Blog 8 – The reality television efficiency drive

Those of us lucky enough to be in gainful employment are subject to regular government driven efficiency drives or rationalisations, downsizing, call it what you will. Basically they try and sack a few of us so politicians can continue to take helicopter rides to Party fundraisers on the public purse. These policies are usually implemented by conservative governments who would much rather cut funding from the working and middle classes than pursue the small but significant number of Australian millionaires who, with the aid of highly paid and skilled accountants, are paying no tax whatsoever – http://www.aph.gov.au/About_Parliament/Parliamentary_Departments/Parliamentary_Library/FlagPost/2015/April/Millionaires-who-dont-pay-tax

Well I say enough is enough. I’m taking a stand and drawing a line in the sand. I’ve had a gutful. So, on behalf of all my fellow schleppers, I took a good look around every workplace I could think of, looking for areas of shocking waste and inefficiency where we could cut back and save money with little impact on our quality of life. With this in mind I am proud to bring you my proposed:

Reality Television Efficiency Drive

Sorry, can we do that again, with the voiceover and dramatic music?

BIGGEST MELTDOWN SHOCK ELIMINATION EVEEEEEEEEEERRRRRRRR!!!!!!

Ta, that’s better.

Yes, after a good hard look at the adverts for several reality television shows (I couldn’t bring myself to actually watch any of them), well alright, for research purposes I took a quick five minute look here and there, with the sound turned down as low as possible, and I think I have pinpointed some areas of massive wastes of money which could be better spent elsewhere.

Spelling Bee

Just what we need, a show where pushy, overbearing parents bully their children into becoming personal cash cows. Not only do we have to suffer the obnoxious parents, we also get insights into the innermost thoughts of the children. As far as I’m concerned, ten year olds are far from being fully formed human beings, and thus I’m not really interested in what they are thinking. In fact I know what they’re thinking, they’re thinking ‘I wish I was outside playing with my friends, not stuck here in a tv studio so mum and dad can pay off the mortgage.’ Anyway, to the excesses. Okay, so there’s the bloke who asks the questions, he’s vital. Then there’s Grant Denyer doing… the introductions, bit of hosting, blabbing on. Not much of a job really is it? I’m gonna need you to fill out this JDF Grant, just to make sure we’re getting value for money here. Then there’s Chrissy Swan. Let’s be honest, she’s an empty vessel and rather a waste of space at the best of times, but what is she doing here? Standing awkwardly to one side, mouthing a few platitudes, stating the bleeding obvious, pulling faces. Really, that’s it. GONE. Bye bye Chrissy, get a real job. There, that’s gotta be half a mil saved right there. NEXT.

Restaurant Revolution/The Hotplate/Masterchef/My Kitchen Rules (and probably several others I’ve forgotten)

All the same show really isn’t it? Same copycat format every time. God forbid they should think outside the square and try something edgy. Nah, commercial telly execs are too smart for that. Once they hit a ratings winner, they flog it to death. Speaking of – Restaurant Revolution bumped for a show about a bunch of amusing cat videos pinched off utube? Laugh? I nearly shat. Love the fact these commercial telly clowns are trying to sue each other. If they’re gonna start getting litigious over copycat clichéd reality show formats, these idiots will be tied up in court for years. So to the excesses. It’s basically three fat fuckers stuffing themselves with food the contestants make and talking about it for 45 minutes. Does there have to be three of them? Let’s bump it back to two fat fuckers for starters. What else, okay here’s a novel concept. Once you’re voted off the show – YOU STAY OFF THE FUCKING SHOW! Forever, that’s it, you’re done, nada, no more, fifteen minutes of fame used up. You don’t come back as a surprise judge… oh my God! Oi didn’t see that coming (that’s because you’re a moron). You don’t get to segue over to another lame reality show on the same network. Newsflash for ya chuckles – YOU ARE NOT A REAL CELEBRITY. No more network cash for you, piss off. ‘I’m a dentist, but it’s always been my dream to be a chef.’ So fucking what? I don’t barge into your surgery with a camera crew and announce it’s always been my dream to start pulling teeth, do I? Just fuck off and do your own job, you arseclown. You wanna be a chef, go do the proper years of culinary training and stop yapping about it.

