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.
TODAY’S mission is twofold:
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.
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.
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.
THIS WEEK, my eyes are puckered little pissholes in the snow, itching like they just got out of jail. I’ve got no idea what’s going on.
I decide to get tested for allergies at the MindBodySpirit Festival in Melbourne.
The practitioner runs a renowned allergy testing company out of Sydney. His stand is not covered in pictures of faeries or banks of useless machines flashing lights, nor does he have glitter on his face, which is a good sign. Still, I’m skeptical.
I sit at the table and he gives me a brass electrode to grip with my left hand, then jabs me in the centre of my right palm – an acupuncture point – with a sensor. This communicates with his computer by a galvanometer. On the screen, the program runs through over 100 foods, vitamins and hormone levels, and he jabs me twice as it clicks onto each category. The galvanometer in front of us swings to full whack for things like vegies, but flatlines for things like wheat and fags.
The practitioner gets irritable when I ask him how it works, but as Anne Smithells helpfully explains on Positive Health:
“As food is placed in the mouth, the body has to immediately rush the correct enzymes to it to break it down for digestion and to add the necessary antigens. This means that the body’s sensing devices have to be able to identify the food. They do this by interpreting the resonance signature, or frequency given off by the food as it reaches the mouth (this can be measured as a wave form, rather like a radio signal). The system has been programmed to recognise the signatures of each of the foods, vitamins, or minerals it is testing, to convert them into a digitised form and then to feed the relevant data into its memory for analysis.”
The bad news: I’m allergic to cow milk – which might be why I found these looming creatures so sinister on Day 100: Testing a Cow-Hugging Ruse – and also Vegemite and nicotine. This might explain why I had to persevere for the entire first year of high school to learn how to smoke without going yellow – and once again when I decided to learn how to smoke without drinking.
The practitioner tells me you can be intolerant to foods for a long time, but as gluten and casein (found in milk) build up in the body, you can eventually tip yourself over the edge. He hands me a tub of enzyme capsules to help break down the nasties in my system, and glibly dashes out a $40 receipt to add to the $110 I’m already paying, without consultation. Oof! Here’s my credit card to stuff down your bra, sir.
Keeper? Will try and stick to what I’ve learned. If you see me ordering a soy latte or smoking a clove cigarette, don’t judge.
I’M late to the party, but I’ll explain geocaching – or ‘hi-tech hide and seek’ – to the absent guests.
The cryptic crossword of outdoor activities, it requires participants to use a GPS to locate a waterproof container (hidden by a previous participant) within a short radius of supplied coordinates. There are over 1.3 million active geocaches listed on websites, spanning over 100 countries.
Sometimes you might have to work the final coordinates out from a series of clues: by taking last letters of a series of road names and then using the numbers those letters fall into the alphabet at, for example. Once you find your haul, you add the date and your details into the logbook hidden within, and add a little something of your own to the package.
My interest wanes almost immediately as my young nephew wields the GPS and takes us at a fair trot towards the harbour… until we’re about five feet away and I spot the life ring. I leg it over while the little fella’s gazing about at stones and bushes, and shove my hand into the hole at the front.
I’ve found a dirty tissue decoy, but when I move around and shove my hand into the back, I pull out an old vitamin bottle. Triumph! Sucked in, kid.
Inside is miscellaneous rubbish and a photo off some kids. The first geocache, 10 years ago, was hidden in the wilds of Oregon and contained software, videos, books, food, money and a slingshot – so things have obviously taken a bit of a slide since then.
I can’t really talk though, as all I have to offer is a Malaysian coin. If I’d planned properly I would have brought along Chinese crackers, a gobstopper and one of those fortune telling fish, to really show the next person how it’s done.
Keeper? Feels a bit like you’re cheating, using a GPS. If you have your orienteering badge, you might want to try a more organic game.
IT’S either a sign of the times, or just because it can’t fight back, but my most apoplectic explosions of rage are reserved for technological equipment. I’ve taught countless printers a lesson they’ll never forget, while my violent rebuttal at the TV playing up is likely to surprise us both.
