Mazzy Star. Not Ween. Just Hall and Oates. Suck on it, bitches. Taste it.

18. If Daryl Hall wasn't in Hall and Oates, he'd be a fan of Hall and Oates. I'm not in Hall and Oates, and I am a fan of Hall and Oates. And the way I read that, you bastards, is that Daryl Hall and I have something in common. And it is that fact that shall prevent me from opening up a wrist for another week.

19. Daryl Hall may be God - a theory that I hinted at many months ago, but never fully expanded upon. And I'm not going to here. But, I assure you, I am onto something.

20. The electric piano line from "You Make My Dreams Come True" bounces in a way that can only be realised by a smirking white guy with perfect hair and teeth.

21. They wore make up on the cover of 'Daryl Hall And John Oates', and looked damn fine. Daryl Hall, in particular, looked more like a woman than any woman you've ever seen. Oates looked like a guy with a huge moustache wearing rouge. Rock on, boys!

22. 'I Can't Go For That (No Can Do)" was on top of the Billboard R&B charts for weeks - one of the few times that this feat was accomplished by a band with a white dude. And people talk about Prince shattering the cultural race barrier. Ha!

23. They never made crappy movies.

24. They appeared on 'Soul Train' and totally ruled. They did 'Rich Girl'. Their appearance was far more impressive than Bowie doing 'Young Americans" while off his dial on cocaine.

25. If I was Daryl Hall, my life would have meaning, instead of me being trapped inside the self-destructing corpse of a brain-dead, unemployable, largely talentless "writer"(ha!).

26. If I was Daryl Hall, I'd have better hair. My hair is floppy, dead, stinky, and threatens to evolve into a mullet if I don't get it cut every few hours. Daryl Hall can have short, manly hair or long girlie hair, and either way he looks like he could go ninja in your house, beat up your family, all the time without stopping his endless, near-orgasmic wave of soulful hits.

27. They appeared in detective outfits for the 'Private Eyes' video. Like Columbo. Or Dale Cooper from Twin Peaks. Twin Peaks is cool. So's Columbo. So are Hall and Oates.

28. They do a song called 'Ennui On The Mountain' on 'Daryl Hall And John Oates', which - ironically - describes my state of mind for the last few years. Daryl Hall knows my secrets.

29. Daryl claims that 'your kiss is on his list'. Although I get the feeling, somehow, that he isn't referring to me, specifically, I put that down to the fact that I wasn't born until 1978. Although I'd LIKE my kiss to be on his list, I wouldn't actually want to kiss him because - after all - that's gay. I'd just like to be ON the list.

30. Their cover of 'Family Man' is far better than Mike Oldfield's endless, pointless version. I bet if Hall and Oates had recorded 'Tubular Bells', it too would be far superior.

31. Oates looks like Howard Stern's producer Gary 'Baba Booey' Della'bate. Both men are cool, but only one was in a band with the flaxen-haired god from Philadelphia, Mr. Daryl Hall.

32. Daryl Hall helps me to assert my status as a heterosexual male, thus helping me to avoid lashing out in fits of brainless violence. I find myself curiously attracted to him because of his mind-blowing lyrical skill and soulful voice, yet I know - in my heart - that I could never consumate my love for him because even though he LOOKS like a girl - he isn't one.

33. Hall wears better clothes than I do, and I don't think it is simply because I have a body that resembles Quasimodo cross-breeding with a donkey. While I wear stinky overcoats and torn band t-shirts that have stiffened under the armpits due to an abundance of deoderant employed to combat my natural barnyard-in-summer-esque stench, Hall is a smooth operator in his dressy suits, tasteful slacks, and polished, but not show-offy shoes. If I broke into Hall's house and stole his wardrobe, I would not look like him. I'd look like me - in good clothes. Conversely, if Hall broke into my house and stole MY wardrobe, he'd look like a glittering androgene in smelly, ripped clothes of no discernable market value.

34. Hall and Oates sound best when pumped out of an AM stereo in a late-70's model Holden, thus joining such esteemed AM contemporaries as The Eagles, The Doobie Brothers, and anything off the Time Life 'AM Gold' compilations. Hall and Oates, naturally, tower above them all.