The Block/House Rules/Reno Rumble (and any of that fans v Faves shit)

Is that all? I’m sure there are another 27 renovation shows I must have forgotten. When are the commercial networks gonna produce a renovation show about cooking? Now ya talkin’. Okay, efficiencies, well pretty much the exact same format as the cooking shows when you break it down. Given that none of them are actually licenced builders that means all of the work is illegal. It’s obviously being built by genuine tradespeople off camera. So on those grounds, get rid of all the contestants. We’re already paying the tradies an arm and the leg, why should we pay a bunch of talentless bogans as well. Bugger off, the lot of you. While we’re talking, what’s with all the running around, panicking and having meltdowns? Yes I understand that reality TV is scripted and based entirely on motion and emotion (BIGGEST MELTDOWN/SHOCK/EVICTION EVEEEEEEEEERRRRRRR), but fair dinkum, if I was having a house built and I saw the builder running around like a headless chook, carrying stuff, crying and screaming, I’d be a tad concerned about the quality of the work he was producing.

Idol/Got Talent/The Voice/X Factor/Popstars and all the others I’ve forgotten

Please, enough of the bloody karaoke shows already. How deluded am I? I thought musicians were created by hard work, honing their skills in garages and pubs for years, but it turns out they’re manufactured in five minutes on reality tv shows. How hard is it to sing someone else’s song? There are 8 billion people on the planet, and I reckon at least 1 billion of them can carry a tune. They can’t all be fucking rock stars. What next, you’ll have people just lip synching and calling that a talent… What? You’re fucking kidding? Apparently they already did it. It’s bad enough we have to put up with the winners of these awful shows putting out several albums of dross before their careers are mercifully reduced to appearing at shopping centre openings, singing the national anthem at sporting events, or touring the lucrative musical theatre network circuit – but it’s a poorly hidden secret that the other 10 losers who weren’t good enough to win a karaoke contest also get a fucking recording contract. We all know they’re really there to prolong the dying careers of the bevy of judges, and there’s far too many of them going around as well. Just stop it already. Sack the lot of them.

The Kardashians

Ugh! I loathe this klan of klueless kashed up kunts. Can somebody tell these useless social parasites that shopping is not a career? It’s no use though, you kill one of them off (Paris Hilton) and there’s an army of new ones just waiting to take their place. The Kardashian virus is particularly virulent, as soon as you think we’ve seen them all, another one pops its venal, self-serving, vacuous, greedy, unearned sense of entitlement shaped head up. And their stupid names all start with a K, even when they shouldn’t. What’s with that shit? Maybe get these girls on Spelling Bee. ‘Now Khloe, your word is Chloe. Spell Chloe …’ ….. ‘K…’ WRONG!! How do the parents keep producing Kardashians if Bruce is now a woman? Where do you start an efficiency drive with this lot? Models? No you’re not. Fashion designers? No you’re not. Actors? No you’re not. Shoppers? I’ve already told you that’s not a real job. Really, what do they produce that is of any worth? Personally, I’m sick of hearing about the ubiquitous Kardashian sisters – Kim (shouldn’t it be Cim if we’re following the misspelt names pattern?), Khloe, Kourtney, Kendall, Khandice (is she a real one, or did I make her up? Who cares, let’s start paying her anyway). I think it’s time we heard the untold story of the lost Kardashian brothers – Kolin, Kraig and Khris. When do the boys get to tell their story? What Kompelling viewing that’s gonna be. This week on the Kardashian Brothers, you won’t believe what happens when Kraig drive his ute to the servo for a packet of smokes (dramatic music) BIGGEST MELTDOWN EVEEEEERRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRR!!!!!!

Okay, I’m bored with this shit now. What’s on SBS?

Blog 8 – On Marriage Equality

First off, let me say this is a subject on which I have an opinion but no authority. As a middle aged married heterosexual I am just an interested observer of the changing Western societal attitude to this particular hot topic.

