

Year of the Rant

Part Two: The Winter of Our Discontent

Winter, 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 - Kevin Costner, wanted by the cliché police

2 - Finally some good news

3 - On the road all right

4 - Let me park the mower and I'll be right in

5 - The worst p-plate test experience of them all and botanico-sexual kinks

6 - The largest sexual organ of them all and clammy females in my bed

7 - The secret of eternal happiness

8 - Lesbians in the lounge and my cervical cancer scare

9 - Out with the new, in with the old

10 - The cemetery is in Cemetery road

11 - Bong diving aardvarks

12 - Demi goeth and the snakes cometh

13 - Is Karma real? It bloody was that day

About the Author

More Works by Lachlan Barker

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

### 1 - Kevin Costner, wanted by the cliché police

Kevin Costner and Whitney:  
I was rooting for the stalker.

Some posts ago I wrote "I'm not one to complain(much)" and put at least a nice photo of the Pass in the morning to alleviate the moaning.

Well this post follows a similar theme, but even for me have I got something to moan about, stick with it and you will be reading a coruscating, white-hot flame out of certain movies that have been festering away inside me for some years.

But first the good news.

I paid off my car this week.

So relieved, and I want to give thanks to my loan officer, Calvin and his team for treating me with courtesy, respect and professionalism.

I won't name his firm here in the copy, as a lover of Media Watch on the ABC it would be against my journalistic ethics (such as they are), but I can say that, when I thought it through, it was the honesty that I appreciated.

The interest rate was high, 20%, but I knew it would be as my credit record has been spotty as a giraffe wearing a leopard-skin coat, but there were no hidden costs and now the car is mine.

You've seen bits of this car in some of my photos, usually bearing down on some numbskull walking, driving or riding on my side of the damn road, and you'll notice it's maroon.

Thus, my only (minor) complaint is that Calvin's company are Queensland-based and driving around in NSW in a maroon car during state-of-origin season doesn't make me happy, and I wouldn't be surprised if they organised it so that any NSW applicants for a loan get good service and a maroon car.

Moving on, the photo here shows the sunset over Mullum, with Naturopath Mick and his lovely daughter Evie-May enjoying the peace and beauty.

I was around there to talk with Micko about a garage renovation we have coming up together, but sunsets like this are one of the reasons we moved here, so we thought we would take a moment to get in touch with our lentil munching side.

The next night I snapped this sunset pic over my tent, the beauty is eternal up here.

You can also see MY car on the forecourt.

So enough of the tree luvin' hippy crap as Cartmen would say, time for some serious spite.

Some years ago I was watching TV and finding nothing was gripping me, to quote Lister from Red Dwarf, "I was in a state of total smegging ungrippedness".

I flicked around between channels and Kevin Costner appeared on the screen.

It was The Bodyguard.

At this time the only thing I knew was that Costner had been in Dances With Wolves, which I had never seen, but everyone had said was a great film.

Tom Cruise made two good films, Born on the Fourth of July and Risky Business, Kevin Costner made one, Dances With Wolves, but at least he scored better than Steve Guttenberg, who has made none.

Thus I watched a little of Bodyguard because of the Wolves vibe and saw that the film was heading for a major cliché, "Surely they're not gonna do that", I said to myself, but sure enough the particular cliché was perpetrated.

I watched a little more and saw they were coming up to another cliché, bigger than the previous, once again I debated in my mind if they could possibly be so bereft of originality that they would go there.

They did.

I then watched with a truly cosmic level of fascination at how bad that film was.

Cliché followed cliché, bad writing overlaid wooden acting that would have made Pinocchio ask for his name to be taken from the credits.

Since the plot called for a stalker to be threatening Whitney, I found myself totally starting to barrack for the stalker and hope he offed her quickly and the film would come to a merciful end.

That film was so bad that, believe it or not, it was one of the few times I yelled at the screen.

My yelling was engendered by the bit where they sleep together (bet you never saw THAT coming).

Then the next morning in a staggering display of hypocrisy suddenly Costner has an attack of morals and says with vehemence, "I can't do this. I can't work this way", and leaves a tearful Whitney begging him not to leave.

At this point, driven beyond endurance I yelled, "Well why did you sleep with her in the first place you f*%$^ng arsehole".

Mind you, perhaps that was the only honest part of the film since all men hightail it the next morning like they're leaving the scene of a crime.

Costner couldn't even give it the, "I've got to be at work early" line since guarding Whitney was his job.

This film so enraged me that I first developed my system of Ultimate Audience Feedback or UAF.

What you do is, when a film makes its debut at Grauman's Chinese theatre the producer, director, writer and lead actors have to attend with their genitals linked to a major power source and then anytime the audience are unhappy they can turn a switch on the armrest of their chair and watch as said perps of the movie start shuddering with infused current.

I would also like to see the UAF used, with extreme prejudice, on Leonardo di Caprio, for The Beach.

I saw this joke of a film one night on the WOOFING farm where I first lived and worked when I drifted into Byron all those years ago.

My friend Dave said, "I'd like to see The Beach tonight, I've heard it's not great, but the scenery is fantastic".

I agreed, sort of hesitantly, and we sat down to watch.

Well he was right on both counts, the scenery was fantastic, and I could certainly believe it repaired the damage to Thailand tourism done by Bangkok Hilton with Nicole Kidman.

Also, "Yes, Dave, it wasn't great".

First thing about this film that boiled my potatoes was that the book by Alex Garland it is taken from is absolutely superb.

One reviewer wrote: "A stunningly confident debut", and I fully agree.

So good was this piece of work that I was amazed that it wasn't his tenth novel.

The book has a crucially tight plot dealing with drug induced madness, pressure, real tension and not an excess word.

But then Hollywood got hold of it and this is what happened next.

The producers approached Leonardo's agent and asked if Leo would do it.

The agent then got back to them and said Leo will do the film as long as he gets to have sex with all the young women on the beach and no one else does, and no one in the film can have a sceric of fat on them.

The producers cravenly agreed and turned a great book into a huge steaming mound of Leonardo's ego.

Additionally, Robert Carlyle was in this rubbish.

He was most famously the lead in The Full Monty, and played Hamish MacBeth and many other roles.

He is a superb actor, just superb, and I wanted to contact him and say "next time you need money, call up and we'll have a whip 'round, that way you don't have to appear in celluloid rubbish like The Beach".

Anyway enough ranting, I didn't even get to Independence Day and Jurassic Park, but that day is coming.

Believe me.

### 2 - Finally some good news

##

We had the day that we all work for at Seabird Rescue on Tuesday this week, a turtle release.

You can see in the photo Kath and Helga on the latter's point of departure for the ocean (Helga is the one with the flippers).

I am aware that there is a thing called sympathy burnout or awareness overload, a phenomenon referring to the overwhelming amount of causes that need to be fought for, but which caring people just don't have the time and/or resources to fight for.

So I'll just quote few stats.

We see 60-100 sea turtles a year at our hospital in Ballina, half of those die.

This is not through lack of care of course, but to quote Dr Mark Flint from University of Queensland, "we still understand so little about the functioning of the [sea turtle's] digestive tract".

This was evidenced by a story Mark told when he visited our hospital.

A turtle was brought to them for care and swam around in the holding tank for a year, without eating, then died.

Upon necropsy fresh sea grass was found in the animal's crop.

Did the turtle shut down her digestive tract for a year?

Was she living on these resources in her tract by digesting them slowly?

Did she have a secret sea grass pusher that she bought said herbage from in shifty fashion down some alley when the UQ staff weren't watching?

We just don't know.

Flippancy aside we confront this issue with every turtle that arrives in the hospital.

The reptilian metabolism in very slow, this is good in one way as it takes them a long time to die (we estimate that some turtles may have been floating for a year, gradually becoming too weak to swim, before drifting ashore), but bad in that it takes them a long time to recover.

Also we can't operate on the gut of a living turtle.

Sometimes we know there is plastic inside, usually from finding small bits of it in the faeces, but all we can do is hope that they pass this damaging matter as soon as possible.

It is guestimated that we see 0.001% of turtles who are in trouble and are lucky enough to wash ashore near us at Ballina, and then are lucky enough to be spotted by a beach user, and then are lucky enough that the beach user knows to call us.

Helga's release is therefore a joyous moment for us all, particularly the hospital staff who feed, clean, medicate and keep the stats on the turtles in the tanks.

This one turtle is such a vanishingly small stat, but makes us happy I can tell you.

If you would like to donate or join Seabird Rescue you can do it online by following this link, www.seabirdrescue.org

By the way, we do turtles and birds equally, but haven't come up with a name that combines the two without being cumbersome eg, Australian Sea Turtle and Seabird Rescue.

This was best put drily by my brother who asked if we ever killed any turtles by taking them to a headland and throwing them off.

NO, we can tell the difference.

Elsewhere, I have started a petition to get rid of promos during TV shows.

This may seem like a trivial thing, but when I thought about it, I only watch commercial TV with my mute button on a hair trigger, and this is a most invasive form of advertising.

Additionally, if we can get the commercial networks to behave on this it gives us a better chance when dealing with more serious infractions eg letting Alan Jones and Kyle Sandilands talk.

If you'd like to raise the blood pressure of Barry Daley the Programming Director at Channel Ten, click the picture to sign or email him direct at barry.daley@sca.com.au

Next, do you know what vampire energy is?

It is not as the name suggests ravening appliances that come to life at night an nip you on the neck while sleeping, but then again in a way it is.

It refers to all the energy consumed by appliances that aren't doing anything, the little red light on your set top box and TV are examples of vampire energy.

Wikipedia states: "In Britain in 2006 standby modes on electronic devices accounted for 8% of all British domestic power consumption.[5] A similar study in France in 2000 found that standby power accounted for 7% of total residential consumption.[6]"

My power bill is $144 per quarter, and using the French stat, $10.08 of my power bill is for things that aren't turned on.

My phone gives me a message "Battery full. Unplug charger at socket to save power."

In my ignorance I used to just take the phone off the cord and think the power was off, but this curious photo showed me I was wrong.

I was lying in bed reading one night, one silent night.

With the chilly winter (for us, those in my home town Bathurst I can hear yelling 'pansy' from here), I have turned off my fridge to save power.

I have mentioned in another post that things are so quiet where I live that sometimes the only noise I can hear is the fridge, well this night with the fridge off I gradually became aware of a high pitched whining seeping into the lower range of my hearing.

At first I thought it was a mozzie, but no.

Then I thought it was my tinnitus(ringing in the ears), but it wasn't that either.

I turned my head and realised it was my phone charger, still plugged in, but with no phone attached.

My engineering friend Antony gave me the technical reason, a charger is a mini-transformer and the whine I heard was one coil trying to induce charge in the other.

So now we all know, chargers plugged in while not actually charging a phone are consuming energy, a small amount for sure, but consider this rough maths.

The power bill for my home is $566 a year, if the 22 million Australians live in five million homes, then the power bill for Australian homes per year is ~$2.9 billion, and this doesn't include commercial and industrial.

Thus every year Australians spend $203 million dollars, and emit 10% of our greenhouse emissions, on power for things not in use.

So enough, this post may be titled "Finally some good news", but on looking back over it I found I managed to moan and preach for 90% of it.

It's genius in it's way.
3 - On the road all right

A friend from high school once said to me that I've led an interesting life, which I guess is true though it always invoked feelings of the famous chinese curse "may you live in interesting times".

I'm happy with an interesting life, less so than being broke at the age of 48.

Another friend I knew in Sydney worked for one of the big four banks and he told me he set the worst example for a bank employee as he "had no savings, but plenty of stories".

So to combine the paragraphs so far, one day I may be able to make some money from all these stories.

Having said that, I am further reminded of the band Blue King Brown, a Byron outfit, who began busking on the stony surface of Jonson st.

Natalie from BKB, when asked on Spicks and Specks, pointed out that the first task was to get people to stop and listen, that was hard enough, but then getting them to pay for it, was harder again.

Anyway, the picture shows me hitching outside Bangalow.

My car needed some more repairs and my trusted mechanic is at Clunes, 30 k or in the hinterland, so when the car was ready I had to hitch up there.

As I stood there arms outstretched I was thinking "why am I still hitch hiking?

I am graduate of Sydney Uni science and I thought by this stage in my life I would own a $40,000 motor vehicle and be able to afford limo service to go pick up my car".

It reminds me that when I first set out to be a writer that I quickly realised that to be a good, or at least interesting writer you first have to have a lot of bad experiences.

No one for instance wants to read about a travel journalist who goes to India, catches buses that are always on time with plenty of comfy seats, never catches Delhi Belly, and doesn't spend most of the holiday crouched over a hole in the ground begging for death.

Never happen, you wouldn't read it.

So I gave up the Trying To Be A Writer idea as I didn't particularly want to spend my life having bad experiences for the edification of others.

All of which is of course voluptuously ironic as life then proceeded to load bad experiences on top of me one after the other.

Elsewhere I have mentioned that I have been to rehab for booze and drugs so I thought in this post I would relate some of the antics that saw me ultimately enter the doors of Marumali rehab centre at Wyong hospital on the central coast.

It all started with a broken heart.

I fell in love with an American woman, who then dumped me for another man.

This was a doubly unique experience for me, I'd been dumped before, hasn't everyone?, but this was the first time it was announced clearly to me that another man was better than I was.

Plus, I'd never been in love before.

This was the real deal, unable to eat, unable to sleep, my regard for this woman made Gatsby's for Daisy seem like a casual, take-her-or-leave-her kind of thing.

