The Only Way is Illiteracy
January 16, 2000
I’m very excited – I found out last night that my favourite band Filter is playing a Melbourne gig in mid February. This is the first time I’ve seen them, and a rare chance too as they’re from the US. I can’t wait!
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I was downloading some new fonts last night, and I’ve noticed that a few fonts have got some really twisted names. The best font names I saw last night included Belching Up Salisbury Steak; Bottled Fart; Breast Bomb; Fish Dicks; Sniping Kids For Candy; Hundreds of Dead Crack Babies; Cat Krap; Chicken Wire Lady; and Five Finger Discount.
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Last night in Torquay we had a power blackout. I was on my computer at the time, and when it got switched off, I thought okay, that’s fine. I can watch TV anyway. So I walked over to the TV… and realised that wasn’t working either. I almost went over the radio to turn that on instead before I realised you kinda need electricity for that too. So I was working my way down the entertainment scale, about to pick up a book, when I thought stuff it, I’ll go for a walk on the beach. (Thank Christ the beach isn’t powered by electricity. Yet).
I noticed that there were an unusually high amount of people walking around the streets of Torquay during the blackout, which occurred roughly around 9pm. They too probably hadn’t been without electronic entertainment for a long time and weren’t too sure what to do with themselves except wander around the town aimlessly.
The first thing I did before I went to the beach was drive to the supermarket to get some Coke to mix with my bourbon (yeah, I can still get pissed in the dark!). When I arrived at the supermarket, there was a large crowd outside the front doors, and they all didn’t look very happy. I went over for a closer look.
The manager of the supermarket was poking his head through the crack of the doors trying to explain that the supermarket was closed until the power came back on. Most people were yelling at him that they wanted to buy candles, but he just kept saying “We’re re-opening when the power comes back on”. A small riot almost started at the back of the crowd due to the total lack of candles in Torquay.
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A short time ago today, I got a phone call from this girl I knew from my first high school. Now, let me set the scene here. I went to two different high schools in Geelong. The first one I went to, I wasn’t in the “cool” crowd. The cool crowd was all the surfers from Torquay. If you weren’t in the cool crowd you just got laughed at and the usual high school crap. It didn’t bother me too much as I had good friends and the surfer thing just gave me the shits.
After a while though I got the shits with the whole school. I dropped out for about two months in year 10 before my parents convinced me to start at a different school. This new school was a bit better, there weren’t quite so many cockheads there, but there were only a few people there I liked. The few friends I did have I was really close to.
So anyway, I moved out of home and went to uni and lost contact with most people from the second high school because they turned into idiots once they left school. I guess that high school wasn’t really the best experience of my life and I’d rather just forget about it, I’ve moved on from it.
That’s why when this chick rang me up from my first high school, I was kinda thrown. I wasn’t ever really good friends with her, I haven’t spoken to her for over 3 years. She invited me to a reunion/21st birthday party of hers, and I simply don’t want to go. There’ll be too many people there that I don’t want to see, and it’ll simply be a big flashback experience of the cool group/reject group thing. I just can’t be fucked putting in the effort to go to it.
So she rang me up today to ask if I wanted to go to her 21st birthday. I almost retorted “21, eh? Wasn’t that how many times it took you to get your driver’s licence?”, as she was a renowned bad driver. I know it took her in excess of 8 goes to get her driver’s licence but I’m not sure of the exact figure. She only really wanted my address to send me an invite, but luckily… very luckily… I’m going to be in Sydney on that particular weekend. God, some things just work themselves out, don’t they? I’m just hoping she doesn’t talk to me again. I don’t want anything to do with my old high schools again.
And one thing that really gave me the shits is she asked me “Do you have a boyf… um a girlfriend you want to bring along?” I know a few of my old, old friends from the first high school went to probably know I’m gay by now. It’s not as if I spread it around, it’s just that I’ve told people that I once thought were trustworthy that I was gay and they told more people than they should have. I don’t think I’d be too happy sitting at a party where a fair few people know I’m gay. Not comfortable with that.
That went a bit longer than I thought it would. Hmm.
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Songs I Want To Create Hard Rock Versions Of, #295:
‘The Only Way Is Up’ by Yazz
Yazz. As if that’s a word.
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At my local Commonwealth Bank, I noticed there’s an almost totally hidden car park at the rear of the store. It’s a bit of a scary car park though – there’s a warning sign as you drive in saying something like ‘By parking in this carpark, you accept that the Commonwealth Bank, Australia takes no responsibility for any injury or death that directly results from parking here.’ A death in the secret Commonwealth Bank carpark? I can’t figure out how you could die in it. It’s the most boring carpark I’ve ever seen, a patch of gravel and that’s about it. Not even any jagged or sharp objects to slit your throat on.
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The kids who live in the house next door to us have started to learn the recorder. Yes, the recorder, the most fucking wheezy rasping instrument known to man… it’ll be only a matter of days before I get a gun.
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Speaking of blackouts, my parents seem to give themselves self-imposed blackouts. Quite often my dad will be sitting in the lounge room reading a book or something in the evening, and as the sun goes down, he won’t turn on any lights or anything because he’ll be so engrossed in what he’s reading. Sometimes I’ll just walk into a dark room in the house at 9pm at night and hear newspaper pages turning.
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So I go on my big flight to Sydney (and successfully escape the high school reunion thingo) on the 4th. I’m going to be doing a bit of a marathon dash from my work to the airport, as it’s my late night at work. I’m really looking forward to it though, I’m meeting up with someone really cool and quite special… Actually, the last plane trip I had was to Newcastle, and it was on a smaller sized plane with 20 seats. The trip I caught from Melbourne to Newcastle only had 3 people booked on it, so when I got on the plane, the pilot said to me…
Pilot: Seeing as we don’t really have many people booked today, you can sit wherever you want on the plane.
Me: Can I take that seat up there in the cockpit?
Pilot: Ummmm…. No.
