peace, joy.... and happiness.... happiness..

Meandering through the city tonight, just killing some time before dinner, I heard the Hare Krishnahs banging away, singing and dancing and so I followed them along for a good 15 minutes.

I'm pretty sure, it's impossible to be unhappy when the Hare Krishnahs are rolling round with their forcefield of happiness. I came peretty close to joining in. Discarding all the shit that I hold so dear and just being happy for no particular reason at all. they all look a little bit like they'd been left in the sun too long as kids, but who cares, they were just out to have a good time. No bullshit. Just a good time.

Standing at the lights waiting to cross the road I see fat old man in a suit, typical corporate gut, eying them with disdain. he looked back, caught me eye and shook his head as if to say: "nuts".

I instantly smiled at him. Not a smile of recognition, but one of complete craziness. Totally caught him off gaurd. He probably looked away thinking I was a nut too.

new blog

Don't sweat, I'm not going anywhere. I'm just spreading myself a bit thinner.

It's my diary of events that I think need to be logged. Things that I want to be able to look back on.

You'll notice there's no connections to my Scum Department profile once you get there, it's a on way street if you like. But Take this as an invite to read it, feel free to comment etc.

http://lookroundandsmile.blogspot.com

The journey through Movember...

They say Movember is a destination. When you sign up, they declare you a Citizen of Movember. I now have a fair idea why. It's been a seriously long month.

Having made attempts at looking to do something charitable with my spare time, I've found myself doing weird and bizarre things like cleaning up primary schools in Melbourne's western suburbs on weekends, donating blood and the most painful of all, sprouting a grimey sex-offender looking redish moustache to raise awareness of men's depression and prostate cancer.

I'm relatively self conscious at the best of times and I'd have to say I'm still not used to the weird looks I get from mothers as they huddle their kids into the car. It seems like a relatively trivial thing to do, but considering I now get called Ned Flanders at work every day, and no one I deal with can take me seriously with a mo, it's all started wearing a little bit thin.

I have raised close to $400, making up just under half of the total of my team's sponsorship (The Melbourne office of the organisation I work for has entered a team for Movember). That said, this has also been an opportunity for me to see how tight and mean spirited some people really are. Of the several hundred that work where I do, only 8 men have participated in Movember. Of the 15 or so people in my team, not one of them has sponsored me and of the 60 or so on my floor, only 3 have donated to the charity.

Now you could probably qualify this by saying: "Well scum, not everyone's got loads of money, people have bills/kids/debts etc" or "Maybe they just don't like you scummy!?" These are both possible options and I've thought about them with loads of others. But sadly neither of them really hold up. People have simply not got into the spirit of it. There are LOADS of men walking around with grotty mo's and yet most of the people I know have either given me shit or cringed.

Maybe I've taken it a bit too personally, it's something I have a bit of a habbit of doing, but it does make me wonder: "What the fuck does it take to get people to lighten up and do something fun?"

All this and the fact that Brendan Nelson is now the leader of the opposition make me wanna bury myself in the backyard.

:)

Heya! what's happenin?

phwoarrrr been a while since I last wrote a blog but there's definately no shortage of material.

It's probably going to a bit treacherous reading through all this shit, and please, don't feel obliged. I just feel a slight urge to spew it all out and have some sort of documentation of it.


I finally moved back out of home. After spending 6 months back there to try and catch up on the debt I racked up while jaunting around europe last summer (their winter). I'm in a share house close to the beach and the city in a really nice part of Melbourne. It's really unfamiliar, infact I feel slightly lost walking around, but that's what I was after. It's the next best thing to entirely changing cities.

I decided to live with randoms for a few reasons. Firstly, all my friends are either too lazy to move out, not worth living with or already have housing sorted out. Secondly because I wanted to meet new people, hang in different circles and get some different perspectives on the world. Already I've had a few culture shocks and my ideas are frequently challenged. Which can be a little bit dauting/depressing/exciting at times. But the people I live with all are decent, nice people, so it should be a-ok.

An example of this is one of my house mates is quite accomplished in the Aus music scene. Been on tour all round Australia hundreds of times, mingling with the best, some of them even coming over to our house. Now firstly, this should be seen as an opportunity to learn from someone who's done well. However it's also really intimidating and somewhat depressing that I haven't really found something that I can be extremely driven toward and to a certain degree it's been the story of my life. The question which keeps popping up is: have I not found something or have I not got the balls to commit to it?

With a friend recently stumbling upon a dream job in Germany recently, it's been a bit of a bucket of water over the head to look outside the box for more satisfying work and maybe more study.


