It bugs the fuck out of me that I can't find any evidence of the billboard ad campaign from I'm guessing the early 80s for vitamins which had the tagline 'Jenny gives John one a day'. (Also that when, in a few weeks, I go searching for this online, the mention above will be the #1 but also the only hit). I searched in the Age thinking that while the ad might not have been in there, surely someone would have written to the Age to complain about it. But no. Or, I misremembered the phrasing of the ad, or the ad never existed in the first place.
To get back to Mallacoota, I could also imagine a weird situation where I could buy a tiny shitty flat in the city to live in a few days a week (could even air bnb it when normality returns, which it never will) and have real life at a country property. The problem is the cats although there's always automatic feeders or some poor but honest country person who's happy to put on their special overalls to feed cats a couple of times a week if necessary for $20 a pop (knowing country people and their greedy extortionate ways it'd probably get to $25 a pop really fast). You can get tiny shitty flats five minutes away from the one I'm in now for $200K, above the IGA no less, position position, presumably completely airless and less than ten years old but already centuries of squalidness. But you know living in Mallacoota is undoubtedly no picnic and you probably move in and think it's all rustic splendour and then you get italian termites or something and a possum falls through the ceiling and the only person who can fix it (the ceiling) will quote you $20K as a starting point and then it's with recycled asbestos sheets and he'll come by and play Tool all day while he's doing it and take weeks and keep beer in the fridge.
And this is what the author of The Bogan Delusion, a plea that putative Australian egalitarianism match its spirit, beloved by conservatives and leftists alike, has come to: a bunch of jokes about his own unease with rural tradies, jumping back into the old tropes which incidentally go back I'm sure 200 years in this country if not earlier, well, of course they tap into jokes about Aboriginal people too don't they. Ha fucking ha. Working where I do I am offered the hand of privileged arseholism every day and they don't care if I don't take it because there's all the more for them.
Helmi is sitting on the Andrew Sachs autobiography I ordered some months ago which came way, way too late for me to be particularly interested in using it to fix this poor dead character actor/dramatist's wikipedia entry, I am about 70 pages in but finding it hard to care much. I may persist at some stage. Meanwhile, it's apparently comfortable although I guess cats usually don't sit but squat/crouch, so it only has to be comfortable for the feet or whatever those things are they have at the back that are kind of half feet, half calves, depending on what they're doing. I think she is waiting for me to get up so she can go to bed. I think only once, maybe twice, she has gone to bed while I am still in bed.
I had a dream last night, or two dreams, one was when I put Helmi and one other kitten and a younger, not fully grown but not adult, cat I had (so no Nancy) in separate rooms and they all found a common escape area and ran away over the rooftops, and I was like 'oh well they'll probably come back', you know one of those if you love someone set them free kind of things. The other dream was that my father was not my father but my stepfather, my brother and I were living in our old house in Hawthorn (IRL demolished in the late 1980s, and in this incarnation with a front room - a kind of 'sun room' - that it actually didn't have) and we were hotly resentful of our stepfather, played by our actual father, who was a stern, hostile man (which in reality our father is not) like possibly a policeman, who was in some way trying to exploit us or diddle us out of our inheritance (nb our mother was not in the dream even as a concept). I don't remember what happened except I do remember thinking, 'I shouldn't even be living at home, I'm... 35' and that seemed super old.
Is that a laminex table top placed atop a fridge? The similar colours are really peculiar. But that's actually not a horrible little kitchen. I wonder what the average temperature is in Mallacoota. (I checked. It's not bad at all. Average summer temperature is 24, can that be real?! Average winter is around 15, which is fine. I guess the temperature increases when it's all on fire). Only about a thousand people live in Mallacoota, which means if you moved there you'd know all of them by name after a few years.
Also when I think of Mallacoota my brain plays Heart's 'Barracuda' (or perhaps it's the Slub version), so I wonder if I lived in Mallacoota would that recede or predominate? The latter notion is really off-putting. Also, whenever Nancy asks 'how much sun?' I think of Leo Sayer's 'How much love', a shit song, and that makes me think of his song 'You make me feel like dancing', and that makes me think of his song about a train.
No comments:
Post a Comment