So to say I was devastated by this dumping was a staggeringly underwhelming word to use.

Perhaps best put by saying that in comparison the residents of Pompeii were mildly annoyed by the explosion of Mt Versuvius.

At the time I was working for an American software company, the head office of which was in Silicon Valley, south of San Francisco, based around the town of San Jose.

I was over there to attend a two week training course on some new gear we were rolling out and she told me it was over on the weekend in the middle of this fortnight.

I got though the remaining week of training, and in truth, the course was a bit of a godsend as it was complex programming that absorbed my mind and allowed me to shy away from any thoughts of the raging chasm of pain that was now buried deep within.

Friday

My flight back to Sydney was 5pm Saturday, but this was Friday and with the course over I drove down up to central San Fran with two friends I'd made on the course, Stewart from Edinburgh and Mike from Dublin.

I dropped off the car I'd hired and then checked into a backpackers nearby.

Then we were free.

It rather sounds like the beginning of a joke, "There was a Scotsman, an Irishman and an Australian loose in San Fran on a Friday night".

All three of these races are, how can I put it?, known for liking the odd beer?

Well!

Man, did we get slaughtered.

The end of the course, the weekend in prospect, the relief of getting out of the sterile building we'd inhabited for the past 14 days, plus, for me, the desire to forget about the dumping.

It all combined and it seemed we were on a mission to denude the entire Bay area of beer.

I can't recall how many different bars we attended that night, in fact, I can shorten that sentence to three words, "I can't recall".

Eventually we had to call it a night due to fatigue, Mike and Stewart peeled off to their accommodation and I wended my way home to bed.

Saturday

When I awoke the next morning I knew I was in trouble.

For the first time since the dumping, I was alone with my thoughts.

I checked out of the backpackers at 11 and mentioned to the young man behind the desk that my flight wasn't till five and could he recommend something for me to do till then?

He then said those fateful words, "well, there's a great pub just down the block, which has good food and so maybe lunch there?"

"PUB!"

I was out the door before he had dropped my key into its slot.

As a Simpson's toast famously put it: "To alcohol, the cause of, and solution to, all of life's problems".

I would drink steadily till three, catch my bus to the airport and then fly home.

The pub (pictured) was great and additionally once inside, and as I'm about to relate, was the first and only time in my life that I believed in ghosts.

I ordered a beer and then noticed a display on the wall, it was a tribute to Jack Kerouac, who, it was said, wrote On the Road there.

Apparently once he'd arrived in California he sat in that bar and wrote the seminal road book whilst, presumably, imbibing vast quantities of booze.

I was strangely comforted by the display and felt this was the place for me that day.

I returned to the bar and ordered another beer.

An American guy about my own age came in and sat next to me.

We struck up a conversation.

His name was Jim and he worked for a book publishing firm back east and had been in town seeing clients and now was, like me, having the day off.

He was actually in the pub because of the Jack Kerouac legend and we fell to talking about books, work, the West Coast and the like.

Just what I wanted.

The hours slipped by on a tide of Budweiser, lunch of chili fries came and went, then I noticed with horror that it was 2.30.

Horror, because I was having such a good time, Jim was great company, the bar was cosy and redolent with the aura of Jack the great writer.

The idea of leaving this cosy cocoon and returning to the real world was repellent, and at that moment I believe the spirit of Jack Kerouac awoke and entered me.

I said to Jim "Do you want to go out and see a few bars this evening?"

He replied, "Hell yeah! But I thought you were flying out?"

"Soon fix that", I said.

I rang the airline, "may I change my flight to Sunday?"

"No problem Mr Barker, there will be a US$50 fee, is that Ok?"

If she had said $1,000, I would have said Ok.

I left Jim and returned to the backpackers, "Ok to stay another night? I'm now flying Sunday."

"No problem", said the young man.

I took my key, dropped my bag back on the bunk from last night and returned to my alcoholic womb and off we went again.

Some more hours in the Kerouac pub, then we found somewhere to have dinner and the night took on the whirlpool effect of Friday.

I said to Jim "Do you know where we can get some pot?", he did and the next thing I recall we were in a terrace house in south San Fran, inhabited by some frankly evil looking people.

We decided not to buy any pot, as we didn't want to carry it round in public, so paid $10 each and smoked up a couple of joints while we were there.

Just what we needed really.

Already bombed from afternoon drinking we were now stoned, on West Coast pot, famously strong and often spliced with other drugs, to boot.

The night then to on the classic kaleidoscopic texture and with the cocktail of pharmas in my blood, I became convinced that Jack Kerouac was walking with us.

I began to look over my shoulder to see if I could glimpse him.

Faces of men in bars merged Jack's photo on the wall of his pub that I had looked at that afternoon and whilst we weren't 'On the Road' in the classic sense, we certainly stumbled up plenty.

I recall attending a strip bar in the Damon Runyon hours and then nothing.

Sunday

If you think things had been wild, that's correct, but they were about to get wilder still, and it all stemmed from me showing a little self-control for the first time in three days.

A lesson there along the "life is what happens when you're making plans" school of philosophy.

At 11 I checked out of the backpackers (again) and to say the pull of Jack's pub to have a few beers to take the edge off my hangover and emotional pain was magnetic would be to completely understate it.

No earthly magnet could match it.

The pull Jupiter exerts on the asteroid belt was closer to the truth.

However, I knew, hungover, emotionally-destroyed me, just knew that I had to get on that aircraft this night.

The helpful young man at the backpackers told me that the airport shuttle came to the backpackers each day at 11 specifically for those checking out.

Great.

I grabbed my bag and waited in tense fashion on the footpath outside, the shuttle duly arrived and I got on board with a sigh of relief.

I was still tense on the ride out to SFO, worrying that I may break at any moment, yell "stop the bus" and jump off and into the nearest bar.

I could be still there today, begging on the streets, but I held on and was delivered safely to the airport.

It was now noon, with three hours to check in, and five till the flight, but that was my plan, just hang at the airport till time.

However, having got myself there, I then rewarded myself, how else?, by attending the first bar I could find and began drinking.

As I was ordering my third beer and the world around me began to swim into focus like the sand at the bottom of a mouldy fish tank, I noticed that next to me at the bar was an attractive, red-haired woman of youngish middle age.

As I went to order, she did at the same time, so I said, "Can I buy you a drink?"

She said "Thank you" and ordered a martini, and like Jim the day before, we struck up a conversation.

I should point out here that I have always liked North Americans, one of my best friends was Sean from Toronto, my ex-wife was Canadian, the woman who had so recently dumped me, Californian, and this red-head was from Colorado.

I think it is their always upbeat attitude and seductive accent, a north American is always likely, as had Jim the day before, to say "Man, you're Australian, it's great to meet you and just hear your accent".

My red-headed friend's name was Colleen, I asked her what she was doing here and in her reply was the first of the coincidences that occurred that Sunday.

"I'm an art buyer, I'm flying to Sydney this evening to buy some works for our gallery in Vail."

"Oh, really", I said, "Are you on the five p.m. flight?"

"Yes", she replied.

"I am too", I said and then we were well away.

I told her about my work, software, silicon valley and the like and we conversed (and drank) happily for the next three hours.

Then it was time to check in, we attended the desk and received our seat designations.

Then, what else?, we returned to the bar and had a few for the sky, and waited for our flight to be called.

Eventually we boarded.

The cattle class of aircraft has ten seats in a row, three near the window, four in the centre and three against the window on the other side.

To this day I don't know if it was the ghost of Jack prodding the arm of the check-in clerk, or simply that we were standing together in the line, but when we took our seats, I had the window seat of row 34 with no one next to me, whilst Colleen had the aisle seat in the middle four seats of row 34 with no one next to her.

So she came over and joined me and as soon as airborne we began drinking from the flight attendant's trolley.

Vodka for her, more Budweiser for me.

Then somewhere between the coast of California and the trade-wind caressed shores of Hawaii, we consummated our love against the window of row 34.

I would advise anyone planning this irregular airborne activity to ask the flight attendant for an extra blanket (each), a tarpaulin if possible.

My salient recollection was trying to cover our carryings-on with a woefully inadequate single blanket.

I don't know why I bothered really, we were so drunk that the noise was a far bigger giveaway than a visual sighting in the darkened aircraft.

If the co-pilot had appeared next to me and said "could you keep it down please, we can't concentrate in the cockpit", it wouldn't have surprised me.

Then we fell into a blissful sleep.

Blissful, that is, for the other passengers, who were then in their turn able to get some shut eye.

We eventually turfed up in Sydney Tuesday morning, I showed up to work and had my arse royally, I mean ROYALLY chewed for a) being a day late b) still in the clothes I wore on the plane, c) still drunk, but MOSTLY for funding my three days of Kerouac with a company credit card.
4 - Let me park the mower and I'll be right in

Back to the "Only in Byron" bit instead of more of my mewlings about how hard life is.

I snapped this pic as I left the office on Friday, and it truly, in my opinion, sums up this town.

We presume the council grass man was driven in by the rain and clearly the most natural thing in the world was to slot it into a park, go in and buy his lunch at Byron Organic Kitchen and then return to work.

Now I may have mentioned this once or twice, but I have a thing about bad road users and I was impressed with this mower driver following the rules, parking neatly and then, I hope, checking his wing mirror before moving into the traffic stream.

You know what they say, "Nostalgia ain't what it used to be", well I'll tell you this for nothing, getting your licence deffo ain't what it used to be.

These days to get your 'P' plates you have to undergo 150 hours of logged driving with a licensed driver before you can sit your test.

Those who are reading this are unlikely to be getting their P-plates, but many will have no doubt suffered, or are suffering, the vertiginous stress of being the licensed driver clinging with bunched fingers to the dashboard as your child starts out on the road.

And so to the past.

When I got my P-plates back in the murky past of Bathurst in 1982 the system was this.

You studied the manual and then went into the motor registry and did a twenty question multiple choice test, if you got 17 or above you could then sit your driving test.

Previously you just booked in, the cop got in the car and asked you questions as you went while observing your driving skills.

As a recipe for accidents this couldn't be bettered.

Already nervous, the student is then negotiating a tricky hill start while the cop asked deviously trick questions like "What is the maximum legal length of a two rope?" (A trick because tow ropes were illegal then, maybe they still are).

So I suspect that the coppers themselves put the kybosh on this as they were forever in danger of their lives as the student veered all over the road whilst trying to think of the safe following distance on the highway or what to do when a siren is heard.

I duly passed my written test and fronted the police station, a copper got in and we drove up town made two lefts, got back onto the main street and returned to the station.

Test over in five minutes, me now a licensed driver.

I say "over in five minutes" not because I was such a good driver, but because of what I heard about a friend from high school who had massive breasts at age 17.

Her test lasted 45 minutes, and I'm convinced that this was not because she couldn't drive, but the cop wanted to observe her thorax moving as she changed gear and manoeuvred around the driving seat.

Also, a friend from Bathurst told me about his test to get a motor bike licence.

Clearly the cop couldn't ride pillion, so they would observe you as you drove around.

Well that's fine, but the system has issues in a wintry Bathurst.

Peter parked his bike, went inside and registered, then the copper came out and stood on the footpath and gave him his instructions.

"Head up town four blocks, then do a u-turn, return here and reverse park between these two cars".

Peter set off and within 50 metres was invisible in a Bathurst morning fog.

He dutifully did as asked, returned and parked to find the cop talking to a bystander.

He parked his bike, switched off and waited.

After a few minutes of conversation he tapped the cop on the shoulder, who then stared at him blankly.

Peter said, "did I pass?", this jogged the memory and the policeman said, "Oh, oh, er, yeah, ah, sure."

Licence given.

My brother got his licence in Warialda, where my mother's family were from.

To say it was a one-horse town would be a disservice to one-horse towns.

A one-legged horse town would be a better description.

My brother passed his test and told me that as far as he recalled not a single other vehicle was moving as he perambulated around town during the stagnantly hot lunch hour.

Additionally the cop asked him to parallel park on a block with no other vehicles on it.

But even these stories of easy licence granting diminish to vanishing point compared with one told by my Agriculture teacher Lindsay "Jack" Cartwright.

He was working on the wheat harvest down on the Hay plain.

The farmer came to him and said, "Lindsay, we need more drivers, can you drive a grain truck?"

He, Lindsay, said "yes, but I'm not licensed."

The farmer said, "no problem. Just head into the cop shop tell them that and they'll sort it out for you straightaway".

So Lindsay got in the ten-tonne grain truck and drove into town.

He pulled up outside the Police station (I think Deniliquin was the nearest town) and walked inside.

Behind the desk sat the local sergeant and Lindsay said, "I'd like to get my licence for a ten-tonner , please."

The sergeant said, "Can you drive a truck?"

Lindsay replied "Yes" and the sergeant responded, "OK, I'll fill in the paperwork now and you can drive me uptown to get some lunch."

Paperwork filed, the sergeant climbed into the cab (carefully skirting the topic of Lindsay driving the damn thing there without a licence in the first place), they drove to the cafe, the sergeant got out and Lindsay drove away, driving test done.

ADDENDUM: When I had coffee with Clinton yesterday he said he'd heard a similar story, but it was milk they went to get for the driving test, so possibly this story of Lindsay's was an urban myth.

But then as Clinton also pointed out, such was the way thing were done in country Australia in the sixties and seventies that if this incident happened more than once, that would be no surprise either.

So there you have it, things have ramped up massively since those days of yore, yet I still wonder why there are so many f@#%$ng idiots on the road.

And now let's move to one of the reasons I became a gardener.

