mystery

 

I thought for a split second this afternoon I saw a person I used to know (or know?) in town, then realised, firstly that it wasn't them and secondly if it was, it would be awkward because that particular person had effectively disappeared out of my life completely a couple of years ago without explanation or warning. I have literally no idea what happened.

Being ghosted is something that I'm pretty sure never really happened to me until about five years ago. There were times when people got the shits with me and, you know, unfriended me on fb or something, but they usually came back (or I didn't notice). But more recently I have had a few people completely absent themselves from my world. Three cases spring to mind. One is a woman who I eventually realised wanted a romance with me, I was unaware, until a mutual friend started talking with me about her using the assumption that we were having a romance - so - I don't know what was going on there. That woman was a bit juvenile I think, the last conversation (?) we had was when she said 'someone just told me something about you', like, what? She wouldn't tell me and we haven't spoken since. I thought we were good friends, but whatever, it's not really that important to me or something I think about a lot.

The other two (intertwined and actually more than just two people) are actually hurtful, though I'm open to imagining it's not anything to do with me, really, but more likely other stuff going on. Chief amongst them is someone I have known since the 1980s, on and off, and who I always felt very close to. Complete as they say 'radio silence' since 2023, possibly a little earlier, we weren't in frequent contact but we could always pick up where we left off. I am baffled, but finally, what can you do? If someone doesn't want to talk to you, they don't. I am not even really imagining that somewhere down the line I will get an explanation, even from a third party. This person is apparently not dead, at least, it just occurred to me to google them and they are still listed in a position in their workplace. 

I think one reason I am bothered is the other connected people. The person mentioned above has a partner and a child who I also liked very much. Put that to one side. They also had a friend, who I was also friendly with, most recently we had a good time in 2019, I think, and once again while we weren't in constant contact, we could be, anytime, I thought. But nah. So with none of them talking to me, I guess I am wondering if it's me... or just circumstances. So yeah I guess it's a double edged sword of not knowing, but that is probably secondary to: I'm worried about all those people insofar as, are they OK?! There's also the distinct possibility that I have deeply offended one or some of them, in a way that meant none of them wanted a bar of me, but I really don't know how that could have happened. 

This is a stupid post because I am going so far away from giving any interesting detail because I don't think they would want to be even slightly identified. Look, it's not an obsession for me but it is bothersome sometimes. A lot of people come and go in your life. A few weeks ago I got inveigled into a conversation with friends about another friend who had apparently dissed me considerably, the conversation assumed I knew this but I didn't at all, but I examined my feelings and realised I didn't care much either - you know - that's someone else's trip. But the people I'm talking about above were, I thought, sympathique. I guess not though. Or something went terribly wrong. What do you think? 

It's probably something that happens amongst people in their 50s-60s. I suppose I better get used to it. People of my generation will cut me off or, they'll start dying.*

*Again. I knew a few people who died from heroin 30+ years ago, but no-one of my age in the last few decades. 

wash, rinse, delete

...or perhaps wince, delete I don't know. 

I have just gone back in time ten years deleting 5000+ emails most of them junk from my first, largely now ignored, gmail account. As I have explained here before, I set up this blog using that email account and as far as I understand it that is not transferable - i.e. I will have to keep that email account forever, if I want to keep this blog going. But that doesn't explain the current weird problem which is that after an update a month or so ago my computer has decided that that old email address is what I want when I select gmail. It isn't. But it always comes up as the default, until I log out and select the tab that takes you to other possible gmail addresses - including the newer one, incidentally labelled 'default'. 

So I keep landing on my old address and seeing thousands of random junk emails so this evening, as a palate cleanser between marking first year students' work, I decided I'd delete some. This turned into a bit of a campaign and I got rid of many. There were quite a lot of emails from old friends in there who hadn't realised they were writing to an old address, and possibly wondered why I had ignored them, but they are all people I still know/consider friends, so it can't have been that much of a disaster. Although that said I didn't read them all, just skimmed. There were messages and/or relics from people who have since died (by 'relics' I mean there was a time, seemingly now passed, when every time a fb friend launched a campaign or petition or something, you'd get a gmail notification of it; so one person in particular whose funeral I was remembering only last week, was heavy on the campaigns in or around 2014 or so. That's just one example there were a few. And a lot of people as well who I don't talk to anymore and am pleased that's the case... 

