

Year of the Rant

Part Three: Spring Loaded

Spring, 2013.

By Lachlan Barker

Copyright 2014 by Lachlan Barker

Smashwords Edition

With thanks to all those who continue to read this rubbish weekly.

# Contents

1 - Machine Gunning Gnats

2 - Collingwood, how do I loathe thee? Let me count the ways

3 - Let me park the yurt and I'll come right in

4 - Filthy lucre

5 - Even filthier advertising

6 - I live in paradise, but I still love a good whinge

7 - A funny man with a dirty surfboard

8 - Superchicken and the Utopia complex

9 - Well this is how 'I' think you should run your network

10 - Isn't it time that John Howard shut up?

11 - There is no news today - except how F%*^ing bad Independence Day was

12 - Showers contracting to the north-east corner

13 - Well, why'd you bloody ask then?

About the Author

More Works by Lachlan Barker

Connect with Lachlan

Read the first chapter of Lachlan's first fiction work – The Destruction of Lasseter's Road

1 – Machine Gunning Gnats

These shallots seemed happy, they started flowering.

Henry David Thoreau's famous quote is "the mass of men lead lives of quiet desperation".

Thoreau wrote these words in 1854, and the sentiment is still relevant today.

Together we can paraphrase it to "the mass of people" to include everyone, but again the essence is there.

When, as I am constantly told to, we compare our lot with those in the third world, we certainly would seem to have the fixings for happiness, yet we in the overfed and apparently overpaid first world are constantly unhappy and perennially running to our therapist moaning about our lot.

This seems to be mostly to do with money, and is best put by Doug Adams.

"This planet has — or rather had — a problem, which was this: most of the people living on it were unhappy for pretty much of the time.

Many solutions were suggested for this problem, but most of these were largely concerned with the movements of small green pieces of paper, which is odd because on the whole it wasn't the small green pieces of paper that were unhappy."

I as you know am perpetually crying poor, yet on a world scale I am well off.

My friend Lloyd, now sadly dead, gave it his spin by saying "whatever you earn, you spend".

And it was certainly true that even when I was living in the corporate world of Sydney and earning six figures, I still had to go through the pockets of my pants on Sunday night, scrabbling up gold coins, to pay for pizza.

To counterpoint this, P.J.O'Rourke points out that by having money and using it to make our lives more comfortable, we are living longer.

So is money, or our perceived lack thereof, the cause of our general society-wide, unhappiness?

Well it's unquestionably a factor, it certainly stresses me out when I hear a new noise from the car and immediately jump to the conclusion that the head gasket is going and how god damn much is this gonna cost me?

But then a friend of Lloyd's and myself, Mark, has this philosophy, "Are you gonna die today? No, then things aren't that bad".

So what's the point of all this?

Well this morning I am very depressed, and I am not sure why.

Previously I reported being unhappy because I was working too hard.

Well today I have a day off.

Sometimes I am anxious and can't park the car on a hill in case it rolls away and gets damaged, well I can see my car from where I type this and it is completely intact.

I didn't drink heavily, or indeed at all, last night, or smoke any pot, so there is no chemical cause for a Monday depression.

What then is going on?

Some of the greatest minds have tried to describe depression and failed miserably, not because they were bad writers or ignorant of the problem, but simply because..., well already we are in the hopeless mire of trying to talk about depression.

I once asked Paula, my wonderfully knowledgeable therapist if she knew what depression was, and she replied, "the whole mind itself is still a mystery".

Thus a small component of a malfunctioning mind is enigmatic to say the least.

However JFK once said of the space race, "we don't do this because it is easy, but because it is hard."

So now I am going to add my name to the list of those who have tried and failed to describe depression.

It helps me to write about it, and it may help someone out there who has always wondered if they are "down" or are indeed, "depressed".

I'll start with something I heard on QI, which was; studies have shown that we all have a "resting" state of happiness.

The example was of two people, one wins the lottery and has more money than they know what to do with and the other is involved in a car accident and is paralysed.

To my considerable surprise, the studies showed that after some time, both these people move back to the approximate level of happiness they inhabited before these events.

Thus the lottery winner, after some months of partying, paying off the mortgage and buying Ferraris, went back to having the same worries as before, and likewise the other, now wheelchair-bound, subject of the study, began to once again concern themself with going grocery shopping and finding a park and whether their children's school was preparing their offspring adequately for the adult world.

Which I found fascinating as my immediate thought would be that both these events would change their lives forever, but, apparently not.

Thus it seems our resting levels of happiness are set in our adolescence, and therefore god help us all, as we all know of the turbulent hormone-fuelled chaos this period of our lives can be.

My primary thought about how to tell if you have depression is if it's mysterious.

That is, if something happens, e.g. the death of a loved one, you will be unhappy, and justifiably so.

Bad as this is, you can hang your low feelings on a readily discernible cause.

But even then it hardly clarifies things because we all know of people who "never get over it".

So although a particular event led to someone being down, if said event happened twenty years ago, is the person still justified in being down, or are they, to quote one of the zarking arseholes who parades around under the title of mental health worker, "just wallowing in it?"

Again, we can't know.

Stephanie Dowrick wrote that "depression doesn't cause suicide".

She clarifies by saying that, "when a person despairs that their depression is eternal, and then they commit suicide."

To illustrate that she writes: "If at some point in your young life a psychological arbiter of some kind visits you and says that you will suffer 800 hours of loneliness in your life, that wouldn't be great, but the upside is that like a prison sentence, you know when it will end."

The problem we all face with loneliness, depression and despair, is that when you are in it, your immediate thought is that this is how I will feel for the rest of my life.

One of the factors in teen suicide I have no doubt, with many a teenager starting to think that they faced sixty more years of this, and couldn't take the pain.

And my main feeling of depression is of a paradoxical world, where nothing, just nothing made sense, and every single thought was diametrically conflicted by the thought immediately after it.

When I was in bed, I didn't want to get up, once awake I never wanted to go to bed.

When at home I never wanted to go out, when out I never wanted to go home.

If I was smoking a cigarette, I often, like a Martin Amiss character, wanted another cigarette.

If I was eating, I never wanted to stop, if I wasn't I never wanted to start.

I constantly thought if only I had a relationship I wouldn't be lonely, but recalled that some of the bleakest periods of my life were being alone and bereft as half a couple.

Once drunk I clearly never wanted to feel anyone than other than the joy of joie-de-vivre brought on by my Pan Galactic Gargle Blasters, but, paradoxically, even as I approached the summit of alcoholic joy, knew that the crash and roll down the other side was coming, with first the depressive effects during, and the hangover after, to come.

When my car was in for repairs I would think if only I had my car back my life would be more manageable, but the moment it was back on the forecourt I would use it to buy booze then not go out in it for days.

I would say "if only there was some good surf I would be happy", but then I would check the surf and even if the surf was good, make that little speech, "it's not so good, think I'll just sit on my porch and drink".

Even sitting still was blown apart by the conflicted mindset of depression.

On the one hand everyone told me I should meditate, but then when I did, my parent's voices would crash through the reverie and scream "you can't sit down, you must work hard constantly."

NB: This was rich, particularly from my mother, who never did a moment's hard work in her damn life.

When working hard I would feel my mental state collapsing and knew I should sit down and read a book, but knew that as soon as I did I'd feel guilty about not working.

I was too tired to sleep and too exhausted to stay awake.

Often I was so angry I would punch whatever was handy, the walls of my tent were common, at other times I would start crying when I saw a developmentally delayed person playing happily with a balloon, I still do not understand why this was, perhaps a grief at how sad the world can be, though even this was a paradox as well as developmentally delayed persons often find happiness in the simplest things, a pretty balloon for example.

Once I scaled the mental Everest of driving to the coast and putting on my wetsuit I would go surfing and once out there never want to come in.

However sometimes a crowd would form, or a big wave would smash me backwards and I would retreat and never want to go in the ocean again.

I could go on but won't.

If you are down and there is no readily discernible reason, this could be depression.

If you are riven with paradoxes, this is another.

A common example is a person married with two wonderful kids, a mortgage, a "good" job, a nice car and to all appearances having got it made, yet they burst into tears once a week or more as soon as they are alone.

This person may have a mental illness and indeed depression, and are now finding that the goals set out by society aren't making them happy.

If you are troubled by thoughts that are unwelcome and general "low" feeling, think of seeing someone about it.

Anyone here in Australia can see a mental health professional through their GP.

I started this blog as therapy, and it has definitely helped.

If one day I learn that someone reading this didn't kill themselves, or even got it together to seek mental health treatment, that's good enough for me.

So I'll leave you with something that helped me, and indeed is why I am a gardener today.

One of the things that used to fascinate me as a child was the way plants would emerge every year in the still freezing Bathurst spring.

As I hid under the bed and waited out the next of my parents' cyclonic rages I would think of those plants and it helped me endure.

I began to check, like Thomas Jefferson of an earlier age, for the first blossoms and flowers of the spring, often pushing through the frost or snow.

I would stare at those plants and marvel to myself 'how tough are these things!', it is barely liveable out here, and these plants aren't just living, but bursting into flower.

All my life I have heard conversations and discussions about who is the toughest footy player, who is the hardest man.

Well, for me the toughest of the lot, and the greatest role model of them all is daffodils growing through the snow.

2 - Collingwood, how do I loathe thee? Let me count the ways.

The title of this post is paraphrased from English poet Elizabeth Barratt Browning's famous poem, "How do I love thee?".

And it's relevant because this post all started with this odd spelling mix on the one street sign.

You see, the streets of Byron Bay are named after poets (mostly).

Thus we have Keats, Shelley, Browning, Kipling, Burns, Jonson and so forth.

Mostly the names are Englishmen and one English woman, Browning herself, but two Australians made the cut, A.B. "Banjo" Paterson and Henry Lawson.

So I found this sign a little confusing, I checked with my fave search engines and Banjo's surname is spelled with one 'T', so what's going on with Patterson Lane?

Probably just one of those things, when the order came up to the sign writer he didn't know how to spell it and so bunged it down the same way his mate John Patterson spelled it.

I might add in my nerdlish way that Paterson is the ultimate in redundancy for a surname.

As Peterson means "son of Peter", Paterson is a latin-english amalgam and means "father's son", a self-evident truth if ever there was one.

Look, it's an Eastern Grey

I-don't-understand-you.

Pater is latin for father, best known to most of us in the term, paternity suit, in which the biological father of a child is determined to the satisfaction of the court.

So a Paterson can say, "I am my father's son."

And we can reply, "thanks for the update, can we get you on Mastermind, special subject 'the bleeding obvious'!"

But then the names of things here in Australia have been a fertile field for confusion and humour.

There is a story, now sadly lost to the mists of time that Kangaroo means, "I don't understand you" in the indigenous dialect of Sydney cove.

Apparently a settler asked a native, "What do you call that animal there?" and the indigenous local replied bemusedly, "Kangaroo".

Elsewhere in Byron we have Marvell st.

When I first saw this I thought for a heart-skippingly joyous second that the street was named for Marvel Comics, of which Spiderman is probably the most famous character.

However upon closer look I saw that Marvel comics are spelled with one 'L' and the street with two.

Turns out that the street was named for English poet Andrew Marvell, much less interesting in my opinion.

(And believe me, there is nothing in the history of the human race less interesting than a seventeenth century metaphysical poet. High school English teachers please note.)

So, sadly we don't have streets named after interesting characters like the Silver Surfer, but just think how cool would it be to live in Spiderman Street or Captain America Court?

Also here in Byron is this very minor confusion for map navigators.

The road sign (top) indicates that the beach was once owned by someone called Watego.

But the second sign seems to be the correct spelling, having only gone in six months ago.

However, if you look really closely at the first picture you can see that the apostrophe in "Watego's" has been added later over the top of another letter, almost certainly an 'e', indicating that it was once spelt Wategoes.

So take your pick really, Wategos seems to be the correct spelling.

For now.

Then, all unknowingly, a sign war began, synchronised nicely with this post about street signs and confusion.

This sign was put up by a poor confused soul with limited intelligence and no friends, indicates that they are a supporter of the Richmond Aussie Rules team.

I snapped this pic on Friday last week.

Then Saturday came and Richmond were beaten by Carlton and are out of the playoffs for this year.

And reflecting this was a new sign put up on Monday indicating that the putter-up of the original sign has gained a hundred IQ points over the weekend, and are now supporting the Sydney Swans.

Abandoning the now defeated Tiges, they have gone over to the mighty Swans, and have therefore some chance of enjoying the fruits of victory. I was particularly impressed with the wrapping of the 'give way' sign in red and white Swan livery, which in itself is largely couloured red and white.

I would also like to point out that if this "change-like-the-weather" sign writer starts supporting Collingwood, then telegraph poles will burn!

But then the ultimate in street name confusion and road sign monkeyshines occurred in Swansea, Wales.

The local council asked for a sign to be translated into Welsh, which is the protocol to help keep Welsh an active language.

An email came back from the translator remarkably quickly and the text was sent down to the signage shed and the sign made, taken out and bolted into place on its required street.

Then the calls started from native Welsh speakers saying "did you check that translation properly?", turns out the Welsh reads: "I am not in the office at the moment. Send any work to be translated."

The translator had gone on holidays and her email autoreply had been taken as the Welsh needed for the sign and duly put up.

If you don't want to take my word for it on the welsh translation, all I can suggest is you visit Wales.

Anything goes there, I can assure you.
3 - Let me park the yurt and I'll come right in

Paul Sironen in action - who'd have thunk

it that he would be used in a

treatise on anarchy.

When I first moved out of my bucolic home town in the country to the cosmopolitan pulse of Sydney, it slowly began to dawn on me that there was a different life possible, and that Bathurst wasn't the centre of thought, as my parents had led me to believe.

This was first brought home to me by a piece of graffiti I saw on a bridge in Petersham in Sydney's inner west, in the heart of Balmain Rugby League Club territory.

On the bridge some inner city radical had written, "The only thing we have to fear is institutionalised anarchy".

Under which some else had written, "And ".

And truly Paul Sironen was the most frightening player in the league at that time.

With a playing weight of 17st (107kg) and standing 6'4" (a smidge under 2m) he was frightening to behold even when watching from the stands.

Whether he was more frightening than institutionalised anarchy I didn't know, then or now, but it was really the wittiness of the graffiti that got me.

Here in Sydney even writing on a bridge was a cut above anything I had heard or seen in Bathurst.

And just across the uni campus was another bit of snappy rejoinding.

A fundamentalist Christian had written, "god hates hommos" (he meant homos, of course, short for homosexuals), under which, possibly the same paint spraying wit from the Petersham bridge, had added, "but does he like tabouleh?"

I think that's where my love of the english language and its fertile grounds for humour began.

So likewise I was impressed with this I read in Reader's Digest.

