Finally....

Every so often someone manages to marry together two good ideas. Here are two examples.

Isn’t that dangerous?

Five hours waiting in an airport makes you take risks you wouldn’t ordinarily consider worth losing your life over. I decided to break my time into manageable pieces and the first part of the program was eating. I call the first activity ‘danger eating’. This requires you engage in conversation with someone who may or may not be insane.

So given that I was looking at an interminable stretch of time alone I made a beeline for the scariest looking person. These sort of people are great because generally speaking, they simply aren’t suspicious of any alternative agendas. Not like, say, an attractive woman or male. To engage in dialogue with attractive folk turns you into the scariest person in the conversation. This, please note, becomes awkward.

Maria was a fairly menacing looking woman well into her fifties, dressed in a large black mountaineering jacket with a beanie that covered her eyebrows. I don’t know if this says more about me than her, but I noticed she also had an impressive thick rope of black braided hair slung over her shoulder. The other important thing to note was she was well on her way to a happy place, plied with alcohol and loud music courtesy of her ipod, which she later informed me that she had no idea about how it worked other than it was on random.

So I sat, having got my lunch, with Maria in the ‘bar’ (symbolically separated from the smallish food court by the type of people seated there – tense looking mothers raging quietly at their children in the food court, tense looking mothers raging loudly at their children in the bar). I of course checked it was okay to join Maria because nothing is quite as embarrassing as being kicked to death in the make shift bar of an airport. Maria shared her story with me of her work on the mine site up north, at one point suddenly slapping the table with a bear like swat, proclaiming that she was having a change of scenery supervising the loading of acid into some sort of refinery process. Something of a tangent, but I am the last who should be complaining.

“Acid?” I asked.

“Containers of acid sweetheart.” She tended to swallow her vowels as she masked her belching.

“Isn’t that dangerous?” I asked this thinking that the safety measures in place were probably so over the top that her answer would be a resounding assurance that it was totally safe. Maria’s body betrayed the advanced state of intoxication by gurgling as she said,
“DANGEROUS?! (insert peculiar hollow noise from esophagus on third syllable) IS IT DANGEROUS?! FUCKIN’ OATH IT’S DANGEROUS IT’LL KILL YA. THAT TIPS ON YA – YOU GOT NO BONES LEFT NO NUTHIN’ !’.” She emphasized this with a far away look in her eye as she took a swig of beer. Believe it or not it is deeply encouraging that people like Maria are out on the job, and I can’t do justice to the deepness of this weary traveler’s story. Needless to say I was incredulous about the acid component of her story.

I come from a world where senior high school students have to swim in water no deeper than their waist, in a group of no more than 35, supervised by a qualified life saver. It is a pathetic site – teenagers standing listlessly in thigh deep glassy water. I miss the days where death could stroll casually by as life’s consummate teacher, taking the odd participant out by the ear as a object lesson about human stupidity. These days stupidity is nurtured and allowed to remain in the gene pool. Where’s the risk?

Well, apparently it’s in Queensland Airport and Port Moresby.

I said goodbye to Maria as she thanked me for her company and careened off to make her flight. I then found the Reverend Richard Turnbull. I only registered that he was a reverend after a read his business card hours after leaving his company. I had sat at a table with Richard at the Conference I was returning from but didn’t have the opportunity to talk to him. Suffice to say he had a sense of humor. During a thank-you speech at the end of the conference, given by one of our New Zealand colleagues he echoed quietly each sharpened syllable as she wound her way through her speech. I’ve got to admit it was one of the most pronounced New Zealand accents I’ve ever heard, but she had a nice dress on.

Anyway, we were conversing politely when a molar shattering alarm erupted over the food court. It was the sort of noise that was incongruent with people calmly strolling around. Which is precisely what everyone did as no one seemed to know what to do. What was needed was for people to scream and run in random directions, indiscriminately smashing stuff. Look, even just one person screaming and smashing stuff would have sufficed. A business man throwing a stainless steel bin through one of the large plate glass windows and heroically beckoning for us to follow him to safety as he leapt down into a jet turbine of a waiting aircraft, would have sufficed. But instead people continued to walk calmly around. So I went off to the toilet where I noticed in the toilet you could vaguely hear an announcement. It sounded important. But I figured if it WAS important then surely I should have been able to hear it. It was an airport, it was post 9/11. I didn’t take into account it was Queensland.

