Aldi Good Things

Occasional, I pull on the bio-hazard suit and go to Aldi. When I do, I make sure to go to the middle section of the shop, the Area of Mystification, just to see what madness they have stacked on the shelves. Sometimes it's not the article on its own that provides the fun, but its proximity to another. I often find the phrases, “... and therein lies a tale”, or “The winter nights just fly by”, spring to mind and I end up giggling my way down the 800 meter checkout conveyor belt.

Purple cello next to under-car-light-kit. (ELO band members getting pissed and confusing which thing to 'hot up'.)

Artists' easels next to motorbike safety leathers. (Because Fauvism.)

A lot of the time, though, something will just sit there and beg all of its own questions.

What kind of day have you had, when you are forced to buy your wheelchair at a discount supermarket?

You are not picking it up from the medical supplier provided by your insurer. You are not being issued with it at the exit of the hospital. Your rehab specialist has not just had it measured and fitted and is going through how lightweight, modern and Jackass it is and how all of the young skate pros will be getting one.

What are the alternatives? You have dragged yourself with your lips through the car park, like you normally do, to get the shopping done but today, the answer to your prayers accidentally turns up in the Aisles of Bafflement? You needed to buy so many cans of suspect dog food that your spine and legs gave way before the checkout, luckily salvation was at hand?

I am a bear of very little brain, but I simply cannot get my head around the set of circumstances in play, where an opportunistic purchase of a discount wheelchair is the antidote. Even the aging couple on the pension, fat of fluid-filled-ankle and mad as a box of hammers (both available in aisles seven and eight) are not going to get there and realise that was what they needed. That happens before then.

Now. Let's talk about Baun tablets and mobile phones...

Bland Designs

"It's already four months into the build and with winter approaching, Rene Magritte has still not moved in. He then suffers a further development application knock-back, because of his windows."

Clint Doesn't Get My Coin

I like to read the book before I see the film. American Psycho Sniper is a difficult one to write a fair review of, particularly as a non-American. As I was reading it I found myself almost laughing at what an unreconstructed plonker the guy was. What I didn't know until the end, was that he was killed recently and the edition of the book I read had the testimonials and memorials from many who knew him, after the main body of the book. While it's not traditional to bad-mouth people in that sort of message, they couldn't say enough how good he was. He evidently touched a lot of people's lives in a positive way.

Now, let's pretend that he's still around so that I get the chance to warn you off this book in an honest fashion, without feeling like I'm speaking ill of the dead.

It is jaw-dropping in its infantile view of the world, the blind patriotism, the one-eyed religious bigotry and the unexamined hypocrisy. It's sort of like Ronald Reagan whispered his fevered fantasies into Donald Rumsfeld's ear, who then in turn dictated them to Captain America's, Down-Syndrome brother.

The guy was far too happy about killing people and dressing it up in patriotism. I understand that soldiers gotta do what they gotta do, but he didn't see any problem with calling in air-strikes that would flatten entire city blocks. There is no way that only combatants were killed. He also mentions that every time he looked through a scope, there were “bad guys” for him to kill. Far more than any other snipers he was working with at the same time. You know what that suggests to me? Yeah. They weren't really all bad guys.

So, he loves killing “savages” to protect Americans and their way of life, but gets on his high horse when not everyone back home agrees with or supports what he and his comrades do. Guess what, psycho - That's one of the major things you're fighting to protect: The right to disagree.

The book is also extremely disappointing in what it doesn't talk about. If you are going to read one of these sorts of books, it's because you want to be a little bit pervy and nerdy and you want to hear what an expert has to say on the hows, whys and wherefores. As an example, he works with the Polish GROM a lot. He respects them but says there were a lot of differences in the way they did things. Then doesn't mention any of them. He's always getting into bar fights. Always. He never mentions any detail. Like I say, if you're reading a book about a SEAL, by a SEAL, you would expect to hear how a professional soldier handles these things. Nup.

He also says extraordinary things such as; the reason he didn't wear a helmet, but preferred a baseball cap on backwards, was because if you want to be cool, you have to look it.

