Comfort Stop

A cold, crappy day. My feet are wet. A single screw has come loose on my umbrella, resulting in the entire oddly fragile, oddly ubiquitous, oddly beautiful contraption to function only with great difficulty. I dare not close it because it will be too hard to open again. But, repeatedly, I do close it, through force of habit, thus condemning me to the task of forcing it open whenever I need to use it to walk my middle-class arse a few metres under open, active sky.

The DVD in the AV library skips, often during montage sequences accompanied by music that I greatly enjoy. I don't get irritated but I am aware that it is happening. People near to me snort amusedly at audio-visual content that to me is neither audible nor visible. I think about how much I want a companion as I watch the based-on-a-true-story people on the screen have amazing relationships with willy-nilly ease; an illusion that they are possessive of prowess being provided by the fact that their life story has been condensed into two hours and, because many of them are homosexuals and probably because the directors are such people, seemingly placing emphasis on every successful relationship that they had ever had.

I stew about how the guy at the Saint James supposedly overcharged me by five dollars each in purchasing tickets to the last Th' Dudes, Hello Sailor and Hammond Gamble show for me and Mat. I stew about the fact that I had to pay for a ticket at all, but justify my purchase on the basis that it is a good bargain and that I thoroughly enjoyed it last time. I might not get drunk this time, particularly considering that I will, more than more than likely, not have any money. Borrow, borrow, borrow, I don't want to miss out on this bargain and that bargain and help me, I have driven too far afield for my bank account to allow, in other words Hamilton City, where I do not like being.

It costs a lot of money to live life, unfortunately, and as such I find myself boxed into the situation of having to decide whether I will sell my tomorrow to an air conditioning firm -- which will have me sweeping small shreds of steel off the floor, dressing differently and pretending to be a homophobe so as not to attract negative attention from companions in wage labour -- or spend it doing my two thousand five hundred word essay about a misogynistic Marxist and a homosexual libertarian, both of which I feel to be self-contradictory personality type identifications. I should be writing the essay right now. Nay, I should be in class. But what am I missing out on anyway?

Never Work / Diligence

Last night I went to Th' Dudes, Hello Sailor and Hammond Gamble at the Saint James, which manifested itself as a quality experience. The investment of additional money in drink enhanced it further. At present I am still reeling, drunk, at Mat's work. I don't feel safe driving home until I've fully given the alcohol a proper chance to wear off, and as such I'm overdaying here until four o' clock, when Mat will finish and take me back to my car. You can tell how bored I am by the fact that I'm blogging. I was intending to get back to it anyway, but partly I didn't feel it was appropriate to follow up the Steve Irwin "obituary" (RIP) with, well, anything really, and otherwise I've just been trying to live life directly for once as opposed to letting it be mediated through inauthenticies and falsities and imagery as the Internet has a tendency to do (Situationist International for the win).


Anyway, the concert was excellent. Hello Sailor was supposed to be playing acoustic sets on this, Radio Hauraki's fourtieth anniversary commemorative tour, in conjunction with their recently-released acoustic album When The Lights Are Out, however, it seemed that they had thought better of doing this by the time they reached Auckland last night (it is quite a way into the tour) perhaps spurred on by audience response at previous shows. The result was that they really rocked out in a spectacular performance that would probably easily set itself on a par with the Hello Sailor of the seventies. Highlights were Graham Brazier's awesome harmonica work and interestingly interesting dance movements and methods et ceterahhh. Th' Dudes were of course comparably awes9ome with me being drunk to the point that I took my shirt off during Bliss, yes, and repeatedly shouted "Peter Urlich is the man!" through all the songs instead of listening to them. People got annoyed with me. Mat collaborated, with me, not the annoying people.


I also bore a striking five dollar shirt from the Warehouse that I had emblazoned in fabric marker "HELLO SAILOR" across the front (Mat's idea and he also went ahead with it). Incoherent. The night was punctuated in grammatically incorrect places by people we were passing by being told "Hello, Sailor!" in a jolly manner. Line Red. Panic! At The Disco are, for the record, a horrendous band and I am led to believe by my expert telling apart of wannabe-emo vocalists that I am being forced to listen to them right now by Mat's co-worker, whose name I don't know because I can't concentrate and who I went to the bakery with before to get a massive tank of a croissant for one dollars and eighty cents' worth of twenty cent coins, as he is cranking it in the shop but now there is lots of customers so everybody better be shush (PS his name is Ony). Mat thought the boss was here before and he was gonna smack my bitch ass off the computer, that he may look like a good man. He's leaving the position soon anyway. Tomorrow he has to try and remember to bring the TV to work so that he can watch Bathurst all day. Oh yes and we only got one hour of sleep last night which probably doesn't help my decidedly artistically miffed state. Save the Rails.

I don't know what the heck kind of idea Toll Holdings think they're doing by threatening to close the North Island Main Trunk Railway, which is of course a very important transport artery of New Zealand and which many of the towns throughout the North Island were built as a result of its existence, just because high track access fees pushed by Ontrack -- that being the former New Zealand Railways Corporation, the government, which now owns the tracks -- are going to cause them to pull less of an absolutely gargantuan profit. Haven't these Australian business imperialists ever heard of social responsibility to a nation? I guess not because we are New Zealand, but these idiots want to put tonnes more trucks on the roads instead of having trains, because it saves on costs. You capitalist bastards. You, capitalist bastards. It's kind of weird that this is happening right after Toll feigned the will to completely shut down the legendary Overlander train service between Wellington and Auckland in what seemed to be an attempt to milk aid out of the government.