I returned to Richard where the shops of the food court were now being closed by giggling girls. Yeah, weird, but they were laughing uproarishly in a girly sort of way, while they clacked in loose footwear and covered their butt cracks as they bent down to secure things in their low slung hipsters. Finally the Queenslanders were taking things seriously. So Richard and I moved a little way over to the departure lounge of Gate 22. Now floods of people were moving briskly down the escalators. In fact, crowds of people who I had only just seen twenty minutes ago board a plane were now leaving.

It occurred to me that something might be wrong.

People glanced at the two of us in disbelief. Now I felt we were perhaps being a little cavalier about the whole thing. Maybe there was a fire, or a bomb or perhaps Maria had a little accident with an acid sample.

I persuaded Richard that perhaps it was for the best that we leave like everyone else, because being reduced to carbon, ash or fat was not cool.

Too my utter amazement we walked past a girl sitting reading a book at the counter of an expensive accessories shop. I walked in and inquired if she had a) heard the alarm (which I was talking over the top of) and b) noticed the crowds of people fleeing.

She responded, barely taking her eyes off the page, “No, it’s just like, they’re testing the sirens.”

“Um….yes, except that everyone has left…” There was no reaction until I said, “…yeah… even the skinny giggling girls from the Beach shop, the Australia shop and the News Agent shop – they’ve closed their shops and left with the crowds, all that’s left up here is a woman with her baby and Maria, and they’re all drunk.” (Look, I don’t know if the baby was drunk, but given she was probably breast fed the odds were pretty good, plus it was Queensland) We finally had her attention. Some ancient rivalry had stirred deep within at the mention of her arch nemesis the skinny giggling shop girls. With a mixture of disgust and hurt she uttered, “No one tells me anything,” before throwing her book down and leaving. I wondered if she should have at least thrown a bin out of a plate glass window before launching herself at the turbine of a jet engine.

Finally, once down stairs Richard and I could hear the unnerving voice over “THIS IS AN EMERGENCY. PLEASE EVACUATE IMMEDIATELY. BLAH BLAH BLAH SOMETHING ABOUT NOT SMASHING STUFF AND ACTING CALMLY.”

Apparently the food court upstairs didn’t have an adequate P.A. system. So Richard and I followed the masses outside all the time waiting for the sudden eruption of whatever death dealing device had prompted the evacuation. Unsurprisingly, and I must say thankfully, no event occurred and we returned through security half an hour later talking loudly about God, Biblical Exegesis and our theories about good looking women. Judging by the glances we were getting, several rules were apparently contravened about what can and can’t mention about God.

Next entry: The D.A.N. Conference. Warning: It’s probably going to be one of those serious sober entries. Then again I usually start off that way.

This is an advertisment for Levi Jeans and Aquatic Pepper Spray

Noticed I can put adsense on my blog site now. It is hassle free because it assesses what your content is about and determines what ads should go on your page. Incredible. What's more, they pay you. I am giddy with anticipation, everytime I write an entry it will be like Christmas, a new little billboard for each new topic I bring up to discuss. Like they say in the adsense help page if my blog space was all about baseball then the advertising would automatically match the predicted target audience.

Surprised to learn that many people know little about Dolphin Rape. Our friends in the ocean may undergo an image change in much the same way as those Steve Irwin murdering bastards, the Manta Ray... Rays.... murdering murderers who are called Manta Rays but only one did the murdering, so it's really Ray. Murderous murdering Ray the Manta Ray. Just... look... all I'm saying is just wear sensible pants when you go swimming - apparently black denim jeans are fairly safe, especially when they get wet, damn hard to get off and as far as dolphins go, they're clever, but a belt buckle and a sensible pair of denims... People got smart about Manta Rays...Ray.... Rays, putting on breast plates. Pinned to the bottom of the ocean makes it damn near impossible to get a barb in the heart. After a few drowings people just took to shooting them. The Manta Rays. In their barbs. Bastards. Steve Irwin murdering bastards.

And in other news Full Metal Sean is open for less that a week (and it's a great blog by the way...) and gets a post from Random Panda. Admittedly she accused him of stealing from her blog.... but like, I have been doing this for pretty much a year, in fact my second entry acknowledges Random Panda as someone who has inspired me to finally do the blog thing... and a year later I get a comment. A YEAR. LATER. Then she leaves a link to a picture of a tumor.
The future of meat eating. Well. I'm not... I am NOT... worried about the future of meat because you know what we can eat plenty of Rapist Dolphins and Murdering Manta Rays called Ray.