A sign in a campus eatery said "Shoes are required to eat in the cafeteria", under which some student had put, "socks can eat wherever they want".

And so to my recent trip to Possum Creek to mow Joanne's lawn, as I whipper-snipped down at the front end of her property I saw this sign indicating "Yurt Parking".

It of course refers to where guests who are attending an activity in the yurt, yoga, meditation and hula are three of them, are to park and uses economy of words to fit on the sign, but more accurately it states that mobile yurts can be parked here.

Which then made me think, are there any mobile yurts?

In it's original form it was the first mobile home, a heavy felt tent used by horse people of the tundra, but then, somewhat to my surprise, I discovered that the sign put up by Joanne's landlady Ruth may have been more accurate than I thought.

A yurt on wheels. They could park it at Possum creek.

And so I'll end this section with the best piece of signage I ever saw, it was a headline in the Macleay Argus at Kempsey.

But first the almost mandatory digression.

Elvis Costello was so in love with the Mental as Anything song, "If you leave me, can I come too?", that he said he would have given anything to haven written that title.

And likewise, I was in the bowling club at Kempsey one day when I saw a clipping from the Argus pinned to the noticeboard.

It was a story about a dispute between the women members of the club and the local council about the positioning of their new bowling green.

The dispute was hotting up and the headline read, "Ladies in white see red in blue over green".

Like Elvis Costello, I would have considered my newspaper career a success if I had written anything as good as that.

I've worked in newspapers for a chunk of my working life, and in my time I've seen some good and appalling uses of English, and, I might add, everything I learned about correct written english, such as it is, came from my training as a journalist.

None of it came from HSC English, what a waste of bloody time that was.

For instance there is no point learning grammar.

Or at the very least, if you are going to teach grammar, you can't mark anyone wrong, for anything.

Let me explain.

English grammar rules are based on latin, and two of the better known ones, you can't end a sentence with a preposition and you can't split an infinitive, are only loose guidelines, not rules, in latin to make the sentence more elegant.

If someone said to you "I wasn't happy with his behaviour, but."

It's not elegant, but wrong it is not. (NB: I just ended that sentence with a preposition.)

In my mind English usage is only wrong if the listener cannot understand what you mean.

Here are a couple of examples.

If you say "I looked out of the window", some persnicketty English teacher would say that is incorrect usage, you are supposed to say, "I looked through the window".

Also, there was a game show a while back called the Weakest Link in which contestants would be eliminated one by one through a general knowledge quiz.

As each participant was eliminated the host would say "you are the weakest link", and off they would go.

But as some wit wrote in to Viz comic, when the game got down to the last two the host should say, "you are the weaker link".

Somehow when there are only two things, weaker becomes the term, not weakest.

Then there is this business of labelling terms to make it "easier"(!) to learn grammar.

Thus we learn nouns, verbs and adjectives.

However, due to the infinite flexibility of english words, even this quickly descends into the murk.

Take colours.

Green is an adjective, everyone knows that, thus, "The apple is green."

But once you take to the golf course, green becomes a noun, "my second shot landed on the green."

Then you can make it an verb, "I'm going to green up my garden before I put it on the market."

Blue.

Adjective: "The ocean is blue."

Noun: "I got in a blue."

Verb: "I blued him till he couldn't stand up."

Black.

Adjective: "The night sky is black."

Noun: (racist) "He is a black."

Verb: "I'm going to black my boots."

And so it goes with the almost infinite malleability of english.

The lexical yoga champ is the word fuck.

in the sentence, "The fucking fucker's fucking fucked it." the F-word fills every category and then some.

And while I'm here.

There is a common story that the word 'Fuck' started as an acronym "For Unlawful Carnal Knowledge", scrawled on police blotters when taking notes on a case.

It is completely untrue.

The F-word stems from the latin word 'futuo: to make love' and has been in use in english since the twelfth century.

The first modern police force was founded in London in 1829 by John Peel, and thus post dates the word by a mere four hundred years.

As you can imagine English was not my favourite subject at school, like many boys and men, I liked the certainty of maths and science.

I still can't understand, though I have a few good guesses, why English is the only compulsory subject in the HSC.

My logic was: you have to go to school to learn maths, you have to go to school to learn Geography, Science, Commerce, Home Science, Woodwork, Metalwork and so on.

But what's the only thing you already know before you get to high school?

English.

You may argue, what about the children of immigrants to this country, they have to go to high school to learn english, don't they?

Well, they do, but they attend English as a Second Language (ESOL) classes and learn far more useful things than we ever did in English.

Also, if English wasn't compulsory, then a lot, and I mean a lot, of people with arts degrees would be out of a job.

So for those of you still reading I will end with some sample HSC (Australia's equivalent of the SATs) English questions and the answers I would have dearly, sorely, loved to have written.

A reading of Letters to Alice changes the modern responder's understanding of Pride and Prejudice. Discuss with reference to both texts.

The dog ate both my copies of these texts, and really I don't care.

Explore how perceptions of belonging and not belonging can be influenced by connections to places.

In your response, refer to your prescribed text and at least ONE other related text of your own choosing.

See above answer re fate of my texts, and really I still don't care.

Explore how Great Expectations and ONE other related text of your own choosing represent conflicting perspectives in unique and evocative ways.

I am still trying to find a stomach pump for my dog and further more, I really, really don't care.

4 - Filthy lucre

Who'd have thought that Radiohead would be

advanced thinkers in the field of economics?

I would like to think I am not hung up on money, I certainly don't want to be as rich as Rupert Murdoch, but, as you know well, I don't want to be spending the rest of my life listening with frantic intent to the sounds of my car, praying that no new rattle or thunk emerges to disturb the equanimity of my days.

Paul Barrie on Media Watch did say though that "we should be prepared to pay for good journalism", and so, I have at least put the link there so anyone can donate if they feel like it.

NB: Whether my gibberings can be described as good is another question, but I can categorically say that I am a better journalist than anyone at The Telegraph.

So what have Radiohead got to do with this?

Well I, like many, was impressed when Radiohead, maddened no doubt by the lengths record companies were going to try to protect the music they had payed so much for, put their latest album up on the web and asked people to pay what they thought it was worth.

I cannot find any source to tell me what, if anything, people paid for it, but I hope it was fair.

Which reminds me of another little piece of economic mastery that the all governments across the world would do well to contemplate.

My friend Antony the super engineer was telling me that an engineer he knew did a study on Sydney's train system.

It was discovered that it would be cheaper for the taxpayer if all train rides were free.

The amount of money spent on turnstiles, ticketing, and inspectors to see that you have bought your ticket, is so massive that it completely eclipses the mere costs of making the trains move.

On the topic, probably the most famous quote to do with money is, "money is the root of all evil".

However, as I learned on a gardening course of all places, the full quote is: "The love of money is the root of all evil."

Another odd character to find espousing valid

economic theory - Michael Palin in Fierce Creatures.

Which I think you would agree is a different matter entirely.

Being hung up on how much money you have is a recipe for unhappiness.

And as Michael Palin's character in Fierce Creatures said to the boss, a caricature of Rupert Murdoch, "how much is enough?"

And likewise it is something I have always wondered, how much is enough?

When I was working in the corporate world of Sydney, I used to hang around with a lot of rich people.

Some of them thought nothing of spending $500 on a Friday night for drinks, pokies, dinner and cabs back and forth across Sydney.

One of them came into the bar one Friday and announced he had just exchanged contracts for a one-bedroom unit in Bondi costing $900,000.

I was earning six figures myself and boy, is that world a long way away.

I don't want to write anything trite about "but was I really happy?", (I can assure you that at ten pm on a Friday night with ten beers under the belt and a load of glamourous women in the bar, I was certainly episodically happy), but it was the period when I first began to contemplate the idea that once you began to earn money, at what point do you stop?

Well there is no answer to this, but an often quoted breakpoint is when you've paid off the mortgage.

However, you can't stop there because you've got to keep earning money for ongoing maintenance and repair, then there are the rates, then insurance, then your kids have to go to college, then you crash your car and need another one.

And so it goes seemingly eternally.

So how much is enough is a question in the realms of 'if a tree falls in the forest', but I will give you a few examples.

A guy I played soccer with at Uni was a classic figure of well-to-do north shore.

Private school then Economics/Law at Sydney Uni.

On graduating he then went to work for the Macquarie Bank, the so-called "millionaires factory", and after some years there he quit and went white water rafting for the rest of his life.

I don't know if he became a millionaire, though I strongly suspect he did, but to his credit he said, "this is enough", and went out and paddled a lot of trout streams.

I might add Keith was telling me that he went to the Snowies in summer one year for a white water session but found that the drought had lowered the river levels to the point where even a kayak scraped the rocks, so they set their kayaks up next to the road and paddled against the stop watch to at least get some fitness training.

It provided tourists driving past with some wacky photos at least.

Another example was a Canadian friend, Dean, whom I worked with at Greenpeace in Vancouver.

Dean had worked with a merchant bank for some years, earning in the realms of $250,000, but eventually he didn't say, "how much is enough?", but "I've had enough".

He woke up one morning and realised he couldn't give the tiniest shit about the movements of money and so quit.

Dean was telling me that he had taped the word 'ignore' over 'hold' on his phone, showing the first cracks in his ability to deal with customers.

While he was looking around for something to do he began working with Greenpeace and used his mighty sales and administration skills to earn Greenpeace a lot of money.

And it has to be said, he did become happier.

He worked four days a week, attracted the attention of all the women in the office and rode his push bike vast distances (to California once) in the company of his German friend Tomas.

And so to myself, as ever.

When my father retired from Charles Sturt Uni he attended some retiree seminars and one thing he was strongly advised not to do was move.

The idea of retiring and then moving to the coast, or somewhere nicer, is often fatal as you get there and don't know anyone.

Understanding the sense of this I 'retired' at age 39 and moved to the place I had always wanted to live, Byron Bay.

Now when my knees are too creaky for me to weed and my wrist no longer closes the secateurs with needed force, I am in the right place for my retirement.

Do I have enough money? No, but I am as happy as anyone with my childhood can be.

If you have any further interest in economics and the cycles of cash, then I recommend this book, Eat the Rich, by P.J.O'Rourke.

In it he travels the world to try to discover why some countries are rich and some poor.

For instance, Tanzania has more mineral wealth than Canada, yet lies in the bottom fifty of the world's countries by wealth.

Albania fell to the absolute bottom thanks to government condoned pyramid schemes, and with the breakdown of internal economics and then the rule of law, the military began selling their weapons to buy food, ultimately leading to the First Bank of Albania being robbed using a tank.

Economics it has been famously said is at best a pseudo-science.

It has lots of jargon and plenty of equations, but predictive outcomes, none.

To expand on that.

A chemist can tell you if you add these two chemicals, in these two amounts, at these conditions, this reaction will occur.

Thus if you park your car near the ocean every day for six months, oxidation of the ferrous metals, or rusting will occur.

Economists can take the same economic system, with the same inputs of labour and capital, and get a different outcome each time.

As someone once put it best, "economists can't tell you what will happen tomorrow, but can tell you why you why they were wrong yesterday".

So to close with, in my opinion, the best fable I ever heard about the pursuit of the money.

A man lived on the coast of Portugal and fished each day to feed his family.

One day an agent from a major bank in Lisbon was touring the area and got talking with the fisherman.

The fisherman was saying that the downside to his life was that some days he caught nothing and his family went hungry.

Other days the ocean was too rough and he couldn't go out at all, and likewise hunger was the order of the day.

So the bank agent says, "well if my bank loans you some money, you could buy a bigger boat and a freezing plant, then you could catch a lot in one go, freeze a load, then sell the rest to pay off the loan."

To which the fisherman says, "What then?"

So the agent says, "well if it goes well, you could then buy a second boat and employ another fisherman to work it, then you would make even more money."

Again the fisherman replies, "and then?"

"Well", responds the agent, "if it goes really well, you can have a fleet of fishing boats, and you don't have to go out at all, just stay in the office and administer your fleet."

The fisherman nods and says, "and then what?"

And the agent replies, "Well then when you've made enough, you can retire and just go fishing."

Says it all really.
5 - Even filthier advertising

This week I thought I would return to actively moaning about something in real time, and those who know me well will already guess the subject, yes, commercial television.

On Saturday I was watching the Aussie rules grand final when alcohol ads popped up on the screen, the first at 4:13pm, then two more before 5.

I'd like to reiterate that I have not suddenly got a bug up my arse about booze because I am off it, but advertising alcohol during the aussie rules grand final, when a large percentage of underage sports fans, largely male, are watching, is, in my opinion, morally wrong.

Is it illegaI?

Well, no.

Although the times alcohol ads are shown on the weekend are listed as children's viewing times (see pic), a staffer at Media Watch said in her email, "I'm pretty sure that sports programs, even in PG time, allow advertising for alcohol."

Of course.

There's always a loophole.

Anyway, I've contacted the broadcasting authority and the alcohol companies involved and will report back when I've been ignored.

I might add, when I began to do my research for this story I went to the Jim Beam, VB and Bundy Rum websites and they have a piffling security on the front to stop anyone under the age of 18 entering the site, and, on the Bundy site you can buy alcohol online.

This seems the height of hypocrisy to me, guarding the website, then advertising on free-to-air TV when persons under the age of 18 are watching.

Mind you, I recall hearing somewhere a good saying for those of us who take on something as almighty as the alcohol industry: "If you think you're too small to make a difference, try getting an ant in your wetsuit."

As a surfer I have had this experience and I can tell you that I knew that ant was there.

Whatever the TV stations and alcohol companies say though, (Most likely response: "Fuck off") I would like to postulate this, what if we banned alcohol ads totally?

We once had ads for tobacco and then they were banned, did that lower the sales?

No.

People who wanted their cigarettes knew where to buy them.

Likewise with alcohol, if there were no ads surely anyone who wanted a drink would still know where to go and get some.

The bottle shop is still on the corner, the pub is still down the road.

Later Mail

I have to update things here and give out a few bouquets.

Jennifer Howard from VB got back to me, which as I've alluded to above, I didn't think would happen, and made this point: the marketing department at VB do at least create ads that do not have children in them, they do not use no cartoon figures, which attract children's attention, and ensure that their ads do not target children.

I made my point that I don't think that there should be any alcohol ads on before 8.30pm and to her credit, she said she would take this point on notice.

Alex Churcher from BM marketing who run the Jim Beam ads has likewise read my emails about the scheduling of alcohol ads and is likewise taking my points on notice.

Channel 10 have proved very receptive to my perpetual whining an have done two things, whether they have anything to do with me I do not know.

But.

I asked channel 10 to remove those logos from the corner of the picture during programming time, they are not illegal, the ABC does something similar, they were just bloody annoying, and they have done that, the promos now appear for a short period on return from the ad break.

It is much less intrusive and has lowered my blood pressure considerably.

On Wednesday night the 2nd of October Channel 10 ran gambling advertising before 8.30pm.