I don't know who what you're kidding by deciding that Latin American was a good subject for me to take and that it is money well spent. I am going to fail the bloody thing. And guess what? I took it that I may get into a Paul Buchanan paper, but with the release of the 2007 Arts Course Handbook it has turned out that the prerequisites for that course have been broadened now anyway so I'm just going to be able to get in having passed two stage politics papers already! So it's a complete waste of suffering and time and effort. Also, one of the other Paul Buchanan papers that was supposed to be happening next year for stage three has taken a crap and died and been taken off the list. Less fetish material less fetish material. Not fair not fair. What an arse. Primo, he's got this philosophy. Art student. You fine arts student. You're fine.

This has been time well spent doing a poofaced blog that I have given up on when I should slash not could have been doing ethnomusicology and Latin American suckful assignments due on Friday, Friday on which I will be occupied chasing steam trains around the south of Auckland and the north of the Waikato with Mat's camera that I have yet to ask him if I can borrow. Yes I am a trainspotter. Marcus Lush is. That makes it even more cool. Don't deny that you like steam trains. Diesels even, or electrics. Trains are good, even though some Situationist theorists seem to take the approach that it symbolises the dehumanising bullcrap procedure of not swearing and of blimmin' shuffling along to work each day, line red. But this is hopeless, atrocious. I'm still working at ze air conditioning manufakturer at the teh moment buttt, buttttocks I have some potential jobs lined up, I hope that I will perhaps get them. It is always a possibility. Yea Mat stop talking to that lady.

Alex put the 9 in the awesome. I hope you enjoyed the post Pie. I have MSN anyway. See ya there.

This is the chemical dump, boy.

Mmmmate.

mate.

Here's me being Graham.

Stephen Robert Irwin 1962 - 2006

I don't even have words but I have tears.

My hero.

Full Circle

Today, as the first birthday of this blog falls, I plunge violently from the brilliant experiences of Wellington and the Overlander back into work. Eleven of the next thirteen days will be spent working in the factory, where I will be constantly asked "Did you go to Erotica?", and then face technically incorrect accusations of homosexuality when I give the answer that I didn't.

The up-side is that at the end of all this I should be free from debt to my parents and able to buy my first CD in a long time. I've already made my mind up as to what it is.

Elaborations on my experiences come when more convenient pictures come.

On Track

I'm so glad I got those assignments out of the way. Only just, mind you, but I did it.

So I'm going to Wellington on the Overlander tomorrow. I'm off to bed pronto -- as in right now -- because mum and I are getting up at five o' clock tomorrow morning to get to the station excessively early for the train. The goal: to get seats in one of the carriages with gargantuan windows rather than the little portholes.

This is the first and probably the only time I'm going to get to do this trip that I've been wanting to do for years. And boy, am I going to enjoy it, especially since I've got all my assignments out of the way. To boot, that's just the train trip -- then there's the experience of Wellington...

Pictures on my return, hopefully. Hooroo.

At Least The Weather Was Nice

It's been interesting to see how hard it can be to perform supposed bum jobs in a factory, to the point that you are chronically hassled by factory workers who openly refer to themselves as "scum" -- jobs like reading five two-digit numbers on a piece of paper and adding them together with a calculator to find out how wide you must cut a piece of steel; or like holding a cylinder in position against a metal plate whilst a menacing, formerly-dangerous machine (it once took the end of a guy's thumb off, but then OSH came in and insisted a safety guard be put on it) puts a crease in it. Factory workers must think in a completely different way to arts students -- obviously to such an extent that my apparent intelligence does not allow me to perform the most mundane of physically tangible technical tasks, that even a high school drop-out can carry out with ease.

It's also been annoyingly interesting to discover how deceptively hard my last two assignments that I want to complete before Saturday are. I've been stressing out of my head today, trying to find Web sites -- it was specified that my sources must be Web sites -- about the traditional and contemporary music and dance of a Polynesian island group of my choice. It turns out that just about all of the Web sites about these island groups are tourism Web sites, that approach the music and dance on a very shallow, yuppie self-indulgent level.

What's worse is now that I've got the idea into my head that it could be possible to finish all of my assignments before I go away on this trip, it's going to feel extra-bad if I don't finish them, and there would be definite potential for it to harm the experience for me. I am gruff.

Yeah Yeah Yeah

Two assignments started and finished in one day! I'd say that's pretty good going wouldn't you? Especially considering I've never before completed an assignment more than a week before the due date. These weren't due until the eighteenth and the twenty-fifth.

I wanted to get them done because I'm going away to Wellington on the Overlander on Saturday the nineteenth. Then I'll come back on the twenty-second. I want to be able to enjoy that trip as much as possible so that's why I'm trying to get all my assignments out of the way.

I hope uni's going well for those of you who are there.

Why is the reception for bFM on my pocket radio stronger out West than it is when I'm in town?

It makes you think.