---

Beirut is playing Golden Plains (which I have tickets to) and I just got an email from the corner saying he's playing a show there on the 11th of march. That week is quite likely to be the very best week of my life.

---

My brother's coming back from the UK this weekend, which is going to be awesome. I haven't seen him since March and he's had a pretty rough trot since then. His girlfriend of nearly 4 years dumped him somewhat randomly and it really shook him up, especially not having close friends and family around to support. We're a pretty tight family and everyone's really looking forward to it.

So I'll be eating at Perl and Punch Lane next week. Celebrating his brief return.

I know this isn't the nicest thing to say, but I'm pretty glad she's out of the scene. She was a arsehole and I doubt I'd acknowledge her if I saw her in the street.

---

For the first time in a good 3 years I'm actively pursuing a girl. It doesn't happen often and extremely fair to say that I'm a novice at this sort of thing. I met her at a gig and kinda fell out of touch with her a few months ago, but she messaged me last week and we had a drink, phone conversations are well and truly threatening an epic phone bill and the future is somewhat bright.

---

Currently sitting at e55 in the city. Great music, good beer, great dingy Melbourne atmosphere. The sun's shining outside, summer's on the way. Shit's lookin pretty good.


Take care, have fun!

a life I used to lead...

A few years ago I used to do a lot of bike riding. Not long distance, road-bike type riding and definitely no mountain bike riding. I used to be a bmx bandit.

Now while you might be rocking back in your chair thinking, oh great, Scum's going to reminisce about his innocent childhood days, it was actually my early 20s and late teenage years (like 18 months ago) that were enriched by riding little kids bikes around big concrete skate parks, home made dirt jumps on vacant blocks and the odd street obstacle like a rail or a bank (see the tyre marks on the wall in the header?).

I was driving home from a game of indoor soccer tonight, absolutely knackered, boiling hot with sweat and stinging from being tripped and sliding along the polished wooden basketball court surface. I hadn't felt like that since I used to ride and I have to say I miss it.

Riding was the ultimate escape for me. It was an escape from homework and study, from work, from my parents, from my computer and effectively gave me an escape from who I was. I could be someone else on my bike. I'd hang out with guys who came from what could have been another planet, compared to the sheltered existence I lived. One guy I used to hang out with, Igor, woke up one night to his mum trying to smother him to death with a pillow. He got away and found somewhere to live at age 16. The only things he had were the clothes he was wearing, his bike and a white gold chain his grandma had given him before he left Serbia. 6 months later the house he was staying in got robbed and his white gold chain got stolen and all he had were his clothes and his bike. I still see Igor around, he's working, saving for his own place and he's got a girlfriend who loves him. He still rides his bike though and he rides it well.

Bike riding used to take me to all sorts of places, like South Kensington skate park, were I'd sit for hours with a few friends and ride the spine and laze in the sun. We'd help the kids from the housing commission fix their bikes and they'd tell us where the police hung out. I'd go to jams in Warragul, Epping, Eltham and road trips to skate parks down the coast or out in the country and share a bond with people who didn't care about the things I cared about it. It was paradise.

I got to bare witness to things like this:

I'd party and get drunk with the wildest people, people who had nothing to lose and everything to gain and they were going hell-for-leather to make sure they had a good time getting it.

I spent hundreds of hours zipping around the bowl at my local skate park, humming weightlessly around the lip, with the zip of the fully pumped tyres tearing along the concrete and the buzz of the free coaster chasing me like a crazy bee. I understood what surfers felt, how snowboarders feel when their flying down a hill, when adrenaline's pumping and the rest of the world doesn't exist.

We used to ride till it was dark, day in day out, the better the weather, the longer we went. Sometimes sitting in skateparks until the police were called to kick us out. Most of my favourite music, music I haven't stopped listening to for years, comes from the bmx videos I used to watch whenever it rained. My walls were covered in posters of the best riders and I was lucky enough to go on street missions with some of the best riders in the world.

It came at a cost though. I have a lump on my shoulder from a broken collarbone that still gives me greif. My elbows and knees are scarred along with severly dinted shins. In the end I had one big crash that really should have put me in a wheelchair. It shook the hell out of me and I never had the confidence to get back on my bike. The last time I went for a ride I got so nervous I nearly threw up.

I still have my bike though, it doesn't live in my room anymore, but in a few weeks when I move back out of home, closer to the city, it'll be how I get to work. I'll be in a suit, on a little kid's bike riding to work like a complete maniac.