I moaned to them on Thursday via electronic means and the next night there were no gambling ads on before 8.30pm.

Thank You Channel 10.

I then contacted the Parliamentary Secretary for Communications, the Hon Paul Fletcher, and asked him:

"Dear Paul,  
Currently there is a regulation to allow alcohol advertising within  
live sports broadcasts, during children's viewing times, typically on  
weekends before 8.30pm.  
Is there any move to remove this loophole so no alcohol can be  
advertised till after 8.30pm?"

So far I have not had a reply.

Bundy rum and BWS haven't got back to me in any form.

Anyway all of this moaning prompted Clinton, who's set top box I am currently watching, to say, "I'm gonna take that thing off you if you don't stop complaining. Anyway why do you watch commercial TV if it makes you so angry?"

His point is well taken, why do I watch commercial TV if it causes chips of enamel to fly from my grinding teeth?

Sadly, they are the only ones who can afford some of the shows I enjoy, The Simpsons, Big Bang Theory, Modern Family and the like.

I can assure you one of my most fevered wishes is that the ABC buy The Simpsons and then my eternal happiness would be complete, The Simpsons without ads, "Oh what a wonderful world".

Elsewhere, one of my favourite shows, Housos, on SBS finished this week, I was momentarily downcast, but, seemingly as ever with SBS, they replaced it with something just as good: Legally Brown.

I've reported elsewhere that Big Brother is one of my tips for the most moronic shows in history, The Bachelor competes, but even these two abominations are put in the shade by Jersey Shore and Geordie Shore, my only acquaintance with these is seeing the promos with the mute button on, but that is certainly enough to see how bad they are.

I am not trying to say bogans can't go out and drink heavily, I am saying that I'd like a few moments alone in a room with the cosmically-sized cretin who decided to film their antics and put it on TV.

Thus, I was mightily impressed when Legally Brown did an exquisite send up called Muslim Shore.

If interested you can find it at http://www.sbs.com.au/ondemand/video/46943811570/Legally-Brown-Muslim-Shore

So in closing I will be monitoring the rugby league grand final this weekend and recording every alcohol ad that comes on before 8.30pm.

Then with my careful documentation I will officially complain to the station I saw it on and look forward to another week of being ignored.

As stated above, things have already moved on and I haven't been ignored.

Feels weird to be not in a perpetual state of whingeing!
6 - I live in paradise, but I still love a good whinge

Lisa Simpson – "complain till you get what you want".

Among my many favourite Simpsons episodes was one where Lisa and her school band take part in a competition.

They compete with Shelbyville in the final, and though the rules carefully state 'no glow sticks', the Shelbyvillians use them and this visual aid is enough to get them over the line to win the comp.

Lisa, Spingfield's best young sax player is incensed, and sets out to change the decision.

Eventually she escalates her complaint all the way up to the Oval office and Bill Clinton himself comes to town and reverses the decision.

At the end of the ep, Marge says to Bill Clinton, "So the lesson here is complain till you get what you want? That's a pretty lousy lesson".

To which Bill replies, "well I was a pretty lousy president".

Actually, neither of these two assertions is true.

Bill Clinton was not a lousy president.

Despite what Republicans will tell you, Bill did an Ok job, including balancing the books, something that hadn't happened for a long time.

Also, "Complain till you get what you want", isn't that bad either.

None of us like to be labelled a complainer, or worse, a whinger, but as far as television goes, the system is set up so that it's not until someone complains that something gets done.

So just a bit of a rehash.

There is indeed a loophole in the commercial TV code of practice to allow alcohol advertising during children's viewing times, if they are part of a sports broadcast, sponsorship for example.

Thus neither the TV companies, nor the alcohol companies are doing anything illegal.

So if there is change to be made, it has to be done at the federal government level, and the Minister for Communications is Malcolm Turnbull, whose email address is: malcolm.turnbull.mp@aph.gov.au

The junior minister, known as the Parliamentary Secretary for Communications, is Paul Fletcher whose email address is: paul.fletcher.mp@aph.gov.au

If you email either or both of these MPs, you can add your voice to the call for change to this code of practice and have alcohol advertising removed from children's viewing times.

So on Monday night I sat down to watch my TV shows, thinking I had fought the good fight, when to me almighty consternation, the source of a new barney popped up.

Gambling ads.

This also happened last week, but Ch 10, where I saw those ads, removed them within 24 hours when contacted by me, and I suspect, many others.

So this week during the Big Bang Theory on Go!, Ch 9's repeater station, ads for the same gambling company appeared, before 8.30pm, I was downcast, thinking I had another week's electronic moaning and being ignored ahead of me, but I was pleasantly surprised.

I contacted the gambling company in question the next (Tuesday) morning, and got a response from them in under 15 minutes.

They said they had passed my whinge onto their marketing department.

Last night (Tuesday) I watched the Big Bang Theory and there were no gambling ads.

Well done Sportsbet and Ch 9.

I might add, that through this whole complaining process the TV, alcohol and gambling companies in question have been infinitely more responsive than our elected representatives.

So it is the ultimate in journalistic ironies that the only people who haven't communicated with me are the two ministers responsible for communication.

####  Paradise.

As before in this raving bloggery when my blood pressure got too high, I decided to head down to the beach to remind myself that I live in paradise and we are not put on this Earth to complain alone.

The picture (right) shows a near idyllic day.

No waves, but a picture of the bay that could have come from a tourist brochure.

In the end I decided to get my board and at least go out and paddle around and get some fitness training.

Once out there I discovered the microscopic waves actually had enough to ride, so I ranged around, stepped up my paddle stroke and caught my first wave.

Wonderful.

For about 30 seconds.

For you see, even this is already descending into a whinge.

With surfing, what happens is, other surfers come down to the shore and watch, if they see someone get a wave, then they say, "Great, I can get some of that".

So they get their boards and come out and join you.

This day there were only about 6 surfers in the water when I entered, but within minutes of my first wave, there were twenty.

Thus, every wave I caught from then on, had someone else on it with me.

Dropping in, it's called.

I've had long discussions with my therapist about the difference between being aggressive and being assertive, and I've made some progress, so this day I decided not to yell, "Would you mind relocating to a different oceanographic locale", and just enjoy what I got.

Which was OK, I guess, but not ideal.

Then, I took off and a kid got in my way, this time I had to say something, for his safety, and mine.

So with my eyes widening to match the narrowing distance between us, I yelled, "WATCH OUT".

Thankfully he heard me, and was spared my full 90kgs full in the midship.

However, then I began thinking, 'well, if there's now thirty of us here and I'm getting dropped in on, and I'm likely to nail a kid every time I take off, then it's time to go'.

So I got out, showered and went round to the gym.

Whilst there I got (and was able to photograph) the two faces of life in paradise.

Suddenly all the TVs in the gym dropped out and an error message cropped up, "Due to electrical disturbance, transmission is temporarily interrupted".

I wasn't unhappy about this, because the MTV station to which said TVs are permanently tuned seemed to have One Direction on all the time.

So I stepped out to have a look and by cracky, the rain was coming down, it is hard to believe that these three photos were taken in the same town just an hour or so apart.

And there we have it for another week.

I've written 52 paragraphs and complained, or written about somebody else complaining, in 46 of them.

I'm getting good at this.
7 - A funny man with a dirty surfboard

The title of this post was said by one of two six-year-old, or thereabouts, girls as I walked home from my surf on Friday, through the Clarke's Beach camping area.

I longed to go back ad ask why she had said "funny" man.

I'm guessing she meant funny-peculiar, not funny-ha-ha, as I hadn't stopped and told them the one about the travelling salesman and the farmer's wife.

The dirty surfboard part was accurate though, as can be seen in the pic, and so I was curious to find out about the other descriptive term.

However, we will never know because although these two kiddies were playing at their mothers' feet, even I knew that a half-naked man walking up and saying "can I have a word with your six-year-old daughter" would have gone over like a lead zeppelin.

I might add, that is where the name of the band came from, one of the Beatles, when he heard them for the first time, said "these guys will go over like a Lead Zeppelin".

So Robert and Jimmy decided to use it as an eternal finger-up to the Beatles.

What this little girl said though reminded me of something I used to hear as a teacher, and so I guess this is a tip for new teachers out there.

I would regularly here teachers say "the kids think this of me, or the kids think that of me".

Wrong, wrong, wrong.

What these teachers were really saying was "I HOPE the kids think this of me", or "I'd LIKE it if the kids think that of me."

And sadly the only way to really know what the kids think of you is to overhear them by accident.

As I did, coming round the corner of a building at Freshwater High School to do playground duty.

Completely by chance I overheard some kids around the corner say, "Barker thinks he is so cool, but he's just a fucking dick."

Lesson learned all right.

Supremely painful though it was, it was sadly true.

I did think I was cool, and like all Gen Xers, I was in a constant rebellion against authority and so was fighting my own war against the senior staff.

I thought this made me cool in the eyes of the students, but no, no, no.

But then Art Linklater famously said at the end of his show, in which he interviewed young kids, that "kids really say the damnedest things", and this is true now as then.

I remember a story I read somewhere about a woman with a Ph.D working as a supervising academic at a uni.

Ph.Ds are known as Doctor, it stands for Doctor of Philosophy, though the accolade spans the faculties, so you could have a Ph.D in Chemistry, Maths or Geography.

Anyway, one of the academic's students came to the door of her home, it was his first visit, he knocked and the academic's six-year-old son answered the door.

The student said, "Is Dr Childers here?", to which the son replied, "Yes, but she's not the sort of doctor that's any use to anyone."

So kids are brutally honest, though they don't mean to be hurtful I'm sure.

This likewise reminded me of a cracker released by my nephew Adam, aged six or seven.

He was at school and asked his teacher for something, she said, "What's the magic word?"

To which Adam replied, "Abra Cadabra".

The teacher laughed and it even got printed in the school newsletter.

Then again this same nephew did another one that was received with less enthusiasm.

One of his dad's mates came over, this guy liked a beer or twenty, and as he stepped through the door Adam said, "are you having a baby?"

Oh dear.

And in an "Only-in-Byron" moment, I went around to the smallest business in town, Barefoot Roasters, to get coffees for the office and while Rosie was brewing those up, I had a learned discussion with the proprietor Rodney, about the biggest business on Earth, the American debt ceiling, so I think I'll take this opportunity to give you my inexpert view.

Essentially, if the US reps and senate agree, then they vote to increase the debt ceiling, and life goes on as usual.

The problem is that the US has a new party who can be accurately thought of as the American Taliban, the Tea Party.

The people in this party are nuts, their beliefs make the flat Earthers seem like lucid thinkers.

What they want is to remove the new health care package brought in President Obama, or at least to water it down.

So they are waving this huge financial stick over the president.

Tea Party members making sure Obama

can't get his hands on their wallets.

Obama, to his credit, in my view at least, is standing firm.

His health care reform has already been voted upon and written into law and his point, which only nut jobs like the Tea Party can't seem to see, is that you can't have a situation where a law is declared then every time the houses of parliament change, you dig up that law and change it, or get rid of it.

What's more, as Barrack has pointed out, the Tea Party can't seem to understand that, if they achieve their ends in this case, next time there is a republican president in the White House, the democrats in the lower house will use the same weapon to remove or water down something the republican president has done.

The Tea Party basically think that no one can be president unless they're further to the right of Hitler, and if, as the Tea Party would see it, by some collective death wish of the American voter, there is a democrat in the White House, they will use fair means or foul to stop democracy at work.

But then health care in America has always been a mystery to the rest of us.

I remember a terrible case of a Hispanic woman whose son had an impacted molar.

She was an illegal immigrant, but her son had been born in the US and was therefore entitled to health care, even if she wasn't.

She searched and searched and eventually found a dentist on the other side of LA, who would see her son on Medicare.

But sadly, by the time she found the dentist and made plans for the three hour trip across town, he had died of infection in his throat.

This I thought terribly sad, and Obama's health care package is designed to stop appalling situations like this occurring again.

Another case, not as bad, but a real warning about travel to the States came up when I was working in Canada.

I was collecting money door to door with Greenpeace, I knocked on the door of a comfortable house in the suburbs, and a tired looking woman came to greet me.

I gave her my spiel and she replied, "Sorry, I love what you guys do, but I cannot afford to donate."

This was a common, probably our commonest reply, but she seemed genuine, and so I asked "why?"

She then told me a truly frightening story.

She had taken a trip to California with her husband and child, but picked up lung infection on the aircraft.

By the time the wheels hit LAX she was having trouble breathing and was rushed to hospital direct from the plane.

She then spent the next four weeks in ITU, then six more weeks in a sterile ward.

Sadly, they hadn't taken out travel insurance, and came home with a $250,000 debt to the hospital, which they were now paying off at $1000 a month.

If you go, go insured.

So to finish on a lighter note, but no less accurate for that, I was greatly amused by an episode of 30rock, which highlighted things nicely.

Alec Baldwin plays the president of NBC and is an arch republican.

He refers to President Clinton as the "inter-Bush" president.

He takes his pregnant partner with him on a trip to Canada and then she starts contracting and he has to rush her to hospital.

She gives birth and they are in the post-delivery ward catching their breath, when the hospital's administrator comes in and says, "It's Ok Mr Donaghy, due to the emergency nature of your visit, the birth is completely free of charge. You don't owe anything."

To which he is horrified and replies, "THAT CAN"T BE RIGHT!!!", and the episode ends with him roaming the hospital looking for someone to pay.

See you next week for more moaning and inexpert political commentary. 
8 - Superchicken and the Utopia complex

Take a good look at this homely chicken, for it is indeed blessed with near miraculous powers.

This photo was taken three minutes after I hit it with my car at 50k an hour.

I was coming into town the other morning and came over the brow of a hill and suddenly this chicken lurched out of the undergrowth and began a wing-flapping sprint across the road in front of me.

I had no time to do anything and the next millisecond I collected it with a dull thump and feathers flew.

I pulled up further down the road and looked back in my rear vision mirror.

All I saw was a motionless brown lump on the roadway, and my first thought was to drive off as the beast was obviously dead.

But my better, vegetarian, self took over and I realized I had to go back and make sure it was dead, and if not, put it out of its misery.

I've had do this before, once with a rabbit and once with a dog, and while not pleasant, is better than leaving it to die a slow painful death.

So I reversed up and pulled into the driveway the chicken had apparently been aiming for and got out of my car.

I yelled "hello", hoping that this was the home of the chicken's owner and I could hand over this unpleasant task to them, but no one answered and there was no immediately obvious front door to knock on.

So with a sigh I turned back to the road, found a rock and went to get the chicken.

To my astonishment, it was no longer there.

The roadway was clear.

"WTF?" I said to myself, then a movement flickered in the top of my vision and I saw it walking about in the undergrowth next to the road.

I watched astonished.