Nup. No. Never. That is almost exactly the opposite of how real cool works.

Even more weird, is that it is just plain dull. I don't know how you achieve that when you are facing daily life-and-death situations but Chris Kyle and fellow writers managed it.

The one shining achievement that stands out for the American military machine, is the effectiveness of their indoctrination.

The delicious, horrible, mortal irony is that he was killed by one of his beloved comrades-in-arms, back home in the US. If it didn't leave a grieving family, you'd almost say it was poetic.

I will not be seeing the film.  

Low Deeds in High Places

Well, I can tell you a couple of things after being a delivery boy for a few weeks. No one living on the bottom floor of a block of flats has ever ordered a box of veg. If I was a small person or pregnant or... bone idle, I would get some dumb lug to carry my 50 kilo of groceries up my stairs for me, too. It does make me appreciate the places that have a level driveway that points straight in the front door, though, despite the horrendous feng-shui.

While I'm invoking the gentle art of rearranging the furniture, another thing I've learnt while traipsing into people's houses with their nose-bags is that I don't feel so bad about my standard of house keeping. I'm continually amazed at who has decided their lives would be improved by getting their shopping brought in to save them time to fight the Minotaur lurking between their bathroom and bedroom.

There are far too many women out there with far too many dogs. I'm wondering where the cat-lady stereotype came from because more often than not, the first thing I'm greeted at the door with is the wall-of-dog smell, followed by yapping, then the directions to, “Just take it down there, don't worry about Buffy. Fluffy, Muffy and Cujo”. Maybe cat-ladies don't answer the door. Maybe they just peer out through the gap in the dusty blinds, muttering. Or, more likely, just lie there being eaten by the furry, mewling throng.

It's not all gloating about other people's squalor, though (my third favourite kind of gloating). Since the last time I had to spend any time in delivery vehicles there have been clutch-thumping leaps in that particular workspace. It's positively luxurious now. This is an unpaid endorsement - I have got to say that the Hyundai iLoad is a very pleasant place to spend a day on the road. I can get the seat far enough away from the wheel not to feel like I'm doing the quando, the air-con is not only present, but good. The stereo is excellent, with blue teeth and controls on the steering wheel like it thinks it's luxury car! They're automatic to the point that the one I regularly drive has cruise control. You barely have to be there.

If I had one improvement to make, well, two, it'd be the following. The rear-collision detector needs to climb down from Def-Con 1. Continually being panicked by the presence of the road on the other side of the driveway is not helpful. When backing out of a perfectly normal driveway it sort of sounds like a shark alarm at the beach.

“Oh my god, there's tarmac here. And here. And here. And still over here. Look out, there's ground. And more ground. Totally clear behind us but beware of the planet earth underneath you. It's still there! Christ I'm going to pass out.”

The other change I would make is probably not so important and a little more esoteric. It's just a matter of font. Here's the conversation I had with my mum.

“So what do you get around in?”

“A Hyundai. It's marvellous.”

“It's good is it? I think they've got tickets on themselves.”

“Why? I don't understand.”

“Calling itself an iLord. Bit egotistical isn't it?”

“It's an “A” not an “R”, mum."

“Oh. Well. That makes more sense.”

I'm Extremely Busy and Important - You'll Need to Buy Another Phone

Did Chief Engineer Scotty instruct Apple how to estimate back-up times?

For those of you who've never watched a Star Trek, the starship Enterprise would suffer some battle damage, Kirk would straighten his lustrous hair, snog an alien hotty and radio down to the engine room,

“What's our status, Scotty?”

“Well Captain, the trans-warp inverters are verted, the dilithium crystals have thrown a shoe, all the weapons systems are pointing at each other and life support has just started a long, flat beeping noise at an old lady. We'll not be operational for at least 24 hours.”

“You have 13 minutes.”

“Right you are, Captain!”

We've all marvelled at the Windows download progress bar that will say, “ten minutes remaining” for two hours, but the Apple back-up smacks it out of the ballpark for hysterical overstatement, followed by a picket-line, a meeting and then a return to work with a revised estimate.