35. Hall never did a master's degree, never became a failed 'writer', and never ended up living with his parents into his forties. This immediately makes him better than me in almost every conceiveable fashion. If Hall made a deal with my parents to move into this house for a week, he would kill himself after the first hour, in a bloodstained orgy of shame and self-loathing at how far into the existential sewer he had fallen. If Oates kicked out Hall, and the band became 'Dave and Oates', I would suck so hard that hipsters and Brunswick St. denizens of all kinds would mock them even harder than they already do. It's a lose-lose situation, I'm afraid.

36. I bet Hall drives something better than a 1978 Holden Torana with really shitty fuel consumption and a stereo that doesn't play the last 5 tracks of any CD. He's probably got, like, a Monaro or something. Or an SLR 5000.

37. If Hall wrote a book, he'd probably get it published. If I wrote a book, I'd let it sit on my hard drive, while I whine endlessly about how my life is a quagmire of misery and doubt, as I wallow in my own pathetic, nauseating self-pity. Oh, wait.

38. Hall's book would be better than mine. Here's what it would be about. One day there was a guy called Daryl Hall who ruled. He went outside to post a letter, and everyone everywhere told him that he was cool. He was wearing awesome clothes, and although he was standing in the eye of the most vicious hurricane that the world had ever seen, not a single blonde hair was out of place. He drove his SLR5000 to the Greensborough Cake Kitchen, and the pie of the week was cheese and pepper steak, rather than the crappy vegetarian shit they normally have. Then he went home, played Halo for a few hours and beat everyone, and fell asleep on a bed of gold doubloons while crooning some awesome 70's pop-rock hits. The end.

39. I love Hall and Oates.

40. And so should you.

Are You Keeping Up With A Commodore?

Check it out, turkeys. My life is governed by the twin forces of extreme egomania and extreme self-doubt and loathing. In order to keep myself away from the hangman's noose and the medicine cabinet's sleeping pills, I find it necessary to occupy the endless, grinding loneliness of my days spent in mental and physical inertia with a litany of increasingly pointless pursuits. Despite my nightly prayers to be visited by the Reaper, I find that I can soothe my shattered psyche and tie together the ragged loose ends of my sanity by indulging in affairs of the past. One such preventative technique has involved the repair and reconditioning of a Commodore 64. And now, because I have absolutely no regard for what might interest the three regular readers of my self-obsessed website, I am going to detail the process by which I have managed to corral the meager forces of what little sanity I have left, and have channeled them into a project that is the very definition of mindless pointlessness.

Back before my life became a cavernous maw of thick, black, dripping hatred, I was a young boy. This was many years ago - about 700 by my reckoning - and back in those days, when chicken tasted like chicken and we had the joy of regular airings of Miami Vice there were two things that were unpopular in my house. The first was me, and the second was my Commodore 64. For those mouthbreathing degenerates who have no idea what a Commodore 64 is, back before the Livejournal generation and DirectX, young nerds used to ply their masturbatory arts on a grey plastic box called a Commodore 64. With a then-staggering 64k of RAM, onboard sound, and a library of games so extensive that it could only be described as 'extremely patchy', the Commodore 64 reigned supreme over the nerds of the world - wielding the grey scimitar of geekdom in its toothy, black-keyed grip. Losers of all colours would huddle together around the clanking hum of their 1541 disk drives, trading games on 5 1/2 inch floppy disks, and 'ooohing' at introductory scrollers which were usually written by European metalheads with bad personal hygeine and no sense of irony. These were heady days, my friends - days in which a young boy could be driven to the brink of madness by the lusts that consumed him. These weren't the lusts that would later result in sexual histories that would cause Mickey Rourke to cringe - no. The lust for games - tantalising treats of the digital kind - fogged the mind and curled the fingers, as young boys on the threshold of manhood would stomp through the 'Electrical' section of K-Mart, spinning racks of games which were on tape, and ogling the EXPENSIVE section which was - invariably - behind glass on the counter. Back then, the video game industry hadn't been invaded by spineless, toothless, no-balls accountants - instead, it was comparable to the independant film industry. Weirdos who never had sex would create a game by hand, on their own, in their parents council flat - would fill it with references to Monty Python - and would release it onto the market, where it would be devoured by throngs of overweight guys with glasses. Games based on all kinds of stupid crap were the order of the day - who can forget 'Potty Pigeon', possibly the world's only simulator of a bird taking a dump on a car window? What of 'Fungus', a magical adventure in the wonderful world of mushrooms and mould? Who played and cannot forget the joys of 'Mermaid Madness', a game that allowed the losers of the world to experience unrequited love from the perspective of an extremely overweight mythological character? For the more aged nerd, the education value of the still-anonymously created 'Sex Games' and 'Sex Games II' provided more anatomical pointers and pneumatic pelvis action than all the sex ed. classes in the world. The Commodore 64 and the games we played ceased to be simply a part of the digital revolution that - although we didn't know it at the time - were experiening, they became a strange 'soundtrack' for our mixed up, misunderstood, thoroughly humiliating adolescence.