My car weighs 15kg (1.5 tonne) and the chicken scaled two at best, so it was the equivalent of an adult human being hit by a five tonne truck.

So marvelling at the beast's recoverative powers I got back in my car and drove to town.

It was relevant in a serendipitous way as this week I was planning to write about the Utopia complex

The Utopia complex is the idea that some magical day will come and you will have solved all your problems.

I refer to it as the Utopia complex, but it may have a real name in clinical psychology.

To describe it more fully, I can think of almost innumerable examples where I would say to myself, "once I get this, problem A, out of the way, then I can relax."

Trouble is, as I've learned over 48 hard years is that once you get problem A safely dealt with, problem B, previously rated second in size, moves up and expands in size to fill the space previously occupied by problem A".

So then you deal with B and C emerges and so it goes.

Is this dysfunctional?

Probably, every damn thing else that I talk about in therapy is, but is it, the Utopia complex, the search for a life with no problems, itself, an Uber, overarching problem, problem Zero as it were.

So as ever I'll digress and refer to a few things pertinent to this.

Here are a couple of things said by people I know.

Scott: "Everyway I turn it's fucked."

Clinton: "This week is always worse than last week."

What both these men said, though it may seem that both are eternal downers, actually helped me.

Clinton's comment helped me understand, for the first time in 48 years, that the problem free Utopia I have always sought, doesn't exist.

Likewise Scott's comment showed that there is always something to deal with.

One of the best examples of this was in a book I read, "To Serve Them All My Days", by R.F Delderfield.

It is the story of a man invalided off Flander's fields in WW1, and repatriated back to England with battle fatigue.

Psycho-neurosis it would later be termed.

He gets a job as schoolmaster in an English public school and begins teaching, and comes to love it, and can move on with his life.

One day while he is teaching news come through that the war is over.

We can't really understand now, how large in the consciousness of Europe that war loomed, but it was referred to variously as "the Great War", and the "war to end all wars".

So for the populace in general, and this former soldier in particular, this was momentous, staggeringly, joyous news.

The schoolmaster himself is at first thinking that this will lead to months of celebrating and little or no work done across the British Isles, yet within an hour of the news coming through, he is already starting to think about upcoming events.

The assembly hall is being revarnished and so they will have to split the pupils into two groups, junior and senior, and hold two assemblies, in a different, smaller hall, and this means he has to get out his notes and change his speeches to be relevant to the two different groups.

The 11+ (A level exams) are coming up and so he will have to start getting the senior boys ready for that.

And these are just two of the little issues in his daily life that have to be foreseen and planned for.

And within two hours he realizes that he has already largely forgotten that the most terrible conflict ever has just officially ended and his daily round if issues has taken over once more.

An example I remember was the longest week of my life when I had my first HIV test.

I went down to my surgery in Newtown in Sydney, and my doctor, Carol Chung, took my blood and told me how it worked.

First they would give my blood a prelim, grosser Immune System Activity Level (ISAL) test.

This simply measured if your immune system was doing work.

If this came back below a certain level, it meant you had not been exposed to the HIV virus, or had any other disease at work in your system.

This test, if negative, can return your results in 48 hours.

So two days later I rang Carol and learned, and to my unholy dread, that the ISAL test had showed activity and they would go on to the higher level, more specific testing.

I was panicked in a way I can't adequately describe.

I should add, the reason for this raised activity was that I was working as gardening labourer at the time and my body was covered with small nicks and cuts from the plants I worked with, and it was this botanical onslaught that led to my immune system working hard to keep infection out of the various wounds.

But I was in my mid-thirties then and my hypochondria was still in evidence, so rationality left through the side door and panic took over.

I began immediately trying to plan for a positive test and how on Earth could I go on with my life if so?

And so the long wait began.

The blood was taken Friday, I had called back Tuesday, then had to wait for the rest of the week till Friday, at the earliest, to get the results.

On the Wednesday of that week I smoked 90 Marlboro Red cigarettes (three and a half packets).

My standard consumption was twenty a day at the time.

I struggled through the days, Friday came, I rang the surgery, the test were back, they couldn't give me the results over the phone and so I made the earliest possible appointment to see Carol.

If the week had been long that two hours waiting for my appointment was the longest.

But even longer than that was the thirty minutes in the waiting room, heart leaping like a salmon every time the door of Carol's office opened and a patient went in or out.

This is where I sat that most relieved morning.

But even longer than that was the time it took for me to walk in when Carol called my name and to walk in and sit down. Even longer than all of the above put together was the time taken for Carol to open a manila folder.

Then she said, "you've got nothing to worry about. The test is negative."

To say I was relieved barely hints at the change that came over me.

I gave her a hug, then walked out into the brilliantly sunlit Newtown morning and sat on a bench under the sandstone wall of the nearby cemetery.

I called Leith, my friend and boss, told him the tests were negative and would it be all right if I didn't come down to work immediately, so I could just enjoy this feeling for a few hours, he said fine, and so I wandered about in a deliriously happy daze, enjoying, what I now see, was the only time in my life I achieved the Utopia complex.

But here's the thing, after just a few hours, and I remember this clearly, I even reported it to my friend Norman in a phone call later that day, I began to feel weird.

I searched around internally and discovered the reason, I had nothing to worry about.

Now that WAS weird.

But then my resting state of mind took over and I began to prepare to go to work.

Train schedule, cash for the ticket, better pack some food, damn, forgot to go shopping this week (for obvious reasons), better get some on the way, damn, haven't got enough for ticket and food.

Better go to the bank machine, damn, my bank machine is the other way from the station, maybe catch a bus to central, then train from there.

Now where's my ten-click bus voucher.

Damn, it's run out, better go to the newsagent and get another one of them.

Which is my closest newsagent? Think it's the one in Erskineville, maybe I can get the train from....

And so like the schoolmaster of old, the joy felt upon hearing momentous, cataclysmic good news, was within a short period of hours overtaken by immediate petty concerns to do with day-to-day living.

So I guess the message for this blog is that the Utopia complex doesn't exist in perpetuity, if you're lucky you may get it for a few hours.

P.G. Wodehouse often used to put it well with a weather simile to describe Bertie Wooster's frame of mind when snootered by other characters who moved throughout the country homes of Edwardian England with sinister intent, "The v-shaped depressions off the coast of Iceland had never been more numerous, nor more vee-er."

And: "If it's not one damn thing it's another."

Also: "Jeeves, it is possible that one day I may laugh again, though very doubtful, but if that is to occur it will be when I am as far from Totleigh Towers as it is possible to be on this Earth."

All this cataclysmic thinking on behalf of Bertie Wooster was usually having to do with having to marry a beautiful woman whom he didn't care for, or at worst, doing thirty days in the county jail for stealing a piece of silver ware.

So it's all relative.

Even the chicken that started all this must have been thinking that life was sweet.

After a near death engagement with the front of my car, followed by a couple of minutes of wondering, "What the Zark was that?!", it had returned to its resting state of consciousness and was pecking away quite happily in the undergrowth.

So there you go, if you attain the bliss of the Utopia complex, treasure it, because within a short time you'll be wondering what to make for dinner.

9 - Well this is how 'I' think you should run your network

One of the greatest comedic talents ever was Spike Milligan, he first rose to prominence with a radio show called the Goon Show, broadcast in the fifties.

One of his great innovations was having no punch line, or completely wrong footing the audience by taking the sketch in a whole new direction.

A good example of this was when one of the shows was set in antiquity and he did the Greek urn joke.

This doesn't work so well here in writing as it is based on the homophonous words, urn and earn, but I think you'll get the point.

One character, Moriarty, comes in and says "what's a Greek urn?"

To which Grytpype-Thynn replies, "it's an earthenware pot used by ancient Greeks for containing liquids."

To which Moriarty replies, "that's not the answer I expected."

And Grytpype says, "neither were quite a few of our smart alec listeners."

I mention this banter because since I got involved with the campaign to clean alcohol ads from TV I've had mostly answers I fully expected, AKA, "Fuck off", but some that caught me off guard.

Actually, any answer caught me off guard, as I was expecting to be ignored.

Only a hundred people read this blog each week, but I've been able to keep that a secret from the people at the Commercial TV networks and alcohol companies that I am persecuting with my moaning.

Obviously once they find that out they will realize that you and I are small time players on the media stage and go into full-ignore mode.

However, as my friend Antony pointed out when I first mentioned I was going to start, sorry, continue complaining about things that upset me on Commercial TV, "I think you'll find that if you feel like this, you'll discover you're not the only one."

And so we've had our little victories, and even the complaining is having the minor effect of keeping it in the consciousness of the networks.

So this week I have contacted the head of Channel Ten, Russell Howcroft through his personal assistant, Josh Howard, with the email above, telling them how to run the network.

Response: ignored.

And since Channel Ten didn't respond, I thought I better get hold of Nine and see what they've got to say. Nine broadcast the cricket, which I watch during the summer, so I sent this to the unlucky Madelaine Clark in publicity, unlucky because now she has to deal with my perpetual caterwauling.

My email to her was:

Matty,

Recently there had been a survey done in which 70% of respondents declared they didn't want alcohol ads in sport broadcasts, is Channel Nine prepared to remove alcohol advertising?

planning to remove alcohol ads from sport broadcasts?"

Nine's response:

"Hi Lachlan,

Unfortunately, there is no comment at this stage.

AKA: Fuck off. (I put that in, Nine didn't say anything so overt, but the meaning is clear).

I have responded to that by asking her to keep me informed if and when there is a comment, but she hasn't responded.

If you wish to read the story about the original survey it can be found at:  http://www.abc.net.au/radionational/programs/breakfast/sport-and-alcohol-relationship-concerns-most-australians/5034772

So moving on, I'll tackle Seven next blog, but they are kind of out of the picture for now, because all their shows are such unmitigated garbage I don't watch anything on their network, so they are spared my ant-in-the-wetsuit carrying on.

However I would like to know something from Seven, why do their sport broadcasts, the Aussie Rules Grand Final was the most recent, lag behind the radio by thirty seconds?

I believe it is so that those of us who like HG and Roy can't listen to their terminally funny sync broadcast of the game.

To compare times, Ch 9's broadcast of the rugby league has only a ten second delay, which is genuinely so the TV computer can get the images sorted for quality and so forth, and I have a special radio with a sound delay function so I can listen to HG and Roy while the action on the field goes forward in sync.

HG and Roy, funnier than anything else on TV.

So I sent this to Seven's publicity department:

"I was wondering if you could tell me why the your broadcast of the Aussie rules grand final lagged thirty seconds behind the ABC radio broadcast?

Channel Nine's broadcast of the rugby league has only a ten second delay. Thank you."

Response: Ignored.

In the end though, I think the most likely outcome of all this will be that Nine do what Seven do, and put a thirty second delay on their broadcast so that everyone has to listen to the damn ads, alcohol and otherwise.

And just to add a bit of philosophy, responding again (sort of) to Clinton's comment asking "why do you watch it [the TV] if it makes you so angry?"

Well, of all people, John Farnham provided the answer.

I'm not a big fan of anyone who shot to prominence by singing "Sadie the Cleaning Lady", but one lyric he sang was this: "If you wanna break the system, you better build a better one."

Well, I'd like to think that I am part of the process of building a better TV system, in which there are no alcohol or gambling ads before 8.30pm, and HG and Roy are enjoyed, in sync with the sporting action, on all five networks.

Additionally, Sandy Roberts, Dermot Brereton, Jason Dunstall, Ray Warren, Shane Warne and Bill Lawry will have their throats closed surgically so that a) they can't commentate and b) breathe.

What a wonderful world that will be.
10 - Isn't it time that John Howard shut up?

\

I was going about my business this morning when John Howard came on the radio and I nearly choked on my breakfast.

Enraged, I spat a mouthful across my tent and bespattered the screen of my TV with flakes of cereal.

And it was the subject matter that incensed me to the nth degree and beyond.

He was propounding the case for nuclear power.

I don't know what it takes to get people like John Howard to understand that nuclear power is not a viable, scratch that, not an option period.

And this speech by the former PM is in the aftermath of Fukushima, where the incidence of thymus cancer is rocketing according to the Guardian newspaper of Britain:

## Corbett Report: Thyroid cancers skyrocketing right now in Fukushima — Guardian: "The issue is bound to escalate further" (VIDEO)

So I'll just add my microscopic voice to the debate.

And I might add, I am a scientist, unlike John Howard, who is, how did you know I was going to say this, a lawyer.

Now I am the first to admit that my marks at uni were hardly distinguished, but I still claim to know more about nuclear power than John Howard.

So here we go.

Nuclear power is not an option because it's ultimate premise is that it only can function if you believe in the perfect machine.

None is, my constant references to paying for car repairs is testament to this, so nuclear power is only an option of we believe that no power station will ever go wrong.

The various engineers involved told us after Chernobyl that the type of reactor built in the Ukraine will no longer be used.

New reactors with a much higher safety margin will be now used, and the engineers therefore claimed there will never be another Chernobyl.

And so these new, "safer" reactors were built around the world.

One of those places was Fukushima.

In the truest sense of the word, the engineers are right, the new reactors are safer than the one at Chernobyl, but the problem with Fukushima was that it wasn't the reactor itself that had the problem, it was the place it was built, AKA, in Japan, on the shores of the pacific, in one of the most geologically active areas of the planet.

Tokyo itself is built on the junction of three tectonic plates, in comparison California, earthquake central, is "only" on two.

Since Fukushima there have been endless stories about the wisdom(!) of building a nuclear power station there, and the responses from the Tokyo Electric Power Company (TEPCO) who built it were a constant succession of "we considered all the risks involved".

I don't think you did.

One would think that a Tsunami would have been something considered in Japan, for any building construction, let alone a nuke power station.

So then one might say, "well can we build a new safer reactor in a geologic dead zone, where there is no danger of earthquake or Tsunami?"

The best known geologic dead zone on Earth is Australia, so is it safe to build a reactor here?

Well, perhaps one should ask the residents of Newcastle who lived through the quake that rocked that city in a "geologic dead zone".

One building after the Newcastle quake,

would a nuke station survive in better shape?

The inherent nature of the shifting Earth is such that even today with all our much-vaunted equipment, there is still no way to accurately predict an earthquake.

So the answer is 'NO', there is nowhere on Earth where you can build a nuclear power station and 'know' it is safe from earthquake.

In closing the Fukushima section I will say that since that horrendous day I have been scanning the news waiting for the Japanese government to announce that they are decommissioning all their other reactors, but they are not doing it.

Seems that the risk in money and death of their citizens is worth it.

Moving on, earthquakes are only one of the potential threats.

Simple faulty equipment is another.

Is John Howard seriously saying that every pipe, every duct, every piece of shielding, every fan, every pump, every brick, every tile, every power supply source is 100% fail proof?

If he is, I'd like to live in a house built by those materials.