The forces of globalisation and a strange wave of good old fashioned common sense have seemingly led to widespread acceptance of gay marriage across the Western world, and most recently, the United States. Now as an Australian, I am well aware of our national tendency to follow in the footsteps of everything the US does politically. However, in this case we are experiencing, to my personal amusement, some resistance.

That resistance comes in the form of our conservative government and a number of its members holding deep seated religious beliefs. Don’t get me wrong, I am not at all amused by our resistance to marriage equality, but rather by the ideological blind spot and the dark corner our right wing politicians have backed themselves into. That amuses me greatly. Watching them stumble around in their self-imposed Dark Ages, continually sticking their collective feet into their mouths, and proving how out of touch they are with the zeitgeist. God made Adam and Eve, not Adam and Steve…

They remind me a little of my dear old dad, a very elderly gent from a past and infinitely more homophobic generation. I never quite comprehended what it was dad was afraid of, but he seemed to think if we let ‘them’ get a foot in the door, they would force us all to be gay with them. I often remarked to him, “Dad, it’s not like they’re gonna go around door to door recruiting.” It doesn’t work like that.

Perhaps what most offends that generation (and our conservative politicians) is the common trope of promiscuity that surrounds gay culture. Though why this would offend a dominant patriarchy of whom the majority of its members spend their entire youth trying to get off with as many women as possible is beyond me. I assume from what I’ve read and from hearsay that the whole promiscuity issue arose from homosexuals being for so long an oppressed minority group, forced into the shadows to express the love that dare not speak its name. It was their way of shouting from the rooftops – we are here, we exist. Ditto with the parades and the sometimes outlandish costume and posturing.

Therefore does it not stand to reason that if they obtain equality of marriage, they will in time be re-appropriated to the dominant culture? They will be anonymous and monogamous, to the same extent that heterosexuals are. They will exhibit the same sort of foibles, and have the same percentage of divorces too.

That’s all fine by me. I’ve never met a homosexual I didn’t like, male or female. I am reminded of an amusing incident that happened to me many years ago, living in Canberra, during the prime years of my life. I had arranged to meet a bunch of friends in a certain bar in Civic, right where the bus centre used to be. I believe it is no longer there. Seated alone at a table nursing a drink it slowly dawned on me that none of them were going to show up. As I made ready to leave a middle aged man appeared and asked if he could join me at my table. I was so taken aback I said he could.

It probably should have occurred to me that he looked and sounded a lot like John Michael Howson (no offence intended). Let’s just say that I worked out pretty quickly he was gay and trying to pick me up. He offered to buy me a drink and being young and cocky I thought, why the hell not. My mates have abandoned me, its freezing cold outside (when is it not freezing in Canberra?) I’ve got nothing better to do, so let this bloke buy me a few drinks and chat me up. So I did.

He asked me if I was Greek. I’m not, I’m an Englishman raised in Australia but I’ve always been swarthy due to my mixed race middle European heritage. So I said, “Sure, I’m a Greek.” That pleased him, because I guess he was looking for a bit of rough.

Long story short, I let him buy me several drinks but made sure to keep my wits about me. I could see the bus station outside the darkening window, my escape route at any time. This gent tried every line in the book to try and hook me, bordering on being pushy at times. I did tell him straight up that I was straight, but he wasn’t buying it. He made me explain in intimate detail what it was I loved about women, and curled his nose up in disgust at my answers. He fully insisted I was gay and that I was kidding myself with my faux heterosexuality. He almost had me convinced for a minute – Christ, maybe I am gay!

If anything his lengthy and persistent come on made me appreciate for a brief moment what it must be like for women having to fend off really aggressive men trying to pick them up. On one hand I was leading the guy on and letting him ply me with drink, but on the other hand I did maintain my heterosexuality all through the conversation and never sought to deceive him on that issue. In the end I saw a bus heading to my suburb ease into the station and I practically sprinted out of the bar with a curt goodbye.