Apropos of nothing except it's Sunday night, I'm kind of mentally bereft after marking student work, it feels like voices in my head, here are a few more old drawing bits and bobs from various times:

ten years ago: yesterday i saw a dead person

29 December 2011: In Kensington, I saw a person being put into a body bag on the road perpendicular to the rail line as it leads out of Kensington station. Seemingly the ambulance officer doing the job was also taking their pulse but I'd say they were definitely dead particularly as the ambulance was still there 15 mins later when I came out of the bank. Some passers by were taking pictures on their phones, as you do, and shouldn't. Nearby yuppies were carousing at cafe tables. Kensington.

mid to late jan 2011

25 Jan 2011: I am trying to start the habit of blogging into the future. If I keep this up I will NEVER REALLY DIE, at least not in blogworld, except of course my blog posts into the future will eventually run out and then I WILL REALLY DIE. I wonder what blogger actually 'is' and whether it will outlive me.

I am in the final throes (I hope) of finishing my short book currently known as The Bogan Delusion. I am at the point where I am 4/5 finished but feeling a crisis of confidence, now being so immersed in what I have to say that I feel like it's not worth saying and uncertain whether I believe it or not. I am at the point where I have railed against class hatred, but then go on to talk about why I have every reason to feel class hatred if anyone does. I'm glad I wrote that down, it now seems a lot more easy to deal with.

I am also over where I would expect to be word count wise at this point in the book, so I can start pruning and culling a bit, which is a relief and a pleasure. This morning I have taken Barry and Charlie out, put some washing on the line, put some clothes away, thrown some mouldy things out that were in the fridge, and fussed around on the internet putting up pictures of Barry etc - time wasting.

I wonder what it will be like in 10 years' time and whether every second conversation will be about Facebook. Annabel last week said she was fed up with facebook and it was a great relief to not have it in her life and I thought about this for a couple of days and then emailed her saying however much you hate/blame the messenger you are cut out of people's lives if you don't get involved in things like that. Hopefully in 10 years we won't be talking about it constantly however.

body found in litter trap

(written 28/12/2010) Some kids found a decomposed body in the litter trap down at the creek. I heard conversationally when I went down to have a look (creepy? I was interested) that it had no arms or legs and was perforated up the front. The Age online says it is not known whether it's male or female. Being in the litter trap suggests it may have floated downstream but who really knows. As I was leaving the crime scene (4 or 5 police vans, a few onlookers) I think I heard someone shout, 'I have evidence! Evidence!'

* Jan 2010 - the body has been identified as being of Concetta Leone, an elderly woman who went missing in September. The police say there are no suspicious circumstances, which leads me to assume the no arms and legs thing was untrue. As was the 'I have evidence!'

it do be like that sometimes

 A famous 2019 saying, typified by this reality. 

a year ago today: publicity for the bogan delusion

I was most gratified by a good review in the Spectator. Even if it was short, and my pleasure a little problematised by the fact that the reviewer compared my book favourably to Owen Jones’ Chavs book which I didn’t necessarily need to happen (at the same time, I did kind of note that Jones somewhere, somehow is attributed with comparing himself to Orwell, which seems a bit Icarusy to me). Jones and Imogen Tyler, who I discussed (i.e. ‘used’) a little bit in my book were on Laurie Taylor’s Thinking Allowed on Radio 4 last week. I’d sent Taylor a copy of my book a few weeks ago, with the hint-hint that I’d be in London in September, and Jones is aware of my book, so I was hoping they’d mention it but nope.

My grandmother Marion would have loved me getting a review in the Spectator, favourable or otherwise, because she read it every week. Though she would for all that have probably not agreed with my book (I’m not sure; it’s hard to imagine her responding to 2011, particularly as she more or less disengaged from daily events in the final years of her life, so I’m used to memories of her not caring about what was going on outside her four walls).

I am writing this en route to my third (I think) commercial radio interview, at MTR (Melbourne Talk Radio – I’d never heard of it – used to be 3MP, which I listened to a lot when I was 11 or 12). It’s Glenn Ridge’s show, I’m only vaguely aware of who he is, too, which would only make sense to me via who he was – a tv game show host or something similar? That’s what I told Mia anyway, now I’m starting to doubt it.