That kind of reminds me of the piece done by a stand up comic, I think Seinfeld, who said, "Since the black box always survives every air crash, why don't they build the whole plane out of the material that they make the black box out of?"

Too expensive I'd warrant.

Which leads me neatly to price of nuclear power.

John Howard this morning was going on with some hopelessly, convoluted gobbledegook about nuclear being cheaper than renewables.

Rubbish, John.

That is serious, serious, tauro-scatology.

TEPCO are decidedly cagey about saying what it cost to build Fukushima, but a new plant in Flamanville, France, of the same design as Fukushima, cost $8 billion Euros, or $A11.5 billion.

How many solar panels, and wind turbines could Australia buy with $11.5 bill?

A lot.

Of course all of the above figures do not take into account the cost of the Fukushima cleanup.

This is of course a wildly varying figure, but the same page that told me of Flamanville estimates $A82 billion.

And this of course doesn't, and can't, count the ongoing costs of health treatment and most importantly, the human cost of death, which is unquantifiable.

The Economonitor lists Chernobyl as costing $975 million to clean up, and took 14 years, but again this figure is unable to fully cost health issues which may go on for years.

So next time you here someone say nuclear power costs 'x' per kilowatt of power produced, ask if they have factored in the costs of cleaning up Chernobyl and Fukushima.

Which then leads me to a point well made by my colleague at Greenpeace in Vancouver, James Pratt, who is anything but his surname.

James pointed out that everytime you here someone saying that a nuclear power station will produce power at 'x' cents per kilowatt, they invariably fail to add in the eventual cost of decommissioning the thing.

This is always infinitely more than it cost to build, since it involves safe(!) storage of radioactive materials for decades, if not centuries.

My colleague at my current work, Scott, played Devil's Advocate, a term stunningly accurate when arguing for nuclear power, and said, "but isn't global warming worse? Wouldn't it be better to have a few nuclear power stations, so the risk is concentrated in a few places, rather than the all-encompassing global warming threat from burning coal?"

Well, that's wrong too.

You can' t escape physics, and the heat inside a nuclear reactor is intense.

This heat has to be dissipated, usually by seawater, and this obviates any supposed global warming reducing effect of not releasing Carbon Dioxide.

I cannot find any source to tell me how much heat is added to global warming by nuclear power stations, but I can assure you that all over the world where reactors are cooled by seawater, the area around the plant shows thermal plumes.

Pack ice reduction - are nukes a factor?

We better hope Polar Bears can jump puddles.

So any gains in the global warming issue are minimal.

I might add the area where this is most grossly demonstrated is the arctic, where recently it was reported that the pack ice had reduced from 180 million square kilometres, down to four, an approx forty fold decrease.

Where does the warm water that is doing this come from?

Europe and North America, where a large number of nuclear power stations are situated.

Again, as Scott accurately points out, can we be sure that the heat emitted by a nuke is a significant factor?

No, we can't, and once again that is a huge part of the problem, things un-, or inaccurately accounted for.

So there you have it, no nukes, they solve nothing, they certainly don't help reduce global warming.

And finally, John Howard, not only did your government get voted out, but you got voted out of your own seat.

Even the staunchly liberal voters of Sydney's lower north shore couldn't stomach you for a second longer.

So, fair's fair, democracy has spoken, retire gracefully, and shut up.
11 - There is no news today - except how F%*^ing bad Independence Day was

The title of this post has been bandied about by many since the dawn of newspapers, but most recently mentioned by Warren Ryan, ABC radio's senior rugby league analyst.

I mention this because as I came into the office earlier in the week to begin this week's post, it occurred to me that I had nothing to write about, and thus, should I say that, and not produce a post this week?

But then those that know me well will tell you that they have difficulty recalling any time when I didn't have anything to say.

Scott, here at work, is a good example, he couldn't begin to enumerate the amount of times I have gone into his nacelle and said "just briefly I want to tell you this...", and have still been there, bending his ear, an hour later.

But then last night as I was watching TV, the roof of my tent began rolling like waves on the ocean and I realised that the possum was back.

Why is she news?

Well, she's not, it's just that now I have to go into lock down mode every night to stop her waking me up.

When you live with animals, as I do, you have to go into virtual spring clean mode every night when preparing for bed, as any food left out will send out the signal to the assorted wildlife that make their home with me that, the smorgasbord is open for business.

A single banana peel for instance, left out where it's smell can permeate, will start a range war between the possum and the rat, over who gets to eat it.

Which kind of leads us where I wanted to go, which is, this week's philosophy: nothing is all good, or all bad.

What has this possum got to do then with that?

Well, there have been nights in the past where I wanted to kill that bloody animal, usually for waking me up at three am, most famously when she put her paw on my electric jug, which began boiling, frightening her, and waking me.

But her presence keeps the rats in check, I'm not exactly sure how, but there is no denying that when she is on patrol, the rats go elsewhere.

So in general I just live with her nocturnal perambulations.

So if we follow the same philosophy, then there must be something good about John Howard.

Those who read last week's blog will know I spent the whole time railing against the man, mainly for his advocating the use of nuclear power.

So I had a hard think, and am having difficulty coming up with anything, and so I'll put it out to you reading this.

If anyone can come up with something good about John Howard, please say, you can fill in the comment section below.

Independence Day

I wouldn't go to work with this hanging over my town.

Some time ago I had a rant about 'The Bodyguard', with Whitney and Kevin overacting to a level hard to believe.

At the end I mentioned two other films that I considered too appalling for words, saying I would get back to them one day, well that day has arrived.

I still resent the two hours of my life wasted, literally, as you'll soon read, watching Independence Day, but I was drawn into it like this.

Some of my engineer mates said that they had heard the special effects were great, so why didn't we all go see it.

I agreed, and we headed down to the cinema complex in George st, Sydney.

We snuck into "Hooter Alley", as named by my friend Daz, and smoked a joint before we went in, then took our seats and waited for the actinic light show.

However, within a vanishingly short space of time I was already furious with the damn movie, even stoned I was tearing big, huge, staggeringly large holes in the plot.

So poor was this laughable excuse for a plot, that I couldn't enjoy the special effects.

Many would say, "suspend your disbelief, and enjoy it", but as a hard nosed character, I simply can't do this, and quite frankly, feel that the producers of the film should give me, for my $15, good special effects and a plot that works.

So what was wrong with it?

Well that is a genuine "where do we start?" question.

Perhaps the best point to begin is a point raised by my friend Lloyd.

The hero of the film is Will Smith, and his wife is a stripper.

Will works for NASA, so I would have thought she didn't have to go to work for monetary reasons, so I'm guessing that her job was a thinly veiled, both literal and metaphoric, excuse to get a near naked woman on the screen.

Anyway, the Stilettan Armourfiends of Stitterax arrive en masse in their giant spaceships which they park above all the major cites of the Earth.

They've blown up the White house, for no discernible reason, yet Will's wife still goes to work.

She is next seen gyrating up and down a pole in some seedy bar in east LA.

Now I've taken some sickies in my time, but even I, a bullshit artist par excellence, would have thought that, "I'm not coming to work today because there are giant space ships all over the place", would have sufficed.

Sometime later for reasons that escape me, and the script writers apparently, said wife has to run into a tunnel under a freeway.

The 'fiends are coming, and she spys a metal door, deadlocked, with a large padlock on it.

In need of quick safety, she opens it with one kick and she's inside.

My first thought was that I would call the LA highways department and say that they need to strengthen their doors if a single kick can open it, but we'll move on.

The Stilletans lay down a napalm-like strafe of goodness knows what alien chemical weapons, and an enormous firestorm goes down the tunnel.

Some time later the firestorm clears and then she emerges from her hidey-hole in rude good health.

Sorry, but a firestorm of that nature would have sucked all the oxygen for miles around into the conflagration, so she would have died of either heat, or suffocation, and would have welded the door firmly shut.

But then she had high billing in the credits, and so this was enough to protect her.

Then there's Jeff Goldblum, who is an actor I had previously respected.

He plays a computer guy and in despair at the inability of the Earth military to penetrate the Aliens force field around their ships, get loaded on scotch in his office.

Then his father comes in to find him lying on the floor near dead from drink and gives him an idea to defeat the force field, load a computer virus onto the alien computer network.

So Jeff jumps off the floor as if he hasn't had a drink in a year, and writes a super-complex computer virus for an alien computer system in less than two hours.

Done to explain this bit of plot.

Oh, please.

Then Jeff and Will get in an alien spaceship that has been lying around at Roswell for the past fifty years, without a service I might add, and fly up to the alien mothership to load the virus.

And before you can say 'knife', they have flown up, docked, connected with the network, loaded the virus and they're away.

Jeff even had time to write this "what's going on" screen widget.

Meanwhile back on Earth, we can't even get the computer in the admin office to print.

Finally, mercifully for you, the reader, we come to the climactic battle scene, even here I was chewing big lumps out of the arm of my movie chair.

Why did they have to fly up in jet fighters?

Don't they have thousands of millimetrically targeted missiles in silos in Nevada that can hit a city block in Moscow with a deviation of less than five metres?

Apparently not, and so Bill Pullman (the president), Will and Randy Quaid, as usual for reasons not adequately explained, fly up in jet fighters and destroy the Armourfiends once and for all.

Again it wasn't adequately explored how many deaths occurred when horizon engulfing torrents of destroyed alien ship debris rained down across LA, but there you go.

Bill couldn't hit a suburb sized spaceship from the ground.

But even then among the things I couldn't believe about this film was that some large quantities of morons gave it a collective rating of 6.8/10 on the international movie database (IMDB).

The only part of that rating I would have agreed with was the ".8", and that I would consider generous.  
It's been a long time since the film came out but I nearly gave birth while doing the research for this rant to discover that they are making a sequel.  
I wonder if Bill will have improved his aim in this new one, and can hit a flying saucer the size of Sydney Harbour from the ground?
12 - Showers contracting to the north-east corner

The title of this post was an oft repeated ending to the weather segment on ABC news by Mike Bailey, the ABC's venerable weatherman.

If there was any rain happening in NSW, Mike would invariably end the weather with this statement, showing on the map the clouds arrowing in on Byron Bay.

As a boy growing up in dry old Bathurst, it didn't mean much to me.  
But when I moved to the said north-east corner and I really began to understand what he meant.

Byron Bay, as is well known, is the Eastern most point of the Australian mainland, and as such acts as a snag to any cloud going past.

Once snagged by the steep slopes of Wollumbin (Mt Warning), or the lighthouse cliffs, the clouds would give up the struggle to sail free over the Pacific ocean and dump their pregnant loads of water on our coastal living heads.

I remember five or so years ago listening to the Country Hour on ABC radio as I drove and the weather guy there was saying that 96% of NSW is in drought, or drought affected, I knew without research where the four percent that wasn't was.

The Rainbow region, as it is colloquially known, is known, regionally as the Northern Rivers, and that is an apt term.

And those rivers have to be fed by something and that something is the relentless procession of clouds hooked down by the coastal cliffs.

Norman Maclean, who wrote "A River Runs Through It", said, "I am haunted by waters".

I never quite felt that, but I was always fascinated by large bodies of water, and I think this is due to the dryness of Bathurst in the eighties.

In this period I went on holidays, with my brother and mother, up to the north coast.

It was a life changing experience for me.

I remember looking out the windows of the car at this strange green stuff growing everywhere.

I had never seen such a lush verdant landscape before.

In retrospect, it was the moment I began planning my escape from Bathurst.

Some of you reading this still live there and that's fine, but it wasn't for me.

As a small boy of nine staring in fascinated wonder out the car window at a landscape that was more green than brown the whole desire to escape Bathurst burgeoned within me and, in the end, came down to one moment.

We crossed a small waterway called Salt Pan Creek and I looked down through the bridge stanchions and marvelled, "THAT'S A CREEK!"

It was wider and deeper than the hapless Macquarie River of Bathurst by a considerable margin, and up here it was only a creek.

So if Salt Pan Creek was amazing, the Maclean River at Grafton was a religious experience.

Not the death shoe of a giant mafia informant,

but a measure of Tully's annual rainfall.

This mighty watercourse was so big that a) boats could go up and down it, and b) you could fish in it.

Neither was possible on the Macquarie.

So with all this water up here, we have had our own way of life more or less thrust upon us.

Lismore, for instance, is the most flood affected town in Australia.

It doesn't get the most rain, that title is held by a clear margin by Tully in North Queensland, famously demonstrated by this concrete gumboot.

The gumboot stands 7.9m high and represents the rainfall in Tully in 1950, of 7900mm.

Additionally, Tully once got 1140mm (45 inches) of rain in one day.

To try to put that into context, Bathurst, for instance, has an annual rainfall in January of 68mm (2.7in) and Tully got twenty times that in a day.

So back to Lismore, whilst not in the Tully class for sheer volume of moisture arriving from the heavens at terminal velocity, it has a lot of issues with floods.  
This is mostly due to the geography of the place, sitting as it does at the base of the caldera of the now extinct volcano, Wollumbin, the water comes down and then follows inexorably a circuitous path down to the low point, and that term is exact, believe me, of the area, Lismore.

So much is flooding a way of life for the residents up here that when I went onto my search engine to bring up some pictures of flooding in Lismore, I was spoiled for choice.

Lismore, as you can see below, had flood issues in 2010 through 2013, and every other damn year, but the menu dropped off the bottom of my screen at this point.

Floods in Lismore? Take your pick.

So much so, that when I looked I had to think hard about the flooding of this year, it was so "minor" that it escaped my memory.

Minor flooding in Lismore means the Wilson river only rose five metres.

The two worst years for flooding in Lismore were 1954 and 1974.

Global Warming

Which brings me, almost eternally, to global warming, and its immediate consequences.

Every year that goes by without us reducing our fossil fuel burning, the flooding is going to get worse.

Now this perennially complex issue is one difficult to describe, but a common technique used by right wing news organs was to finish a story about global warming with a two second sound grab from some crusty oldster, who would turn to the camera and say "I've never been so cold in my life."

This grab would be incredibly powerful and people would come away from the story with the feeling that it's all Ok, and if there are any consequences, they will not be visited upon us for hundreds of years.

Sadly not so, and the first symptoms of this global convulsion will be Extreme Weather Events (EWEs).

These will take many forms, normally temperate cities will have summer temperatures of 45 degrees Celsius for two weeks on end, dropping to 35 degrees (maybe) at night.

Cyclones will lash the coasts for not three days, but ten.

Cold snaps will snap colder, and deeper.

Scouring winds will pour out of the deserts and blow for days on end.

Already these events are playing havoc with insurance premiums, with the government being increasingly called upon to underwrite the repair bill.

Said governments are already becoming increasingly reluctant to do so, yet to obviate the need for paying out for repairs, they are unwilling to close a coal mine to stop the damage occurring in the first damn place.

