The summer of 1999/2000 was the Last Summer at the Beach. I knew I was moving to Sydney, my optioned narrowed to a single path, with nothing much to do but wait. I designed real estate ads for pocket money, and every morning I'd go down to the beach and swim and re-read some paperback novel. I had my spot near the pool, and I got to know the regulars. I worked on my zine, and wrote emails to people in Sydney. I only had one friend left in Wollongong, all others having faded away or moved away, and some nights when I was bored I would go over to his house and watch wrestling videos, play guitar.
The summer of 2000/2001 was the Summer of No Work. Sydney was still new to me; my first summer in the city. I'd been working at Angus and Robertson, but it was shut down for renovations for three months, and I was living off my savings and working hard on my novel. It was my most decadent summer, and I felt very essential. I had a friend called Jaki with whom I would have impromptu insane nights - I remember one night that went on forever; that involved us, at one point, eating flowers, and the next day it turned out somebody had stolen eighty dollars from Mel's bedroom. Jaki was great at spending hours in a coffee shop; she had a lesbian friend who was in love with her - they'd come over and we'd lie on the papasan cushions and watch movies. She still has my video of Pump Up The Volume - I have no idea where she is now.
I went to Bronte Beach with Vanessa and Fiona on Christmas Day. One night I sat on the top of a carpark with Fiona and Janet and we were questioned by security guards - I put the scene in my novel a few days later. Vanessa and Fiona and I went on a roadtrip down to Austinmer for a few days - we had a picnic, and drank at the now-famous Headlands Hotel.
That was the best summer.
The Summer of 2001/2002 was the Last Summer at Angus and Robertson. There were great Christmas casuals, one of whom was Lea, who I already knew of through other friends. Working there was fun like it hadn't been since I started. I remember the work Christmas party, and another night out with the same people a week or two later: eight people sitting on a dock on the harbour, everybody with a crush on somebody else. (The Christmas casuals were too good, actually - they were so nice, as well as being young and thus cheap, that after Christmas I stopped getting shifts anymore.) My novel was submitted all over town; I'd been growing increasingly manic as one publisher after another rejected it. By Christmas I knew it wasn't going to be published. I wrote in my diary that it seemed like my life changed on a weekly basis. Mel told me she was moving out; Lea moved in. I was half-fired/half-quit at Angus and Robertson; a week later I found out my novel was going to be published. I smoked a thousand cigarettes and became convinced that something terrible would happen to prevent it being published. I was due to go to Europe with my father in March; Lea was taking off too, and she moved out the week before I left.
It was a summer of intensity and beauty and eventfulness. Everything kind of went to hell after that.
The Summer of 2002/2003 was the Summer of No Hope. I had stopped keeping a diary before that summer - there wasn't much happening in my life that I wanted to remember. It is hard for me to reconstruct what happened that summer - I had no diary or blog, and even my emails are uninformative. I was preparing Suburban Aliens for publication, but other than that I don't appear to have even been writing to people. I didn't know what I wanted to do, I felt mentally and physically sick most of the time, I was dangerously thin and not eating much. The only really nice memories I have are of hanging out with Bree: watching movies, drinking at her place or mine. Watching Freaks and her walking home late. I rarely ventured out of the house except to get coffee, and briefly made friends with one of the waitresses, but I wasn't in a good place for making friends, and the friendship died before it got going. I formed a misconceived plan to do an MA, because I couldn't think of anything better to do, then found out that it all took place in the early evenings, which was the only time I didn't feel depressed and alone - I changed to a BA, even though I already had a Bachelor's degree, and actually perservered with this plan for a while until the pointlessness of it all became overwhelming. Not a summer to remember.
The Summer of 2003/2004 was the Summer of New Hope - gradually dragging myself out of depression. Bess moved out and Bree moved in. A great New Years on the roof and the balcony, staying up all night and talking to Bree all through the next day. A strange January where we hung out a lot and argued constantly over everything. Swimming at night, playing apartment Teletubbies basketball with Dane, where hitting Bree in the head was worth three points - she wasn't impressed. That was the night of the day my agent told me she didn't think very much of my new novel.
Nights like
this one are what I remember. Thanks Bree.
The Summer of 2004/2005 was the Summer of Alexithymia - feeling nothing but the heat, wandering around in a daze, neither happy nor sad. The workmen outside Plup and the wind that changed direction and covered everything in dust. Doing a housecall on the hottest day of the year - carrying a thousand books over a rubbish pile in forty degree heat. The first summer I'd ever spent alone in the apartment. New Years Eve on top of Centerpoint with Tim; Harriet and Ella's birthday party at Jubilee Park.
Everybody I knew broke up with the people they were seeing; my group dissolved, and has never really re-formed, at least not with me as a part of it. I made some new friends. The heater in the pool upstairs was broken and I didn't swim, so it didn't feel like summer. I worked a lot. Mostly I remember the dust, and a vague longing for something slightly better, or more dramatically worse - I didn't much care which.
