Wednesday 26 December 2012

In my time of dying, I want nobody to mourn...


What is it about some deaths, disappearances and murders that capture our attention so much? As this year draws to a close, one thing that is fascinating is the events that catch our attention, or at least the media’s attention more so than others. Politics, Economics and self-interested rambling of the media aside, there doesn’t seem to be anything more fascinating that a decent murder, especially one that is wrapped in mystery and preceded by debauchery.[1] While in any given year, there are around 1.2 reported murders per hundred thousand people in Australia, how many murders are not reported? More to the question is: can we, as a populace, let alone those fuzzy control freaks that make up the media and political circles, deal with the seemingly severe lack of control that we have over our lives? 

What is it about looking from a distance at a family who has lost a loved one through violence? We rubber neck through the facts and try to find a reason as to why this wouldn’t happen in our house, yet we are fascinated by it. We can’t seem to stop at just sinchelectually deconstructing the facts and motives on the players. We go beyond that, to lay blame on the victim, or worse, to excuse them. We look at the Jill Meaghers and the Baden-Clay families around us and moralise and philosophize as to why they are different to us. Why we would never be a victim or be guilty of a crime like that. Crime dramas still plague television and movies more so than most other genres, and the news of someone being killed, being raped and/or going missing still dominates over other stories. I wonder whether the main reason for this is that there is no voice of the victim in a homicide related crime; so we can speak for them, or at least, speak about them without fear of them telling us we’re wrong. There is also an asymmetry of ability to respond available from the culprit. Take for instance, the inability of 2day FM’s Mel Greig and Michael Christian to be able to say something like “The idea that someone would top themselves over a dumb prank is just plain bullshit [and] If you’re dumb enough to fall for a prank like that, you at least deserve to be fired, and so does your boss, who ought to have known better than to release such info.”  However, if that were said, there would be further outrage from people who seek to “speak for the trees, for the trees have no tongue.”

Looking into it a little more, there tends to be a polarisation of these interest stories. We are fascinated by two types of death stories. Firstly, and mainly, the ones that involve a respectable member of society, both of the victim and the accused, that is able and willing to plan out an elaborate series of events that hide the motivations and premeditations of the scene and people. They then seemingly slip up somehow on the most bizarre or uncommon occurrence that begins to unravel their disguise; as if God herself took a moment to intervene. We wonder at the marvels of the Inspector Grishams of the world who always get to the bottom of things, regardless of how carefully planned the murder was. We hide every experience we have ever had with real life police, who generally have trouble finding their way to McDonalds without tasering themselves in the pills, let alone have any ability to solve a crime.

The second type is the polar opposite. The victim may be one of us, but the accused is not from our realm. The accused is without morals, without education and without social standing. He is a gutter dweller that has slightly graced our realm, bringing the horror of Dionysian dualism to our newspapers, radios and television screens to mock our sense of control. The police here are what we want them to be, stupid Neanderthals that bash up the clearly guilty persons, for they are not guilty of an action, they are guilty of simply being who they are. They are murderers, rapists and paedophiles. It is not in their actions that these types are guilty, it is in their very existence that they are guilty and as such, they have no rights, no reason to seek redress from brutality toward them.

When crimes are reported, the ones that are reported generally do not match the average of that crime. This year, the violent deaths that have captured our attention are only a few: Alison Baden-Clay; Jill Meagher;  Azaria Chamberlain. The common theme of murder doesn’t seem to get reported, as it is, at least partially, here.  The theme of the reports is about trying to lay blame somewhere. Some may say that the victim brought it on herself by the way she acted or dressed, others may lay blame at the family and friends, yet more lay blame on society at large in an attempt to hide from the very real horror that there is nothing stopping us from oblivion just as there wasn’t anything stopping the victim from meeting her end. Are we trying to lay blame or create a reason as to why it will not happen to us? Do we not have control over our own safety?