Here I am (right) with my bulbous schnoz scanning the flower of the Aloe Vera plant.

Many who use this best of skin creams have never seen the plant it comes from, even fewer (inc me till now) have seen the flower.

I enjoyed this moment one the property of my client Eric at Clunes.

On my return home I noticed that my aloes were flowering too.

So I snapped the pic below.

Then I remembered how my aloes got there and that's a tribute to the toughness of these plants.

I'd done some work for Eric and he asked me to prune the aloes back, I did so and asked him if I could take the trimmings as I have some trouble with Psoriasis.

He consented and I took four or five large stems home.

When I got home I needed to unload the car hurriedly and wasn't sure where I was going to plant my stems so I hastily threw them over the fence of the small garden on my hillside and then forgot about them.

Some time later I remembered them, went out to check and found that like a baby that can change it's own nappy, the stems had cheerfully taken root and were growing happily away on their own.

The ultimate plant for the lazy gardener.

Finally, I had a very stressful day yesterday for various reasons, but stuck to my guns and didn't head for the Rails (pub that is, not a suicide attempt) to get loaded.

I went to the gym instead and as I was leaving I saw this skyscape , rainbow an' all.

This reminded me that here in Byron I have access to the ultimate non-drug relaxation technique.

So I headed out to Wategoes beach and took a moment to enjoy the tranquillity of this wintersun dusk.

I hope you did too.

Next week back to the usual format of non-stop f@##$$%^ moaning.
5 - The worst p-plate test experience of them all and botanico-sexual kinks

To paraphrase the Two Ronnies: "In a packed blog today!" we will be a bit all over the place, but then since that accurately sums up my life, let's go with it.

So let's start in the garden.

Following last week's post in which I showed some pics of the aloes in Eric's garden and at my place I received this picture from my friend Mike.

He lives not far from Bondi in Sydney's east and had a similar planting story to tell.

He bunged a small aloe stem in this bed four years ago and now he has this magnificent beast.

The flowering is a curiousity.

I have been working in Eric's garden for five years and have never seen the flower before.

Additionally, plant things, flowering and otherwise, tend to happen earlier for us up here in the north, so to see these flowers spring forth at the same time 800k to the south piqued my interest.

As I said to Mike, "It's as if an aloe switched was flicked across the state".

It's most likely something to do with the season, colder than usual?, wetter than usual?, no frost?, some frost?

Who knows.

In the end for whatever reason these flowers appeared, they are food for the soul.

Elsewhere in the undergrowth I had an interesting job this week, pruning grass trees.

Those who know where I live will immediately assume this means enormous marijuana plants, but no, Grass trees, of the genus Xanthorrea, look like this.

This grass tree, however, looking like the botanical equivalent of an uncared for Shetland pony, is in need of some attention.

Pruning these things is not something to be taken lightly, indeed the second half of the title of this post refers to what is going on in this second picture.

Now I love plants, but that doesn't mean I am going over the top and expressing my love for them physically.

To deal with the xanth you have to get very personal with them.

The down hanging brown growth has to grabbed by the handful and cut away bit by bit.

To do this you have to get heavily personal and invade the plant's personal space.

Usually the dead material is full of ants and these spread up your arm in waves.

However I find it satisfying to clean them up and is one of the things I like about gardening, variety.

I've learned a little in my chaotic life in the workplace (I've had over three hundred different jobs. That includes part-time work as a student and each garden I label a different job, but even so that seems a lot) and one of those things is that we want some variety in our work and some sameness.

If you are driving to work and can go over in your mind what is coming up, that is stress reducing.

If you face unmitigated chaos in your work from the moment step across the threshold, that is very stressful.

Particularly if the chaos is different from yesterday's and you know tomorrow will be different again.

This was best learned by me when I took a job at a bakery in Byron.

I was living in a rustic shack west of Bangalow with no toilet.

I was on the dole and basically staring out the window.

I developed the real bad habit of having a drink at 11 in the morning.

After some weeks I ran into a friend and told him "I've got to get a job. I need to get out of that bloody shack during the day."

My friend said, "I used to do deliveries for the bakery in Byron and as far as I know, they've haven't been able to find a replacement. Why don't you ring them?"

I now know why they hadn't been able to find a replacement.

The job was every definition of a living hell.

And the relevant part was this.

After 1am the only things that are open in Byron are the nightclubs and the only place that the nightclub patrons can get food at that time are the two bakeries.

My bakery was 50 metres down the street from the infamous Cheeky Monkeys backpacker bar, which closed at 3am.

I started work at 3 and every night I would step across that threshold to be confronted by a sea of screaming drunk backpackers demanding pies and sausage rolls.

No coffee in the staff room and warming up for work, I went from half-asleep to stressed in the time it took to put my foot across the door.

Indeed it was while working there that I was suddenly reminded that I came to the north coast to be a gardener, not deal with drunken idiots.

So I'll close this particular strand of discourse with this panorama shot of Liz's wonderful garden and the peace I find there.

And so to the p-plate stories.

I'd like to say there has been a flood of correspondence, but I've had three stories, so I'll call that a flood.

The first is from Jane Williams and those who have suffered Bathurst, or Byron for the that matter, over Easter will understand.

Jane wrote:

"Such fun getting your P's back in the day!

Mine was in 1980, the Easter long weekend (didn't realise this when I booked it!) I didn't have the question and answer test just the Cop in the car!

Straight up William Street through all the bikie traffic that was in town and then a hill start near Stannies.

At that time that was where all the police stayed for the weekend, so there were cop cars coming and going while I was doing the bloody hill start!

That over I had to go to some random narrow street, (to this day I'm not sure where) and do a three point turn.

I ran up the gutter while doing this but I was distracted by the cop asking me questions.

I was pretty sure I would fail, but he said he hadn't failed anyone that day and he wasn't going to fail me!

Back to the Police Station and I had to angle park between two motor bikes!

Did it perfectly!!!

All in all he only asked me three questions!

Does make you wonder Lock Barker why there are so many bad young drivers on the road these days.

I only had my L's for three months and the only accident I've ever had wasn't my doing!

Thanks Jane.

Next is from pharmacist Fleur.

Fleur wrote:

"I had one of those non event driving tests, in Walgett I got my L's on the first day of the Easter school break, and then my P's the last day , so had my L's less than a week.

Having made my appointment with the police, he got in the car, asked how long I had been driving, which I truthfully said years... on the farm, chatted about the weather, the shearers strike and so on.

He directed me across town, (not far) he got out went in and saw a bloke, came out and we headed back to the station.

He went through the list of things I had to achieve in the test... hill starts, traffic lights etc all blissfully ticked off as not possible to do."

Editor's Note: Walgett is flat! A town planning lecturer at Charles Sturt Uni had a student there and his assignment was to fully map the town, including contour lines. The student emailed back that Walgett was at 130m above sea level and the 131m contour line was 40k out of town. He didn't have to put contour lines in the assignment and Fleur didn't have to do a hill start.

Fleur continues:

"The next time I drove was in Sydney traffic 6 months later , in the rain at night , in my brother's bomb of a mini, that had a very loose gear box, what a freak out that was.

I'm not sure who was more stressed, my brother or myself."

I'd say any other road user nearby - Ed.

Finally, this story is not an urban myth and easily tops the list for best p-plate story ever.

One of Fleur's friends showed up for her driving test in Walgett. The cop was waiting outside the station with his clipboard.

She gave her name and they got in the car and started the test.

Right from the start things went wrong.

She bunny-hopped her first attempt to pull away from the curb, the seat was in the wrong position with subsequent difficulties of putting the correct pressure on clutch or accelerator pedal.

When she went for the blinkers she constantly turned the windscreen wipers on.

After some minutes of staccato travel around town the cop said, "Have you ever driven this car before?"

Fleur's friend said, "No", looking curiously at the cop.

The cop replied, "then why did you choose to do your test in it?"

Fleur's friend answered very confusedly, "I didn't, you provided it for me."

There then presumably followed two looks of wild surmise, followed by a rapid u-turn and fast return to the police station to find the owner of the car inside reporting, again presumably, in outraged tones that her car had just been stolen right in front of the police station.

Needless to say she didn't get her Ps that day.

6 - The largest sexual organ of them all and clammy females in my bed

##

##

How's this for a distinctive plant?

This thing is, believe it or not, a lily.

It is close sibling to the better known Gymea Lily.

The Gymea is characterised by a red stamen, and the mighty beast on the right has a white flower.

I believe it is called the Madagascan Flax Lily, but may have the country wrong, anyway I will confirm that before publishing deadline.

(Yes, even I have deadlines, self-imposed, but they exist nonetheless.)

I am only in the picture for scale, I didn't plant it, tend it or have anything to do with making it what it is.

It grows in the garden of my Clunes client Eric and is another tribute to the amazing fecundity of the soil up there.

There has been a bit of a plant theme running the last few weeks and I realised that this picture had to go in.

Every time I look at this plant I am reminded of my luck.

Many of us never find their place in life, and so despite my seemingly eternal poverty and ceaseless moaning I have to say I have been astonishingly lucky in that I figured out what I wanted to do and where I wanted to live.

And it all came to me in one moment.

I was surfing at The Pass in Byron on my annual holiday, away from the IT world of Sydney, and I looked across at the green clothed slopes of Wollumbin (Mt Warning).

My family have been farmers for generations and as I looked at those slopes I began thinking, "There are few better places in the world to be a gardener".

(NB: there is a subsidiary philosophical lesson there as well. All your best ideas come when you are surfing.)

So that holiday I returned to Sydney with some excitement, that itself was a novel feeling, and began making plans to leave the city forever.

Eventually I unhooked and finally drifted into town one rainy Saturday afternoon with everything I owned under my arms or on my back.

In retrospect I would have done it with more money (sand dunes are not so much fun to sleep on when it is for more than one night), but then that's a third philosophical lesson, that Paula, my wonderful therapist wholeheartedly agrees with, that all of us would have done nearly everything differently if time machines existed.

So enough philosophy, let's move from plants to animals.

But before we do I'll tell you about Ray Braduick.

I read this story in a Bill Bryson book and it still fascinates (me anyway).

Ray was a keen amateur pilot and his favourite thing to do was to take his Gypsy Moth up for a spin at dawn on a Sunday morning.

One Sunday he did as usual and was startled, to say the least, to see the horizon carpeted with Japanese Zero fighters.

Ray lived in Hawaii and this particular Sunday was December 7, 1941, and the Zeroes were launching their attack on Pearl Harbour.

They fired upon Ray, and he sheared off and due to skill and luck, landed his craft and lived to tell the tale.

Therefore Ray became the first American to take part in World War II.

However no one remembers him, as they do Sir Edmund Hilary, or Roald Amundsen, first to the top of Everest and the South Pole, respectively.

And thus, I have a fund of disconnected stories that I think are interesting, but have no real connection to anything else, so I am going to bung a couple in here.

So, unconnected stories.

First: I believe I hold the world one-legged standing long jump record.

When I escaped from Kelso High School, my first real job was as laboratory attendant at Charles Sturt Uni.

Among my myriad tasks was collecting leaf litter in the sclerophyll scrub at Sunny Corner (a misnomer if ever there was one) about 20 k east of Bathurst on the Lithgow road.

The lecturer, David Goldney, I believe, had placed wooden-framed trays with a wire base throughout the forest and once a month I went out and collected any plant matter that had fallen into the tray.

David used this as a measure of the "speed" of the ecosystem.

So one winter morning I drove out and was bashing through the forest doing my collecting.

I came along the path and stepped over a fallen log and as I looked down to keep my footing was rapidly and irremediably discombobulated to observe that a Tiger Snake was lying in the grass a mere 20cm below my rapidly descending right boot.

I have no recollection of the next few seconds.

The next thing I do remember was standing on the path some three metres from the snake looking back.

Slowly, ever so slowly, my limbs began to return to my control.

The shaking eased and it dawned on me that powered by pure fear I had leapt off my planted left leg, no doubt shrieking like a debutante afeared of getting mud on her dress, cleared the log (approx 70cm high) and launched myself the full three metres to an entirely new grid co-ordinate.

Climbing the air ladder farmers call it.

So there you go, I can't prove it, certainly there were no measurements, but I nonetheless claim the world one-legged standing long jump record.

For the record, I can say this was possibly the only time in my life that I was happy that Bathurst is so zarking cold.

Why the snake wasn't hibernating I do not know, but the bone-chilling freeze of that Sunny Corner morning kept the beast sluggish and little interested in the activities of any large endothermic mammals nearby.

Next, clammy females in my bed.

At the time I was living in a converted garage 10 k or so west of Byron toward Mullumbimby.

(NB: I have a dream! A simple dream really, to one day live in a building designed to house humans, not cars as then, or a tent as now.)

I slept on a sleeping roll on the floor and one night I was blissfully asleep when all of a sudden, SPLAT!!!!, a green tree frog landed on my face.

As with the snake above, to say I was merely disconcerted is a completely underwhelming term to describe my reaction.

I went from prostrate on the floor to clinging gibbon-like to the rafters in less time than it takes scream, "What the zarking buggary was that!!!"

This particular frog and I had coexisted quite happily for some time, she lived in the drain hole under my downpipe which came down on the outside wall next to the door of my bedroom.

This night she had hopped the wrong way and entered my dwelling, then unable to get back out she had commenced hopping around the perimeter wall of my sleeping area trying to find an exit.

Eventually her staccato progress had brought her to a point where her way forward intersected with the start of my bedding roll and with one more hop and we were getting some genuine face time.