For me, video games were never the same after the Commodore 64 died sometime in the very, very early 1990's. The IBM PC and its clones rose to supremacy as the dominant home computer format, and the insidious Gates empire began to flourish on a bed of stolen ideas and broken promises. For all intents and purposes, the Commodore 64 was a relic of a useless past - a kitchy artifact consigned to the scrap heap of history, much like hula hoops, Eurogliders records, and Brian Mannix himself.

But, no. I couldn't let that happen, could I? Could I let a piece of my past slip away with such an ignomious defeat? Didn't the Commodore deserve a place amongst the rest of my self-obsessed, utterly unhealthy personal revisionism? Could a Commodore 64 and my Huey Lewis records share shelf space without rendering me a chronological eunuch, incapable of admitting to myself that it is no longer 1984?

Of course it could.

Like I give a shit about my mental health, anyway. At this current point in my long, brutal death march towards the grave, I'm hardly reknowned for my mental stability, so adding more fuel to the rising fire of my total and complete psychic collapse certainly couldn't hurt.

It started with emulation. Emulation is a thing that sad loser nerds do when they want to impress each other by talking about how all modern games are horseshit compared to Space Invaders. When nerds have pissing contests, they usually involve something popular being trashed for no discernable reason - and so, emulation and I were made for each other. To emulate a Commodore 64, one must download an unbelieveably dorky piece of software, run it, and within minutes their $3000 PC will be transformed into a C64 that can be bought at a flea market for fifty cents. Then, they can stand back, scoff heartily about how intense and hardcore and old-school they are, play a few games of 'Paradroid', and then it's back to the couch for pizza, Jolt cola, and some incredibly bland anime.

Sounds good to this neurotic bastard. I decided that if I was going to emulate the C64, I'd do it in style. I'd do it like it had never been done before. I'd party like it was 1985. So, setting my already-fragmenting mind to the task, I set about scouring this man's internet for every Commodore 64 game I could find. I searched high and low for the table scraps of the Commodore era, downloading entire FTP sites with relish and abandon, and filling my hard drive with some of the most godawful bullshit ever to be realised on a computer screen. For days, sometimes weeks, I would sit at my computer with glassy eyes and the faint smell of fecal matter, refusing to bathe, eat, shave, or do anything except track down every shitty, obscure C64 game I could find. My parents would walk into my room, usually after a solid nine-day stint at the computer, and would find me blotchy skinned, paranoid, and shaking uncontrollably as I swept the mouse across web pages and ftp sites, determined that my pointless, asinine collection was as complete as it could possibly be.

Finally, it was done. I was sure that there was nothing left to find. I had combed every square millimetre of my mental inventory, cruising through long-forgotten memories and invading tracts of cranial space that by all rights should be reserved for memories of pornography and drunkenness, but were instead devoted to cataloguing the video game industry of the 1980's. I googled for leads, I followed up every phrase I could recollect from my pre-breakdown era, and I slayed an endless army of mental dragons - memories of fists in the face, boots in the nuts, and flames in the hair strangely entwined with memories of Rainbow Islands and Airwolf. They had to be separated if I was to come out of this emotionally unscathed.

And on the 745th day, I sat back and stared at my collection. Nearly 10,000 games collected, taking up four gig of hard drive space.

"Ha!", I yelled. "Ha! Take that!"

But who was I yelling at? After all, did anybody honestly care about my pissweak collection of forgotten video games?