To start with the sheer numbers; the Australian Institute of Criminology reports that somewhere between 250 to 300 people are reported as being the victim of murder or manslaughter each year. This seems to have been continually decreasing over the years, and many peeps have pointed to the development of medical science to explain this trend, as it also matches with a growing number or assaults, so the theory is that people who, in past times would have died from their attack are now getting medical help and living and as such, their assailants are getting nicked for assault rather than murder or manslaughter.

But then, that is only the reported crimes. Given that the Australian Federal Police tell us that someone gets reported as missing every 15 minutes, the reported crimes may be only a tiny portion of the actual occurrences of people getting killed by someone. Notwithstanding the fact that 95% of people reported missing turn up in the first week, of the 35,000 people reported missing each year, 1,600 a year seem to stay missing. It would be a fairly decent assumption to say that a good deal of these people are buried in someone’s yard. And yet again, these are only the people reported as missing; which means they have to be missed by someone, which would probably not include the murderer, unless they were stupidly trying to create a type of explanation and alibi.

In Brisbane, the disappearance and death of a former beauty queen, mother and wife in the leafy suburbs, Allison Baden-Clay who is then found ten days later, 14 kilometres from her wealthy home captured the attention for weeks. For some reason, the media and facebook posts all showed shock about the husband being charged with her murder, despite allegations of a troubled marriage and wandering eyes and hands and despite the statistics that overwhelmingly show the family home to be by far the preferred location for violent crimes. After all this, a further twist revealed the possibility that Mrs Baden-Clay may have taken her own life. That she had high levels of an anti-depressant medication in her blood and an empty box of some Mother’s little helper in her newly leased car. This type of suicide is blanketed by ads asking if you are, or know anyone that’s a little depressed, which we’ve spoken of before.

These silly little wankers seem to blanket most of the reports about the case of the English nurse, Jacintha Saldanha who supposedly killed herself, and supposedly killed herself after allowing two DJs from Sydney access to the future Queen of England’s private nurse.

The idea that a dumb prank could be seriously held to blame for an apparent suicide is a nonsense and hides from the notion that any person or organization that holds personal information of any sort on someone must have considerably better standards in place to stop this type of thing happening - the most noticeable element about the prank itself was how ludicrous it was and they really didn’t sound very convincing.

During the prank, the DJs even commented that “Are they putting us through?...if this has worked, this is the easiest prank call we’ve ever made...your accent sucked by the way.”  They sounded more like Barry Humphrys than the Queen and that was probably supposed to be the joke, that they would and should have been hung up on, as the DJs later confirmed - the idea that it worked is such a concern - if anyone, whether they be a nurse, doctor, lawyer, accountant or whoever hands over such information on what was clearly a stupid hoax to any reasonable person, they ought to be close to being shut down.

Funnily enough the boss of the relevant hospital, John Lofthouse ... ”denounced the action as foolish and regrettable.“This was a foolish prank call that we all deplore,” he said. “We take patient confidentiality extremely seriously and we are now reviewing our telephone protocols.”“

SuPERB

If you have nothing in place to stop a staff member at a hospital from revealing very personal information to a dumb prankster about the future head of state , then it’s a bit thick to say that you take confidentiality seriously guvna. The reports were then about possible criminal charges, police looking into it etc, however it apparently escaped police’s finest minds if impersonating the head of state is actually a crime...

But that’s dodging the main issue: that you can’t say that someone who kills themselves; a wife and mother of young children who takes her own life can be blamed can she? Her family and friends can’t be blamed can they? It’s much easier to look at a weird joke from two larrikins and blame them. Walk into a room with a corpse, a suicide and don’t look at the note, don’t look at the family, don’t look at the friends, don’t look at the don’t look at any of the circumstances, but then see a copy of ‘the Catcher in the Rye’ in the corner, or a painting on the wall, or a CD in the player; something that can be removed, something that should have been removed; and you can lay blame and throw it out with the rest of the crap that a life cut short collects. And you can reason that you have that control; to be able to throw out that element that doesn’t deserve to be in our realm, as it didn’t in that poor lady’s.

