DAY 292: Cuddling piggy-wigs

20 Jun

Double squealage.

NOT quite the same as Hugging Cows, which was to help a farmer with a new ruse to fleece rich city folk, Cuddling Piggy-Wigs is done for the pure joy of it.

The feeling’s not mutual though, as when I pick up a grunter it lets forth a piercing scream. The piercing scream ceases the moment I put the beast down again.

The next piglet does the same, screaming accusingly like a car alarm as its mother scarfs down cauliflower leaves, unperturbed.

They were like this when I found them.

Keeper? Yes. If I persevere they will scream less.

DAY 291: Going to a rally

19 Jun

WHILE I’m a-brim with non-specific empathy, I don’t have much of a social conscience.

This year’s mission is to lasso my sphere of consciousness into ever-wider circles – with the paradox that writing about the experience brings it all, remorselessly, back to me. Sorry about that.

One matter in the news that never fails to move me is the plight of asylum seekers. Maybe it’s because all that was required of me to move to Australia was mountains of paperwork – yet all I was escaping was stagnancy. Maybe it’s the unfairness of it all.

The World Refugee Day Rally, which gathers in Melbourne’s Carlton Gardens, wants to see  an end to mandatory detention. It argues that refugees should be settled in their Australian communities while their cases are being heard, rather than incarcerated in camps for years at a time, or shipped off to Malaysia.

“No one’s ever accused me of being an economic rationalist before,” Refugee Advocacy Network organiser Mark Riley points out to giggles, “but it saves money having asylum seekers live in the community.”

Human Rights lawyer Julian Burnside points out that locking up traumatised people and dividing families for five years at a time causes great psychiatric harm, that eventually either gets turned against the system, or inwards, in the form of self-harm or suicide.

Leading the march of thousands to Fitzroy Town Hall is the Red Brigade, who I last saw when I led their zombie parade through Falls Festival on Day 122. They oompah us through some free the refugees-style chants as we proceed through the suburb to awaiting Emerge Festival.

Keeper? I think this is the start of a new enlightenment.

DAY 290: Thanking a Gloria Jean’s franchise profusely

18 Jun

EXPRESSING gratitude, it’s said, is one of the most positive things you can do for your well-being.

Stopping in at Gloria Jean’s this morning, for the sort of white mocha atrocity most Melbourne coffee joints point-blank refuse to deliver, I notice the board plastered with good tidings from happy customers.

Sometimes it’s a customer who is heartbroken to be moving to a different town from their favourite barista. Sometimes it’s a customer sending a postcard from overseas. Customers express sorrow that they will never again see the kind faces of this franchise, or joy that they have finally found the soy latte of their dreams.

I’m moved to add my own missive in similarly bouncy writing. The most honest, positive thing I can say is that I’m very pleased there’s a coffee joint the moment I step off my train. This, still, is passing on the love.

Keeper? Yes. And I think I’ll do a whole day of thanking people later this week. Watch out!

DAY 288: Getting insulted at my own garage sale

16 Jun

IT’S eight in the morning and five straggly men are peering through my gates (not a euphemism).

“The ad in the paper said nine,” I admonish, marching past them with a bunch of cheery balloons.

“That’s okay, we can wait,” one says, pushing his nose through the pickets.

On the dot of nine, they sweep through my carport like gannets.

“Is this all you’ve got?” one asks, peeved that I’ve assembled no medals, antique clocks or rare vinyl he can flog on his stall somewhere or other.

This garage sale is a far more businesslike venture than the local community meet-and-greet I had envisaged. “You’re the first person to say hello,” I beam at one bloke who mutters a “g’day”. He ignores me.

“Who’d buy a book with a cover like that,” one matron snipes of some anthology or other as her friend stands back an adequate distance from the table to make it clear she will not be roused.

“Me,” I point out, “I did.”

As the hours wear on, I become increasingly aware of all my expensive follies during the last few years of gainful employment. Take the Ab King Pro, which it turns out, everyone has one of at home, and everyone is using as a clothes horse.

Talking of which, I haven’t sold a single item of clothing or accessory. A woman tries to offer me a dollar-fifty for a cardigan I paid fifty bucks for while getting bored waiting for my tram on Gertrude Street, and the leather doctor’s bag that looked well worth $60 at a secondhand boutique in St Kilda is considered, but ultimately deemed not worth two dollars.

These 'Gaugin' girls may well look mortified.

Keeper? Now that I’ve quit my job to live on magic beans, this is a lesson on the value of money that has come a smidge too late.

DAY 287: Making a vision board

15 Jun

Don't worry, this isn't my one.

VISION boards have been used as a tool to focus one’s goals for decades, but ever since self-help gurus like Oprah have been peddling that nebulous “law of attraction” (probably the most bankable phenomenon in recent years), the art of pasting pictures of things you aspire to own and achieve to a bit of board has really catapulted into the zone of Things Winners Do.