An ice age later my heart rate dropped below a hundred and I loosened my grip on the rafters and returned to earth, literally and metaphorically.

I switched on the light, grabbed the frog, returned her to her drain hole and closed the gauze door that I had forgotten earlier when I went to bed.

I found a half-smoked joint in my ashtray, fired it up and with the calming smoke regained the ability to sleep.

I checked my bed from top to bottom to see if anything else had decided to pay me a visit, found it clear and went back to bed.

As I drifted off to sleep I understood that nature had provided me with a little thumbnail of where my life was at.

The first female in nearly a decade to willingly get in bed with me was not even the same species, and even then I had responded by leaving said bed with the rapidity of a Saturn rocket.

I really, really needed a girlfriend.

### 7 - The secret of eternal happiness

Rather an ambitious title for this post, but stay with me through my multiple discursions and you'll find out what it, the secret, is.

It all started at the gym a few months ago.

I swiped in at the front desk as usual and the nice young woman behind the desk said, "what do you do for a job?"

"I'm a gardener", I replied, then added, "why do you ask?"

"Because you're always so filthy."

I looked down at myself and I had to admit she had a point.

I do remember to take off my boots if they are mud-encrusted, a not uncommon occurrence up here, but usually my shoes are the only things I change.

But then I've never really understood the point of dressing nicely to go to the gym as within a short period, particularly in summer, your clothes become a sweaty, rumpled mess.

As a gardener I am each day up to my knees and elbows in soil, weeds and mulch, and these various outputs of the Earth seem to find me comforting and cling to me with a touching degree of affection.

I might add, when I was living as a freaky hippy down near Port MacQuarie I realised I needed a job so applied to the local indigenous council for an advertised position as web designer/system admin for their new website.

My girlfriend at the time was on the panel that interviewed me and later that night she said, "I take it you weren't aware that there was a twig stuck in your hair during the interview?"

I wasn't, and I didn't get the job either.

So most of my life I've felt an affinity for this character from the Charlie Brown comics, Pigpen.

I hasten to add, I don't want to attract the nickname Pigpen, but even I have to admit that it is pretty apposite.

So put your seatbelt on as we swing wide through some sidebars before returning to the main point.

When I did my teacher training I had a very good lecturer called Mike King.

He told us many useful techniques and one was, "never give out schoolwork as punishment, because the kids will come to see all schoolwork as punishment."

(If they don't already, I certainly did.)

When I heard this and understood what a good point it was, I suddenly realised another of the infinitely, ludicrously poor parenting techniques that my mother used.

To wit: she made us do housework as punishment.

Thus when my brothers and I made our various escapes from Bathurst we all refused to do housework and were appalling people to live with.

We were pigs.

We were slobs.

We made Comic Book Guy from The Simpsons look like an anal-retentive neat freak.

My elder brother Robert lived with two mates from his rugby league team in Coffs Harbour while they played for Sawtell in group 2 of the NSW Country Rugby League.

The three of them had one pot, one plate, and one cup.

"We ate in relays," Robert said.

So Noel would cook his pasta, then eat it, pass the pot on to Les, who would cook his pasta while Noel used the plate to eat, then Robert would have his turn.

I presume they washed each item between uses, but there's every chance they didn't.

I likewise was appalling and remember in my second year at Uni living in a flat in Newtown, Sydney.

My room had two boxes about waist height with a couple of slabs of particle board across them which was my desk.

I had a mattress, with no sheets or blankets, to sleep on and that was it for furniture.

My clothes lay in a huge conical mound on the floor and my one concession to a system of cleanliness was this.

When it was time for bed I would take off what I was wearing and throw it on the top of the pile, then next morning I would take a shirt and pants from the bottom of this feculent mass and put it on and go to uni.

My logic was impeccable in that whatever was on the bottom of this teetering, mouldering pile had been there the longest and therefore I hadn't worn said items for the longest period.

Not a good system, but a system nonetheless.

What my long-suffering friends who had to sit next to me in lectures thought is not recorded, probably though, now I think about it, their clothes were in a similar state of terminal decay.

However, bad as the situations of Robert and myself were, they were nothing compared with what awaited me in our middle brother, David's, flat on the shores of Botany Bay in the summer of 86/7.

At the end of the uni year I had a job as a storeman and packer at a factory in Redfern, so I gave up my flat and went to mooch off my brother for the summer.

He had a flat in San Souci in a block with the title Sans Vista, obviously chosen by a someone not conversant with basic French as it means "Without a view", a title unlikely to get renters queuing to sign a lease.

Digression: Speaking of badly named things or places.

I heard one afternoon on the radio a guy from the Realtors institute saying that the worst place name in Australia (possibly the world) to try to sell real estate was Dismal Swamp.

At first I couldn't believe it, but here it is.

And just to combine my digressions, before returning to my brother's flat, one of the reasons there is no "meaning of life" or not one "Secret of happiness" is that each of these nebulous concepts is highly specific to the individual.

Thus there must be seven billion "secrets of happiness" on this planet.

A tribesperson from Ethiopia only desires a regular supply of food to be happy.

A north Korean wishes for the removal of the clinically insane leadership and brutal totalitarian generals to attain some degree of contentment.

An Argentinian only wishes to win the world cup soccer, preferably beating Brazil 9-0 in the final.

A Chilean likewise wishes to win the World Cup, first, beating Argentina in the semi, then gubbing Brazil 10-0 in the final.

An American Republican wishes for all democrats voters to be forcibly relocated to a communist country and another, bigger gun to have in their home.

And so it goes, we all want different things to be happy.

So back to the flat.

I opened the door and all I saw (at first) was dirty clothes.

They covered the floor in every direction, shin deep.

In amongst these clothes was a series of trails like Voles or Pikas leave in the grass as they scurry about the tundra collecting their food.

Vole

I should add at this point that both my brothers arrived independently at a system for clothing that meant they never had to do a wash, they bought a new set of work clothes every Friday.

Vole Trails

Thus, there on the floor of my brother's flat was every piece of unwashed clothing he had bought for, well, god knows, but say a year, easy.

I followed the little trail down the hall to the door of the second bedroom.

I shouldered open the door and found that every other piece of junk my brother had was stacked inside.

Boxes of junk, unused winter clothing, opened and unopened mail, electronic components (my brother was a minor Dick Smith-ish character and liked tinkering with stuff like that) were all in there.

I observed the terrain and noticed a tilt in the topography against the far wall and guessed that the bed was there.

I kicked and shoved the junk aside and waded, rather than walked, over to the bed like a beach goer moving through waist deep water.

I picked up a box of Christmas decorations and saw in the space under it, the top of a mattress.

So I "made" my bed.

This consisted of taking the various pieces of junk off it and depositing them around the room wherever I could find somewhere to stack it where it didn't immediately fall off it and clonk me on the head.

Once I had enough surface area to sleep on I threw my rucksack down on it and went to explore the rest of the flat.

And believe me, "explore" is the correct term.

Neither Livingstone (Africa), Sturt (Murray river) or Giles (Northern Territory) faced the same trepidatious passage as I did wandering along my brother's Pika trails.

If some Japanese soldiers who didn't know the war was over had been hiding under the couch it wouldn't have surprised me.

The floor I have described as covered with soiled clothing and moving up in elevation things were just as bad.

Every level surface of that place above floor height had one, or more often, many takeaway food containers on it.

The little table in the hall had at least thirty, certainly the stack was a metre high, KFC chicken buckets on it, with the phone clinging precariously to the edge.

As you can see in the pic the buckets are shaped to stack neatly inside each other and clearly each evening he had come home eating his chicken then stacked the box inside last night's.

In the kitchen every cup, plate, pot, bowl, knife, fork and spoon in the place was stacked, dirty, in a huge teetering mound in and around the sink.

Any other square millimetre in the kitchen without dirty crockery on it had more takeaway food containers on it.

McDonald's, Hungry Jack's, you name it was there.

The only part of the flat that wasn't covered with detritus was the little table-cloth sized porch out the front, but as you will soon see, I was gonna fix that!

I'd like to say from this remove that the first thing I did was set to and clean up, but I was as slobby as my brother.

Also, those of you who have been watching this space will probably guess what I did next.

That's right, I went and bought some beer.

All that flat really needed to be "really" messy wasn't it? A load of empties cluttering up the joint.

Without harping on it (I hope) my brother and I had different reactions to our parents' abuse.

I, in the words of a country song I like, invested in "Cigarettes and whisky and wild, wild women".

While my brother David overate.

He is very obese, apart from overeating, he overate the worst fatty kind of shit food that you could find.

The only green thing in the flat that remotely resembled food was some fungus growing on the carpet.

So I hied me round the corner to Ramsgate shopping centre and bought a case of beer.

I brought it home and discovered with some surprise, but then understanding, that the fridge was empty.

Why empty?

Clearly, he only ate from Maccas and such like, so didn't go shopping in the conventional sense.

Why then was the fridge on?

Of course.

I opened the freezer and sure enough it was stuffed to the gills with ice cream.

However that suited me so I put all my 24 cans in the fridge, opened one and then wondered what to do with the box.

To say there was not a square picometre of space left was an understatement.

I wandered back uptrail to the living room and saw the glass door leading to the porch.

I opened it and saw a wonderful area to stack my beer boxes.

I put the box out there and then commenced "what I did in my summer holidays", viz: drinking a can, going out to the porch, crunching it underfoot and throwing it in the box.

In a staggeringly short period of time the number of boxes mounted and in another trifling gesture toward domesticity, if a box fell off the top of the pile onto the lawn below I would go out and put it in the bin.

(I really wish I was making this up.)

The weeks went by and David and I became friends with the Kogarah Council Health Inspector who began dropping by, asking us, at first, "to clean this F*^%&ing filth pit up", but by mid-summer he began coming on Friday afternoon and having a beer with us.

I still get the occasional Christmas card from his kids.

Then my mother came to visit, and two things happened that were unique.

First she did some housework (we had a cleaning lady back in Bathurst) and twenty or so loads of washing later, the living room carpet reappeared (it was light grey. I had wondered.)

And finally we return to the "secret of happiness".

Despite the filth, for the first time in our lives my brother and I were happy.

I'm thinking now that it was the first time we had been able to spend in each other's company without our parents present, and so we weren't, for the first time in our lives, cowering under our beds while our parents smashed up the house.

I was under way at Uni, passing (mostly), while my brother was in his dream job, working with computers.

I stored and packed my boxes at the factory, earned some much needed money, then went home to sunny San Souci and drunk beer on my brother's couch.

So there you have it, the secret of happiness is to live in filth.

I encourage you to turn your house into a pig sty.

I certainly worked for me.
8 - Lesbians in the lounge and my cervical cancer scare

I just want to say from the off that I will in no way now, or ever, make light of cervical cancer and the women who suffer from this dread malady.

It is no joke and as you will see if you stick this post out to the end it was no joke for me either.

To get there we not only have to go all round the houses, but across the world as well, on the journey we meet courageous Johnny, a gay stockbroker, Johnny's marvellous mother, Margaret, his fractious father, Bill, Johnny's friend John Turner the protestant priest, one of his, John Turner's, female clients and Nicole and Jenny, two lesbians I shared a house with.

So fix your tray table back and put your seat in the upright position as we fly to Glasgow, Scotland and get things moving.

In the northern summer of 1993 I was living in Glasgow, once again I was Trying To Be A Writer and as usual, failing stupendously.

Glasgow has a fearsome reputation for street crime and urban decay, but I never had a problem in my whole time there, and I worked for a newspaper in the worst slum in Glasgow, Possilpark.

I found the people there couldn't have been nicer to me and particularly my friend Neil's family.

He introduced me to his cousin Johnny, his aunt, Margaret and uncle, Bill.

And when I say they couldn't have been nicer, this meant that whenever I was hungry or cold I would infest their couch till they gave me some food.

Johnny worked for a charcoal-suited, chestnut-panelled brokerage house and told me that he had to keep his homosexuality a secret at work as he strongly suspected he would be fired.

The movie Philadelphia hadn't yet come out (it would be released while I was living there) and at the time all over the world gays like Johnny had to live a double life, out to his family, but buttoned-down and straight at work.

I came to admire his courage greatly.

Any slip of the tongue at work, "I went out to that club, He Man's on the weekend", for instance, could lead to a sacking.

So Johnny became my first male gay friend, my first gay friends, of either sex, though were Nicole and Jenny.

Nicole, Dik-dik was her nickname, and Jenny were superfit rowers.

They had both been selected for the World Championships the previous year and lived together in Sydney's inner west.

I used my cuckoo-like abilities to move in with them.

I needed somewhere to doss for a couple of months before flying out for Asia and then the UK with Neil.

So I showed up to the flat one day while Dik was at work and told Jenny that Dik had said it was all right for me to use the couch for a couple of months.

Then, when Dik got home from work and Jenny was out rowing to Brisbane or wherever she went on her training, I told Dik that I had dropped in and Jenny had said it was OK to doss till my flight left.

Divide and rule, it's pretty easy.

By the time they had talked about it I was rusted onto the couch watching The Simpsons.

It was a very learning experience for me as Nicole and Jenny broke my Bathurst-based homophobia, I learned that a) gay people are real and b) they are ordinary folk with hopes and dreams and c) they don't have green skin and five heads.

Life in Bathurst tended to make one believe that gays were akin to aliens.

The experience that most remember of that time was this.

One summer Tuesday I went home at 2.15 to find Dik (she was a highly-skilled physiotherapist), dressed in shorts and t-shirt, rubbing oil into a nude Jenny in the living room.