The (hopefully) final verdict on what happened to Azaria Chamberlain was given this year. This is the perfect case, and always has been, about our ability to create an ‘other’ out of our fellow human being. Mrs Chamberlain in particular has always been scrutinised way beyond the point of absurdity; that she didn’t act like a grieving mother should, that she was a witch or that she was one of those religious cult types, we have always repelled the notion that, in some circumstances, in most circumstances, a dingo is never very far from our door and there is little we can do about that. Instead, we hide from that fact and create an ‘other’ out of people who have been through such circumstances.

Then there was the troubling case if Jill Meagher, an ABC journalist in Melbourne disappeared after a late night party and was found dead and raped. At the time, there was so much facebook, faking about whether she was dressed appropriately, whether one of the ‘marrieds’ should act/dress/be like that; whether society could be blamed; whether it is a symptom of a sickness in society that such an event could happen to ‘one of us’.  People honestly saying things that equate to laying blame on the victim. How dare she drink, enjoy herself and not cover herself up. Very strange. There is an element of naivety or throwing caution to the wind, but the element in all these types of comments is one of ‘that wouldn’t happen to me or mine because I could/can/do control the whole situation away from that happening.’ I can keep the dingo, the rapist, the murderer from my door.

Another story that didn’t overly catch the public eye, but almost did, was the tell-all tale of Major General  John Cantwell (ret.). The one thing that I am talking about is his recollection of the American strategy in the first Gulf War called ‘industrialised killing’. In order to avoid trench warfare, the put bull-dozen blades on the front of tanks and buried the Iraqi soldiers alive. The theory is that this would result in considerably less allied loss of life than traditional warfare. But doesn’t it strike you as wrong? Soldiers dying in battle by being buried by sand from the waring opposite army sounds so much worse than the same soldiers being shot by the opposing army. Is it because they don’t have a chance to shoot back? Well, they never really would have against such a well organised and well funded force and they did what they were supposed to do. It’s hard to remember that point I guess. Soldiers are trained to die. The good ones are trained to avoid this, but in terms of a war, the victor is the army that inflicts a heavier casualty on their opponent than their opponent has placed on them. This is why the ANZACs, the Red Army, the Vietcong, the IRA and the like were so successful, they inflicted greater loss on their opponent relative to their own situation. 

The poor Iraqi soldiers though, buried alive and probably didn’t even ever realise how. All of a sudden, these soldiers stop being the invaders of Kuwait and the bad guys and become these people, these anonymous to us people that we may identify with and object to their demise based on the idea that when someone dies, when anyone dies, there should be some sense of justice. You should be able to understand, to reason or to negotiate with the person or thing that comes along to kill you no matter how bad you have been. What a silly notion this is.

This post’s lame joke

When Seamus died at the age of 89, there was a problem, rigor mortis set in and they couldn’t close the coffin lid. The undertakers called in Seamus’ wife, Dot, to see the problem.

“Well, what do you usually do in this situation?” Dot asked.

“Well ma’am,” replied the undertaker, “We generally cut it off and re-attach it to his body...you know... around in the back.”

Dot thought the whole thing strange, but the undertakers assured her that this was quite common practice and no-one would know.

The next day, Seamus’ funeral was a beautiful affair; a solemn, yet beautiful ceremony filled with distinguish guests, family and well-wishers.

Dot was very happy with the turn-out. Looking into the open coffin of her late husband, Dot knew that he was in a better place, at peace with everything and at the same time, looking as though Seamus was still very much a part of her life; there with her, loving her. Some condensation from the humidity of the day collected around Seamus’ cheeks and then formed a droplet of water that ran down his face. Dot loving reached over to wipe it up. With a smile on her face she quietly whispered to her dearly departed husband, “See, I told you if freaken hurt.” 