It’s “ground breaking cognitive neuroscience”, according to one dedicated website – oh, guffaw – and there’s even a Vision Board Institute, at which you can study to be a Certified Vision Board Coach, thus helping other people to upgrade their life visioning processes. And other guff.

As a plain old map of your ideals and intentions it’s not a bad ruse, though – and two things I focused hard on as a kid did come true: I made believe I was the editor of various mags and rags, and told my mother I would move to the other side of the world. (Unfortunately joining the Famous Five and being regularly rescued by firemen failed to materialise.)

So here’s my vision board. 

A ute upgrade. NB: ute must work.

One of these.

Ablility to do fancy ATV moves, including reverse.

Carpet and curtains in my house. (That’s not me in the picture, incidentally. That’s 200 per cent more winsome LA music journo Kim Morgan. I thought it couldn’t hurt to include her on this vision board too.)

I need a chap on hand to prune my trees.

Optus reception outside of CBDs.

Ability to talk to people in social situations without stabbing the lemon in my drink with my straw.

Keeper? Yes. Will print out and stick on the wall.

DAY 286: Diagnosing psychopaths

14 Jun

Hot.

TILL now I thought ‘psychopath’ was just a generalised term, roughly translating to ‘nutjob’.

Not so! Also known as antisocial personality disorder, psychopathy is a category in the weighty Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders (DSM) – a manual that’s informed doctors and psychiatrists since 1952.

In Jon Ronson’s ripping new read, The Psychopath Test, the journo uses Hare’s Psychopathy Checklist to personally diagnose a number of suspected psychopaths, from a dictator (no great stretch) to an executive responsible for laying off thousands of workers. It’s surprising, experts in the book note, how many psychopaths you’ll find at the head of companies, running the stockmarket or in the entertainment business.

Of course, there’s a tendency for the layman to gaily over-diagnose in this day and age: so-and-so’s got ADHD, blah blah’s probably mildly autistic (no other explanation for it), you-know-who’s a narcissist… suddenly everyone’s either a pop psychologist or a psychopath. But damn it, this one’s fun. Turns out I know three!

TAKE THE TEST

Upon perusing this checklist you’ll probably think, what tosh! Anyone would avoid admitting to those characteristics. But the psychopath sees things like cunning, glib charm and impulsivity as positive traits (necessary traits for CEOs and Wall Street traders), and so will load up points while brimming with pride, under the godlike delusion that he or she will get one over the profiler anyway, probably by slicing off their nipples.

I think that’s how it works.

If you want to test someone else without them knowing, you can casually base questions around each point on the checklist, as though in conversation. (1.) “If someone was ineffectually trying to get their point across, would you do it for them? Wait, I haven’t finished… Ow!”

Or you can test yourself, via these scenarios a psych student put together.

I self-scored 9, but having riffled through the DSM when I was taking A-level psychology, I know psychopathy’s not my particular problem. Not top of the list, anyway.

Incidentally, a score above 28 in Texas – should you already be in trouble – incurs the death penalty.

Keeper? Would be a bit hard to assess someone in my head with any more than five categories to work through, so twenty’s a bit much. I suspect I’ll have forgotten all about this idea by tomorrow.

PS: Here’s some email spam that went around a while back.

A woman, while at the funeral of her own mother, met a guy whom she did not know. She thought this guy was amazing. She believed him to be her dream guy so much that she fell in love with him right there, but never asked for his number and could not find him. A few days later she killed her sister..

Question: What was her motive for killing her sister?

Answer: She was hoping the guy would appear at the funeral again. If you answered this correctly, you think like a psychopath. This was a test by a famous American psychologist used to determine if one has the same mentality as a killer.  Many arrested serial killers took part in the test and answered the question correctly. 

DAY 285: Hacking hair in a rainforest

13 Jun

USING my newfound barber skills from Day 266 – although I am without comb, admittedly – I give Old Dog a haircut in amongst scenic Tasmanian rainforest.

I can’t examine the front lest I slide down a ravine, somewhere in which winds a gurgling brook by the sounds of it, but still I reckon I do a pretty decent job.

Keeper? Doing things with a lovely view makes them 90 per cent more tremendous.

DAY 284: Smashing a telly

12 Jun

TODAY’S mission is twofold:

  1. To let Launceston’s garage sales determine the day’s adventure
  2. To duly have the adventure

I’m secretly pleased that the various garage sales only bag us a rabbit hutch, an Ella Fitzgerald single and a TV, as anything involving a tent or mattress would have had a direct impact on my latte intake.

Instead, we go back to Old Dog’s house, where he determines that I need to smash up his old TV to make room for the new. Because, as the comedian Jeff Foxworthy noted, “you might be a redneck if your new TV is on top of your old TV”.

At first I look into throwing the telly out of the window, rock star-style. I’m pretty fed up with writing about the antics of musicians. I’ve given them the best years of my life, for shame, and now that I’m calling it quits it’s about time I show them how it’s done.

Unfortunately, the window’s not big enough, so I take a sledgehammer to it instead.