Late: so I went to do the Ridge show, and it was fine – the guys on the show were pretty slick, and I was fairly scattered in my responses, but I imagine that’s OK – the important thing probably is not to seem smug or pompous. The whole thing had a cloud over it though, because there were police all over the station because someone had died in the building overnight, probably a suicide. When I got there the producer mentioned all the cops and I said, what’s that about and she said you don’t want to know, but then later when I was in the control room a panel operator came in and talked all about it, occasionally casting glances at me. The person who died had motor neurone disease, he was 60 and apparently there had been some kind of party the previous week after which he had called to thank everyone who had come, and there was a theory that he’d been saying goodbye to everyone. He’d done his show that morning and then he had died somewhere on the premises. I thought the staff I was talking to there were a bit in shock but they were coping.

So I did the Ridge show and it was fun. Unlike Fidler, they hadn’t read the book and I should be regarding that more as an opportunity (the difference is, I suppose, if the interviewer has read the book they become your collaborator in presenting your ideas to the audience; if they don’t know anything about it, you have to scrub away at their unknowingness). Not that I blame anyone for not having read it, I couldn’t give a loose root.

farewell a&r

The Angus and Robertson store in Camberwell, temprorarily still a bookshop (for Dirt Cheap Books) but basically the skeleton of what was a very long-lived and now like many others dead book retail outlet. The remnants (signs, etc) of a Borders branch is across the road.

pip proud 1949-2010

I just realised it has been a year and a week since Pip Proud died. My memory had him dying late in March. It was not a shock when he died particularly since the last time I saw him he looked like he was already dead (he was asleep/unconscious, and clearly in a terrible state).

I had actually cut Pip off somewhat up until the last year or so of his life because I had come to feel he used me as a way to get cigarettes and alcohol, which he couldn't get in the normal course of a day, or not as much as he wanted. He was occasionally manipulative about it too, playing me off against his sons in various ways which I didn't appreciate. Even though I am aware alcoholism is an illness. But I miss him very much. A conversation with Pip was always a surprise, almost to the end of his life he stayed connected to the news - he had a much better handle on world events than on things in his own life - and had a whole wry commentary of his own on the world.

He is most certainly going to be the subject of a future book. He had a tragic life in so many ways, starting with a horrendous family life - Pip casually related episodes of family violence like it was a film he'd seen. So for all that it was amazing he had such a poetic soul, and not at all surprising he was so angry at the same time. I feel (and so did he probably) that his life ended entirely unresolved. Along with Alastair Galbraith, Nic Dalton and Craig Stewart I played a little part in helping him find a new audience for his music late in life, and I think that was a good thing for his life narrative, even if it also gave him completely unrealistic expectations about his future. I had a lot of contact with death last year and it was terrible each time, I suppose Pip's has been the hardest one because he was not ready to be philosophical about it, except in the occasional expression of bravado, which is not the same - in fact, probably the opposite.*

*The opposite of bravado is not cowardice and I don't mean to imply that.

under a bus

For a long time now people have been using falling under a bus as a convenient way of representing mundane, random death. I don't want to get all philosophical but why a bus? In Melbourne we tend to see trams as the people mover in streets, though you hear a lot more of people falling under trains and dying, than you do under trams, for some reason. Of course the most common transport-related cause of death is car accidents, but for some reason these seem more gruesome and 'that's horrible' than falling under a bus, though most of us can expect on present indicators to die prolongedly in drawn-out and miserable care institutions. Is there something vaguely comforting about falling under a bus? Does one think of Big Ears driving the bus full of cotton-reel people, and it's only the Mayor of Toytown who's hit, and he just gets a red mark on his forehead?

Usually falling under a bus is summoned by people who generally indulge in thoughtless, risky self-harming behaviour eg smoking, as 'oh well, I could die from lung or throat or some other cancer, but I could fall under a bus, so...' (the 'so...' meaning, 'The randomness of the world means I refuse to partake in any consideration of what, all other things being equal, the likely outcome of my behaviour will be.') But I have also in work scenarios had it suggested to me that I keep various files and other research materials user-friendly in case I fall under a bus. Strangely, I did feel this was a pretty benign way of putting it, and I wouldn't have felt that way if instead it was suggested I might have been garrotted or fall off a tall building.

So what exactly is so great about falling under a bus?

there's been a death - in the opposite house

Well up the street actually.

hello sailor singing 'blue lady'

Cool song. Great pragmatic and informative intro too (once you get past that opening second of what the Germans should call glitschtortur!). Dig that blue lady in the first 30 seconds, dancing. Or perhaps she's just a blue woman, I don't know.