That aside, my only other foray into the world of homosexuality has been attending the Mardi Gras in Perth and Sydney to offer my tacit support of that formerly oppressed minority group. Most memorably I was once had the good fortune to be invited by a friend who was in the armed forces to watch the Sydney event from the balcony of a high rise apartment on Oxford Street.

The view was spectacular, but we had to share the view with a collection of young army recruits, let’s call them grunts, one of whom was quite forthright in his opinions of the event. “Fuck off, ya dirty arse bandits,” was typical of the tone of his non-stop barrage of homophobic commentary throughout the evening. So I stood there and bit my tongue, listening to this arsehole, who probably had some deeply repressed gay yearnings himself, because I thought, I’m a guest there, and this apartment belongs to someone in the armed forces.

Then it happened, an ACTU themed float rolled by, and this grunt leaned over the ramparts and screamed, “And you can stick ya fucken unions up your arse as well!”

That was the final straw – I pushed the twat off the balcony.

Anyway, marriage equality has got my support.

Blog 7 – Obsolete objects

As I get older I have gradually started to notice some of the things that are disappearing or have already disappeared from our world. Not so much the big things, but the smaller everyday things. This is a thing in itself, this sudden appreciation of small things lost, as it is not something I would have spared a minute’s thought for in younger years. But now somehow, each of these often minor and trivial losses is another tiny arrow to my heart.

I understand why this is happening. It is because as time passes, slowly and inevitably, I too am becoming obsolete and disappearing along with the world I grew up in and grew so comfortable with. This is fine and I accept that it is the way of things. It must happen for the world to go on and keep progressing and challenging the young. It happened to my father and mother, and their parents before them, ad infinitum.

Yet it is still incredible to think I grew up in a world without personal computers, ipads, mobile phones, ATMs, the Internet, and immediate 24/7 access to everything and everyone. Sure when I was a child, some of us thought we would be living on the moon and Mars by now, or travelling through time, and driving around in flying cars, having eliminated personal greed, solved world poverty and learned to live and let live – but you can’t have everything.

To paraphrase someone who’s name escapes me, but I read it on the Internet, possibly in The Guardian online, if you had told us that in the early 21^st century we would have instant access to every single piece of knowledge ever known to humanity in a device held in the palm of our hands, we probably would have turned you upside down, dacked you, and flushed your head down the dunny for being a hopeless fantasist. The fact we use this knowledge to access all manner of pornography and post inane and abusive messages and images to complete strangers is somewhat disappointing, but evolution is a slow process punctuated with wrong turns.

Just out of interest, here is a list of objects which I have noticed are on the verge of disappearing from our world as we speak. Look around and remember these items when you see them, for pretty soon they will be little more than part of our collective social memory:

Public telephone boxes – who uses these things? Only the poor and desperate my friend.

Home land line telephones – no longer required once you’ve got broadband wifi, or something like that. A young person told me, not over the phone.

Wrist watches – next time you’re in the city, check the wrists on anyone under forty. See a watch?

Video/DVD stores – are they even called video stores anymore? These things are gone with the dinosaurs, dying off by the day. My local outlet is a case in point. It shut down at its cool location in the middle of the suburb next to the start-up gym (how popular are gyms???) and re-located to this really sketchy dark warehouse out on the edge of town alongside the railway line. I went there once, and some guy tried to sell me meth in the car park. There’s an M&M machine just inside the door by the counter which the attendants have just abandoned and left to rot. The M&Ms are all melting into one another and leaving a trail of slime against the glass. The machine is a symbol of what the store itself is becoming. The staff can sense it too, with their resigned faces, doomed eyes and slumping postures. I haven’t been back again.

CD players in cars – no longer required.

News print – too slow. Yesterday’s news by the time it gets to the page.

Books – pffffftttt. Kids read Twitter. Attention span, hello? If you can’t tell me what you need to say in less than 140 characters then you ain’t got nuthin’ worth sayin’.

Tea ladies – just kidding, but I swear we still had them when I started my first job.