This post’s inappropriate over-share

I used to like a few bands that either now, or at some stage, I stopped liking because of other people. Guns and Roses were an example. For a few years, I really liked their stuff, then all of a sudden, all these dorks at school liked them and, just like that, I stopped liking them. Not only that, I actually sold off the albums that I had of theirs and turned my back on the whole thing. Years later, I got back into it a little, but never too much. But just recently I have been trying to collect some music from here, there and everywhere for car tapes and running type compilations and have remembered this really groovy cover that Avril Lavigne did of some song that used to be on an old mini-disc player, blaring out at me on my morning ride to work. I found the song, here, only to find out that it is a Metallica song...like really...Metallica...now I don’t really like it. I have thought about the idea that I can’t stand the Culture Club, but quite like the song ‘Do you really want to hurt me’, so long as it is sung by the Violent Femmes. But I guess I am just vain at heart.



[1] Then again, I am not sure that the public’s attention is ever really grabbed by something as much as the media would have us believe; the constant talk of the 24 hour news cycle seems a furphy. Listening to most media outlets, it would be more accurate to call it a 24 day news cycle, because that’s about the time most editors seem to take to realise that there is no interest left in a given story.

Wednesday 19 December 2012

1:37...that’s an excellent time

sorry folks, but I promised to removed this post if a statement of claim were received... it has been, and it's now 7:35 on Wednesday 29 May, 2013...it will return when this matter has been dealt with fully.

Sunday 16 December 2012

Control, Gun Control and not Morgan Freeman


There seems to be a bizarre fact about humans: when we are put in serious crisis, our response seems to be: to do anything to regain the perception of control. Remember that feeling when we were kids when our parents kept us safe from all the perils of the world?  Or at least we thought they were doing that, until that day when they really didn’t. That day when we realised that we were vulnerable to everything around us and only chance and circumstance would ever keep us safe. 

There is a certain strength in saying ‘play your role in life, but remember that it is just a part’. However, there are other ways that we maintain that illusion of control. Religion sometimes kicks in; the Dalai Lama can have some groovy quotes “Using force is not a sign of Strength, but rather a sign of weakness.” That sounds good, but is he right? I doubt many people would call it weakness if a Travis Bickle or Martin Riggs type character busted in during any of these shootings and beating the gunman mostly to death. Christianity has its cool understandings too...”That which you do to the least of my brothers, you do to me.” I’m not sure how far ‘the least of my brothers’ extends. I don’t think it would extend to people suffering from a personality disorder. The need for control, the need to know, to see and to be seen as being able to analyse seems to surpass all other needs. 

It doesn’t seem to matter what that control is, how irrational it is or how costly or stupid it is, we want to regain control and our initial way to do that seems to be obsessing about the details of an event.  Isn’t it the funniest thing? It may be one of those things, in line with irreducible complexity, that may well prove evolution to be incorrect. What difference does it make when everything is over and done for, we want to know the most minute little detail for no other reason than to appear in control of it, to have knowledge of a situation so that we may pretend to surpass it.

There have been a few times in my life where a crisis emerged and my response is to gain a knowledge of what happened, every little piece of evidence, every thought, every action, every motivation so that the situation can be analysed to the point of absurdity and then well beyond. I am fascinated in my own ability to obsess about wanting to know details as an initial response to a massive scare; a crisis that knocked you off your feet. Then the thought hits you: the only reason you want to know all this shit is so you can avoid laying blame where it should lay. You can then analyse, philosophise, bicyclise your way back to the controlling and analysing uber-rational dude. Notice how I even subconsciously changed from the first person back to the narrator during that thought?

This bizarre fact seems to be amplified by social media. We can tweak tweet and facebook our possession of knowledge about an event,   a hero or a villain in considerably less than the time it takes to actually read what we are re-tweeting or sharing.  With this in mind, I have been amazed to see the obsessive re-posting of a commentary, allegedly written by Morgan Freeman which essentially contains a self-defeating argument. It doesn’t take too long on Google to find out that Morgan Freeman has nothing to do with these comments and that they were apparently written by “a dude named Mark in Vancouver” However, while a weird apropos  go out to a dude named Mark in Vancouver, I do remember a similar chain post happening on previous shootings our ‘murkin cousins have endured that had been falsely credited to, inter alia, Leonard Nemoy and George Carlin.