I so cannot wait to see what ads Adsense put on my blog.

Easter. Booyakasha!

Knee deep in Quokka Crap

That's me on the left - as you can see Quokkas are huge.


Going on camp tomorrow and thought I'd throw this together before anyone else read the previous blog and, well, contacted the authorities.

Rottnest island will be our destination with the 70, actually maybe 80, year 12 students. I'm running some seminars on stuff like happiness.

Here's an extract from the second seminar, just in case you thought you were missing out on somin'k.

Social isolation, the breakdown of community, has lead to sadness becoming pathological. Modern technologies and materialism ain’t doing much to help.

I came across an article that grabbed my attention, and while I didn’t entirely agree with the theory, the central tenets did address some of the things that I felt had gone wrong.

The article in question was from the Time magazine, written by the Evolutionary Psychologist Richard Wright. Evolutionary Psychology is as it sounds, an analysis of the way humans have developed and the way they best function within their environment. A lot of currency has been put into looking into the ancestral conditions humans found themselves.

In his article “Evolution of Despair”, Richard Wright describes his work as the “study of maladies resulting from contrasts between the modern environment and the “ancestral environment”, something he suggests being called ‘mismatch theory’.

Wright puts forward that we are designed for social cooperation, as it improves our chances of survival; natural selection has imbued our minds with an infrastructure for friendship; including affection, gratitude and trust.

Anxiety has a role to play in that having unpleasant feelings gets us into the next generation. Feeling ashamed or disappointed for actions taken that are not condoned by society are useful in causing us to stop and think. Bad feelings are natural.

What is not natural is going crazy: sadness to linger into debilitating depression, for anxiety to become chronic and paralyzing – these are diseases of the modern world.

IN trying to reconstruct the ancestral environment evolutionary psychologists have turned to technologically primitive society. One astonishing thing discovered was the low levels of cortisol (a by-product of anxiety) and when a Western Anthropologist tried to study depression amongst the Kaluli of New Guinea, he couldn’t find any.

The thing that turns sadness or dejection into pathology is social isolation.

It is tough living with social transparency. However the

Anthropologist Phillip Walker studied bones of more than 5000 children over a period of reaching back to 4000BC – he could find no evidence of scattered bone bruises. In modern society such bruises would be found on more that 1 in 20 children who die between the ages of 1-4. In the ancestral environment there is little mystery about what went on behind closed doors, because there simply weren’t any.

It is not urbanization that has so much been the problem, but suburbanization. The combination of transience and residential isolation leaves many people feeling along. The suburbs have been especially hard on women with young children. The Anthropologist Marjorie Shostak writing about life in an African hunter gatherer village that she did not come across isolated, bored mothers.

Evolutionary Psychology explains why modern feminist movement got it’s start after the suburbanization of the 1950s.

The 1963 book The Feminine Mystique apparently grew out of a conversation that the Betty Friedman with a stay at home mother in which the woman spoke with quiet desperation about the anger and the despair that Friedman came to call the problem with no name, and doctors came to call the housewife’s syndrome.

Harvard Professor Robert Putnam notes that the ultimate in isolating technology is the television. 28 hours (the average – which is highly likely to be more these days) in front of the TV is a lot of time bonding that you’re not doing.

Randolph Nesse, another evolutionary psychologist, points out that “Television can distort our self perception”. It is a fact that we compare ourselves with others, but now, we compete with the fantasy lives we see on television. Our own wives and husbands, fathers and mothers, sons and daughters can seem profoundly inadequate by comparison. So we are dissatisfied with them and even more so with ourselves.p.67

Timothy Miller in How to want what you have writes “The pursuit of more can keep us from better knowing our neighbors, better loving our kin – in general, from cultivating the warm affirmative side of human nature…People spend their lives honestly believing that they have almost enough of whatever they want. Just a little bit more will put them over the top; then they will be happy forever.”

The Worried Well

We are medicating our depression without asking why it is there. Gail Bell examines some of the factors, while Guy Rundle assesses the questionable values we have subscribed to.