I decide to set up an impromptu experiment, to see if it is actually possible to avoid an episode if I really put my mind to it. I want to upload a very large file, and I want to do it right now – on this country train – and I am not allowed to curse, tut, slap my forehead or even bunch my fist if it fails.
Common sense dictates this is a stupid idea – I’ve tried it many mornings before and only achieved a dozen disconnects and accompanying oaths. It’s bloody asking for trouble. What’s more, a woman has sat next to me and is clearing her throat softly every few minutes, despite there being free seats elsewhere; I know full well that if I were to mete out a savage little “FUCK” upon disconnection, I would be able to glean some enjoyment from her discomfort, which makes this experiment all the more challenging.
Having established the controlled variables, I hit ‘send’ and keenly watch the progress report at the bottom of the web page. We’re passing through North Melbourne and out into the internet wasteland that is Sunshine, always a trouble spot for my disposition. Meanwhile, I’m egging myself on by watching the connectivity box; watching the green squares flicker in a desultory fashion around point zero. I can feel my blood pressure rising.
I dare myself further by thinking of the money; how much of my data allowance this is using up with every passing minute.
“You can’t do it, can you?” I taunt silently, as I struggle not to shake my head slowly and condescendingly at the screen.
After 25 minutes, 90 per cent of the file has been uploaded. I’ve got my hand over my mouth, Hillary Clinton-style. We stay on 90 per cent for a further 14 tantalising minutes… and then finally, finally, that punchable little pop-up reports: “You were disconnected by the PPP server”.
Woohoo! I feel a strange kind of elation; something like triumph. The computer may have totally failed in its simple task, but I have succeeded in mine.
Keeper? I can do this.
WHEN I realise I can still fit into my Brownie Guide uniform – give or take a couple of hips – I feel obliged to both remake my Brownie Guide promise and creep my family out.
It’s not a million miles from my forthcoming Australian Citizenship pledge, really – let’s compare the two.
I like the way you get the option of removing the word ‘God’ from the Australian Citizenship pledge, though. Onya, Department of Immigration.
I’ve got a copy of my Brownie Guide handbook, so I am open to suggestions as to what badge I should go for first.
Keeper? Ongoing.
PRETTY sure I spelt Johnathon’s name wrong, but since Mum found it in the attic, it’s safe to say he didn’t receive this love missive from my nine-year-old self.
THANK GOD.
Now no one needs to know.
In a plastic bag morbidly stuffed with my childhood teeth, hair and hospital tag (sponsored by Cow & Gate baby formula), this loaded letter lay dormant.
It’s an exemplary communiqué of aggressive masochism, setting myself up for a future of codependent bliss. Beautifully written. Pacey.
To be honest, I’ve got no idea who Johnathan is, nor Jane, the scheming bitch.
Doesn’t matter, I’ve now written a better love letter, to someone more memorable. I hope he gets it, as when I texted a picture of my undies to him on Day 190, he never received it, which made for an awkward conversation when the accompanying blog post went up.
Keeper? Yes.
AH, the existential pain of the youngest child. Always outsmarted, outpunched and outrun, and always roundly thrashed at Trivial Pursuit.
The youngest child can go one of two ways: into musical theatre, where their ‘lookatmelookatme’ tap routines will be indulged, or into their bedroom, to sulk.
Well, all those hours in the bedroom choreographing routines to Annie and Starlight Express have finally paid off, as when it comes to Wii Just Dance, it seems, I’ve got the moves.
It was only a matter of time before my brother and I were pitted against each other by his children, and the quite frenzied anticipation and screaming in the room (not me) as we line up to take on ‘Wake Me Up Before You Go Go’ proves this is a showdown everyone has been waiting for a long, long time.
Keeper? I WON. HA HA HAAAAAAA HA HA HAAAAAAA HAHA etc.
Australia 2012. It's okay, we're friends.
Hey man, now you're really living 
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