Summer is my turning point: this is why I dread New Years' Eve, and January. Partially it's the turn of the calendar, the artificial divide that is made real, because people believe it, and organise themselves around it. People do new things, and every summer seems to bring change to my life - I rarely finish them as I started them. I don't know how I feel about this one yet, or what it should be called - ask me in a couple of months. It might be the Last Summer at Plup. I swim, and I feel the tension in the atmosphere, the sense of cables drawn tight, humming. There's always an intensity to summer, a sense of violence and mystery, lightning in the skies.
Sleep easy, Sydney. The Bra Boys and the Commancheros are working together to put an end to the violence:
"Maroubra's Bra Boys surfer gang and the Comancheros bikies gang met today to discuss the situation before condemning the violence of the past few days. Bra Boys member Sonny Abberton said today his gang and the Comancheros, who have a large Lebanese membership, were working together to burst the bubble of racial hatred.
His brother and fellow Bra Boys member Jai Abberton said: "We (the Bra Boys) have never been involved in any of this racial tension."
(Link)That's Jai Abberton who recently beat a murder rap, by the way... The Comancheros greatest moment was their showdown at Milperra against the Bandidos bikie gang that left seven people dead.
Here's a comment about the Bra Broys from a website rating various Sydney beaches: "m`bra is a good beach, it gets a bit windy thou but its a the only good surfing beach ... but of corse they have bra boys, and it sucks when they fight random people or harass girls.. but oh well its the same every where, just stay away from the guys with the tops off playing fotty, because thats usally them."
Sounds just like the people "of middle-eastern descent" who started this whole mess, doesn't it? So many dark ironies in this story.
Why is somebody in Connecticut systematically google-stalking me? All different aspects of my past combined with "Nicholas Carvan". Who are you? Show yourself. Are you somebody from my past? I love it when long lost people re-discover me through this website. Are you one of my many fans (ho ho, that joke never gets old...)
Are you a malicious stalker? If so, I'm sorry, the position of malicious stalker has already been filled on this blog, by the entity I refer to as the Creepazoid. How are you doing, Creepy? I haven't heard from you in a while. Isn't it about time you tried another abysmal attempt to get me to make a fool of myself? Swine, I challenge thee to a duel. Pistols or fisticuffs, your choice. Stop masturbating in front of the computer and send round your second.
I don't have much to say, really, but I think I'll type for a while and see what comes out. I know some of my recent entries have been on the ordinary side, but these days I take the view that anything new will probably help keep people occupied, and checking back. What's been going on with me? Well, you should see your humble narrator right now. I have been, as my grandmother would say, "in the wars". I think I have fractured my little toe after viciously stubbing it. I have somehow pinched a nerve in my back. And I have a very impressive looking graze on my arm - it looks like I have an attack of flesh-eating bacteria - incurred on the big slide at Coney Island, in Luna Park. God bless Coney Island, for so many things, not the least of which for having rides dangerous enough to injure yourself on. I made quite a spectacle of myself - I nearly won the whirligig slide-off thing, despite a bad position, by sneakily pushing off the nine-year-olds who were on the ride with me. Afterwards, apparently, one of them called me "the biggest cheat I've ever seen" for not putting my hands in the air when I was supposed to. I didn't hear the announcer, honest I didn't. Anyway, that will teach the little blighter not to blindingly follow authority.
In addition to these injuries, I seem to be suffering from a strange, recurring olfactory hallucination - I keep thinking I smell a distinctive, rotten odour. At first this wasn't a hallucination - it was the pan near the sink that I left to soak a few weeks ago. But despite cleaning the pan, I still smell this smell everywhere I go. Not just in my apartment, either, but in all sorts of places.
I might riff for a bit on the racial violence at Cronulla Beach. Brief summary, for overseas readers - racial tension has been a-brewing in the Sutherland Shire after a group of people "of middle-eastern appearance" bashed some lifesavers in reprisal for an earlier incident, which escapes me. But tension has been, apparently, a-brewing for a while. The "westies" have been impinging on the turf of the good people of the Sutherland Shire. Interestingly, part of the problem has been disrespect for women. Today, a grass-roots campain to organize "Bash Leb and Wog Day" on Cronulla beach resulted in five thousand beery beach louts assembling, literally draping themselves in the Australian flag, getting drunk, and viciously attacking some people of middle-eastern appearance who apparently hadn't listened to the news in the last week and decided to take a stroll along Cronulla Beach. The media, it should be added, did a very good job of promoting "Bash Leb and Wog Day" in the last week or so.