Maybe those loonies who stood on street corners in sack cloth and ashes shouting "the end is nigh" will finally be proved right.

Global Dimming

Then there's global dimming.

What's this?

Global dimming was a phenomenon first brought to light in the wake of 9/11.

After the planes hit the towers, an immediate halt was brought to all flights in North America, while the whole mess was sorted out.

And in this flight hiatus, a climate scientist then got some data no one expected.

He had climate stations set up across the continent, from Alaska to Florida, and in the three days of no flights, the average temperature of the continent went up by one degree.

I know it doesn't sound much, but one degree in three days is an awful lot.

Turns out that the aircraft vapour trails were reflecting massive amounts of heat away from the Earth.

So we have set up this awfully uneasy system, if flights stop again, for any reason, the volcanic explosion in Iceland was one good example, the temperature of the planet could rise faster than anyone ever supposed.

What can we do about it?

Simply turning off a light or two, if done in every building in the country, could solve the problem.

Else, Lismore will lose its unwanted title of 'flood capital' of Australia, and anytown, Australia, will begin vying for the title.

So in closing I'll refer to a novel I read by John Wyndham, The Kraken Wakes.

It's a science fiction novel about creatures from Jupiter who colonise the Earth.

Due to the almighty pressures of the gas giant, the only place they can survive on Earth is in the very deepest parts of the ocean, where the pressures are comparable to their home planet.

A conflict begins between us and them, and the creatures of the deep move atomic reactors under the poles and begin melting the ice, to cover the planet with more water.

As the water levels rise, a slow, but ever increasing panic begins and people begin fleeing the ocean shores for higher ground.

At one point a character is watching the building of levy banks to protect the city of London.

Another character asks, "Is this going to work?"

To which the first character says, "No".

So he is asked, "Well what can we do about it?"

His response applies to us if we don't start turning off some lights and shutting coal mines, and is:

"Find a hilltop and fortify it."

13 - Well, why'd you bloody ask then?

This is the fourth time I have started this post, which is not like me, but I am finding it difficult to maintain a particular thread of discourse.

One of the things about being a professional writer, which I am only in the very loosest sense, is that you have to develop control.

You get to a sticky point, and the natural urge is just to give up and say 'it's all too hard' and go and do something else.

Anyone seeing the finished product has no idea of all this background angst that went into completing it.

So what's wrong with me this week?

I have been having a difficult time with business issues and my house now on the market, with possible consequence of having to move, and this uncertainty makes it hard to concentrate.

No one is forcing me to write this blog, but I do it for my own reasons, mainly having somewhere to moan, and Wednesday is the day.

So I am going to attempt to stick at it.

So what's with the title?

This stems from someone I know asking me how I was.

Now this is a perennially thorny issue for anyone with chronic depression.

The genuine answer is usually "not good", but I have long since learned not to say this, because no one really wants to hear it.

Also, most people are busy with their own lives and problems to listen.

I understand that as well, which is why I go to counselling with Paula, she being paid to listen to me moan.

But therefore, what do I want people to ask?

I know it's a reflex more than anything else to ask how someone is, but I think I'd prefer people to just say 'hello', rather than 'how are you doing?', if they're not prepared to listen to the answer.

And then if someone does ask how I am, and I give the "fine, thanks" answer, it leaves me feeling terribly alone, unable to express my true feelings.

It kind of reminds me of one of Ben Elton's books Stark.

The female lead, Rachel, was saying she didn't like being referred to as someone's 'lady', she goes on:

"In the end Rachel began to think she would honestly prefer to be known as someone's casual fuck, than their lady."

And I kind of feel the same here.

But then the next part of the problem is that I do unbend, against my better judgement, and say "I'm not doing so well", I usually get asked "why?", and this opens a whole other Pandora's box, because when I say why it is that I'm feeling like this, the advice starts.

And man, does this make me mad.

I urge the entire sentient world to take a leaf out of my therapist Paula's book, and never give any advice.

I once had to explain to my brother that therapists, if they know what they are doing, never give advice.

He thought that I went in and lay on the couch, and the therapist then told me what to do, avoid him and my father in that particular case.

But this was of course completely untrue, I was avoiding my father for the usual reasons, and I was avoiding my brother because he agreed with my father.

So in the end this leaves me kind of out of options I can tell you.

I don't want anyone to ask how I am if they aren't going to listen to the answer and, clearly, I don't want any more advice.

As I once had to explain to my brother, by giving advice you are basically saying you know more about life than the receiver of said advice.

I might add that one of the bits of my philosophy that I have developed is this: "advice is the opposite of money, people will give without stinting, but refuse to take a cent".

So no more advice please, unless your prepared for me to tell you what's wrong with your life.

Mind you, I really have a chicken and the egg paradox going here, because the people I am most mad at don't read this blog, so who am I yelling at?

Not you, that's for sure.

So let's move on to another topic, mainly so I have a photo to go with the blog, vegetarian's aren't soft.

Why's this matter?

It doesn't really, but I remember when one of the Australian cricketers, Peter Siddle announced he was a vegetarian, in fact a vegan.

There was some controversy with many saying that you can't play professional sport if you don't eat meat.

Well that's rubbish.

I have been a vegetarian for some years now and feel fine.

I did have low iron recently when I went for my annual checkup, but I saw pharmacist Fleur and she gave me some iron supplements, they taste like a rusty gate (joke), but they have certainly been doing the job.

If I had a big day of energy expenditure, gardening, cycling, gym and surf, I would often be very tired around six in the evening, and have to work hard to stay awake till ten so I could sleep through the night.

But since I've started taking the iron pills, I haven't had a problem.

And I might add, I became a vegetarian once I began doing autopsies on sea turtles down at Seabird Rescue.

I can assure you once you've followed the scalpel inside the green liquid contents of a long dead turtle, you'll never touch meat again.

Promise you that.

So I'll close with this picture of the world's most dangerous vegetarian.

If you're willing to go up and stab your finger in his chest and tell him he's soft, then I'll start eating meat again.

Cape Buffalo – even the flies steer clear.

About the Author

Lachlan Barker is an author who lives in Byron Bay, Australia.

When not complaining to the internet through his blog at cyclonecharlie88.blogspot.com.au, he surfs or works as a gardener.

He entered rehab for booze and pot in 2008 and hasn't looked back since.

He has been on every continent except South America and Antarctica, and they're next.

More Works by Lachlan Barker

Long Way Round to Rehab

Year of the Rant – Part 1: Ignition Point, Autumn, 2013

Year of the Rant - Part Two: The Winter of Our Discontent, Winter, 2013.

The Destruction of Lasseter's Road (first chapter preview)

Connect with Lachlan

Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/lock.barker

Blog: http://cyclonecharlie88.blogspot.com.au/

The Destruction of Lasseter's Road

[Available at Smashwords October 2014]

It all started when Kellner at number 312 decided to blow up the stump that was blocking his driveway.

Kellner hated that stump.

It didn't stop him accessing his house, but merely from parking next to the verandah of his house, which was a problem as he repeatedly had to bring in his shopping in the pissing rain.

He could have had it removed when the tree guys were there, but Kellner was a cheapskate.

He didn't think he was, he thought he was merely prudent, but anyone else when asked would make comments like "he knows the value of a dollar", and "he would make $20 worth of effort to get back $10 owed."

When the tree guys charged him the exorbitant fee of $350 to cut down the tree, he asked aggrievedly "do you use gold chainsaws?!"

Then they'd had the outrageous audacity to quote him $2,000 to remove the stump.

Over his dead body.

So the tree company had cut down the tree, mulched the logs and left with the stump in place.

It was a big tree, and therefore now, a big stump.

It sat in the exact middle of the cul-de-sac end of his gravel driveway and was exactly in position to annoy him every time he came home.

He had tried his own hamfisted efforts with his rusty, never starting, always breaking down and always blunt chainsaw to remove bits of it from time to time, but he had never changed the bulk of the thing, and now he'd had enough.

Kellner couldn't have exactly told you why now was the time to do something about it, but it was almost certainly to do with his neighbour, Wills.

Kellner hated Wills, but then really, Kellner hated everybody.

Disliking the bulk of the human race seems to go hand-in-hand with being a cheapskate, why? Who knows, but Kellner certainly fitted the mold, maybe it was because it was only other humans who constantly cheated him out of money that was certainly his by right.

His work paid him less than he deserved.

The supermarket charged him more than the products were worth.

The government took more than their fair share in tax.

But Wills his neighbour didn't have any monetary interaction with Kellner at all.

No, Kellner hated Wills simply because of the noise.

Lasseter's road was a meandering suburban entity that wound away from the town and got quieter with every passing bend till you arrived at Kellner's driveway, the last dwelling, in the full blown countryside.

Thus Wills' constant habit of partying every weekend with backpacker chicks he met in town annoyed Kellner to the point of making his doctor think he was eating raw salt, nothing else could explain medically Kellner's blood pressure.

To be fair to Wills, he constantly invited Kellner to his parties, but Kellner never went, suspecting (quite rightly), that Wills only invited him to reduce the number of neighbours at home in bed, who would then complain about the noise.

And this decision to remove the stump, by fair means or foul, had been taken by Kellner in the week after a particularly noisy party.

Even then, Kellner probably could have handled the noise, but the accompanying annoyances were beyond the pale.

For instance: even if Wills had not invited him over, Kellner knew there was a party on because of the number of drunk and stoned backpackers who would get lost and turn up in Kellner's driveway and ask if "he knew where Wills lived?"

Whereupon Kellner would tell them "no", and they not understanding or simply full of drunken bonhomie would then say, "but you must know him, he's a great guy and there's a party on tonight, it must be around here somewhere?"

Kellner would then relent and whilst grinding his teeth give them approximate directions and let them get on with it.

He had for a while deliberately given them the wrong directions, but that had just led to innumerable camper vans driving up and down Lasseter's Road all night seeking the party as mariners had once sought the Flying Dutchmen.

So he suffered on the whole in ground tooth silence.

He had tried wearing his chainsaw earmuffs to bed, but this had had the counteracting effect of not hearing cars pulling up onto his forecourt and coming out on the morning to find he had been parked in by these party goers who had thought his parked car was a sign that this was party parking, they had then parked their van and wandered off through the trees to Wills house to party all night.

So all in all Kellner was not a happy, or even fully sane man when he began the process of obtaining explosives to remove the stump.

A saner person would have noticed for instance that the very house he wished to park closer to, was ipso facto, close enough to sustain damage.

But the stump by now had become the repository of all Kellner's frustrations.

Somehow it embodied everything that was wrong with the world, or at least the part thereof that Kellner inhabited.

And so he sat down at his computer to find out how to turn that small volume of hated wood into a large amount of smithereens in the shortest period of time.

Milliseconds ideally.

Wills was drunk.

Even he knew he shouldn't be drunk at two in the afternoon, but if he knew it internally, there was no way he would admit it publicly.

He had a job, sort of.

The sign on the side of his car said "builder", but he wasn't really, or perhaps more accurately, he was a builder who hardly worked anymore.

What he did do, when he could pull himself together to do anything, was supervise people who really knew what they were doing.

Even then the word supervise was a hopeless over-estimate of Wills' skills.

If he got a job for a new client, it was usually because an old client from the time when he did swing a hammer had passed his name on.

Then Wills would swing into action and beg other tradesmen in town to do the job.

Wills hated and loved those phone calls.

In the short period after the phone had been replaced in the cradle he would be filled with a joyous euphoria, he had work, he could afford more alcohol.

This feeling of well-being would last until the first problem arose in the build.

Then he would cross the divide into hating this job, the client, the tradesmen he had dragged on site, the building supply house, the labourers who worked for him, the architect, the council for placing countless footling regulations in the way of doing things and all because they kept him away from the bourbon bottle and the company of 18 year old backpacker chicks (his word) which he preyed upon.

He went to the fridge and poured himself another drink.

He was "not at work" this day, meaning he was supposed to be supervising the laying of a concrete slab at a build outside town, but had twisted the arm of the concreter to do it all without him and was now sitting on his deck getting a full alcohol glow on before the weekend's partying started six hours or so hence.

He had as usual invited his neighbours for the night's party, but as usual those miserable, police-calling gits would not attend.

He didn't really want them there anyway, but even Wills knew that he had to try to maintain some sort of political détente.

He wasn't sure if anyone could have him kicked out, or indeed if even the coppers could do anything when they showed up once a weekend to tell him to keep the noise down, but keeping some sort of peace seemed to a good idea.

Of course once 8pm rolled around Wills would be in the midst of bourbon-induced revelry and didn't care if the US Navy started shelling the place in a vain attempt to keep the noise down, he was drunk and was allowed to have a little fun wasn't he?

But then neither Wills nor Kellner could have foreseen that a single tree stump would not only see the end of Wills partying but the end of life as the residents of Lasseter's road knew it period.

O'Driscoll knew he had been doing this job too long.

He often tried to remember back to a time when he was a young policeman and to discern if his attitude to the job had been different.

He knew the job wasn't different, the things he'd hated then, he still hated now, but back then he seemed to have more patience.

O'Driscoll felt that this was ironic, and certainly paradoxical, in that young men were supposed to have less patience, but he felt that back then he had more time to take over things.

Why then was his fuse shortening on a daily, if not an hourly basis?

Like the slowly dispersing cracks in a concrete dam wall, he could feel a parallel corruption of his restraint.

The scenario he feared was if just one more drunk started arguing with him, then abusing him, in the course of his work, he would go off like the fourth of July.

Just one more drunk, just one more loud mouthed, habeas corpus quoting drunk could see him turn from a regular Joe into something so incandescent, so full of nitric rage that not even a straight jacket could contain him.

Probably the thing that most enraged him these days was the "Why don't you go and arrest some axe-murderer?" line that he got from every single fucking drunk.

The drunks seemed to think that what they were doing, pissing on a shop front, fighting in the street, vandalising parked cars, then pissing on said car, jumping on bikes left chained to parking meters, and/or spitting on him, were somehow perfectly reasonable ways to behave.

His old cop buddies from the academy who worked in different locales would say make similar complaints, but then they would admit that at least in their towns the drunken crescendo occurred only Friday and Saturday nights.

O'Driscoll's town was a coastal resort with nearly two million visitors a year and the partying was 24-7, and thus there was no let up for O'Driscoll and his colleagues.

Even then, the tourists were in general the best behaved of the people he dealt with.

Handsome Aryan men from Germany, passionate French girls, Danish travellers.

There only offences were driving vehicles that were as roadworthy as a rowing boat.

When they partied at their accommodation they would shut it all down meticulously at 11pm and go quietly to bed.

No, the real troublemakers and regular abusers of O'Driscoll, were the locals and their sense of entitlement to do whatever they damn well liked and if someone complained that was too bad because they were locals.

With a sigh O'Driscoll realised it was time to go out on duty.

He got his car keys and drove out of the station.