I stepped through the door to be confronted by what I have subsequently learned is the holy grail of male heterosexual fantasies.

But here's the thing, my major concern was that one of my sitcoms, Roseanne, came on at 3pm and I wouldn't be able to watch.

So I changed my shoes and jogged down to the local Olympic pool and did my laps.

I did do 40 instead of my usual 20, as well as ran five k to get there and back, so maybe the sexual overtones had got to me after all.

And before you ask, as Neil did with his tongue hanging down to his knees, I don't have any pictures of that incident, nor any of Nicole and Jenny, nude or otherwise.

So with my homophobia receding I became friends with Johnny and, as with all my friends, began to moan about my childhood.

Once Johnny learned that when I began moaning that was it for the next four hours, he said, "perhaps you should speak with my friend John Turner. He works as a counsellor."

Johnny did this as a friend, but mostly so he didn't have to listen to me for another four hour moaning session.

So he arranged a meeting for me with John Turner, we met at Johnny's flat during the working day and I quickly added another to the Courage Hall of Fame.

And to explain the back story of why, here's a potted history lesson.

In 1916 the Irish were revolting.

The country rose up against the hated London rule of their country and declared an independent Ireland.

However the northernmost province, Ulster, heavily populated with protestants came against the new union and asked (demanded) that they still be ruled by London, and thus Ulster became Northern Ireland.

This lead to the troubles and the rise of the IRA (catholic) and various protestant para-military groups to counter them.

The Ulster Freedom Fighters (UFF) and the Ulster Volunteer Force (UVF) were two of the more prominent.

This religious animosity quickly spilled across the Irish Sea to Glasgow (you can see from the map that Glasgow is nearly as

close to Belfast as it, Belfast, is to Dublin) and is epitomised by the rivalry of the two largest soccer teams in Scotland, Glasgow Celtic (catholic) and Glasgow Rangers (protestant).

To say these two teams are rivals is to barely hint at the scale of the feeling between these two teams and their supporters.

Put is this way, the largest news story in Scotland after world war two, by a country mile and then some, was when Rangers signed a Catholic.

So a priest in Glasgow, of either religion, holds a much higher importance in society than in just about any other country than perhaps Italy.

I mention all this to give you an understanding that the religious divide permeated all levels of Glasgow society.

Johnny's father, Bill, is a lovely man but with one really annoying habit, he loved to start, then sustain arguments.

And one of the things he liked to argue about was religion, he was a jocular supporter of the UVF and had "Support the UVF" written in pencil on a soon to be painted wall in his kitchen.

One Sunday Johnny was home with his parents and Bill had started an argument (again).

Things went their usual way and at one point Johnny's younger brother said, "But dad, what if Johnny marries a catholic?"

Johnny remarked drily to a friend that was there, "I think he'd be rather relieved actually."

Which just shows (to me anyway) the illogicality of prejudice.

Bill spent his life railing against Catholics, but in the end if Johnny had brought home a young catholic woman and announced her as his fiancé, that would have been (we suspect) better than if he had shown up with a young man and reported that this was his "life partner".

But family squabbles aside this religious divide had far more serious consequences for some, and John Turner was one right in the cross-hairs.

For you see, John Turner was the only openly gay priest in Scotland.

I met John Turner at Johnny's flat while Johnny was at work and within microseconds understood what a massively powerful man I was privileged to be with.

John Turner is dead now, killed by a skidding car on an icy road in Germany, his funeral had to be miked up to allow those who couldn't get into the church to hear from outside where they formed ranks four deep.

The gay community of Scotland and the rest of us cannot quantify his importance, then or now.

As usual I ignored all this and began moaning about my own problems.

At that time my alcoholism hadn't really surfaced and my main problem was hypochondria, thinking I had a disease or injury that I didn't.

The most insane of these fears, and believe me the word insane in the current context is exact in its use, was when I was sixteen I thought I was about to die from cervical cancer.

In science class in year ten, a girl sitting behind me put up her hand and asked "is it true you can get cancer from having too much sex before your sixteen?"

Mr Cartwright, the teacher, answered, "Yes, there is some thought to that, and that's Cervical cancer, difficult to diagnose and nearly impossible to treat."

I had had my first (and only, at that time) sexual experience at the age of 15yrs and 11months, I turned green and began sweating in fear.

My mental illness was at its peak then, I now know, ten years of hiding under the bed had induced just a little anxiety in me, and it was exhibiting in hypochondria.

As I'm sure you all know, cervical cancer is a female only disorder, but the only thing I took out of the exchange between the girl and Mr Cartwright was, "cancer...sex...before 16. Yes."

I spent six months in true fear that I was going to die.

Additionally, I couldn't seek medical help because my parents had banned me from having sex.

You see if I got hurt or sick doing something allowed, mowing the lawn for instance, then I could be treated.

But my parents had point blank told me that I couldn't have sex and thus I believed that they would prefer me to die than be treated because I had broken one of their fifty gazillion rules against doing anything fun.

It was a harsh world I can tell you.

Anyway, leaving that dark mire, let's return to Johnny's well-appointed living room, and what else would you expect from a gay man's pad?

John Turner, once I had bent his ear for an hour about my hypochondria, told me an interesting story.

One of his female clients also had hypochondria.

And like me, she had spent most of her childhood listening to, and occasionally, trying to stop her parents smashing each other up.

Sometimes, John told me, she had got between them and was physically trying to hold her father's arm to stop him smashing his mother's face.

I asked John why these similar stories could lead to the same symptom, hypochondria.

John replied, "Well, it's difficult to say, but it seems to me that she sought to control her parents fighting, but couldn't. Then mentally it seemed to her that the lesson was 'I can't control my world, therefore I can't control anything, and therefore, even my own body is beyond my control.'"

And thus hypochondria.

John's client had gone through many cancer scares, all thankfully imaginary, as well as HIV.

I in my turn thought I was going to die of cervical cancer, as stated, Parkinson's disease and Tetanus.

It is of course richly ironic that the one disease I did have, anxiety disorder, was about the only one that didn't fill me with fear.

So I'll close with this story that is funny now, but deffo wasn't then.

As I've said repeatedly, to friends verbally and written here, I am not attempting to tell any of you how to be a parent, but am happy to state that I hope these stories of my parents tell you definitely how not to do it.

#### The Talk.

I went to school with a marketing genius.

His name was Grant Foster and he wrote away to some address for a job lot of condoms.

Once they arrived word got out that you could buy one or more off him.

This was marketing brilliance because me and all the other pubescent boys at Kelso High had to buy one.

If you didn't, you were tacitly admitting that you weren't having sex.

I wasn't getting anywhere near having sex but like most bought one to at least let it be known that the possibility was there.

So I put the condom in my wallet and then forgot all about it.

One afternoon subsequent to that I was studying at my desk and my mother came out to speak with me about something.

She noticed my wallet and said, "look at the state of this wallet, it's on its last legs."

(Those of you who read last week's blog will know that then as now the state of everything I own is deplorable, all those items quickly looking like a street man had discarded them as too shabby.)

My mother picked up my wallet and began shaking it, and everything in there fluttered or clattered down on my desk.

Amongst which was the condom which I had completely forgotten.

When I saw it land my heart went not just into my mouth but through the top of my head.

I had to frantically think of a story to explain it.

Not easy to do off the top of your head, actually not easy to do any time.

A sleeping bag for a mouse? A water proof for one finger?

My mother noticed it, picked it up and said "what's this?"

She turned it over and then the penny dropped.

She said "OOHHH, LACHLAN!" and turned on her heel and walked away.

I sat there in true terror.

As stated above my parents had flat out banned me from having sex.

The punishment for this transgression would be major in a way that made the previous ten years of abuse look like a bedtime reading of Alice in Wonderland.

In the end it turned out to be worse than anything I could imagine.

A few days later I was studying again when my father appeared at my side.

"Your mother tells me that she found a condom in your wallet, is that true?", said my father.

"Yes-s-s-s", I said staring obliquely in his general direction through slatendecular eyes.

He then went on, but before I report the next bit of dialogue, the penny dropped for me and I realised that my father was about to give me THE TALK!

Sex, the birds and the bees.

Given the already hopeless track record of my parents, even at the time I remember thinking this ought to be f@#$$^#ing good.

My father continued, "I take it you know what venereal disease is?"

"Yes." I replied.

"And I take it you know what pregnancy is?"

"Yes," I replied as before.

He then went on, "well I don't want any of those things happening to you. So just concentrate on your [HSC] studies and your L-plates and forget about sex."

So there you have it, the birds and the bees from Theo Barker, just don't.

And of course many of you will have picked up on the fact that a condom was the simplest and most effective method of stopping either pregnancy or venereal disease.

Logic was to that talk what fun is to cleaning a toilet.

Most of my thoughts about it as distilled and written here came of course many years afterward, at the time, like all these talks throughout history, both parties involved would have paid a large sum of money to be anywhere else on Earth to avoid the crucifying embarrassment of the situation.

So there you have it, another example of how not to be a parent.

I really hope this helps, it certainly does me to write it.

9 - Out with the new, in with the old

I think it was Kerry O'Brien, the ABC journalist who said, when comparing the government of the day with the Whitlam government, "Remember, we once had a government that left you breathless, rather than saying, 'don't hold your breath'".

Last week, as usual, mostly without realising it myself, I included a bit about gay rights, which then led me to realise that ten percent of the human beings are gay, and so I behoves me to write something about 50 per cent of the population and their lack of rights, women.

I have treated women pretty badly in my time, I'd like to think I'm better now, but really I can't know, I cannot redress individual wrongs, but I can write something here that may help.

The real leap forward for women in Australia came in 1975 with the implementation by the Whitlam government of "no-fault divorce".

Looking back now none of us can conceive what a breakthrough, what a staggering impact this Act had.

Previous to this, divorce would only be granted through the courts by the adversarial system, with one partner proving the other had engaged in a criminally culpable act: adultery, then as now, was common, but also abandonment or felony would work if the court could be convinced.

Please note, felony did not necessarily mean domestic violence either, before 1975 it was generally considered that if a man gave his wife a flogging, she almost certainly deserved it by nagging or other goad.

In doing my research I discovered some appalling carryings-on that take your breath away.

For instance in Alabama the original constitution of 1819 stipulated that a divorce would only be granted with the consent of the court and permission from, wait for it, TWO THIRDS OF BOTH HOUSES OF PARLIAMENT!

Needless to say few if any divorces were granted.

Another historical quirk of my researches was that the first no-fault divorce Act of the modern era was introduced in California in 1970, and guess who signed the act into law?

Ronald Reagan.

Reagan is generally considered the icon of conservative values in the States, indeed there was even a plan, thankfully, mercifully, short lived, to add Reagan to Mt Rushmore.

Reagan, the arch Republican was governor of Ca. during the Sixties and called out the National Guard over the Berkeley riots among other acts that got him hated by the better set, but by signing in no-fault divorce it just goes to show that no one is all bad.

But back to Australia pre-Whitlam.

One of the saddest things I ever saw on TV was some footage taken outside a pub, it showed a woman sitting in the back of an EH Holden and her husband was bringing her a middy of beer from the pub.

Sadly I haven't been able to find a picture of this, but take it from me it was conservative Australia writ large.

I don't think it was ever mandated that women weren't allowed in pubs, but the societal pressure not to attend the public bar was almost as powerful as a law.

However, the look on the woman's face in the back seat of this car was so downtrodden and broken that I subconsciously decided that one day I would start a blog and write something about it.

And so to no-fault divorce, I, and I suspect many of you reading this, were still in primary school when Gough came to power, so it was largely before my time, but I have distilled this from that time, from stories told to me by those who lived through it.

A woman who was being beaten by her husband every Saturday night for ten years, finally realizes that she has got to get out before he kills her one drunken night.

That decision itself takes an inordinate amount of courage.

So she then has to find a lawyer to represent her in court.

At the time almost all lawyers are men, so even finding one to represent her is an issue, paying for it another staggering financial hurdle.

Lawyer engaged, she then has to find some, or even 'a' witness.

Her neighbours have heard the abuse going on for the last ten years, but a) her female neighbours are too scared to testify, fearing that they will be beaten up by their husbands, and b) her male neighbours will not testify as comradely support for the husband, who, as alluded to above, was only beating her because she deserved it.

If she was 'lucky', she would still have a black eye or broken nose when she went to court, and this was often the only 'evidence' submitted to an invariably male judge.

It was known for the judge not to be convinced and send her home to another ten years of domestic violence.

So the title of this blog refers to the recent despicable act of the Gillard government to remove a large number of single parents from the single parent pension, introduced at the same time by the Whitlam government, and put them back on the dole.

The single parent pension went hand-in-hand with no-fault divorce and gave those unlucky broken women a measure of financial independence and some means of escape from a DV home.

Even in this modern era, single parents of either sex were struggling even with the SP pension, now many have to go out and find work.

This keeps them from their children whilst at work, and they then have to pay for child-care, which neatly sucks up any money they earn, a hopelessly backwards paradoxical step.

I wonder if the Rudd government is going to complete this unholy double crown and make domestic violence legal again?

OK, moving on to something a bit less blood-boiling.

Recently I read an article about gangsta speech in LA and learned that they use the term 'beezer' for nose.

I found this curious because the last time I heard the same slang it was in a P.G.Wodehouse book.

Wodehouse famously wrote about English upper class twits in the twenties.

His stories are generally considered the most fluffy writing in modern English, as light as a superbly finished souffle.