Personal service at servos – Had to admit I was really shocked when I pulled up to a country servo last month and someone came out and pumped the fuel for me. I blinked, pinched myself, asked them what the hell they were doing invading my personal space, then checked my mobile phone to ascertain what year it was. Thought for a minute I might have stepped across a break in the space time continuum, or walked into a Stephen King short story or an episode of the Twilight Zone. You know the one, where the guy wakes up and he’s the same but everyone else is different… which episode? THEY WERE ALL LIKE THAT! (Sorry, channelling Jerry Seinfeld there)… Who? Just some 1990s comedian you’ve never heard of.

Personal service anywhere – like at the supermarket. Who needs personal service?

A sense of modesty – I put this down as a corollary of the 24/7 access society we have created. There are people maturing now who have never known a different world. When you are used to immediate gratification and have the capacity to gain immediate access to everything at your fingertips, it’s probably natural that some might consider qualities like patience and hard work obsolete. I call this the Kardashian Syndrome. To the previous generation it was the Paris Hilton Syndrome…Who? Just some old lady everyone’s forgotten, but she taught us the important principle that it’s perfectly acceptable to act like a whore and still demand to be treated like a princess.

Which is funny in itself because I know full well my generation had it easy – no wars, plenty of jobs, decent medicine and health care, green fields, sunshine and exercise – a world that for the most part got better and more comfortable by the year.

But those poor bastards who came before me, now they really had it tough.

BTW my list of obsolete things is itself probably obsolete, because I am way waaaay out of touch.

I can remember the precise moment I became aware of my own mortality.

I was 35 years old, flying from Vietnam to Japan through some turbulence, when the plane just dropped out of the sky. The overhead luggage compartments flew open, luggage went flying, everybody screamed. The pilot screamed through the intercom in a foreign tongue. That was the scariest part – nobody spoke English. I looked at the panicked Oriental faces. What is he saying? What is he saying?

It lasted about ten seconds, the plane righted itself again. It felt like an hour. Nobody said a word, at least not in English. Just a bit of turbulence. The rest of the flight was a white knuckle ride for me, and every flight since. In my imagination up until that moment a plane crash would involve the jet gracefully descending like a bird toward the ground, offering hope of a heroic escape, not plummeting straight down toward the earth like a stone. Months of rugged survival on a lost desert island, until finally, discovery and rescue. The triumphant return to civilisation, hardened, bearded. My god, he’s alive! He’s alive!

That was the end of my youthful invincibility.

Over the past few months, I have sat by my ailing father in hospital beds, listening to his stories about his childhood and my childhood, stories of his youth in World War II, stories of long dead family members, listening to fancy machines doing the breathing for him when he couldn’t suck in enough air for himself. He’s still fighting, still clinging on to life. We can’t complain, 84 is a good innings, if he has to pull up stumps this year.

The other week, on one of his many dismissals from the hospital ward, we sat waiting for the nurse to bring him his take home medical pack. Ten times he asked me what we were waiting for. Ten times I asked him to lend me fifty dollars. Ten times he told me with a smile he wasn’t that senile yet.

My mobile rang, it was my mother asking where we were. ‘Yes mum, we’re just waiting for his medicine. We’ll be home soon, mum.’

Dad looked at me and asked, ‘Is that my mum on the phone?’

‘…Dad, your mum died thirty years ago.’

When I look in the mirror now, the stranger I see with the greying hair and crows feet is not the graceful youth I still perceive in my mind’s eye.

One night I dreamt I was sitting with my son in a room, and he was talking and laughing with a youthful boy of teenage years. They were talking about going outside to kick a ball around, and I was excited at the thought and eager to join them. And then it suddenly struck me that the youth was his own infant son grown tall, and I, I was an old man. Too feeble to get up out of my chair and join them outside under the sun.

In my parents’ slow but inevitable decline, I see my own mortality.

 

Alright. I’d be the first to admit that I’m a crusty old git who finds it difficult to cope with the pace of change in the modern world. Don’t get me wrong I’ve tried. I played computer games up to the point where ‘Pong’ was superseded, I love my ATMs, and I know enough not to refer to them as ‘ATM machines’ any more. God knows, I’m practically married to my mobile phone.