Of course they didn't. But that didn't stop me from being flooded with a feeling of Rocky-esque elation. I was the conquering hero - I had set out on an almost holy quest, and I had come back with the Grail. A complete set of Commodore 64 disc images. My life was complete.

That was, naturally, utter bullshit. After a while, life began to fist me anally with such force and vigor that my eyes exploded and my mind fell out of my head. And as my total and utter meltdown in 2004 found me cuddling the psychic toilet bowl, vomiting up mouthfulls and bellyfuls of thick, black, poisonous bile - a seemingly endless reservoir of existential nausea and emotional malaise - I realised that even though my life was slowly being transformed into the ruins of Pompeii, I needed to reach out for something to keep me from simply putting my head on a train line, or opening up a wrist with a single, smooth swipe of a Bic razor. And that thing was to be the nauseatingly self-mythologizing recreation of one of my adolescent totems.

So, where to go? Where does one go when one wants to acquire the junk of others? If I was the kind of fellow who craved the experience of taking the cast off effluvia of another atrophied life so that I may transplant it into my home, where would I go?

Of course. I'd go to Ebay.

Ebay is a curious beast. On one hand, 'The World's Marketplace' is more like 'The World's Tip' - a place where gnarled, half-chewed pieces of garbage suddenly shimmer like gold. 'One man's trash is another man's treasure' is nowhere truer than on Ebay - but this does not change the fact that at the end of the day, it is still trash. But trash was what I desired - and so, I began scanning Ebay listings for Commodore 64's. Preferably in Melbourne. Obviously, I can't afford to have one posted from Siberia or Venezuela - it had to be within driving distance of my sarcophagus.

I finally found it. A Commodore 64 in Rosanna. I bid my $10, and almost immediately, a bloody bidding war broke out - as I clashed swords with another savage warrior, our hearts beating with bloodlust and our eyes wide and waxy. $10.50. $11. $11.50. On and on it went, as we ducked, parried, and deflected each other's blows. Finally, I found my opening and brought my massive consumer blade down, nearly severing my opponent's head at the $19.50 mark. I was victorious. I felt powerful. I felt belts of testosterone charging through my veins, and I felt my loins bulging with the need for sexual release - a 1.5 inch tent forming in my ill-fitting, scrambled egg-stained slacks.

I conquered. I felt like Conan, if Conan had no life. My jaws clenched, opened wide, and clenched again - sticky ropes of grey saliva strung between my yellow, broken teeth. I squeezed my hands tightly into greasy fists, my eyes shut tight and my breathing ragged and erratic. Every time I looked at the screen, I felt closer to orgasm - I spiralled upward on a cloud of sensation that emanated outward from my chest and filled my entire body with warmth. Every time I caught a glipse of the 'YOU HAVE WON THE AUCTION' sign, I would flinch in painful ecstasy, my eyes rolling back into my head, one hand on top of the monitor, bucking my hips almost imperceptibly.

I had to pick up the Commodore from Rosanna, and so I saddled up the Torana, put Cyndi Lauper's 'Girls Just Wanna Have Fun' in the stereo, and pointed the great steel beast towards my destination. When I skidded to a halt outside the nondescript suburban home and leaped through the Torana window, Dukes Of Hazzard style, I was met by some old fart who looked like Gandalf from Lord Of The Rings.

"Give me my C64!", I bellowed, beating my chest and posing my musculature.

"Here it is.", he mumbled, pointing a gnarled, crusty finger at a dusty fruit box.

I bounded over, leaping over his head and landing on the ground in the combat stance.

"This is it! This is what I've longed for!"

I pulled out my wallet and threw it in the air. Jumping up to meet it, I span once, kicking it open with an outstretched foot and, with a deftly timed punch, knocked a twenty dollar note out of it. The note fluttered through the air and landed in Gandalf's hand.

"Thank you.", he whispered, dropping to his knees in a bowing position.

I landed in front of him and quickly folded my arms across my massive pectorals, my veins throbbing with raw, undiluted power.

"Put it in the Torana.", I commanded flatly, examining my perfect half-moon fingernails before pulling a mirror out of my back pocket and checking my reflection.

"Yes, Lord.", he whispered, loading the boxes into the boot of my car.