Part of Gail Bell’s answer lies in re-examining the role that depression plays. Guy Rundle (executive producer of ABC arts) puts it well in his published response to Bell’s essay:

“Much of what is currently called ‘depression’ is a new and real social – psychological disorder, produced by widespread transformations of Western societies in the past three decades. In response to these transformations - in shorthand, the media revolution, and the changes to work and home life, and social space and culture – many of us have become more vulnerable to the onset of feelings that selfhood, existence and connection to others have been pulverized, and that meaning and contentment are not only absent, but impossible. ”p83

Rundle goes on to say

“ Our culture…has become one in which strength, aggressiveness, selfishness and hardness have become the cardinal virtues. The hard bodied ethos of the gym, the competitive nature of the contractual and outsourced work, the visibility of enormous wealth, the surgically enhanced standards of beauty, and the theme of social life as competition (a la Big Brother) have become central motifs. Even in areas of public emotional life – pop music, TV shows like Oprah – the ‘touchy feely’ content is frequently subsumed under the idea of shaping oneself for maximum success…(We are)…one step on from “greed is good” – it is not money per se, but power, recognition and the capacity to “make a mark” that one shapes oneself towards…What could be worse than admitting something is wrong”p.86

Richard Wright would say that it is social isolation, the breakdown of community that has created an environment of despair.

Gail Bell, and further Guy Rundle put it down in part to the changes of our values that are unsustainable in light of the destruction they are causing.

Ok... move on now, go watch some Beat Takeshi or listen to Arcade Fire...

Eating people is wrong I think

I convinced my Year Nine students that there was nothing wrong with eating human flesh….

No, really.

It all started innocently enough. I wanted to challenge their world view and they wandered into my classroom with something that smelt a lot like ambivalence.

I smell it when I walk to work past the dog kennels after it has rained.

But yes, we talked about the values present in other cultures and someone rolled their eyes. Eye rolling is the equivalent of someone producing a small side arm and firing it at heavily armed militia.

I proceeded as one who stood little to lose.

“Yes… well, seeing we are merely a sophisticated animal, and people eat animals, I can’t see the harm of eating a human being.”

Laughter.

“No really, I wouldn’t kill a human being, like murder someone and proceed to eat them. But you know, just eating them.”

Less laughter, but nevertheless laughter.

“No, like if they wanted to be euthanized or painlessly removed from this life then sure I’d eat them. Why waste perfectly good flesh.”

Almost silence now. I’m wondering when I will stop.

Student: What do people taste like?

“Well (clearly I have no intention of stopping until I’m sitting before a disciplinary committee), contrary to what some people will tell you, human flesh tastes like really salty pork.”

I screw up my face at this point.

“But I’ve found that if you soak it, or better yet stew it, it comes up ok.”

And now to really drive home the horror. I start by laughing quietly.

“Of course, the wonderful thing is I can say all of this to you and you won’t believe me. Then again even if you did believe me what are you going to do about it? You’re Westerners. You’ll listen, be morally outraged and then wander off to the next thing that distracts you. You won’t actually do anything. Will you?”

There is no laughter. Someone shifts uncomfortably in their chair, and my slightly glazed eyes roll over to them whence upon a leer a slight smile. “Don’t worry, I won’t eat any of you. You’re fee paying students… Of course, you go and get yourselves expelled then all bets are off… but I’m just saying, until that day comes... and I trail off. Heck, some of the students even debated quietly amongst themselves whether or not it was illegal to eat another human being. I did not get the last laugh though. I had a gander at the student’s journal writing after my class. This particular entry was written by a quaint little red headed girl.

"If you/people want to eat other people that would be alright, just don't tell anyone"

Sometimes I lie awake at night thinking about the things I’ve done. Sometime.

White Trash and Dogs

Tanya has also got into mud wrestling. That may come as a surprise to many of you as I could imagine as you might see it as improper or trashy. But you’ve got to understand that “White Trash” is really big at the moment. Pole Dancing, Speed Dating, Crystal Meth, heck if it’s good enough for Kate Moss… (though she did coke) Of course it’s not real mud. It’s that health spa stuff, and the rules are basically 1. “Don’t pull hair” 2. “Stop if the other person ceases to move”, except they don’t use the word ‘cease’ because it confuses some of the participants. Instead the instructors use phrases like “please stop if you think the other person is dead”.

Actually this is all a lie. She does go to the gym though. And some of the people she knows do pole dancing. And some of those people do it on the grounds that it’s for fitness. And please don’t write to me about using a conjunction at the start of a sentence because it’s all the rage with White Trash.

