bus

I note that in the early days of this blog I used to talk a lot about public transport and I did seem to be going hither and thither on outer suburban bus services in particular. That happens less now though I do still go far and wide, but often now it's by car. Why? I don't know but I will say that, while it is perfectly legal (or I choose to think it is) to take Perry on the train, he is anxious about it and so it can really only be short distances. He can't go on buses, he'll never know what that's like. 

This afternoon I was late for a meeting because the bus was l-a-t-e. I have really come to depend on the 402, I don't know why it comes so frequently and travels so valiantly between two places that don't per se need to be travelled between (Footscray and East Melbourne, I mean, that's fine but if you were in Footscray and you actually wanted to get to East Melbourne fastish, you'd go on the train right?) though obviously not many people actually travel the whole distance instead they take bits of the route. Anyway, I do expect it to be quick and so when it doesn't show I fall to pieces. 

I've got nothing else (or perhaps just nothing) to say on this topic. Do blogs waste energy i.e. are they bad for the environment? If so, then I've done a bad thing with this post, it has no point.

then i realised...

...that in fact my blog is actually pretty dull. It's mainly just about episodes of Homicide! Which is... I mean... which is just an old tv show, about as old as me, and actually about as dull! So it's either that, or Pintandwefall records! Why didn't anyone tell me?!

But then, I'd tell you other things from my life but they're either about meetings with students - which are interesting, at least to me and I hope also to them, but naturally confidential. Things like that. Trying to negotiate university online systems. Which is not necessarily confidential but you want to hear about it just as much as I want to try to do it. 

Anyway I shouldn't even be writing this now. I have a ton of things I need to get done in the next few days, inc. a conference presentation for next Monday. 

Here are four pictures from my bus ride to work this morning (yes, I take the bus sometimes. I know it's ridiculous but I get-so-bored-by-walking-the-same-route). 

I love this building, it's 80s Housing Commission. 

I love this one too, for different reasons. It's on the opposite side of the road. 

This is inside the bus. There were few people on it. 

Close to where the rail station will be eventually I gather. 

living death

I thought I would try to avoid the monster queue at N Melbourne so today I played it smart and got off at Kensington to take the bus from there. As a transport interchange, that place offers neither of the things it promises (i.e. no transport and no interchanging). The level crossing of the railway line means that traffic is often backed up right out of Kensington but at the same time it might well be doing that anyway without the railway line, as the street is ludicrously narrow (it has actually been narrowed; it doesn't need to be; and there is a doubly wide section of footpath that could be a bus stop but this would presumably limit the village atmosphere of three blocks of backed up stinking traffic trying to find a sneaky way into the city and impeded by a stopped bus and train boom gates). The bus spends so long at the stop waiting for people to get on, that more people keep coming along; it's absurd. And then once it sets off of course it takes a freakin' age to get there. A youngish woman and a child of 3-4 were in the seat in front of me having an argument about who was more cranky. It was at least a friendly argument.

I could have spent the time working on my laptop except I had nowhere to put my umbrella and was very distracted by the men at the back complaining about the stupid government and myki and the woman up the front who was coughing half her body weight in phlegm into a handkerchief. She was a magician because whatever she was coughing up it was constant, but the handkerchief remained - at least in her mind - functional. The man next to her had one of those trolleys with an oxygen bottle on it, but he was stoic and silent.

Hell is other people, I know, but the bus from Footscray to E Melbourne via Kensington traverses a particular ring you don't want to pass through that often.

waiting

This is what's to my left, or rather, what you would see if you were facing me right this instant, well, I suppose you would have to be crouching a bit or sitting down, because it's kind of laptop height and the laptop's on a lap. I am waiting for the 401 and it has not yet come. I don't remember it ever taking this kind of immensely long time (2-3 mins so far) so you can imagine my intense ennui at being made to wait. I am sort of imagining that the one that does come will be so immensely amazing, it will be kind of a business class version, to make up for the extraordinarily long - now 4-minute - wait.
Wish me luck

crawl of... death

So I have to get to Park Orchards by 10.30 on a Thursday morning. A little time spent on the Metlink website has me sorted on a Broadmeadows train at 8.34 and in PO at 10.14 or thereabouts, luverly jubbly. Well, of course I arrive at Broady station and to my enormous surprise the train is 20 minutes late. This means naturally I get to the city three minutes after I am supposed to take a 307 bus to the Donvale terminus. At this time I always enjoy calling the hapless call centre workers and putting in a complaint, and they have perfected a brilliant synthesis of politeness and complete lack of interest that I suppose deflects people from thinking that they are dealing with someone who might want to defend the lateness of trains. (The bus, by the way, was 9 minutes late getting to the appropriate spot for me to connect with the 271 Ringwood bus which was due 6 minutes after the 307. However, the 271 was fortuitously 3 minutes late. It’s like cliché of a primary school maths problem isn’t it. Once getting on the 271 I gave John 3 apples who gave Jill half the number of apples Peter gave Redmond, who had twice as many apples as me).

I read The Age every day and I appreciate the universe it creates, a pleasant fantasy based on elements of fact though, unlike for instance the film Fargo, not universal truths. Yesterday I enjoyed seeing the Age grapple with why people might perhaps want to live somewhere more than 3 km beyond the CBD. The good reason they never seem to have tried on for size is that many suburbs offer triple the variety interest and versatility than any number of elegant Fitzroy ruined terrace houses, but that’s not important right now. Yesterday it was so someone could buy a block of land – any land please god even if it’s in (shudder) Epping – to reunite their family, and family is something the Age understands has relevance to the ethnics. Similarly the Age’s obsession with public transport is both intriguing and misses a basic underlying fact. This is that the state government whoever they may be can get away with underfunding public transport because only a small percentage of Melbournians use it (and many of those are too young to vote and probably equate reaching adulthood with the ‘freedom’ of learning to drive). Yes, it is a catch 22, because the more PT is funded the better it will be and the more people want to use it, but at the same time, the more possibility there is for people to feel disgruntledly in the thrall of a government (or semi-government) service.