The dreggs

When I sit down to write a blog, I know I have something to say, I'm quite often uncertain as to what it exactly is, but I just feel like there's something to get out. After I've recognised that, I sit here and stare at the blank screen for a bit, read other people's blogs, go and get a cup of tea, come back and write something.

Last night I went to a buck's party. It was a guy I went to uni with, someone who, although I haven't spent a great deal of time with, I get along with really well. We both come from totally different places but we seem to strike a middle ground where we can sit and rant on for hours about politics, economics and misc. His friends had organised an evening of activities starting with go-karting, dinner and then of course a trip to the strippers.

I usually get this far in decide that my writing is mediocre and think about putting everything in point form. But today I think I'll plunder on.

So we meander down to King St, we were in a big group, straight after polishing off 9 bottles of vodka between 15 of us. Having only ever been to the strippers once, to visit a friend who was working behind the bar, I can say with reasonable confidence that strip joints are probably one of the most fucked concepts in modern society. They're absolutely vile.

We went upstairs where we sat round a table and had strippers stand there and do there thing. I felt like i was in Requiem For a Dream as one of the dirty old men throwing money, behaving like a pig, screaming "arse to arse!" The people around me were dirty business men in suits, oogling at the dancers with jaws-dropped.

I just re-read what I've written and can't help but think it's really just elaborate point form.

Now, I understand, you're right to think: "hey why the fuck were you participating if you're so against it". I'm not going to make excuses, I just wanted to hang out with these people and have a good night. I spent most of my time staring into my glass of scotch or watching the people around me and wondering how the whole circus could be good for anyone.

Everything from the way the stripper approaches you with warm smiles and a sparkle in their eye, they press themselves against you and run through their routine. I didn't want to be an arsehole about it, but I'd thank them and tell them I was not interested in a lap dance. The straight up blatant objectification of women that goes on in there is nothing short of primitive and totally gross. The men have no respect for the women, and the women have a detached, jaded business-like approach with the men. There's nothing human about the whole experience.

I feel slightly drained after getting that out and I really don't think I have what it takes to dive in to the depths of the underlying issues of the whole stripper thing.

I will say this: as an economist, the fact that a market for this sort of "entertainment" exists and thrives, is proof enough that society is seriously ill and there is something inherently wrong with men. And I've just reminded myself of something else I was going to write about earlier in the week, so excuse me while I continue.

I'll start off with the following: It's sometimes pretty embarrassing to share the same gender as some people.

I'm a big fan of public transport, predominantly for the people watching as well as having a sense of contentment, knowing that the journey is now out of your hands. However I frequently see people in their very worst. Especially men. Watching guys, eyeing off women, making an effort to sit next to a women and then spending the whole ride staring at her, watching what she's doing, with the view that they've got a great chance of sleeping with them is just fucking gross. On Thursday morning I saw a old guy in a suit clearly eyeing off the school girl sitting next to him every 15 seconds, it made my skin crawl. They look like slugs, predators, vermin.

I almost feel like I need to apologise for them, but I'm not really in any position to claim a "hey I'm holier than thou" stance on anything.

fin.

anyone wanna come down to Fitzroy for some live music and a beer?

come along.

Scum Department's Trivial Pursuit...

For one piece of the pie, provide a reasonable answer to the following:


Q. What are we doing here?

music news

I just got home from seeing Old Man River at the Northcote Social Club tonight. I saw him at Splendour and really enjoyed his set. When I saw tickets were on sale for $12 ( <----cheap!!!!!!!) I bought some tickets and went with some friends.

The set was fantastic. A combination of creative and interesting depth of music, great stage presence, a totally hot chick on keyboard+backing vocals (great singer in her own right too, which definately multiplies the hotness), according to my friends a super sexy bass guitarist, crowd participated well, crowd was also pretty cool. The music's definately got some pop-catchyness to it, but that's some soul behind it, some banging guitar build ups and a generally good, tight sound.

The supports (The Hampdens) were also pretty rad. Their single doesn't do much for me but the rest of their stuff is really good. I'm going to wait for them to release an album though before I invest.

Going to a gig beats the hell out of sitting at home watching TV. Live music is one thing I will never ever go without. Look out Meredith, Daft Punk, Angus & Julia Stone etc etc

--------------------

I read in BEAT that Mondo Generator are rumoured to be touring. Being a pretty seriously enormous Kyuss fan this is good news. If you like QOTSA, listen to Kyuss (+Mondo Generator+Masters Of Reality+Mark Lanegan+Dessert Sessions). It's Josh Homme and Nick Oliveri's earliest (and best) work with John Garcia. Oliveri (bassist) started Mondo Generator as a side project, but according to their website, it's become his #1 priority. It's good old fashioned metal.

