return

I sent the previous post from a $2 for 10 mins terminal at Sydney Airport and used the word 'shitport' (I invented that myself - like it a lot) and the terminal deleted the word 'shit' from both the title and the posting itself. I assume on postings from the home computer this won't happen, i.e. it's not Blogger's policy but the computer terminal people's. As it was a large email I sent to Kathryn Clarke that was even crankier than the posting didn't actually send through, as far as I can tell (she may let me know otherwise). One of her rats is breathing strangely which is cause for concern.

Anyway so I was up all night, and of course on the plane across the aisle from me was a big, Of-Mice-and-Men kind of big, guy whose enormousness might have been attributable to his ability to feed continually on his own snot. And the 1 hour flight seemed to take about 5 hours even though Annabel lent me a comic novel to read which I am actually enjoying and intend to finish this evening.

I got a bunch of great records in Sydney, which I know is what you really want to hear about. I got four records by Hurrah (2 LPs, an EP and a hybrid) I only ever was really keen on their song 'Flowers' which was a b-side of a single I once had, which is reissued on the hybrid, so that's great. I guess I will listen to the others. That was a sound investment as each of those records was 50c. I also got a 2JJ live late 70s album and the Motors' Tenement Steps which I remember coming out in 1980 and being bagged by the right-on RRR people as being cod punk/new wave by old people, which it probably was but I'm enjoying it. Also a couple of cool singles including a promo EP for the Cumquat lable which I must do some research on. And a Utopia album Swing to the Right and... probably a lot more but it's cold in this back room and I want to go back and sit in front of the heater with those dogs I feel so much empathy with. Who are presently barking at the back door just as I would if someone locked me out the back after I ate my dinner.

Extraordinarily (of course, not) my workplace have contrived through incompetence to remind me how little they require to give me a proper job, by cutting me off the internet and tossing me back and forward between the usual (cliché, I know) petty bureaucrats in an organisation that has a ratio of 2 administrative staff to one academic, as I said to Kathryn Clarke the other day, they needed one to take me off the internet, now they need another one to put me back on but I have to find the right one. She being administrative staff herself (and working at the time I called her to complain) it seemed appropriate to dig the knife in as far as it would go. The fact that she works for another organisation on the other side of the nation, irrelevant. Those people all confer all the time and you only have to know one to communicate with them all.

A few days ago I arrived at Broadmeadows station on foot with a few minutes to catch a train and was confronted by two gormless youths, one prodding at his mobile by the station entrance and the other smoking a stupid cigarette by the stairs leading to the dumbest pedestrian bridge on earth. In the vast space between the two a $50 note was curling over on itself. I picked it up rapidly attempting to make eye contact with either boy in case there was to be some problem. Neither of these young men wished to deal with another person, and had obviously had no eyes for their immediate environment either, because they hadn’t seen the fifty. I think this is the beginning of me starting to wonder if perhaps some people are stupider than me.

I was in ACMI later that day with a copy of Sweet and Lowdown which had been due back the previous Thursday, so I was all ready to pay a $15 fine. I was told this would not be required as their computer had crashed earlier in the day and all the records were gone. I had to tell the woman behind the counter how this was the second lucky thing that had happened to me, that I had also found fifty dollars. She said the same thing had happened to a friend of hers a few days ago, ‘so it’s been a week of pineapples’. My first thought was, she calls a $50 note a pineapple because of its colour (I am pretty familiar with the $20 being a lobster but I’ve never heard a fifty being called a pineapple before). My second thought was, no, her friend bought $50 worth of pineapples. I didn’t say anything. A few days later I decided my first thought was the right one.