For some reason people can disconnect from the idea that roads are not also every bit as much a feature of planning and governance. I remember the argument I had with some dumbass students I had to cope with five or so years ago re: road tolls and train tickets, where they didn’t think they should have to pay road tolls and I said well why is using a road different from using a railway and they said (sort of unanimously, or at least a couple said it and others agreed), ‘well we don’t buy tickets’.

On the bus I entertained once again my irritating ability to recognize one of probably thousands of irritating pop songs I sincerely dislike, from a few squeaky bars above engine noise. It was Dire Straits’ ‘Walk of Life’. I mean for all I know that chronically horrible keyboard line is completely calculated to be audible above every other ghastly noise of daily life (as it was lived almost 30 years ago). I hate that song very much thank you. The radio also played some things I like though like ‘Summer in the City’ and ‘Get it On’. I suppose I say these are things I like but in truth I would not voluntarily play them for my pleasure. I just hate them about 30 000% less than ‘Walk of Life’, which should not even have been allowed to be a song. That song was like a direct by-product of a Thatcher government, and not in a good way like songs by The Specials or whatever, but in a way that it was like Thatcher policies created the diseased environment in which such a travesty could flourish. I don’t have a clue what that song is about (Chuck Berry? That’d be right)* but it should have died on the first night of its existence. Instead it is still being played, its cheesy topping piping like a wheezy phlegm tweet above the sound of a bus engine and passing cars on Hoddle Street. I want to smack not only Mark Knopfler but everyone who bought that song and who responded favourably to its inclusion on a hypothetical playlist in consumer polling. That would take the rest of my entire lifetime I suppose – it no doubt sold millions and not only would it take hundreds of people hundreds of years to find out who bought it, but also getting them lined up. Some of them are probably now dead and I would like to think there could be a special exemption for dead ones but maybe there isn’t. It would probably be easier to just smack everyone born between 1940 and 2000, as I am pretty sure no-one under 10 would have bought ‘Walk of Life’, and you’d be going pretty well on getting the largest possible section of those who did just concentrating on the 11-70 year olds.

The downside is it’s not fair that so many people who didn’t buy or otherwise support ‘Walk of Life’ are getting the punishment. But as far as I’m concerned that’s part of living in a society. So much of one’s life is dominated by other people’s bullshit. I mean why am I always singled out for explosives testing whenever I come through the airport? I’ll tell you: it’s because I look white and educated (and the truth is, I’m both) and am unlikely to kick up a stink. If there is actually a system that makes my selection genuinely random, then I should buy more lottery tickets, because random is less random than I realized. Anyway. The real reason I have to so often suffer the boredom and indeed it’s probably even humiliation of being checked for explosives every time I get on a plane is that other people are jerks. It’s no different to being slapped because other people bought ‘Walk of Life’. I know I’ve put it in your head now, sorry, but I didn’t create or support it in any way. It disgusts me.

* Later, I wikipediaed it and it's about street musicians. I guess as they were its inspiration MK put all the royalties from the song into small coins in a huge tank and went around shooting 20p a piece at street musicians. No, seriously, he does a lot for charity.

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?

this morning

I walked to the tram through Gowanbrae. This takes about 1 hour 10 mins. I noted along the way that there is a bus system through Gowanbrae now that requires you to call 15 mins in advance if you want it to come to a particular stop. Actually it's a pretty good idea, though it seems more suited to a little Turkish village than a big grown-up suburb in the most suburban nation in the world. If it works for the Gowanbraeans, it works for me (I must catch it some time - said the cat). Then my knee was sore when I got off the tram. Oh boy!

No pictures. You wouldn't cope.

disease is rampant

Well, so yesterday I came down with yet another cold, not as bad as the last few, but this is about the 5th this year (I have probably complained in my usual flamboyant style all through this blog so I could go back and check but won't). I felt nauseous Thursday - sore throat Friday morning - taking cold and flu tabs Friday day - feverish at night - slept a lot of today, which is something I actually hate to do.

Mia is playing with New Estate tonight at the John Curtin but I'm not going. I am sure it will be a good show - the third last with Brad. You read it here first, possibly.

So I have a lot of writing to do and will start on that pretty soon. I have a journal article to finish by the end of the month, having submitted two last week I don't feel that I have been slack in that regard. I have also (finally) started writing my new undergrad course which will be an epic, but I already feel very good about it.

For some reason something made me remember I absolutely think The Fall are one of the best bands ever. This is one of my favourite of their tracks. It was never on a 'real' album.



Later - so being ill I thought I should be allowed to entertain myself with babyish mindless flippin' entertainment and I watched The Bill for the first time in ages. What a painfully stupid program that has always been, but is much more so now I'm sure. Tonight's episodes re: a series of bomb attacks in Sun 'Ill doesn't know whether to patronise its viewers or titillate them with self-righteous bumf. The final scene re: a key clue, 'the Elvis four' which is revealed to be an anagram of 'the four evils'. That's about as much an anagram as 'a nag ram' is of 'anagram'. I suppose I shouldn't be so swift to condemn, the storyline hasn't resolved and maybe the Elvis four will end up referring to something like the Million Dollar Quartet, but it's looking unlikely. And every line, every character, and every scenario in The Bill is... well... well, it's a shitty program!!!

Later still - I see Mutiny on the Buses is on later tonight at about 3 am - if I'm up (having slept most of the day you'll recall) I can get my fix of genuine cockney characterisation and hijinx then.