This morning I was in the post office and heard a camp man about 10 years my junior with one of those 10c piece-sized patches of white on the back of his head say 'hello sailor!' the way some people less camp and a hundred years my senior might say, 'blow me down!' or 'well I never!'

that abandoned car in full

It's still there - the police have known about it for weeks and presumably passed on information to the owner - and by golly it has provided tons of fun for the local kids in the meantime. I would say it's like the 21st century version of the old 'puffing billy' in the playground.

hello this is joannie

Paul Evans’ single Hello this is joannie is a sensational double novelty record, as well as being a very catchy tune, which is probably the most important thing about it. It has the novelty effect of, firstly, celebrating the advent/ availability of the telephone answering machine; secondly, being a grisly death song utterly belied by the jauntiness of the sub-disco pop of the tune (the bass in the opening verse - sweaty!) and production (perhaps that’s the fourth impressive thing about it – it’s jaunty yet gruesome/ morbid). I remember having the song explained to me by a friend, before I’d actually heard it (funny how often this happens, still). The explanation had to start with a rundown of the concept that some people now had these devices that answered the telephone for you if you were out (later another friend lent me a tape of a Bob Dylan bootleg, including a song he put on his answering machine; so the first answering machine message I ever heard apart from Joannie's was Bob Dylan's). What I didn’t realise was that such devices had existed in some form since the 1920s, when messages would be recorded onto a wax disc; certainly it wasn’t a piece of technology that particularly excited me in itself. The explanation then went on to describe the song as being about a man whose girlfriend dies in a car accident and he calls her number to keep on listening to her voice. It is sick. ‘Hello this is Joannie’ begins with a strummed guitar, a ring tone and then the answering machine message itself – it’s the chorus, and it’s the only time that it’s not included as part of the narrative; while its inclusion at that early point is strategic and clever, it does disrupt the flow. The first chorus is Evans’ character telling us that he and Joannie spent some time (‘last night’) at his house. He (not she, apparently) got drunk (‘I drank a little too much red’) and they fought. When she left in anger, Evans’ song persona was left bereft (‘I felt so damn bad’). He calls her the following morning and receives the answering machine message – the chorus again. He leaves a message for her: ‘Joannie I’m sorry and I’m feeling oh so small’; later, he calls again – chorus two (well, three really) during which Evans ‘oohs’ anxiously. We are then treated to a short middle 8 guitar solo, indicating a fraught waiting period, and then the music takes a step back as Evans lets us know that when the phone finally rings it’s not Joannie, as he hopes, but ‘a friend’ who tells him Joannie has been killed in a car accident. It was, apparently, due to angry driving: I never should have let her drive home angry from my place I’ll never hold her again and kiss that funny face A lightbulb, however, goes off above his head. He realises he can still hear her talking if calls her answering machine, another chorus, during which he riffs ‘I’m so sorry Joannie’, the most poignant part of the whole. Like some of the very best pop music, the whole record explores a deeply tragic (what the Victorians would have called ‘pathetic’) story with absolute flippancy. There is a hint of Hitchcockian obsession about the tale, though of course the events conveyed, including the final calling of the answering machine, take place in a very short space of time (under 24 hours, almost certainly). What is most confronting in ‘Hello this is Joannie’, however, is the absolute bouncingness of the tune, which might almost be called saccharine but for the tuff rubbery bass which provides bountiful structure and support from the outset (but particularly in the opening 30 seconds).. I have never seen a video clip for the song, or a video of a live performance – should check YouTube – but I can only imagine that it couldn’t go down very well; Evans already sounds too joyous on the record, without visual confirmation. I can only imagine the way that the song could be interpreted visually is in some total subversion of the story; for instance, with Joannie still alive and gaily singing to Evans over the phone while her many glamorous friends silently try not to cack themselves in the background. Any other interpretation would require the people who made that long Renaldo and the Loaf video. I must say I feel the song does Joannie a disservice. Sure, road rage is an issue, but the distinct impression one gets is that her anger was Evans’ narrator’s fault, not Joannie’s, and it was the compliant way she tacitly allowed Evans to upset her so completely that her anger distracted her from proper road behaviour. I know what you’re saying – perhaps I’m doing Joannie a disservice; we’ll probably never know. Evans is on record as saying there was no Joannie in real life, which does her a further disservice if you ask me. The song made no. 10 in Australia in 1979; Evans had already had two hits in this country, twenty (!) years earlier, in 1959 and 1960. He also wrote songs for Elvis, including the b-side of 'Are you lonesome tonight', which is something to mention. http://www.paulevans.com/