“Apple Manufactured Phone, Captain Grey Area here. How long to back-up?”

“O.M.G. You just won't believe how many folders there are in my own retarded filing system and then there's the music and these photos and that video and some games and... oh crap, is that really email? How old are you?”

“None of your bee's wax. There's a clue. I used that phrase.”

“Well, I can tell you that this is going to take at least 16 days. No, five days. No, six hours. Yeah. Six hours.”

“Really? That's where we've settled? Six hours? Can I quote you on that?”

“Yes. Absolutely. Six hours and not a jot le... finished.”

“Yeah. Thought so. God-damn drama queen. Now, if I could get you to...”

"Bup, bup, bup. I have important updates."

The Slow Road Back

Everything has changed.

If you read the previous post, you will be aware that life took an unexpected and terrible turn for me and my family this year... and that's why I've been silent.

I've been step-by-stepping it and just staying sane. It was only recently that I realised that I could even live through my daughter's death. It wasn't that I was suicidal, it was simply that profound grief and mourning hits you in a way where everything beyond a certain point becomes opaque and that point is very near. I had no vision for what happens next. Not even lunch.

It's weird. You (assuming you aren't suffering the same thing and I fervently hope you aren't) are right now, aware of what you have 'going on'. You have several plans in your mind, some things that need to get done. You also have longer range stuff that you need to think more specifically about and you make time to think about them because they are a forward narrative that gives your life shape and meaning. There was a T-shirt slogan that went something like “life is what happens while you're making plans.” Well, I don't believe that is true at all. A lot of life is driven by making those plans, even if it doesn't go the way it was designed, it is at least still going.

Grief robs you of that. In among the many horrid things it is, it is a profound state of motivationlessness. You get stuck in some very tight thinking that spirals in on itself, revolving around one certain fact and one certain event. Everything outside that gets obliterated. But, as the spiral starts to loosen, you become able to come back to some larger idea of yourself. That's when you can actually picture living again.

In May, I went back to my corporate gig, shortly after the funeral and found that not only was the effort of being motivated and energetic about driving the project utterly beyond me, the mental agility required was gone, as well. I was anxious and agoraphobic, sleep deprived and jittery and just plain sad beyond description. I couldn't even reliably count coins to make change at the shops, let alone lead people in a competitive, business environment. I'd been on parental leave with her before it happened and coming back to 3,000 emails is one thing, coming back to 3,000 emails when all your priorities have been blown out of the water is quite something else. You couldn't find the amount of care I had with a tunnelling electron microscope.

So, I quit. It wasn't even a decision. It was simply a matter of survival.

I took the period that would've been my long-service leave just to 'be'. To be with my broken little family and keep breathing.

That period has finished and the vision and idea of what I will now become, has to sharpen up. A mortgage in Sydney guarantees that I can't be a house-husband forever. I have taken the first, tentative steps back out into the world and that's why I'm firing up the blog again.

I think it's potentially amusing and that was the point of A Grey Area to start with. I'd never promised to always be light-hearted and my moral compass always tells me to at least acknowledge the complexity of life, but I do actually live for a giggle and my new gig is an amusing turn in life.

I'm delivering organic fruit and veg to people's houses, for a family run company, a few days a week. Never, in the field of human digestion, has one man been paid so little, for delivering so much.

In the 80s, I was at a Steiner school. Since then, in a varied work life, I've been a cabbie and a bus-driver, driven trucks and delivery vehicles.

I've gone back to my roots.

The road and god-damn hippies.

Broken Hearted

My daughter died.

She was having morning tea, choked on some food and despite the efforts of ambulance staff and then the doctors at the hospital, she could not be revived.

She was at day-care. I had just started her there in preparation for my return to work after three months as stay-at-home dad, to her and her brother.

It is at once too personal to share and too monumental not to talk about. I find myself broken in unimaginable ways as Emergency Contact and I go through every parent’s nightmare.

I’m dwelling on whether to post her eulogy, or not. It identifies us in a lot of ways and that’s not good for a number of reasons. But, I also want my boy to be able to come back to his daggy dad’s blog at some time in the future and not hit a blank spot where his sister should be.