And now to mistakes. We were sitting round with some friends who were talking about buying a dog. During the discussion they mentioned that one of the pups they had seen was going to be put down because it suffered from a slipping patella. It was a Fox Terrier pup worth $600, getting chucked out because of a dodgy knee. Hope these people never open a nursing home. Anyway, these folk were going to give the dog away if someone would take care of him. Have I mentioned that Fox Terriers are bred to kill foxes. Anyway I went to check him out. My friend directed my attention to this cute little dog, actually handed it to me to hold. We bonded immediately. My friend, Giff, and I sat amongst the two pups that were left. This dog seemed absolutely fantastic, much better than the other idiot pup that lumbered around like Frankenstein’s monster - tearing the place up. Damn thing also took a piece out of my thumb – idiot. I expressed my satisfaction with the animal to the owners and my surprise that no one liked it. I was promptly handed Frankenstein’s monster. The damn thing one. The idiot.

There was an awkward silence. Followed by another.

The desire to express the thought that perhaps destroying him was for the best was left unspoken and Giff and I proceeded home with Frankenstein's monster; just to see if he got on with everyone. He stayed the night and the new dog and our old dog (car accident survivor veteran) got on quite well. What I omit to mention is what stands as substantially more significant. My wife and the new dog did not get on quite well. Ollie (short for Oliver – my daughter’s idea) couldn’t speak English at all and never understood what Tanya meant by “I hope he doesn’t dig up the plants”. Of course if he did understand I could only put it down to the fact his knee was causing him terrible pain and he didn’t wish to live any longer. Suffice to say he should be called a tree/shrub terrier In hindsight I should have given him a couple of foxes to tear up.

The other intriguing thing is Ollie is quite vengeful when it comes to reticulation. Something about the way they jump out the ground when he least expects it and wets him. Just him, not the grass, or the trees, or the house or the other dog. Just him. So he waits until everything goes quite and then he digs up the reticulation. Every other morning I wake up to the tirade of abuse my wife directs at Ollie about some such thing. These vary now. Clothes pulled off the line, barking rudely, jumping up on a fresh cleaned pair of pants, eating something he shouldn’t, not being dead. But the reticulation was the stone end. I thought “Right, he needs to be set straight”.

Tanya had left the house and I smashed a window.

That’s a bit of a jump in the story, but I’m worried I am going on, so I thought I would get to the point. I walked out to the sight of Ollie tearing up reticulation. Coffee in hand I yelled out "Oi". Ollie did not respond to my clearly articulated requests to desist. So I tapped the window with my shoe/boot.

Glass, pretty lame stuff really. Who would have thought? Great to look through, not that resilient. Dog stopped digging though. Getting showered in glass kind of got his attention. It was like an action movie. The only thing missing was a bad guy getting tossed through the window. That happened later when Tanya heard my story. Sure, I come out looking like a lunatic. “So, you got angry at the dog and smashed the window?”

“Not in that order, but yes.”

Shop Girl - Dodgy Old Men

Don't want this to turn into a 'film blog' but I really have to write a little note on this amazing film.

The girl who rented this to me mentioned that it left her a little lost and that it was a weird film. I totally connected with this film ( and please watch all of it, don't march over and turn it off - slowly realizing that Limb is a pervert) and found it to be a thing of beauty.

It is a brave move for Steve Martin because it leaves him not looking so great. That, for me was part of the beauty. In what starts off looking like an exercise in self aggrandizement spirals into something quite the opposite. I won't say much more other than Claire Danes is beautiful. Watch it to see someone who can act - portraying so much through very subtle facial change. Of course there are not so subtle moments - but it is a film that lingers. the soundtrack plays a huge part in that.

I have to warn some of you that if you decide to watch this film, be prepared to have your values challenged. It is a love story between a 26 year old and a 50 year old, and yes I most assuredly cringed. There's a whole lot of in your face stuff here - but as the film draws to it's conclusion I thought the insights about Lust and Love what we think we want and what we need are beautifully portrayed. It is heartbreaking to see Martin's self inflicted isolation as the revelation dawns on him. So many men in his position - well, maybe not anywhere as rich. The voice over jars and I don't think it is necessary but then what are you gonna do. And yeah you can tear the film apart. But this is my blog, and I'll cuddle bags of poo if I so please.

One day I'll go on about Miller's Crossing. Watched it again the other night and it still sits there as my all time favorite film. And you care because....