It appears a self-defeating claim that a sensationalist media should be blamed for it creates a culture of celebrity worship, which we are hearing from someone who has no background in anything but acting and as such, has no claim to make a statement apart from the sensationalised over-representation his ‘brand’ has in the world.

But taking the time to read through the statement that Morgan Freeman didn’t write, it’s amazing to see the actual message is quite pointed.  The responsibility for the latest shooting murders doesn’t seem to go to the gunman, or the guns, movies, books  or a society that values death, debauchery and rape over all else for no other reason than these qualities sell. According to the very unreal Morgan Freeman, we are responsible, via the media’s apparent obsession with sensationalising everything so that the gunman will be “...remembered as a horrible monster, instead of a sad nobody.”

Wow.

Take a step back and think about that. A person, going through whatever delusion, acquires weaponry that enables him to murder innocent children and bystanders, and who is responsible? Um…hullo? ,,, A pair of DJs from Sydney make a phone call and apparently they are responsible for killing a person. Someone attends a scene of a suicide or a mass killing in their minds. They see the blood, the aggression, the depression, the clear lack of any ability of those around these people to act in time to stop a disaster from happening and they see none of these things. They see a copy of ‘The Catcher in the Rye’ in the corner, they see a violent DVD on the coffee table or they see a cartoon of Mohammed in the bin. That must be the reason. Not for any other reason that one can then assign blame to an external source. One can analyze and judge without having to justify and care. One can make this analysis safe in the comfort that there is such an asymmetry of information. It takes real courage to say…”Um, excuse me, but I don’t have a clue what you are talking about.”

Shame on us for reasoning with our eyes closed so tightly.

The penultimate point that slips in just under the radar in this statement is about gun control. “You can help by donating to mental health research instead of pointing to gun control as the problem…”

This screams a little less of a dude named Mark in Vancouver and a lot more like a statement from a vested interest group like the NRA’s ‘guns don’t kill people’ type non-sense. Our poor ‘murkin cousins generally claim a ‘right’ in their constitution which was put there from a Machiavellian principle that a well-armed civilian militia would instill a peaceful state. What was probably true in Florence, 500 years ago could hardly be more wrong of the US today, where the well-armed militia marks the biggest threat to that peace, rather than the protector of it. To think that, in one year, guns in the United States were the weapon of choice for more than twenty times (9484) the murders that occurred in Australia, England, Wales, Finland, Germany, Canada and Spain combined (545) is a hard argument for these peeps to get around. So either guns kill people, or Americans do.  

This post’s lame joke:

A hunter calls 000 and yells “I think my friend is dead! He just plopped down and died!”
The operator replies “Sir please calm down first make sure he is dead.”
The hunter says “Okay hold on.”
Two loud gunshots ring through the phone line and when the hunter returns, he says “Okay now what?”

This post’s groovy, identity-seeking quote:

To-morrow, and to-morrow, and to-morrow,
Creeps in this petty pace from day to day,
To the last syllable of recorded time;
And all our yesterdays have lighted fools
The way to dusty death. Out, out, brief candle!
Life's but a walking shadow, a poor player,
That struts and frets his hour upon the stage,
And then is heard no more. It is a tale
Told by an idiot, full of sound and fury,
Signifying nothing.


This post’s inappropriate over share:

When I was about 14 or so, I became obsessed with this stupid idea that I had been cursed by something or someone. Strange things happened to me and rather than put it down to dumb luck or just par-for-the-course-of-life type conclusions, I became convinced that there was a source to it; an author and a curse. So at the time I messed around with this Alasdair Crowley stuff about removing a curse. I don’t remember exactly what it was, black candles and red paper, or perhaps the other way around, don’t remember. But I remember as soon as I’d finished the whole thing, there was this nastiness, this presence that never seemed to let go. I had forgotten about it after moving away from home and the passing of the years. When my elder son was about 1, we moved back to Brisbane and passed through my hometown on the drive through. Passing the old house where I grew up, I barely recognised it as it had been ten years since I had been there. I looked at the trees and the once nice gardens and tried to remember the way it was when that same feeling kind of walloped over me again: a fear of some kind. I know that it is probably all in my mind, but it is amazing how vividly these types of things appear.