If you sat down and tried to work out two of the most diametrically opposite socio-economic groups in human history you would struggle to do better than the Edwardian upper crust and gang-bangers of LA.

Yet, they use the same slang term.

How did a term for the nose cross the Atlantic, lie dormant for nearly ninety years, then resurface in a group so removed from Bertie Wooster as to be almost in the realms of quantum unbelievability?

I don't know, and I suspect no one does.

This is another of the curiosities that the English language throws up now and then.

Now I find this fascinating, but then I was hit full force by a 12-gauge geek ray at an early age.

I can assure you that I have more in common with Ross in Friends and Sheldon Cooper in The Big Bang Theory than anyone else and it doesn't make you any cooler to say that, infinitely the reverse if anything.

So for those with no job, who I suspect are the only ones still reading at this point, here are a few other quirks of English.

These from Bill Bryson's researches:

'Fall' for autumn is actually an English term, used by Shakespeare.

Rhode Island refers to a land-based state and comes from the Dutch term for 'Red Island' which the term originally signified before coming to encompass the whole entity.

Pass the buck has nothing to do with dollars but refers to a buckhorn-handled knife which was passed during poker games to signify who was due to ante up or bet.

California is named for a wholly mythical queen Califia, and that is so apposite for a state based largely on making myths real in Hollywood.

A speech pattern that I have noted (I use it myself) is the modern Australian habit of saying 'yeah, no'.

This is the ultimate paradoxical answer and there is no known attestation, as with so many english terms, to its genesis.

It is in fact the 'hiccup' of English.

A hiccup is defined in some medical dictionaries as 'a spasm of the diaphragm with no known cause or function'.

And this describes saying 'yeah, no' perfectly.

'Yeah, no' is of course an oxymoron, 'Microsoft Works' and 'Military Intelligence' are two others often humorously quoted.

Finally, I'd like to return to one of my well-ridden hobby horses, so sonically picture a Sideshow-Bob-esque growl as I state: Commercial television.

On Monday night I tuned in to the only show I like on Channel 9, Hamish and Andy's Asia Gap Year.

When 8.30 came around I was enraged, to put it mildly, to discover that they weren't on this week as Channel 9 were using an old trick to get viewers to watch their new show.

Those who know me well will tell you that among the many things I loathe as a card-carrying old-fogey are reality TV shows.

Among these excrescences on the bum of humanity the one that I detest with every fibre of my being is Big Brother.

Even I can't articulate fully why this is but I think it is the modern obsession for being famous, and by extension, rich, without doing anything.

I at least write a couple of thousand words each week.

The singing and dancing reality shows you at least have to sing and or dance.

But Big Brother you just, from what I understand as I've never watched that garbage, go into a house and the thinnest woman wins, but only if she appears nude.

So you can see why I was incensed when Channel 9's only intelligent show was replaced with a show from the other end of the spectrum of human thought.

Perhaps the saddest thing is though, 1.3 million Australians watch this trash.

I have printed the ratings for that night below.

1 The X Factor 1,633,000

2 Nine News 1,430,000

3 Seven News 1,373,000

4 Big Brother 1,309,000

5 Today Tonight 1,239,000

In the end, and even irremediably sadder is, I can't figure out which of the five shows printed there is the most repulsive.

Three of the shows are laughably titled news and current affairs, but if you watch Media Watch each Monday you will commonly see all three caught out ignoring facts that get in the way of a good story, and the other two are reality TV shows.

Which brings me rather neatly to close with another oxymoron, there ain't nothing remotely real in a reality TV show.

### 10 - The cemetery is in Cemetery road

And appropriately enough, Cemetery road is a dead end.

I snapped these pics while out riding my bike, which is my latest secondary passion.

I say secondary because I have a simple enough philosophy these days, "surf when you can, work when you have to".

So work is my top priority, then surfing.

If I have got my work done and there is no surf, then I literally get on my bike.

When I saw this signage, I at first thought it a bit redundant, but then was reminded of my ex-wife's confusion when we returned from Vancouver to live in Sydney.

Sydney is an organic city, with roads, streets and alleys disappearing up and down vale, round corners, changing names as they go and with numbers placed on houses apparently by a chaos-theory practitioner.

Vancouver, where my ex was from, is far more ordered.

The avenues are numbered and the streets have names.

Thus, a friend giving direction to their house may say "head for Commercial and First".

Meaning they are located near the corner of First Ave and Commercial Drive.

House numbers are an additional aid, going up by 1600, that is, the first housing block on a road is 1600, the next block has numbers starting at 1700, so if you just have an address, say 1812 West First, then you know which block it's in.

Many then say why not number the streets and the avenues and make it even easier.

Well apart from removing the charm of a corner like Maple and Third, Calgary did do this and this led to confusion of it's own, if your directions were for 4th and 194th (yes, Calgary has a 194th st), you better make sure which is which or you will be a long way from your destination.

Which also reminded me of a conversation I had with my friend in Trevor in Vancouver one stoned Sunday.

I was telling Trevor something about my native land and mentioned The Great Sandy Desert and the Snowy Mountains.

Trevor then looked at me amusedly and said, "do you have The Big Wet Ocean or the Large Green Field as well?"

My dope-addled mind grappled with his question and I got the point, talk about naming something what it is.

The dry geographic feature first named is indeed, Great in size, Sandy in composition and a desert to boot.

The Snowy mountains are, or they were at that time at least, snow capped.

This then led me to examine some of our other names and so:

The Great Barrier Reef is a reef that forms a barrier and it is truly great any way you want to use the word, in size and visual splendour.

The Great Ocean Road fills all three words of its name accurately.

The Blue Mountains are blue-the blue is from the eucalypts from the area which reflect more bluish than green light.

Deep Creek, South Australia we suspect is deeper than the next creek over.

The worst place name in Australia previously referred to in this blog, Dismal Swamp, is pretty dis...

Actually, I just looked it up on Google images and it's not too bad to my eyes, but I realised that it was most certainly named by an Englishman, all of who saw Australia in the early 1800s as nothing more than a hugely desolate wasteland, and no doubt Dismal copped the brunt of that.

Long Reef in Sydney is long, well longer than some other reefs, there are no Short Reefs for instance.

Little Bay is little and so it goes.

I might add since we are in the geographic area, I heard on the radio on the weekend that Royal Prince Henry hospital in Sydney's south-east was originally called The Coast Hospital, a much more charming and accurate name than the one bestowed once some damned monarchist got hold of the naming rights.

So why do we name things so obviously?

Well my ex-wife for one will tell you that giving something a name that reflects its appearance is much better for a newcomer to navigate with than naming it, as is common, after a person.

Thus one suspects we could pick Little Bay out easier than we could Byron Bay.

Hopefully, your colour gradations are adequate, and I ask if you can tell which of these two pictures is of the Blue Mountains?

So just because I am a nerd really here are some naming things.

Sydney, Melbourne and Hobart were named after notable British gentlemen of the day.

Brisbane, and I'm sure any Queenslander reading this will gnash their teeth to learn, was named after the then governor of NSW, Sir Thomas Brisbane.

Adelaide was named after the German bride of King William the fourth, who rejoiced in the fully splendid name of Adelheid Amalie Luise Therese Coralin of Saxe-Meiningen.

Perth is named after a county in Scotland, Darwin for the scientist Charles Darwin and the only (belated) indigenous entry to the list of capitals etymology is Canberra, "meeting place" in the local indigenous dialect.

Of course if we'd known we would have asked what is your phrase for "phenomenally boring heck-hole in the middle of nowhere that no-one cares about", but none of us can see the future can we.

Side Note on Psychology: Intelligent people leave Canberra, only nut jobs go there.

Of the other major cities, Newcastle after the English industrial centre in the north-east, Wollongong is from an aboriginal word woolyungah meaning "five islands", Parramatta, Australia's second city means Place of the Eels and my old home town was named for the Earl of Bathurst.

In Queensland all the major towns are English derived, notably, Townsville, Cairns, Gladstone and Rockhampton with the exception of Bundaberg, which is a composite of the name for the local aboriginal people, the Bundas, and Berg, a common ending meaning town, as in Edinburgh and Pittsburgh.

In Victoria indigenous naming finally got a foothold with Geelong and Ballarat. Although Bendigo sounds to my ears an aboriginal name it is in fact named for a local (white) shepherd, famous for his boxing.

Tassie has all English names with Queenstown, Launceston and Devonport.

South Australia has a mix with English names with Port Augusta and Victor Harbour, whilst Whyalla, Coober Pedy and Coolgardie are indigenous, with Coober Pedy meaning white man's hole, water hole that is, no salacious giggling please.

Western Australia has white names on the coast with Geralton, Bunbury and Port Hedland, whilst Kalgoorlie is an indigenous term for (most likely, "Place of Silky Pears").

I asked various friends what they thought was the commonest street name in Australia and the various guesses were: Boundary, my Aunt Jen, High, from surf friend Ivan, Smith from Tom and Scott, Main from someone whose name escapes me, Ocean, from me, Station from Warren and Railway from Becky.

Well the answer is none of these, but Park.

This rather mundane entry highlights the lack of imagination when it came to naming streets in Australia, I tried "Funny Street Names Australia" in my search engine and only got North American and British sites, Butt hole Road in Doncaster England was probably the best, but the residents clubbed together and had the name changed to Archers Way.

The best name I saw with my own eyes was on Vancouver Island, BC, Canada and was Twiggly-Wiggly Rd, Nanaimo, we suspect named by a local councillor's five year old child.

However if our streets stick to the middle of the road, our town names throw up some crackers.

Burrumbuttock, Tittybong and Delicate Nobby are three redolent with mirth, Useless Loop in WA seems like a place not to drive, Boyland, Qld we suppose has male gay visitors patrolling some rich pickings and Bland Shire would be a better name for Canberra.

Mind you, the English have it over us with town names as well, with Cold Christmas and Nasty leading a list that includes Foul End, French Beer, Splatt and Watery Bottom.

And segueing neatly, I learned at pub trivia that Schizophrenia means literally "broken head".

Schizo- has the same word root as schism, meaning to cleave in two, -phrenia from the same source that gave us phrenology, the crack pot victorian-era "science" of telling criminality by the shape of someone's head.

And so last weekend I went on a cycle with Pharmacist Fleur and her friend Janet, we did a very popular ride in this area to Seven-mile beach via Broken head, and very appropriate to, for a loony like me, to pedal my broken head over Broken Head.
11 - Bong diving aardvarks

##

##

My school two hours after I started cookery class.

Since I gave up drinking and rugs [Sorry, that's meant to be drugs, I have never been addicted to fabric floor coverings.]

I've been slowly getting the world into focus and one of those things has been getting in touch with old friends, or more accurately, with people whom I didn't know were my friends.

Faceplant has been instrumental in this and even though I worked in IT, I was never an early adopter, as it's called.

I was brought to Facebook by Bill Louis, in the year ahead of me at Kelso High, with one of those social network emails, purportedly from Bill, asking if I wanted to join.

I did, and have been able to make a leap that I never thought I would, being friends in adulthood with people from school.

My time at school was very unhappy and I linked this with everyone who was there, which is of course the wrong thing to do.

But I think it's a human trait to weight bad things heavier in our minds than good things.

Is that right?

I think so, for instance the old customer service aphorism, if you treat someone well they will tell three people, if you treat someone badly they will tell thirty people.

And so (sadly) the things I mostly remember from school are being yelled at by the teachers and being bullied in the playground.

Which leads me to another piece of philosophy that I developed over the years: "The things that made you cool at high school, became proportionately less cool the further you get away from said school."

At my high school in the 70s and 80s in country Australia the coolest person, at least coolest male, played football, failed all his exams, drank alcohol, smoked pot and had sex with lots of women (at least he said he had sex with lots of women, we all know the truth now).

But as time went by and the same male moved into the adult world of jobs and marriage, he would find that women casting their eye about for a prospective male, wanted someone who was intelligent enough to have a good job, didn't drink or smoke pot, and clearly, only had sex with one woman, her.

I, like almost everything else in my life, did it the wrong way round, and fulfilled all the above categories of being cool at high school, once I turned thirty, behaviour which, as I have related, led me eventually into rehab.

And I can assure you, women looking for a relationship don't hang around outside the rehab centre looking for men.

Perversely though, men do.

Quite a few of the women I met in there, said that such-and-such a male was waiting for them to come out, and saw themselves as her protector.

Which is rehab speak for "he just wants a shag, and sees me as an easy option".

As if she didn't have enough to cope with without having to fend off the amorous advances of a dysfunctional male who felt that simply because he had driven her to Wyong hospital, she owed him something.

I'd like to add that I don't mean to harp on about going to rehab, but I likewise don't want to glamourise excessive drug and alcohol taking either, but since many of the interesting stories of my life occurred whilst under the influence of, or recovering the next day from, drugs and alcohol, I think it is a good counterpoint to show the down side.

For that reason I feel I have something in common with Billy Connolly, one of the world's greatest comedians.

Billy built a career on riotous drunkenness, getting drunk, and then telling people what happened.

But once married to Pamela Stephenson and had his first child, he realised it couldn't go on, so he became teetotal and moved away from stand-up comedy into the quieter world of funny travel logs.

It occasionally worries me that I may run out of stories to tell and things to say, with my own riotous behaviour now receding into the past.

Having said that, quite a few of the funny pics I've taken recently have been while out cycling, and there was no way I would have had the fitness to cycle anywhere while still on the juice, so we hope that, like Billy, I will soon develop a fund of stories that occurred whilst sober, so let's all look forward to that.