While I think about it, do me a personal favour.

Be good to each other and back-up all the photos you have of anyone precious to you.

I've Been Bullied at Daycare

I’m back as a stay-at-home dad for a few months. Darth Baby had me to himself for three months last year, so it’s only fair we offer the same level of so-called care to The Bobble Head, his little sister.

As well as me retying the apron strings, Darth Baby (which he isn’t anymore – let’s call him “The Boy”) started at his new daycare centre. When you are introducing a little person to daycare, a parent attends for a few hours on the first couple of days, which is how I found myself being bullied. Not once, but twice.

At lunch on day one, I was sitting at the miniature table next to The Boy (now two), enjoying watching him do his free-form thing to outmoded ideas such as portions and possession, when a coterie of three, three-year-old girls flounced in and sat around us. 

If ever I’ve had a terrifying vision into past, present and future, it was delivered perfectly by these three. I was sort of blindsided by the simultaneous impression of what these girls are now and what they will become and what they’ve always represented to me. They were so far from being blank-slates, I felt fairly sure I could’ve walked out into the car park and pointed out each one of their surgery-enhanced mothers in their giant four-wheel-drives just from the high angle of the ponytails and clouds of Givenchy.

Mean (three-year-old) girls.

The girls size me and The Boy up, and the ringleader whispers into her lieutenant’s ear. The lieutenant speaks,

“What’s that on your forehead?” she asks, pointing at an old scar that I don’t think about from year to year.

“What, this?” pointing to where I think it probably is these days.

“Noooo, *sigh*” corrects Ringleader. “Here,” she indicates on her head where it is and how stupid I am in the one, simple movement.

“It’s, it’s a scar,” I stammer, already badly on the back foot. The effrontery! (It’s a bloody good story, how I got this scar. Should I tell it? Probably not appropriate and a little too long for this audience.) The Boy, oblivious as all good innocents should be, hides something he doesn’t like from the inside of his mouth on the third girl’s plate. “Go, Boy”, I think.

Ringleader, after a nanosecond of consideration, says, “My mother had a scar on her face, but she did something about it.” Am I allowed to admonish them about their manners? Come to that, am I allowed to punch them?

“I’m certain she would’ve.” I’m getting arch and defensive with a three year old. Meanwhile, The Boy leisurely eats a yummy looking thing off Lieutenant’s plate without her noticing because all three of these vicious little pieces-of-work are focusing on me. “Go on without me, Boy,” I mentally encourage. I’m a goner, but you don’t have to be.

To shift gears, I ask their names. Ringleader speaks for all three and I would love to list them but it’s not legal to publicise underage criminal’s names, so probably not cool to accurately identify horrible little Uber-snobs. What I can write is that their names so hilariously occupy the centre of a Venn-diagram of intersecting circles named, “My astrologer says it’s a power name” and “Cashed up Bogan”, I had to stop myself from asking if they were joking.

Introductions made, Ringleader’s predatorial gaze falls on my beautiful, little lamb of a boy as she hisses,

“Why is that kid using a sippy-cup?”

“’Cause he’s… he’s little… and can be a bit messy. And he’s my son,” I bleat, starting to feel the heat of a blush rise to my cheeks for the short-falling in my parenting and The Boy’s abilities.

“Pfff,” says Ringleader meaningfully to the other two. Mercifully, at this point, The Boy hands one of them a half-eaten piece of cucumber in a gesture of sharing (she didn’t have any) which requires a staff member to come and intercede to correct the social infraction.

On day two, the bullying was far easier to take. I was mobbed by about eight kids who all wanted to rub wet sand on me, telling me it was different kinds of poo. The Boy stood to one side, leaning on a miniature shovel, laughing fit to burst. The staff were required once more to correct things as it appeared that several of the kids had got so worked up while battering me like a sav, they’d started throwing sand - and that’s a no-no. Rubbing poo into people, well, that’s not covered in the rule book.

Not long after that, while sitting on a rock getting the sand out of my shoes, a kid I hadn’t seen before came up to me and said, “What’s that on your forehead?”