Keeper? A tough job for an animist, but it’s ultimately fulfilling. A friend likes to take crockery to a field and smash it. Similar deal.

DAY 283: Snowballing through a drug and alcohol free town

11 Jun

Uncanny.

THE weather down in Lilydale’s fine, but the tips of some of Tasmania’s mountains are capped with snow, so I set out on a mission to have snowball fights up two of them.

Old Dog’s in the driver’s seat, which is a good thing, as Mountain No.1 – Mt Barrow – turns out to be a tight squeeze. It’s like Sunday afternoon suburbia up here.

Old Dog gets tetchy about town folk with four-wheel drives they’re afraid to get wet. Parking halfway up, we lope off into the bush and lob some snowballs around, before building a snowdog for prosperity.

These young men were overjoyed when we furnished them with a carrot for their snowman.

When we drove past again and insisted they take peanuts for freckles we creeped them out a bit.

Mountain No.2 is one of the Great Western Tiers. Old Dog tells me it’s like the surface of the moon up on the Central Plateau — 10,000km2 of boulders and over 4000 lakes, 1000m above sea level.

We drive up through Poatina – a small town that was bought, in 1995, by Christian youth organisation Fusion Australia. It serves as a drug and alcohol-free community for vulnerable youths, some of whom we see jumping off the roof of the local shop in utter boredom.

What? The hedge maze wasn’t fun enough?

Poatina’s motto is “it takes a community to raise a child”, which turned out to be a bit unfortunate when their leader was accused (by Derryn Hinch, no less) of sexually abusing a teenager – a teenager whose history was one of sexual abuse. To their credit, this article is archived on the Poatina website, and the man has since stepped down. But we don’t know any of this at the time, and are more fascinated by the fact that all the buildings are made of the same kind of brick.

Up on the plateau, we turn off the headlights and drive through the snow, stopping off at lakes to skim stones, marvel at the snarled, twisted trees without canopies, and lob icy snowballs.

Keeper? Yes.

DAY 282: Getting my misshapen face read

10 Jun

VENTURING into somewhere like the MindBodySpirit Festival is bound to set off new age rage.

It’s not just that I’m agnostically skeptical of things that cannot be proven; it’s that my experience in the field so far – just in the course of this blog – has been something of a holistocaust:

* My reiki healer breaking and entering into my no-go zone
* My tealeaf reader unacceptably changing the subject to Princess Diana
* Being pinned to the table during acupuncture
* Getting cupped within an inch of my life

…And at Frankston’s Psychic ’n’ Parma night I was told I’d wind up hitting rock bottom and running drugs for bikies. Peruse the ‘cosmic shit’ category of this blog for more woeful incidences.

So, wandering around the Melbourne Exhibition and Convention Centre, taking in stands on aura photography and Christocentric light over the gentle strains of acoustic guitar, I feel that old rage start to boil over.


Sure, there’s the odd, slightly adorable flake who, if not communicating with angels, is at least communicating their own desperate need to do so, but everyone else just seems so… smooth.

They’re not crackpots, but crooks, quacks and snake oil salesmen. They appraise you in a fraction of a second, assign you to a drawer and whip out the relevant patter. Their motives border on criminal.

I pick a stand.

While the Chinese have long read faces to identify problems in a person’s constitution (kidneys around the eyes, heart around the nose…), the face reading stand I visit analyses your features on a more spiritual level.

“It’s not fortune telling,” Abby tells me as she slides my chair in close by pulling on my hands, until our faces are a foot apart. “I just tell you where you are at in life by reading the shape of your face.”

I would have thought genes come into play regarding both the shape of my face and the state of my life right now, but I’ll suspend my disbelief from the nearest hat stand for 10 minutes ($25).

To begin, Abby pops her eyes in mock-astonishment and mimics a huge pointy chin by pulling both her hands out into a V in front of her. I’ll let this go on account of English not being her first language. She says I’m sticking my chin out defiantly, which means I force my way through life – and other people had better get out of the way. I can be interpreted as manipulative, but I’m holding my motives inside – hence my sunken cheeks. The left side of my face, she appraises, is particularly sunken – and that’s my feminine side, representing creativity and sensuality, which are being thwarted. My jaw is tense and so is my body:

“Look how tensely you are sitting in this chair right now!”

Throughout, Abby beams – quite winningly – as though we’re sharing a private joke, although it feels like I’m the butt of it. Then she peers at me and wheels back in satisfaction. “You have one eye bigger than the other!”

She’s about to elaborate, so I jump in and point out this is the result of a head injury one exuberant night, back when nights were still exuberant.

“But everything happens for a reason,” she scolds. Then: “Why would it affect that eye?”

“Because I landed on it.”

She shakes her head and smiles beatifically.

Time’s up.

Keeper? Truth be told, I’d pay $25 for someone to stroke my face for ten minutes regardless of the insults that may come with it.

← Older Entries
Newer Entries →