To start, here's a couple of Sutherland Shire stories to set the mood. The Sutherland Shire, like the Shire of the Hobbits, is very insular, conservative and largely forgotten by the outside world. It is the middle of middle Australia, the whitest of white-bread. My first story is that of a rich North Shore boy I knew when I worked at Angus and Robertson. His father was the Australian manager of a large multinational company - but that lifestyle wasn't for him. His greatest joy in life was the weekend, when he would go out to the nightspots of the Shire with his Shire friends - get drunk, meet slutty Shire girls. How he would extoll the virtues of the Shire to me, his glorious nights out there! The point I am trying to make is that the Shire is a state of mind, and for some people, it's all they've ever sought in life...
My other brief story is that I have once in my life been out for a night on the town in the Sutherland Shire, for a friend's bucks party. We caught a courtesy bus, the "One Chance, One Life Shuttle Bus" from venue to venue. It was Friday night, and the secretaries, tradesmen, office-workers and retail employees were out on the town. I had a fun night - quite a spectacular one, really, sociologically speaking - as we went from one Leagues club to another. My clearest memory is of a point towards the end of the night as I watched some boofy bloke try to chat up a tart while surreptitiously tugging on his dick in the dark club. Ah, the Shire...
I also grew up in a variety of beachside suburbs, one of which can now be seen four nights a week on the new Channel Seven soap Headland. (And isn't that a surreal experience? Watching these people wander around a fictional landscape that you know so intimately. By the way, you want to know how cheap that show is? It takes place in the fictional Headlands Hotel, which by a wild coincidence used to be the non-fictional Headlands Hotel, known to locals as "Headies". They didn't even change the sign on the pub! In fact, I think they may have
named the show Headland to avoid the expense of having to replace the sign!)
Anyway, having grown up on a beachside suburb, I know well the feelings of resentment aimed by everybody (including me, in my youth) to "Westies" - those dark-skinned, soccer playing hooligans who set up on the grass and don't respect the time-honoured traditions of the sacred Australian beach. Having also grown up amongst surfers, I also understand the resentment towards the puff-chested blond surfers who strut around and believe they own the place.
Now to get a little bit controversial - is anybody game to call me racist if I say that young, male, Muslim-Australians, in my experience, often have appalling attitudes to women? If anybody's game, that's what the comments section is for. A mildly less controversial statement: surfies, in my experience, often have appalling attitudes to women...
Both groups come from cultures that tend to emphasise male bravado and view women as accessories. Both cultures have warped notions of honour through physical violence, in particular notions of defending women's honour through violence. In the list of "famous Australian gang rapes", members of each group can claim number one and two. The surfers gave us Leigh Leigh, the Muslim-Australians the Western Suburbs pack rapes of a couple of years ago. I don't mean to suggest that there aren't plenty of fine people from both groups, but the worst of both groups are about as bad as it gets.
And yes, I do realize what dodgy territory I am striding uncautiously into here - and I'm not helped by the fact that in writing this entry I seem to be hopelessly caught up in the facetious/provocative mood I sometimes get into, which so many people find unnapealing. What I'm trying to say is that there was something inevitable about all this. The coverage of it has been subtly racist, I think. The "Lifesaver" in Australian culture has an undeserved reverence. I don't know the details of what went on to cause all this mess, but a strong undercurrent has been indignation at the attack on volunteer lifesavers. Not saying they deserved it, but I think it is more than possible they were not entirely innocent - that position of lifesavers is not deserved. Most members of surf lifesaving clubs that I've known are not motivated by a desire to save lives but instead by the priviledged position it entails, the beach lifestyle, the impression they think it makes on girls, the access to the lifesaving club, and the opportunity to spend hours strutting about and checking out surf conditions. (Lifeguards, the paid weekend surf supervisors, are different. They take their job seriously.) Another subtly racist piece of media coverage - the news tonight attempted to contrast the "peaceful" start of the day's tribal gathering, where white guys draped in the Australian flag yelled the "oi oi oi" chant, with the latter violence. Unfortunately, there is no contrast there - just different ends of the same unnapealing spectrum of ugly Australia.
To be facetious again, the only dissapointing thing about today's violence was how one-sided it was. I hoped both sides would show up, the macho Muslim-Australians and the macho Anglo-Australians, and attack each other in a fine Darwinian display. Instead it was one-sided - and horrific, and embarrasing, once again, to be Australian.
"The tragedy of the commons" is a phrase coined by philosopher and ecologist Garett Hardin. It refers to the unfortunate outcome that occurs when there is a conflict between resource management as it affects an individual and a group. An example is overfishing - it is to the advantage of all who fish an area to limit the catch of each individual member, yet for any given individual fisher, it is to his or her advantage to overfish.
This explains why every fucking DVD I ever hire is scratched to shit. It would be beneficial to us as a group to look after them when we hire them, yet as individuals it is easier to just leave the things lying around to get scratched.
I like game theory - it explains so many of life's annoyances. In a future installment of this blog, I will show how the Prisoners' Dilemna and the evolution of co-operation explains why Sydney drivers are more likely to "wave you in" than suburban drivers.