Tuesday 11 December 2012

Friends, we are gathered here today...


Today marks fourteen years since I was married. I guess we were married young, and life hasn’t been completely beer and skittles, but mainly because there is only so many skittles that I can handle. Then, thinking about it, we do most things young...we retired and moved to the beach at 35, so it’s all relative I guess.

I’m not too fussed about looking back and wondering about the facts of past things. It is too easy to input ‘facts’ in to a situation that simply were not facts at the time. These sorts of thoughts tend to focus too much on negative and ‘what could have been’ type things that are the stuff of fiction, not reality. However the one thing that anniversaries and other events (like paying car registration) do is act as an anchor point in our lives that we don’t really want. They give you this snapshot of life from fourteen years ago with which to mull over and wonder if you have travelled the right track and whether you are traveling fast enough along that path.
Car registration is one time of the year that makes me ponder “have I driven far enough in the last year to justify that expense? Have I come far enough in the last year?’ But to think about what I have done in the last fourteen years, that is a bit of a trip. What would 1998 Michael think of me ? I pondered on this thought for a while this morning, went for a run, which didn’t cure it, so I figured that I could either worry about it needlessly all day and probably tomorrow, or just build a time machine and record the conversation that I had with myself. Which I did and spent forever transcribing it for your reading pleasure (but don’t worry about that, I used the time machine to get that time back, then went to the beach and wasted it).

ME  : “Hi, how are you?”
1998 Michael “Dude”
ME  “Yeah dude, I know”
1998 Michael “but dude”
ME  “Yeah dude, I know”
1998 Michael “Dude weird hey.”
ME  “but dude”
1998 Michael “yeah, I guess you have a point there.”
ME  “So you nervous about everything today?”
1998 Michael “well, you tell me, should I be?”
ME  “Nah, it’s all groovy.”
1998 Michael”So how are you...us...me...whatever.”
ME  “we’re great. Did the country thing for a while, did the city thing for a while, then retired and moved to the beach.”
1998 Michael “Retired? So are we rich or something?”
ME  “argh, we do alright, but we’re rich in spirit.”
1998 Michael “So we’re a loser?”
ME  “No, it’s not like that...you’re such a dick when you don’t get something.”
1998 Michael “Dude?...did I ever finish that philosophy degree?”
ME  “Yeah”
1998 Michael “and post-grad?”
ME  “Yeah.”
1998 Michael “and a PhD?’”
ME  “Nah, started it, but life took a different turn and you’ll have a useless, alcoholic supervisor.”
1998 Michael “So what did you do?”
ME  “Switched to law”
1998 Michael “Oh...and you were saying we weren’t a loser...dick....so what are we doing on our anniversary?”
ME  “Nursing sick kids who’ve had their tonsils out.”
1998 Michael “Whose kids?”
ME  “Our kids you dick.”
1998 Michael “we have kids; I hope they take after me rather than you.”
ME  “You’re such a dick.”
1998 Michael “Hey, so, has J ever let you...well.. you know...”
ME  “Nah, not yet.”

Ok, so that probably worked better as a concept in my head than it did on paper.

1998 Michael “yeah, blame the medium.”

Hey, enough of that.

My wedding day itself was beautiful in a very ‘this is what a wedding is supposed to be’ type way. My reflections on it are more of the day before – it seemed more special – the rehearsal of the ceremony where it was just people involved in a major way that were there – it was a very close and sincere type event and, looking back, does present itself as the point in which J and I declared to all that that’s what we wanted to do. The day itself was gorgeous,  draped in ceremony and some extravagance, but funnily enough looking back it appears to me as more about everyone else witnessing us rather than us doing something to be witnessed ...but not witnessing that , seriously dear reader, get your mind out of the gutter (and don’t get me wrong, we did that later on contra to all these weird comments about that... I mean, we were tired and drunk and all, but there’s some things you just have to do...at least twice).  