It was Saturday at 6pm, he just prayed that tonight wouldn't be the night he cracked.

"Coastal Demolition, Brad speaking."

"Yes, I wonder if you can help me, I want to remove a stump from my driveway, can you guys help me with that?" Said Kellner.

"Possible, how big is it?" returned Brad.

"Well it's about, 1 metre across, maybe a metre and a half."

"OK, um, normally you'd get an excavator to do that, have you tried any of the tree companies?"

Kellner ground his teeth.

"Yes, I have, but the guys who cut it down wanted to charge me the earth to do it. Also, I don't think you could get a big enough machine down my driveway to dig it out. That's why I'm calling you guys, as far as I can see, the only way to get it out is to blow it up."

Brad, the voice on the end of the phone sighed internally.

He wished they'd never advertised they did explosive demolitions.

From the day his company had, they had been fielding a semi-regular series of calls from weirdoes who just wanted to blow something up.

He began the weeding out process, "Well ok, I'm happy to come and have a look, but the minimum price for any explosive related demolition is $5,000. Are you prepared for that?"

Kellner nearly dropped the phone, he cleaned out his phone ear with his little finger, "did you say $5,000?!" he responded.

Brad sighed internally once more, "Yes. Any demolition using explosives requires local council permit approval, insurance, the explosives and staff to execute. Plus nearby buildings, roads, pipes and trees have to be checked and shielded. Do you still want me to come out and check it out?"

"NO" yelled Kellner into the phone and slammed it down.

He paced about his kitchen fuming to himself.

He had a mental picture of a couple of hundred.

In his mind's eye he saw a demolition guy come out, place a stick or two of dynamite under the stump, open a beer, press the plunger and the job would be done.

Once again he had not counted on the local council placing a thicket of regulations around him doing what he wanted on his own property.

He wandered out to the front verandah and stared at the stump.

As he did he noticed that his "always on its last legs" car, was leaking again.

He went over and knelt under the front fender.

This time it was the radiator, a very small pool of green fluid was dripping on the ground.

The leak wasn't enough to worry him, his car had achieved an almost Zen-like state of continuing to run despite the eternal lack of care he bestowed on it, he would just have to remember to fill it before he left.

He stood up, he went automatically to dust the gravel off his knees, and as he did so noticed that there were dark stains upon his skin.

Probably oil or diesel from leaks from other parts of his engine.

Then something clicked in his mind.

Diesel.

Where had he read something about that?

Something to do with diesel exploding, something to do with home made bombs.

"Home made" was an expression Kellner loved, it implied less money spent.

He went back inside and turned his computer on.

The party was in full swing and Wills was, as always, drunk.

Like the Inuit of Northern Canada who had twenty-two words for snow, correspondingly Wills had a range of words to describe his drunken feeling.

A mild glow described how he felt when drinking alone on his stoep at two in the afternoon.

Mildly jouyous described the period around five to six pm when he was "allowed" to drink, and the pace of his bourbon consumption would quicken.

"Pretty Happy" was when he began to forget what had happened.

And the ultimate was "totally fucking legless", which was literal, and described his immoderate progress around the party, groping women, saying things like "Do ya' drop 'em?" (Meaning the accosted female's underpants), and was a period of the night when his legs no longer functioned as decent ambulatory devices and so legless was accurate.

He also has the expressions "Shit faced", "Slaughtered", "hammered" to allow composite adjectives.

"Pretty happy, verging on shit-faced", for instance, allowed him finer gradations to his descriptions of the revelry.

Now it was ten pm and Wills was completely happy.

His younger workers who did the procuring for him had done a good job and his house and lawn was covered with 18 year old women.

The music blared, the lights resounded and his mood soared.

Clouds of marijuana smoke drifted on the breeze.

"What", thought Wills, "could be a finer lifestyle than this?"

A song he thought he recognised came on and he yelled, "TURN IT UP! I love this song."

The music soared forth and he realised it wasn't the song he thought it was.

No matter.

He moved onto the dance floor and sort of tried dancing with a couple of attractive young women.

In his drunken state he didn't notice them edging away.

They knew him too well.

It would have surprised Wills to learn that almost everyone at his house that night hate his guts.

The others at the party, all younger than Wills, only attended because he provided vast tubs of free alcohol.

He thought they attended because he was a great guy who despite the ongoing years still knew how to party.

Oh the self-deception of the middle aged.

He shimmied across to the ice tub and got himself another can of bourbon mixed with coke.

Kellner ground his teeth.

Another Saturday, another party at Wills's place.

He had already told two van loads of revellers that the party was next door and "couldn't they bloody hear it?"

They had responded as usual with the "can we park here?" question, as if everyone on Lasseter's road would be falling over themselves to provide convenience for those attending.

He told them to go back to the road and park at Wills, and they had backed lurchingly down his drive in the dark.

He knew he was in for another night of little sleep and ongoing, increasing frustration and hatred of his neighbour.

Among the real crosses for Kellner to bear was the issue of timing.

His job was with a road crew for the roads authority and was up at 5am each week day to join the crew.

And like all those with a regular early start he found it impossible these days to sleep in on the weekend.

He had tried, saying to himself, "c'mon it's the weekend, have a relax."

But he had always just ended up lying in bed with his eyes closed, until eventually, with a sigh he would roll over and start his day.

And of course this had become vastly worse with the advent of Wills next door.

Now it was Saturday night again and he faced his usual courses of action.

Like most, Kellner found his heart racing as he faced the confrontation of asking Wills to keep the noise down.

It was a paradoxical endeavour.

If he went over early-ish, say 9pm, Wills, full of bourbon-fuelled bonhomie would wrap his arm around Kellner's shoulder and ask if he wanted a drink.

Kellner would say 'no' and then ask him to turn the music down.

Wills would say 'yes', and drop the volume.

Kellner would go home and then wait out the next step.

Which was, an hour after Kellner had gone home, sometimes a minute, Wills would have completely forgotten the conversation and when next a song he liked came on would once again yell 'TURN IT UP', and so it would go for another Saturday night.

If he waited till midnight when the local council noise covenant came into force, Wills wouldn't even remember the conversation.

Then Kellner would ring the coppers and complain about the noise.

The police were very good and would do their best, but in this partying town, particularly in the summer, they had so many calls for noise abatement that they sometimes didn't get to Lasseter's road till three in the morning, by which time Kellner was a red-eyed wreck, dozing fitfully in his chair in the living room, knowing the futility of entering his bed, since the moment he did he would have to be up to tell someone to get out of his driveway, or know that simply the volume of the music would rattle his walls and make his bed dance in time.

So he continued his research into home made bombs on the internet, and with each passing second an unconscious desire to make Wills sorry burgeoned within him.

"You there Barry?", crackled the radio in O'Driscoll's car.

"Yes, June", he replied.

The dispatcher this evening was Constable June Holcroft, O'Driscoll got on well with her and they had a loose and definitely unspoken agreement that she wouldn't bother him if she could at all avoid it.

"It's that time, I'm afraid," said Holcroft.

O'Driscoll's heart sank.

Like most in this coastal party town he knew the time to the minute without looking at his watch.

When the pubs shut, when the nightclubs shut, when the bakery opened, when the first coffee shop opened, all provided him with time markers that helped him through his shift.

However, again like everyone else, he had trouble keeping track of the days.

"That time", from June meant that it was Saturday midnight and now the noise complaints would start coming in.

"It's not is it?", said O'Driscoll in a hopelessly optimistic attempt to change the time and day of the week.

"Sorry Barry, but it is. And first up is your favourite address."

"What again? Jesus does that guy ever stop."

"Well not this weekend, you on your way?"

"Sure June. I'll go now."

'Your favourite address meant Wills place on Lasseter's road.

O'Driscoll couldn't count the times he'd been there, but each visit was a carbon copy.

He cursed under his breath and started driving.

Kellner had decided not to go over and put his heart through the racing stress of trying to get Wills to turn his music down this night.

He wasn't sure himself why it stressed him so, but it was most likely to do with the fact that it never did any bloody good.

Some Saturdays Wills would turn down the music, but as ever Kellner wasn't able to relax, sitting in his living room waiting to hear if a song Wills liked came on and the music got sent up to heaven again, whilst Kellner gritted his teeth in his private hell.

Also, even when Wills did turn it down, usually only after the police came, the roar of the drunken conversation would easily fill the sound vacuum and once again Kellner would have to wait till the last reveller had gone to sleep, before he too could find some rest.

So this Saturday he had gone for the easier option of calling in his complaint to the police as soon as the noise covenant came in at midnight.

The police were very good about it, in that they now knew why Wills' neighbours called in at 12:01am, and responded as rapidly as the events in town would allow.

Thus it was Kellner's call, routed through Holcroft on the switch, that had set O'Driscoll on his way.

O'Driscoll parked his police car at the end of a long line of cars parked haphazardly on both edges of the road, indeed the gap in the middle was barely adequate for a single car to pass.

He locked the vehicle and began walking.

If he hadn't been here every Saturday for the larger part of his working life, he would have known where to go by the noise.

It was scandalous, he had no difficulty understanding the neighbours complaints.

He turned into the driveway and approached the house.

As ever possibly a hundred, maybe more people were thronging the joint.

He entered the exo-rings of partiers and began to shoulder his way through to the heart of the action.

If the noise was scandalous, so was the condition of Wills, O'Driscoll knew him well by now and was able to pick him out where he stood leering down the tops of two young women.

With a long practised skill he manoeuvred his way to the music centre and turned it off.

The onrushing silence, well comparative silence of only the voices echoing around the place continued.

Wills, vaguely sensing something was wrong, well different, to what had been happening previously, turned and saw the upright blue figure of O'Driscoll staring balefully at him.

"All right Tony, it's midnight and you know you've got to turn down the music", said O'Driscoll.

He then waited for the next part of the routine.

Wills walked, well lurched in an upright sort of stagger, over to speak with the sergeant.

He threw his arm around O'Driscoll's shoulder and said, "Aw, yeah, officer, real sorry about that, do you want a drink?"

O'Driscoll looked down at Wills' hand dangling below his shoulder.

"Take your hand off me", he said, in as calm a tone as he could muster.

Thoughts shambled around in the subterranean caverns of Wills mind.

He faced this regularly.

He had to impress the young women at the party with his mature(?) and strong dealing with the policeman.

He faced a difficult decision.

He wanted to get through the conversation without looking like he was backing down.

But also, he didn't want to antagonise O'Driscoll who had the power to write him a noise citation, and, he vaguely thought, the power to confiscate his music centre.

"Take your hand off me, " repeated O'Driscoll with about the same level of menace as a leopard stalking a gazelle.

Wills equivocated.

"Would you like a drink officer?", he said, allowing him to take his arm off the policeman's shoulder and rummaging in the ice tub and coming up with a beer.

"No", said O'Driscoll, "what I want is to not be called back here tonight because of noise, or any other complaints, do I make myself clear?"

Wills struggled to come up with an answer that gave him some face saving wriggle room.

"Oh, sure, there's no problem with that, you sure though you don't want to take a beer along with you when you go?", he said.

O'Driscoll, fed to the back teeth with dealing with this guy, just shook his head and turned and left.

He made his way through the now (slightly) subdued crowd and began the walk back to his car.

Wills turned back to the young women he had been 'talking' with to discover they had taken the opportunity to flee his advances and made for a part of the party that Wills wasn't.

Wills, waited till he heard a car start on the road and drive away, prayed that it was O'Driscoll's car and then yelled, "OK, PARTY ON!" and turned the music up to about half it's previous volume.

'That should impress everyone', he thought and began patrolling for more female company.

Kellner groaned.

He was able to follow the events of O'Driscoll's arrival at the party as if he had been listening in on a phone extension.

Some nights Wills had co-operated, this was one night when he didn't.

Even at half volume he would have described the music as blaring, throw in the conversation and it was as if O'Driscoll had not been there at all.

He had a vaguely defined feeling that it was somehow bad form to call the cops twice in one evening, his only hope now was that one or more of the other neighbours would complain.

He went into his bedroom and lay down and wondered what his quota of sleep would be this night.

As he lay there he heard a snippet of a Wills sentence, ".... Yair, I wasn't having that, I even offered him a beer, and he ....."

'Some day', thought Kellner to himself, 'Some day'.

The noise continued and Kellner began his Saturday nightly activity of staring at the ceiling and waiting for exhaustion to overwhelm the sounds from Wills house.

The stump was no longer recognisable as such.

An ice sculpture now stood in Kellner's driveway, or perhaps a highly localised snowstorm had fluttered down in the night and formed itself into peaks and scallops on the woody surface.

It certainly looked quite beautiful to Kellner as he stood and admired his handiwork in the dawn light.

Like all cheapskates Kellner had kept everything he had ever owned in his life in a ramshackle shed made of stringybark logs, rusty gal and fencing wire.

He had once bought a cow which he was planning to milk, but quickly learned the lesson that so many diary producers have, that having even one cow gave one a morning and night chore that couldn't be ignored and tied you to the house, making holidays out of the question.

He likewise has had a brief enthusiasm for gardening and had layed out a garden in which he would grow veges, and save himself the exorbitant costs associated with purchase at the supermarket.

But likewise, he had found the work hard and by the time he brought in soil and fenced it off, the veges from the garden had actually cost more than those bought in town.

Thus his shed was full of the remnants of past ideas.

One such remnant was bags of fertiliser, and it was this product that now covered the top of the stump and trickled down around the sides onto the driveway.

Kellner had finally shuffled into a restless sleep around three am, but his body clock had snapped his eyes open with a click that almost audible at 5am.

A lifetime of rising for work at this hour had once again denied him a desperately needed sleep in.

He had tried.

He rolled and lay with his eyes shut, but after a mere ten minutes of this he had swung his legs out of bed and lumbered groggily to the kitchen to make coffee.

Once he had imbibed some mouthfuls he had decided that since he was up he may as well get on with the stump removal.

He wouldn't have really thought he was out for revenge, but he had to work Monday and this was the day he had set aside for the stump to go.

He finished his coffee and went out to the shed.

He shifted things around till he had located the fertiliser and began dragging the bags out to the stump, one by one he emptied their contents out until he was he had emptied all the bags.

His internet researches had not been clear about what volume of fertiliser was needed to create what sized explosion, but like the chinese inventors of gunpowder centuries before he decided to start big, as it was a big stump.

He had brought home a jerry can of diesel during the week, and now he emptied this onto the fertiliser and it, in more liquid form, splashed and trickled down and through the fertiliser, pooling around the seam of stump and gravel.

He once more stood back and admired his work.

Looked good, but would it work?

Soon find out.

The last piece of the apparatus was an electrical circuit to create ignition.

The diagrams he had looked at had all favoured a car battery with wires leading to the charge, but Kellner's only car battery was in his car, and he had carefully backed it up the driveway away from the ignition zone.

SO how could he set this off?