--------------------

I have pre-ordered an allegedly signed copy of Beirut's new album, which is yet to be officially released? Funnily enough I now have a copy on my iPod and I'm going to listen to it non-stop for the next month. *holds breath*

- I found a girl I liked.
- I hung out with her and we partied.
- I got to know her a little bit.
- I fell for her.
- We had a pash (I'm older than 16 I promise)


- Thanks to facebook and her retarded friends (see post below). I'm pretty sure I've fucked it up since then


- I feel like I'm 16 again.

"woah, what the fuck, what the fuck was that?"

"ahhh that's a nipple gaurd dude"

"nipple gaurd? wow, didn't know these things existed. feels kind cool" *sticks nipple gaurd on forehead*

"where did it come from ?"

"ahhh that chick over there was wearing it" *points at topless chick in the middle of the loungeroom, wasted, masturbating to The Clash*

"fuck"

"man, this is pretty wierd."

shot with an elephant gun...

Upon reading through Hayley's music tastes, I spied that she is a fan of Beirut.

In my opinion, Beirut's music is beyond words. I don't have to skills to describe how I feel when I listen to songs like this:

Turn it up loud, hit play and shut your eyes....




Two weeks ago i was sitting in swanston st maccas, gnawing on a burger, with my ipod earphones dangling down from the neck of my jumper. An old Chinese woman came and sat opposite me. She looked at my head phones and I offered them to her. I played her that song and she closed her eyes and began to laugh. She swayed along until the end, when she opened her eyes, in a heavy accent, but excitedly, she said: "Beautiful, beautiful".

Hi folks. How's it going? I hope you're all well and everything's going along swimmingly.

It's been a while since I've sat down to do a blog for numerous reasons and some of them have lead me to question why I ever bothered doing this in the first place. I'll get to that in a moment. Let me have a moan (which is one of the reasons why I did start doing this).

The past 5 weeks have been pretty action packed. Having successfully fulfilled what could only be deemed as the norm, I have begun full time work. A process which, if anything, has probably had a fairly positive outcome on my life. I get out and exercise fairly regularly now, running up to 10k a night, playing indoor soccer etc. I'm back playing the bagpipes and I've got some studio time hooked up with a friend who's into experimental type stuff so we're going to like... experiment, I guess.

Another thing full time work has given me is a sort of bizarre desperation to do as much as I can with my life. I have ambitions to take my work fairly seriously and "run with it" (ie: sell out completely), I also have ambitions to go backpacking again on some sort of epic adventure from somewhere to where ever). I want to take up German classes again, as well as guitar lessons. I want to improve my clay target shooting.

One of the reasons why I haven't been blogging excessively follows.

It's something that has been massively weighing on my mind, it's something that Marika raised a few posts ago and I've felt that blogging before doing anything about this would be somewhat selfish (by blogging, I mean really shitting on about myself). That is the idea of doing something charitable. Doing something selfless. Helping someone else. For a few weeks, I decided to pursue this by looking at various avenues (a few google searches) and hit nothing but dead ends. The sad thing is, I've never done any really charitable type work before, so I have no idea where to look.

I just deleted a big chunk of text elaborating on this as I felt it made me come accross as a complete knob. So here it is: if anyone can suggest a worthwhile way/place/task that I can donate my time to, preferably with some sort of direct contact with people (not just walking round raising money/behind the scenes type work, I want to actually spend some time helping someone), or if you can recommend a good place to look, post a comment or email me. Thanks.

I'm pretty uncertain. I'm not really sure if I know what's what, and I can't really explain why not. What kind of frustrates me is not being able to really put my finger on what it is, and it's frustrating that I don't know why I can't.

What I am fairly certain about is the fact that I don't think I need to find an answer in a hurry. I'm confident that i have some idea that half the fun is going along not being able to figure it out at all. Not enough people ask why, and one too many people believe they've already found the answer and they're content to let sleeping dogs lie.

I've had too much coffee, and I'm struggling to find a solution. My fingernails have been chewn to bits and I know that there's something up with them. I just wish they'd be open and help me out, because trying to get through all this from behind a wall isn't really doing anyone any favours.

Put this on...


I was sitting in the car driving to a friend's place tonight listening to that song, I had it up real loud.

fin.