Looking back at photos and memories, something that immediately comes to mind is that most of the people at the ceremony,  I haven’t kept in touch with, some deliberately, others have just taken a different road and become strangers to us. Of the ten people in the wedding party, we only stay in contact with two of them...that includes siblings and people that were close friends at the time. Some had break-downs, some died, some became tools. Actually, looking back on it, they always were tools I guess.
J and I initially had this idea of finding a really big rock somewhere in the middle of a paddock to get married in front of with just two or three close friends and a celebrant.  Living on the New England tablelands at the time, there were heaps of glorious places like that: a really big rock in the middle of many hectares of flat ground with a backdrop of mountains framing the horizon. We were then going to have a big party in a hall somewhere and put on a dance or something. I was going to write to the Tooheys company and ask them to make a keg of beer called “Borrowed” for our wedding – so that we could have “something old, something new, something borrowed and something blue” all on tap. J had found the perfect dress, which she told me about many years later. It had a sort of a Wynona Rider in Beetejuice type feel to it. I would have loved that. Her mum talked her out of that into a traditional white thing, which she looked absolutely stunning in.

One of the disadvantages of getting married young is that your parents have way too much say in things. Before we knew it, our guest list had grown to 150 and the whole affair was turned into a pissing contest between families about who was spending the most amount of dosh on what. And they stamped their taste onto the wedding. The big rock was replaced by a garden as a compromise to it being replaced by a church and the jug band was replaced by a jazz band. Don’t get me wrong, the day was a perfect wedding, just more about everybody else’s understanding of what a wedding should be, not ours.

Everyone came to it, from the newly-divorved parents of the bride and  their new partners to the sister’s skeezy boyfriend who was too busy trying to hit on the slutty maid of honour to the alcoholic ring-in step aunt, all were in the prime and having a great time. But where have all these people gone? We don’t talk to most of them anymore.

Are you in this situation? Looking back on the day, there were many people there that day that I thought would stand together with us until the end of time (which is also pretty soon if you believe all these crazy Mayans). These people had such a close bond to us at the time that we thought nothing could ever break it. The crazy thing is, it wasn’t really anything huge that broke it, it appears as if time itself got in the road. It was the little, petty things that got in the way, then there was the inevitable breach of trust that remained unanswered and unaccounted for. And then a justification of the whole event from both sides to re-intent history so that it is more palatable. Strange...I guess you just have to ‘make the best of this time and don’t ask why. It’s not a question but a lesson learned in time. It’s something unpredictable but in the end is right...’

This post’s lame joke:

Time travel jokes are like, so 2050.

This post’s groovy, identity seeking quote:

"All truth passes through three stages. First, it is ridiculed. Second, it is violently opposed. Third, it is accepted as being self-evident."- Arthur Schopenhauer

This post’s inappropriate over share: 

Don’t buy Rivers brand boxers. They are seriously cut the wrong way (right up the middle) and seriously give you pain where you don’t want pain unless you meat and potato the day away. So I threw about five pairs out and now am going commando most of the time, which puts an extra spring in my step and has the advantage of enabling me to do pretty much anything when I’m wearing fisherman’s pants commando style. I think I could steal the bakery oven out of Woolies and the checkout chicks wouldn’t notice.

This post’s reflection on a previous post

I have received many comments, jokes and concerns about the post of a few weeks ago about Dakabin State High School. Included in this is a formal complaint from the school to the academic institution that organised the prac who have labelled it non-academic misconduct and stated that “...Many of the comments made in this piece are particularly detrimental to staff at that school and I understand it is considering its own responses to that statement.” Firstly, I would welcome a response from the school and will publish it in its own right on this page as I both encourage fairness and openness and stand by my comments.