He went back inside for a coffee refill and thought about it.

He jiggled the cord to his electric jug to boil some water for a second round of coffee.

As you expect, his cord looked like Isaac Newton had used it for early physics experiments and it had to be jiggled into place create a circuit.

An idea formed in Kellner's mind.

He had had a problem with rats.

His television wouldn't turn on one night and he eventually discovered that starving rats had chewed through the power cord to the back of the TV.

As one would expect, he had taken the chewed cord and thrown it in the shed, he couldn't have imagined what it could ever be used for, but now his frugality would pay off.

He went out to the shed and ferreted about.

Under a rusted out ride on mower, but dangling over some besser blocks was the cord.

He wrestled it loose of its impediments and took it back to the house.

He got some pliers out of his work room and then examined the cord.

He found the parts chewed by the rats and cut the cord off neatly there.

Then with some scissors he separated the two wires back about twenty centimetres from the cut, then stripping the plastic from the copper core.

Beautiful.

He plugged the cord in and flicked the switch.

Holding one wire with the rubber handled pliers he brought in closer to the other.

A spark crossed the circuit and every light in his house went out.

He had shorted the circuit.

He went around to the fuse box to flicked the fuses back on.

The hum of the fridge and light in the kitchen came on again.

Kellner was satisfied, he had the power.

He plugged the cord into a power point in the front hall and carried it out to the stump.

He placed the two wire ends into the diesel-fertiliser mix and went back inside.

He bent down to the power point, installed at ankle level in the hall, and flicked the switch.

Nothing happened.

In the part of his mind where no one else can go, in the inner mental sanctum where he could be honest with himself, he knew this would happen.

The reason, generally, that home made things are cheaper is because they don't work.

Or, they work once and then fall apart.

Or, they work, haphazardly, sometimes effectively, most often not.

Kellner sighed.

He walked down the hall and stood on his front porch looking at the mound of chemicals piled on and around his stump.

As he stood there in the quiet of the Sunday morning his befuddled mind slowly grappled with a seed of mystery deep inside.

True the explosion hadn't worked, but...

He turned and looked back down the hall toward his kitchen.

The light was on.

That was different, last time he'd tripped the fuses.

He turned back to the pile.

As he did so, he noticed that the morning wasn't as quiet as he'd previously thought.

Down at the very lowest level of his hearing a sound was seeping in.

Where had he heard that before?

At breakfast.

The faint noise was a snap, crackle, pop, as of a famous breakfast cereal when the milk is added.

He went out to the pile and looked at the point where the cord entered the mix.

The sound was clearer now, and there was a sizzling component.

Then Kellner noticed that at the epicentre of the noise, bubbles were emerging.

With an appalled fascination he watched as a bubble grew and popped, and was then replaced by another slightly larger one.

With a rush a terrifying realisation hit him.

Against all the odds, he had succeeded.

His home made reactor pile was approaching ignition point.

It was the last coherent thought he had, his endocrine system took over.

He turned and fled.

Through the house, out the back door and into his ramshackle shed.

He dove through the air and landed behind some straw bales bought to mulch his garden beds and crouched down and held his hands over his ears.

Less than a second later the air was rent by an almighty ka-whuffing sound, felt as much as heard, and the whole thing went up.

Kellner had hit the jackpot of home demolition.

Inside his shed he watched with a preternatural fear as the rusty gal walls at the back of the shed bulged outward and then sprang back with a clank that rivalled the sound of the explosion.

From the house he heard the tinkling of broken glass as every window on the front of the house disintegrated in a welter of shards.

The stump itself, lifted and tilted as if by a giant hand, then resettled down the driveway from the newly formed crater showing its previous lodgement.

The natural eucalypt oil in the wood, combined with the spark and latterly encrusted diesel caught and red flame began to lick around the stump as it settled, mud encrusted roots exposed, on the gravel.

Kellner was a not a religious man but prayed for the first time since childhood that he would come through this alive.

The percussive effects began to recede, replaced by the sounds of falling debris.

First the heavier chunks of wood, glass and gravel settled over the environs of his house, clunking, clanking and thunking over gal roof and timber decking.

Then the lighter material began to fall and Kellner could hear the pitter-patter of a gentle eucalypt rain on the roof of his shed.

Eventually even this died out, and the quiet of Sunday morning returned to Lasseter's Road and the only sound Kellner could hear was a persistent ringing in his ears.

However, unbeknownst to Kellner, the effects of his explosion were really only just starting.

His attempts over the years to reduce the size of the stump with axe and chainsaw had made a series of cracks and fissures in the body of the stump.

Sometimes he cut down, sometimes he held the chainsaw parallel to the ground and thus a series of geometric shapes had been visible in the stump.

One of these, about the size of an adult human leg, had been separated from the stump and launched into the high atmosphere like an organic rocket.

Coated with diesel and dusted with fertiliser this chunk of timber sailed aloft trailing smoke and glowing red.

At the zenith of it parabola the chunk turned lazily, gravity took over and it began its descent.

As it speed increased the flames died down, but driven by the increasing rush of highly oxygenated air over its surface anew and demonic cherry red incandescence burgeoned.

Wills' septic tank was not in great condition.

Installed by the previous owner some twenty years ago, it had now succumbed to the heating and cooling cycles of the seasons and was cracked on all surfaces.

Wills had inspected it from time to time and often thought he should do something about sealing the cracks.

If the wind was strong in any direction it wasn't a great worry, but if the wind was light and drifting toward the house, then Wills's place was enveloped in a fairly foetid odour.

But then like most builder's jobs, paid or otherwise, Wills found it far easier to just say, "she'll be right" and go back to sit on his deck and drink bourbon.

And so when this most aerial piece of Kellner's stump arrived at terminal velocity from on high, the cover of the septic offered little or no resistance.

With a crack, then a groan, a section of the cover gave way and the still flaming chunk of wood entered and became as one with 25 years of well matured sewerage.

And there for a few seconds matters rested and the peace of this Lasseter's Rd dawn returned.

Wills, passed out drunk on the outdoor couch on his deck had started visibly from the first explosion at Kellner's place, but then unable to see the cause of the noise returned to his drunken sleep.

Which was a shame in its way as he would have been the first human to see a septic tank exploding.

At first the timber merged with the contents of the tank and a chemical battle ensued, with the moisture within at first threatening to douse the rocket red surface of the timber.

But the thing about septic tanks is that they gas off.

The smell that Wills had noticed over his tenancy was indeed a highly valuable commercial product, natural gas.

A bubble of this ignited, spread its exothermic message to other bubbles in the tank and the peace of Sunday was once again split by an almighty explosion.

The roof of the tank lifted with a lurch and the contents erupted skywards carrying, then splitting the roof of the tank into smaller pieces of concrete.

The cracks in the side of the tank gave forth geysers of raw sewage and the side walls likewise came down and the contents at the base of the tank decamped sideways in all directions.

The percussive wave of force travelled up the pipes connecting his tank with the house and all three of his toilets, two upstairs, one down, became a revolting mirror image of their function, spewing raw sewage out instead of in.

The toilets began to run and cascades of the muck formed rivulets, then creeks and finally small streams of sewage, flowing along the halls and down the stairs.

At the base of the stairs the various courses merged and an ankle deep pool of waste began to cover the living room carpet before flowing over the step, onto the deck and down the garden.

The flying sewage then began to retrace the path of the burning timber progenitor of this cataclysm and returned to Earth, covering the roof of Wills' house, the driveway, the garden and Wills himself.

Wills, insensible from twelve hours of bourbon drinking slept on.

Some time hence he would wake and know truly what hell was.

"Barry", crackled Holcroft's voice over the radio.

O'Driscoll stared at the thing in disbelief.

It was 7am Sunday morning, an hour after he should have clocked off.

There was no way, just no way, that Holcroft was thinking of sending him on a call.

Following the first call to Wills' place he had then dealt with the usual round of Saturday night calls to holiday makers and told them, one after the other, at one house after another, to turn the music down.

He had argued with drunks till his already threadbare tolerance had approached a point similar to the pile of explosive in Kellner's driveway.

With gritted teeth he tapped the 'respond' key on his car's mobile.

"June", said O'Driscoll, in ominously low tones, "I know, I just know you are not calling me to go on another call."

"I'm really sorry Barry", said Holcroft without preamble, "I really am, but you're the only mobile unit left and this is a recall."

O'Driscoll rolled his eyes.

A recall would indeed tie Holcroft's hands.

In an attempt to "simplify' dealing with late night complaints, the supervising officer had decreed that if at all possible, the same officer would return to a previously complained about address, as they already knew the situation, and it was thought this would aid in sorting things out.

As if, O'Driscoll had thought to himself many times, ANY administrative tweak would make dealing with irascible drunks any easier.

"All right", said O'Driscoll, "what is it."

"OK", said Holcroft, "I'll read you the exact words of the call that came in four minutes ago."

Holcroft cleared her throat, "There was a big party last night that went on till after 4am, then this morning there were two explosions at the party, now there is a really bad smell and I have had to close all my windows. Can you get someone to have a look up there."

June continued, "the call came from a Mrs Trail who lives at 264 Lasseter's road."

"Goddammit", said O'Driscoll. "OK, June, I'll go and see."

O'Driscoll pulled over, made a u-turn and headed out of town.

Driving the vehicle was less a policeman than a blue-clad incendiary device getting ready to detonate.

O'Driscoll noticed the smell some kilometres from Wills's place.

On this summer morning he had the windows down in an attempt to stay awake and in a far less successful attempt to provide some serenity to his fusing mind with a gentle rush of morning breeze.

With the first waft, he rolled up the window and found that the toxic odour was unstoppable.

He drove on attempting not to breathe.

He pulled up much closer to Wills's house than last night, the young things at the party, as always seemingly able to operate without sleep, had decamped for an early surf of just not to be there when the clean up started, and so the line of cars along the road was much reduced.

He pulled a t-shirt out of the boot of his car and with this providing minimal at best odour reduction, walked down Wills's driveway.

Within a few steps of doing this he stopped and stared.

A perfect circle of..., well, now that he attempted to form a sentence, he wasn't sure what the substance was, but continuing inside his head, he saw a perfect brown circle covering the lawn, driveway, deck and roof of Wills's house.

O'Driscoll had been on the force twenty years and like all beat coppers had a plenty of stories, some tear-squirtingly funny, others that still rankled.

He had seen fires, vomit covered driveway, blood strewn bar rooms, fights, accidents and wild parties, but even he had never seen anything like this.

Whatever THIS was.

O'Driscoll continued to stare and as he did a movement caught his eye.

On the couch, on the deck, a figure was struggling to stand.

The encrusted figure slowly, shakingly gained his feet and like O'Driscoll stared down the lawn.

O'Driscoll, still uncertain, knew one thing with clarity.

He wanted to be a long way from this odour as rapidly as possible.

"HEY!", he yelled.

The figure on the deck started visibly, then turned and saw O'Driscoll in the driveway.

He began a shaky ascent and as he slipped and slid his way till he stood before the sergeant.

O'Driscoll saw now that it was Wills, and realised from the flecks of toilet paper stuck to his surface among the brown goo what the substance coating every surface was.

O'Driscoll then said a line that would go down in the annals of police folk lore.

"So Mr Wills, how'd this happen?"

Wills stared.

He stared the stare of a man who had woken up with a chronic hangover covered in sewage.

He began to speak, but then realised he had nothing to say.

He didn't know how this had happened.

O'Driscoll waited a few moments and then continued, "Well, however it happened you better start cleaning it up."

This broke the walls of the little restraint Wills had.

"Clean it up! What are you fucking talking about, I didn't do this, and I'm not cleaning it up."

"Oh, so you do know who did this?", O'Driscoll took out his notebook, "would you like to file a complaint against the perpetrators?"

Wills stared wildly around him.

He hadn't done this, couldn't this dumbass copper see that?

But then large chunks of the night before were lost to his memory.

Whatever had happened, and whoever had done it, Wills didn't know.

O'Driscoll waited once more.

"So Mr Wills, can I have a name please?"  
Wills shook his head.

O'Driscoll waited again then put his notebook away.

"OK, then I'll leave you to clean this up. Be aware that following the neighbours complaints you can be cited under the environmental health act if you do not abate the smell and leaking sewage. The maximum fine can be as high as $20,000 per breach, do you understand?"

Wills stared dumbly with bulging eyes at the policeman.

Sometimes there are no words, or more accurately, no language had developed adequate words to describe his immediate situation.

O'Driscoll gave it a few more beats to see if Wills would respond, and then turned on his heel and walked away.

He drove back to the station turned in his car, reported briefly that the explosions on Lasseter's road were fireworks and it was simply a big clean up job up there.

Then drove home and went to bed.

Wills finally regained his deck, found the phone and began calling anyone whose number he had in his phone that had been at the party.

But those he could reach didn't answer the phone and when he went to leave a message he realised that asking anyone to come and help clean was unlikely to respond to a message saying "there's shit all over place, can you come and help clean it?"

So he then searched his house for some cleaning materials.

He began at the top of the house and began frantically trying to remove the sewage from his carpet.

Within thirty minutes he had cleared a space a metre square.

He estimated he had a week of cleaning to go.

And so Sunday continued on Lasseter's Road.

Kellner sat contentedly on his porch and watch the stump burn away, soon it would be small enough to hack up and remove completely from his driveway.

He would wheel barrow in some soil and stones from the boundary of his property and fill the crater.

Then he would be able to pull up to his house, then turn full circle and leave his driveway front on and not face the anxious reversing that had been his such a big part of his driving life before.

He had swept up the broken glass and would replace that as the weeks went by, costly it had to be said, but in general the overarching glow of having removed the stump, quietened his mind.

Additionally, having noticed the smell he had snuck through the trees and watched, hidden from view, O'Driscoll's interview with Wills.

His hearing was till imperfect, and he hadn't been able to audit their conversation, but the body language told him all he needed to know.

What's more the near square acre of faeces spread across Wills residence had provided him with a satisfaction he had never known before.

All Kellner's frustrations over all those times Wills had refused to turn the music down over all those Saturday nights was now gone, washed away on a tide of sewage.

He hadn't consciously set out to get revenge, but he had succeeded, all unlooked for, beyond his wildest dreams.

O'Driscoll slept well during a Sunday for the first time in as long as he could remember.

Most Sundays he struggled, with his mind continually churning over the arguments he had had with raving drunks through Saturday night.

But this day he drifted off to sleep with the image of Wills, covered in shit, facing multi-thousand dollar fines and having to clean the lot up on his own, with a raging hangover to boot.

Like Kellner, O'Driscoll had not set out to revenge himself on Wills, but he had been granted a privilege denied so many law enforcers, of seeing one of their tormentors completely reduced to mental and physical rubble.

None of the three men would have said they believed in karma before, but certainly Kellner and O'Driscoll did now.