"WATCH THE PAINTWORK.", I screamed, rushing over to him. One of his yellowed talons may have scratched the immaculate surface of my vehicle. I slapped him across the front of his ugly head, and gave him a quick jab in the nuts with the toe of my shoe. He grunted and winced in agony.

"Forgive me, Lord.", he hissed, tears streaming down his face.

"Begone.", I howled, as I delivered a series of uppercuts to his chin and balls. He grunted and sobbed - but finally, I tired of his presence, and the sight of his pain and torment ceased to amuse me. I pointed at his shack.

"Back to your hovel, slave. I shall call on you at another time."

He hobbled away, leaving a trail of sticky red blood. Climbing onto the roof of the Torana, I pointed at his broken, shambling body and laughed - a resonant, booming laugh that smacked of testosterone.

Then, I put Cyndi Lauper back on and steered the mighty Torana back to my twisted tomb in Greensborough.

At home, I fixed the manacles back onto my legs, and padlocked the chain to the wall of my bedroom. It was time to power up the machine of my dreams.

"IT WORKS.", I screamed, as I was met with the blue screen. A fork of lightning speared across the sky, which turned black and stormy. I began to laugh, and I couldn't stop. An insane, crying, shaking laugh that came up out of my belly and filled the house - painting itself across the walls and floors.

But something was wrong. The disc drive. It wasn't powering up properly. The operating light came on, and the boot light lit - but after the first power cycle, and the sound of the head reading track 0 on the disc, it is supposed to power down and go into standby. Dammit! That old bastard tricked me!

"What's this piece of shit?", Jules demanded, yanking the chain around my neck and leaning into my face. His breath was hot and smelled of coffee and hatred.

"It's just a computer. That's all. It's just -"

"IT IS SHIT. GET IT OUT OF THE HOUSE, YOU FUCKER. IT STINKS. IT IS OLD GARBAGE. GET IT THE FUCK OUTSIDE OR I WILL FRY YOUR BALLS."

I began to cry, shrinking into myself, and holding up my hands as a shield.

"I'm sorry, Dad! I'm -"

"YOU ARE A WORTHLESS FAILURE. I HOPE YOU DIE."

"Yes!", I stammered, "Yes, me too!"

I took the Commodore outside and set it up on a table in the garage. The garage is Man Kingdom, where I could work without being disturbed by such trivialities as eating or hygeine.

The drive was fucked. That was clear. I picked it up and, with my teeth clamped together so hard that the gums bled, I smashed it on the ground - gasping orgasmically as slivers and shards of plastic skittered across the cold concrete floor. And then, grunting in pleasure, I jumped up and down on the pieces, kicking them with my heavy boots and grinding them into dust. I looked down and noticed that there was a piece of the drive's circuitboard that was still intact. I picked it up and spat on it, my face a mask of zealous rage - and then, I put it in my mouth, chewing it powerfully and feeling the diodes and circuits cutting into the soft flesh of my palate and gums. I swallowed the mixture of saliva, blood, and shattered computer bits and stomped inside.

Back to Ebay. I needed another drive, and quicksticks. I found one, engaged in a protracted bidding war in which lives were destroyed and souls were ravaged, achieved orgasm at the sight of my win, and within weeks, my drive appeared.

"Parcel.", the postman declared, peering at me with his beady little eyes through a pair of sperm-stained reading glasses.

"HAND IT TO ME.", I screamed, kicking the door open and throwing him against the wall with one hand, seizing the parcel with the other.

In the kitchen, I reached behind the oven to my secret stash of weapons. Picking up a long katana, I drew the blade from the scabbard and immediately launched into a series of exquisitely timed moves, slashing at the wrapping with elegant poise - my throat emitting a series of ancient Oriental grunts and yelps.

A 1541 MKII. Oh, the elation. And for $5. Could life get any better?

The answer is, of course, no. Buying a shitty floppy drive for a twenty-five year old computer is the absolute acme of my existence. As I stare at my haggard face in the mirror every night, running hot water in the basin and scrabbling for the nearest razor blade, this is the thought pushes me to the absolute brink of insanity.

I took the drive outside and plugged it in. It powered up. Good. The boot sequence was fine. Lovely.

I tried to load 'Rambo'. I love the C64 version of Rambo.