And so to the title of this post, one night I was so stoned that I developed the idea that Aardvarks were going to get into my bong and then jump up my nose.

An Aardvark is a rabbit-sized insectivore from southern Africa.

Just where this idea came from I couldn't say since I was smoking said bong in Australia, and an animal the size of a chicken is never going to penetrate nasally.

Most of us under the influence of pot think we have had the greatest ideas since Newton discovered gravity, and we often write these things down, they're so profound.

However, when we stagger out to the living room the next day and try to check we find a sodden piece of paper with illegible scrawls disappearing toward the torn edge, where, short of rolling papers, we have ripped off a bit of our magnum opus to roll another joint.

If we can decipher some of it, we invariably find that it says things like, "Milk, and will, but only, yes."

Or, "Water doesn't grow!!!!"

Not least, "Stumps of trees, what use???"

Please note, the punctuation is mine, these scrawls are of course devoid of this aid to clear reading.

However I have had some good times on pot.

Daz and I smoked a joint in an alley next to the theatre before seeing the South Park movie in Sydney's George street movie complex.

We refer to it now as Hooter Alley (Hooter being of the many nicknames for pot), and I can assure you it did enhance the experience.

Perhaps, too much, I was shell-shocked when I came out, the sensory overload was phenomenal.

Also, I am probably unique in this, though if you have any similar tales please send them in.

I always wanted to be stoned whilst taking off in a jet.

So when flying off to somewhere I smoked a joint on the footpath outside the airport, then boarded the plane and strapped in.

That was a rush!

It was pre-9/11 of course, there is no way I'd encourage anyone to take drugs anywhere near an airport now.

Also, I did have one idea when stoned, for a new type of surfboard fin, which I then developed and am trying to sell.

I can assure you that whoever said "inventions are 1% inspiration and 99% perspiration", was telling the absolute truth.

It is attributed to Thomas Edison, but since he stole most of the ideas that would make him famous (and rich) then there is every reason to believe he stole that expression as well.

However it is true, I've done nearly half a decade of R-&-D and I still haven't got the fin to market.

If it ever sells and I make some money from it then it will have to be said that I had the original idea whilst really, really stoned.

Which reminds me of one person's secret of life: "a little bit of everything".

This was said to me by a young American on the grass lawn behind the backpackers we were staying in.

It was high summer and I was on my annual vacation up here in Byron.

We sat on the grass, women in bikinis and men shirtless in board shorts, music played from the ghetto-blasters.

Beach volleyball went on under lights, we had all surfed most of the day.

The eskies were full of beer and I joined a group who were passing the peace pipe around.

A young American packed the cone with Nimbin buds, handed it to me and said, "my secret of life is a little bit of everything".

Which is pretty good (and one of the few stoned ideas worth reventilating).

Clearly, he didn't mean "a little bit of paedophilia", or "a little bit of murder", but a little bit of pot, a little bit of alcohol, a little bit of fatty foods, a little bit of work, a little bit of surfing and so on.

I can generally agree with this, if I could have had a little bit of alcohol, or a just little bit of pot, then things would have been fine.

But of course it was the anaesthetic effect of the drugs that quickly became essential to my being, and so I overindulged, to put it mildly.

If any of you have a secret of life I'd be happy to hear it, and I'll add this bit of philosophy as well, since it likewise, in my opinion, is pretty good.

Whilst living in London my I was chatting (read: moaning) to my friend Don about a girl who had dumped me and the talk turned to human relationships in general, and Don said this: "In my opinion, the best relationship is one where both parties have to compromise the least."

Pretty good, huh?

The opposite, for instance the relationships in P.G.Wodehouse novels where Bertie Wooster is constantly having to give up cocktails, cigarettes, golf, sleeping in, meat, fatty foods, murder novels and even his man, Jeeves, every time he got involved with a girl, are clearly a recipe for disaster.

So find a relationship where neither of you have to compromise too much and have a little bit of everything.

With thanks to Don and a nameless stoned American for this week's tips on living.

### 12 - Demi goeth and the snakes cometh

##

Some more good news for all of us who like sea turtles, and who doesn't?

This week we were able to release a breeding age Hawksbill turtle called Demi.

All our turtles are important, but Demi was slightly above the line for a couple of reasons.

Hawksbills are critically endangered, apart from the threats that face all turtles, hawksbills suffer a historical disadvantage as they were the turtles commonly used to make spectacles out of, and so they were slaughtered in their thousands, so getting any Hawksbills rehabilitated and back in the ocean is a great day for us.

Also, with the help of James Cook Uni we were able to attach a tracker to her shell.

This is lightweight and doesn't interfere with her swimming, and allows us to follow her progress.

Why do we need to know?

Well it's probably best put by something said by Rick Shine, my former reptile lecturer. (That is, he is an expert on Reptiles, not covered in scales and sleeps on the radiator in the basement.)

He said (or words to this effect), "what we know about sea turtles is equivalent to studying the human race by only observing what goes on in maternity wards".

We only really observe turtles when the females come ashore to lay, and the littlies when they hatch and return to the ocean.

Once they start swimming, our knowledge is lost to the vast ocean, itself still largely mysterious to us.

To give you some idea of that, we still don't know much about the Blue Whale's life and it is the largest animal that has ever existed, so easily is an animal swallowed up by the briny depths.

Things have improved with modern technology, tracking devices and so forth, but there are still vast murky holes in the picture of the turtle's life cycle.

So with Demi we are first hoping to find out her home range, and hopefully, where she breeds.

Rochelle, who is conducting the research, conjectures that she breeds in far north Queensland, and this is a pretty safe bet.

However to get there she will have to fight the East Australian Current, which flows down from Qld toward NSW.

If she can't outswim that, she may take the path that the littlies follow and ride the current down to the NSW-Victoria border, then swing out into the Pacific above NZ, across to South America, up that coast and back across the pacific via the Galapagos and Hawaii to her "home" in north Qld.

The tracking unit will hopefully tell us that.

We certainly hope she breeds again and it would be of immeasurable satisfaction to all of us to see a second generation of turtles run down a Qld beach one day, knowing that the rehab work done by our hard working shed staff, paid for by our members' contributions, has been part of the cycle.

Elsewhere in the reptile world, a question I'm sometimes asked is, "Do I encounter many snakes in my gardening?", and the answer is surprisingly 'no'.

The reason for that is that my passage through the undergrowth is usually accompanied by the mower or whipper-snipper and the vibration (snakes don't have ears, they "hear" by vibration in the ground) gives them fair warning that I am coming and to get the hell out.

However on Saturday whilst working at Joanne's of Possum Creek (her of hula dancing fame), I got a double dose of our reptile friends.

First a Carpet snake that was happily minding its own business in Joanne's gutter, when I came by cleaning the leaves out.

I was on the third rung of the ladder when my (thankfully) gloved hand reached out for the next sweep and I realised that the lichen-encrusted stick I was aiming at was indeed a 1.5m Carpet snake.

I was up a ladder at the time and nearly fell off the damn thing as well as nearly suffering involuntary evacuation of the bowel.

For the record, although carpet snakes are non-venomous, their mouth contains a lot of alien (to the human system) microbes and so if they do nab you, infection is a common side-effect.

I've had several people say to me since that, "that's OK then, carpet snakes aren't aggressive".

Well they can have their moments, believe me.

I have been struck at five times by Carpet snakes.

Once when working at the animal reserve in Bathurst on school work experience.

Once when cycling home along the edge of my gravelled road, and three times by a large male that was asleep on my engine block.

What happened was this.

My friend Antony had come up from Sydney to stay for the weekend, and he parked his car next to mine and for the weekend we walked and cycled to and from town.

I was still drinking then, and so walking home from the pub was a more sensible option, and it's relevant to what happened next believe me.

Sunday night he drove off to Brisbane for his flight home and I prepared for the working week to come.

Monday I went out to start my car and as I went to put the keys in the ignition I noticed my waste bag was stuffed up under the steering column.(picture simulated right.)

I sat and stared at it for some time.

My hungover mind grappled with the problem, like, to quote Douglas Adams " a super tanker doing a three-point turn in the English channel".

We had sunk a bucketful of piss, but I couldn't remember doing that.

Eventually, with sinking heart, I arrived at the answer.

Rats.

I grabbed a gardening glove from the back seat and looked in the bag.

Inside was an empty chip packet I had carelessly left in the car.

The rats had taken the chip packet for food, grabbed my nice cotton bag, dragged it up and wedged it under the steering column, formed a nest and spent a comfortable weekend there.

They also, as I now discovered when I turned the key, chewed all the wiring through to the engine.

The lights on the dashboard lit up, but the starter motor did not kick, even a little.

Not a sausage.

I called the NRMA and he came and examined the issue.

He turned my key in the door lock to make sure they key was functional, then opened the bonnet and hotwired the car into life.

He switched off and then said to me, "I don't know what they [the rats] have done, but all I can do is hot wire it and you'll have to get to the auto-electrician ASAP."

So he sent me on my way.

The auto-electrician examined things superficially and then he said, "I can't see from here where they've chewed, so to fix it I'd have to trace all the wiring, I may find it in one hour, it may take ten. I charge $80 an hour, so it could be $800 or $100 you're looking at."

Bollocks.

I couldn't afford $1 really.

So I got him to show me how to hotwire the car and went on my way.

So for the next few days every time I wanted to start the car I had to turn the key to the on position, then open the bonnet and short out the ignition fuse in the engine bay.

Which was fine till Wednesday morning when I opened the bonnet and discovered a carpet snake asleep on my engine block.

Asleep that is till I opened the bonnet, and this snake, like Garfield the cat, did not like being woken up.

I had already had my patience tested this week and now this.

I stared at the snake wondering how to handle the situation, but I was in a hurry, so had to dive in.

I grabbed it by the tail, and it, affronted by this dastardly attack from behind, reared and threw a gaping jawed strike at me.

I leapt back like someone had set off a small explosive under my boots.

But I was in a hurry and my another grab and the same thing happened, I then said some uncomplimentary things about the snakes parenting and sex life ("You're a fucking bastard".), then made my third attempt.

Once more the snake showed no compunction to leave and demonstrated this by flinging its head at me, once more making it known that my depredations were not welcome.

So I called time on our wrestling match and said, "Look, Pal, I've got to go, sorry, but that's the way it is".

So I shorted the fuse, the engine started, I shut the bonnet and drove away.

When I got to town I re-opened the bonnet and found the snake gone.

So all fine from then on, but when I went out Thursday I wondered what next?

The rats had come to eat the potato chips, the snake had come to eat the rats, following the food chain upward, I was prepared to find a Wedge-tailed eagle on my car roof waiting to eat the snake.

So back to Possum Creek, the Carpet snake in the gutter was very placid and only wished I was gone.

But the first reptile Joanne and I encountered that day was a different kettle of fish.

I was whipper-snipping and Joanne came down to talk with me about what jobs needed doing.

I switched of the snipper and started talking to her.

Then, over her shoulder I saw a two metre Brown snake sunning itself in the grass, thankfully, five metres away.

I wasn't sure of Joanne's attitude to snakes, many visitors from the British isles, accustomed to the more placid and infinitely less toxic Adders of Britain, find our heavyweight snakes a little scary.

For the record, and it is hard to pin this down, but it is commonly quoted that six, sometimes five, of the world's ten most dangerous snakes live in Australia. (The inland Taipan, with a bite that can kill half a million mice is the frightening number one.)

Anyway, I interrupted Joanne, and gently tugged her arm and said, "could you come over here with me, please Joanne?"

I then reefed her around and she nearly broke her leg tripping over the whipper-snipper shaft, and was about to ask (I suspect) "WHAT THE SAM HILL DO YOU THINK YOU'RE DOING?", when I let go of her and pointed at the Brown snake.

She handled it well and said, "oh, yes, that's the one that lives in the base of that tree."

We then calmly discussed the gardening and she (Joanne) went on her way.

I went back to the car for my phone, but by the time I returned and approached closer hoping for a close pic, the snake, alerted by my tread, had decided that things were getting too crowded here in its favourite sunny patch and wriggled off.

Which reminds me of a Scottish friend of mine, Nicola's, story of her parents visit to Australia.

Nicola's mum and dad were staying in Cairns at a tropical resort and her mum phoned Nicola back in Scotland using a public phone (remember them?) outside the reception area.

Nicola said they were talking normally, when her mother screamed like she was being murdered, dropped the phone and all Nicola could then hear were the sounds of the Australian tropical night.

She hung on for some time, but there was no further word from her mother, so she hung up and rooted frantically about trying to find the name of the resort so she could ring back and see what on Earth had happened.

She couldn't find anything useful and this was in the nineties before mobile phones were widespread, so she spent nearly a day in agony wondering if everything was all right.

Eventually, her father rang back and said that a green tree frog had dropped on her mother's head.

Worried, scratch that, TERRIFIED, her mum had dropped the phone and run screaming into the night.

A green tree frog of course isn't dangerous, but I think any of us having a bit of the local wildlife parachuting in would give my one-legged standing long jump record a good shake.

PS: Apparently her mum washed her hair fifteen or so times before she felt clean, and developed an understandable aversion to using a public phone.

PPS: Although a green tree frog is not dangerous, I have related previously of getting one smack in the mush at 3am and believe me, I jumped as well.

Encountering anything in the dark suddenly can be terrifying.

I might add that Nicola's mum being Scottish was already hypertense about life in Australia and the things here that can kill you, best put by Bill Bryson, himself the epitome of the nervous visitor to our shores, when he wrote: "I looked up this animal in 'Things that Can Kill You in Australia, Volume 27, chapter 23.'"

And it has to be said that we have a lot of venomous things, I mean a lot.

The world's deadliest spider, the Funnel web lives here and to put things into context about this spider, it leaves the Red-back behind in a trail of venomous dust, and the Red-back is the Australian analogue of the much feared Black Widow of the United States.

Can you tell which of these spiders is the Red back and which the Black Widow?

(Red-back is the lower pic. You can see how similar they are.)

And both these species pale dawdle far behind in the dangerous stakes when compared with the Funnel web.

Even the Funnel web's scientific name, Atrax robustus, gives you an insight to its nature.

The story I remember most about Funnel webs was from my friend Johnno, a gardener I learned a lot from while working with him on the northern beaches of Sydney.

Johnno picked up a double handful of leaf litter that he was going to put in the wheelbarrow and as he lifted it he suddenly saw on top of the pile, getting nearer his face with each passing millisecond, a Funnel web raised in aggression posture.

No one, not even Johnno really knows what happened next, best guess is that Johnno set a record similar to my one-legged standing long jump, but for mulch hurling.

He was working in French's Forest at the time and we believe his double handful of leaf litter landed scattered over parts as far north as Mona Vale, approx. 20 kilometres away.

So apart from the Funnel web, a spider apparently designed by Hell labs, we also have the box jellyfish, with a sting so painful that a victim can still be screaming after morphine has been administered.

The Blue-ringed octopus has a venom that defies local strategic arms treaties, snorkellers were sometimes bitten when they put a shell in their pocket and the Blue-ring swam out to find out who was messing with its house.

We even have the only poisonous mammals, the Echidna and Platypus, with the male of the species equipped with a poisonous claw on it's rear foot. (No one is clear why it's there. It seems to be to do with mating and dominance.)

The Cone shell is another beauty with a venom that paralyses the small fish it preys on.

The Brazil Cone Shell is the most venomous, but our species are no slouches that's for sure.

One source I consulted said this: "Due to the toxicity of the venom Cone shells should be handled very carefully, if at all".

So I was astonished to find this picture on Google images.

This young woman will almost certainly appear next in the Darwin awards.

Even on close up I can't confirm is she is holding a Cone shell in her palm, but take it from me, don't go messing around with any shells on the Barrier reef, if the rest of the country's pattern of toxic animals is any guide, treat everything as if it's venomous.

So I'll close with a few stories about snakes, since that has always been my main area of interest.

Ironically, it was one of the third year subjects I failed at Uni, but unlike all the other things I failed it was nothing to do with drinking, smoking pot and playing soccer, I failed because I was too interested.

How's that?

Well, so fascinated by the animals themselves, I spent all my time reading esoteric and odd facts, some of which I will finally put into use here, that I didn't read the coursework properly, and so failed.

Anyway, when white settlement began the english settlers and convicts began recording the animals they saw, the Brown snake being one of them.

It was quickly realised to be deadly and to be avoided.

The Brown went on the list with the Tiger and Death Adder as snakes that would kill you if bitten, certainly in the days before anti-venin.

It even happened for me.

When I moved to Byron Bay I did various jobs and one of the best was as warden on South Ballina Beach for the Shore Bird protection patrol.

One sunny summer afternoon my partner and I discovered a snake slithering among the rocks of the south wall.

I thought it was a Brown snake, but the colouration was a bit different to the standard pattern.

I could tell though it was an Elapid, that is the family that Australian venomous snakes belong to, and ensured everyone avoided it.

When I got back to my computer, I looked it up and discovered it was a Rough-Scaled Snake, I'd never heard of it, but sure enough, I had stumbled across, not literally thank the lord, another brown snake that is, and here I quote from Sciencentre, : "A dangerously venomous species with strongly neurotoxic venom. It is a ready biter and is responsible for at least one human death and several severe envemomations. If bitten, apply first aid and seek urgent medical attention."

Great, now I'm discovering them in my own backyard.

Then the settlers began to move into Queensland and began reporting another "brown" snake, larger than the Brown previously reported, this was the King Brown or Mulga snake, and it was as deadly as the Brown.

Things went on and then reports began coming in of another "brown" snake, the scientists once again went out and examined this beast and classified the Taipan, and yes, it was even more unhealthy to be up close and personal with.

Tai Pan incidentally is derived from Cantonese and means "Big Shot", an appropriate name that's for sure.

So by then I had a mental picture of reptile scientists cowering in their laboratories, dreading the next phone call saying "we've found another 'brown' snake", then going out and finding the arms race has ratcheted up another notch.

Sure enough.

Long term settlement in the "dead" heart of Australia meant that the animals came under closer scrutiny, and differences were noted about the local taipan.

For one, it changes colour from winter to summer, so it was contended that there may even be two new species out there. (god help us)

Once again some death-defying scientists went out for a look and discovered a single new species, the Inland Taipan, rejoicing in the scientific name of oxyuranus microlepidotus.

And sure enough, it set a new standard for venom.

A single drop can kill 100 adult humans, and a single bite may contain a hundred drops.

As of this writing date the Inland taipan is the most venomous land snake on earth, but due to its (thankfully) shy and retiring nature, there have been no recorded deaths from this beast.

And so to the list.

You may in your travels have heard things said like "of the world's ten most deadly snakes, 8 of them live in Australia."

The number varies from list to list, but the list below from Listverse is a good general model.

It puts the Coastal Taipan below the Brown, which I disagree with, but it's reasonable.

It declares that five of the world's worst snakes are Australian, and 50% is enough to be going on with, believe me.

So.

10. Rattlesnake - North America

9. Death Adder - Australia

8. Vipers - a group of folding fang snakes including the Gaboon Viper with fangs 60mm long, eek! From many continents

7. Phillipine Cobra - Asia

6. Tiger Snake - Australia

5. Black Mamba - Africa

4. Taipan - Australia

3. Blue krait - Asia

2. Brown Snake - Australia

1. Inland Taipan - Australia

And in conclusion I'll say this, I've never seen a snake at Possum creek before last Saturday when I saw two in one day.

So I predict that this is going to be one of the worst snake summers we've had in a long time.

Let's just pray that we don't discover a new species of "brown" snake that is even worse than the Inland Taipan.

13 - Is Karma real? It bloody was that day

Karma is powerful force up here in the Rainbow Region, but I constantly have to ask myself if I truly believe in it.

As a hard-nosed scientist I was trained to only believe in things that could be measured empirically.

And I'm sure that you, like me, really hope it exists when someone does you wrong and you want the bad person in question to get their come-uppance from a vengeful cosmos, but I think that's the wrong (negative) way to think about it.

You're supposed to, as far as I can tell, drift about in haze of beautiful thoughts and seemingly, marijuana smoke, and good things will come to you.

But as I began tapping out the rhythm of this post I was still leaning toward it not existing, then, like a bolt from above I was suddenly reminded of an incident that proved, to me anyway, karma is real.

It was the most embarrassing thing that ever happened to me sober, and there was a crowd of nearly as hundred to see it.

I'll get to that at the end, but first a little about climate.

It gets cold here in Byron Bay.

Nothing like the old home town of Bathurst, but cold enough for me.

People up here constantly remark on my inability to handle the cold, I am the first into long pants in Autumn, and the last to shed the jumper in spring.

Then when people find out where I grew up they say, "You should be used to the cold!".

Well, here's the thing, the reason I left Bathurst is 'cos I was always so bloody cold.

I went searching for a better place, somewhere warm, somewhere with surf, and of course, mainly, somewhere my parents weren't.

So when people give me the "you should be used to it" line, I always tell them the Polar bear joke, which explains things better than I can.

So.

A polar bear cub goes up to his mother and says, "mum, do we have any Black bear in our family?"

His mother says, "no".

The cub then says, "well have we any brown bear in our family?"

His mother once more says, "no".

So the cub goes on to ask, "Grizzly?"

And his mother says, "no, we have none of them, we're pure polar bear. Why do you ask?"

And the cub says, "'cos I'm trying to find out why I'm always so bloody cold".

Which reminds me of a story I read about a psychiatrist employed by the US military at the start of the second world war.

The top brass wanted him to find out under which climactic conditions each soldier would operate best.

So he assessed them by unit and they were sent to various parts of the world to serve, some to the burning deserts of North Africa, some to steamy tropical jungles and others to the frozen wastes of Europe in winter.

The campaign was a successful one with the soldiers operating well in their various locales.

So at the end of the war the psychiatrist was called in the Washington to receive an award.

As the general was handing him his medal he asked the psychiatrist how he did it, "did he use psychometric testing?", or "perhaps an exercise program under stress with body temperatures carefully measured?"

"What was your secret?", the general asked.

The psychiatrist replied, "when they came in to see me I asked them if they wanted to go somewhere hot or somewhere cold."

Occam's razor, all right.

And I must admit I kind of made the mistake when I moved here of thinking that Byron had a temperature in the mid-thirties all year round.

But Wednesday this week I had that fantasy categorically smashed when I made the mistake of reading my thermometer at 7am and learning it was five degrees.

It was cold, but I was half wondering if I was seeing things, or worse if I had, rumpelstiltzkin-like woken up in Bathurst.

This is an occasional nightmare I have these days, I know many of you reading this blog love the old home town, but I for reasons stated don't, so suddenly to be living there again doesn't make for restful sleep.

And speaking of nightmares, well odd dreams at least, something I often dream these days is that I am drinking again.

Even in my dream I say to myself, "Oh, am I drinking again? That's odd."

I suppose it's only to be expected, a lifetime on the jungle juice does lead to a long lead time to get off it, but I find it particularly annoying to be reminded of the pleasures of a cold glass of Chardonnay whilst getting my eight hours.

But then I wake up and realise, thankfully, it was all a dream, and my therapist Paula, and doctor Mark can relax again and I am not showing up to see them red-faced and shaking-handed for therapy or my latest appointment respectively.

So leading back to the opening stanza about karma through a sign I

saw at the library which truly goes down as a genuine "Only-in-Byron" moment.

The library held a colouring competition and the winner was: Akira-Tygar Chee.

When I first read the sign I thought that Akira-Tygar Chee was a form of drawing, but as I read closer I realised that it was indeed the name of the winner.

Now you can name your kids what you like, but I wish some would not lade their kids with years of name calling.

Speaking of, when I was at uni there was a vet student called 'Everard Cock', I was going to say it doesn't get better than that, but on the same list was 'Hugh Cumber', which is not as rude but made me laugh.

And so to the best joke I know on bad names.

I guy walks into the local council office and says, "I want to change my name. Is this the right place to do it?"

The council worker behind the desk says, "Yes, here are the forms, what is your name?"

The guy says, "Bill Bumwiper".

The council staffer replies, "oh, well, I'm not surprised you want to change that, what do you want to change to?"

To which Bill says, "Fred Bumwiper".

Additionally, a bit of housekeeping.

A few posts ago I wrote about naming of various places in Australia, and one of those places was Bland Shire in NSW, well on the radio this morn I heard that in an enterprising piece of work by the local tourist promotions department, Bland Shire is hoping to twin, or triplet, with Dull, Scotland and Boring in the USA.

And so finally to Karma.

As usual the Simpsons put it best.

One episode Homer gets Apu, the Kwikimart owner, fired due to the sale of expired products.

Apu goes through some soulsearching and his previous anger at Homer for getting him fired turns around and he goes to the Simpson home to apologise.

Homer answers the door and gets confused during the conversation and says, "you're selling what now?"

Apu replies, "I am only selling the concept of karmic realignment."

To which Homer says, "you can't sell that, karma can only be portioned out by the cosmos", and shuts the door.

Apu, left alone of Homer's doorstep looks down at his feet and says, "he's got me there".

And so to my experience of the karmic realignment.

My first job when I left high school was as a laboratory attendant in the science department at Charles Sturt University.

It was a great job, I was earning the staggering amount of $150 a week, compare that with my elder brother who was receiving $27 a week to play rugby league in country NSW.

One of the conditions of the job was that I did the course offered by the science department.

I was supposedly so that I learned what the students were doing in the labs that I had to set up, but in reality the science department were so desperate for students that one extra, by any means, was worth it.

So I began work and study and loved it.

By doing the course I got to know the students and began partying with them.

As a lab attendant I was the worst in the history of the human race.

I was lazy, disorganised and every second day of the week operating on three hours sleep from another party I attended till near dawn.

In effect I was a perfect choice for the public service.

One day I was walking past the Rafters bar and noticed a couple of female students sitting outside on the newly built, but not quite finished deck.

I decided to go over and be a big man.

These particular students had left their area of the lab a bit messy at the end of their last class and I'd had to clean it up.

So I went over and gave them the rounds of the kitchen in my loud carrying voice.

Even as I type this thirty years after the fact I shriek internally with embarrassment at my action and even my motives in thinking that this would impress anyone.

I came to the end of my tirade and with a final, "make sure you clean up every time and don't ever do it again", I turned on my heel to make a dramatic exit, put my foot down a hole left in the deck for shade trees to grow through and fell flat on my face.

The hundred or so students sitting on the deck eating lunch whom I had previously been "impressing" with my monstering of two female students then broke into a truly heart-felt and perfectly justified guffaw at me.

Boy did I deserve it.

So there you have it, karma is real and that day it was instantaneous.
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

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 concretor 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 incandescant, 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 purshace 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 emtied 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 vcar 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 it's 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 fusebox 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 powerpoint 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 powerpoint, 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, 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 Lasster'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.