The bloody thing is magic. It’s got sports, books, porn, the capacity to allow me to gamble all my money away in an instant, there’s even a button that allows me to travel through time.* In fact it does everything except make phone calls.

But there comes a point where even I throw my geriatric arms up in the air and cry dagnabit you young whippersnappers, can you just leave the fucking technology alone for one day? Seriously, the iphone 4 was just dandy. We didn’t need the iphone 5, and we sure as hell don’t need the iphone 6.

Yes I know you just love to go and sleep outside the store so you can be the first one to get the latest piece of whiz bang technology. Look at you with your fancy mobile phone apps that you invented and sold for a million bucks overnight. Well aren’t you something. What are you proving? Shave that hipster beard off, go out and get a real job, and get a girlfriend while you’re at it, you young punks.

Oh you have got a girlfriend. Is that her? Damn, she’s hot. Nice tatts, great tan and the boob job looks real.

Anyway, that’s not the point. The point is that all this 24/7 access and attention seeking is going to lead you into a future of mental disorder when you learn that the world doesn’t revolve around you and your immediate needs. You are not a celebrity, despite what Andy Warhol said. The world doesn’t give a stuff about you, and once you’re over 21, it’s over pal. So unless you’re prepared to work hard and actually have a genuine talent, forget about it, Johnny Punchclock.

I got up in the middle of the night recently to answer the call of nature (oh yeah, don’t think you won’t have bowel issues when you’re older either) and as I walked past my teenage son’s room I heard these noises. So being a concerned parent I opened the door…

…He was talking to his friends on Facespace, or Mybook, or whatever you call it, because god forbid everybody needs to know what you are doing at 3.45am on a Wednesday morning! I mean when I was fourteen and my dad burst into my room in the middle of the night, at least I had the decency to just be masturbating.

Which leads me onto porn, as most things do. When I was a kid you couldn’t get access to porn. Your only hope was to find your old man’s secret non-contact girlie magazine collection (back of the cupboard dad god bless yer) or a sodden hand me down from some bigger kids in the bushes behind the school. Christ when I was a kid we would have cut our left arm off just for a glimpse of tit!

But now, it’s in your face, it’s ubiquitous, porn stars are mainstream celebrities. Hard core porn is so readily available at the click of a button that these days any eight year old can watch a dwarf fisting an amputee – and that is surely not a good thing, not a good thing at all.

I worry about the future, now where did I put my damn glasses?

 

*This is bullshit. I made it up.

Why failure is good for you

I’m sure we’re all familiar with the growing trend in the modern world to smother kids in cotton wool and protect them from the vagaries of real life. This is bollocks of course. Life isn’t a reality TV show, where all the losers get put back in the competition again. Where not only do you have to suffer the obnoxious media presence of the talentless so called winner, but also several of the losers as well.

Newsflash kids – we live in a dog eat dog capitalist society, and there can’t be a handful of winners without a whole bunch of losers to prop them up. The only upside is that we all get the choice to be winners or losers (unless you’re exceptionally unlucky). We all get to sink or swim, gorge or starve.

But don’t despair, because the truth is that failure is in fact good for you. I’m sure you’ve heard it somewhere. Failure builds character – from defeat comes the first spark of victory, when you lose, don’t lose the lesson, and the greatest triumphs have their roots in the depths of despair.

Take me for example. I’ve been around for a while, and when I was a kid, it was acceptable to be a loser. In fact, they encouraged you to lose, they beat it in to you – teachers, parents, neighbours, bullies, even your friends. Why? Because they were all psychopaths, but not only that, because failure is in fact life affirming.

Trust me, I failed at everything at least once, and I’m a better person for it.

I failed at school

I failed at sport

I failed my driving test

I failed at relationships

I failed at sex

I failed at friendship

I failed as an employee

I failed at writing

But in every case, I persevered until I got better. Yet if I had been a raging success at any of those things right off the bat, would I have put in the effort to improve? Hell no. I would have done what most people do, rested on my laurels until I’d pissed all my talent up against a wall.

When I was a kid, my father took me down to the river and threw me in off the jetty. There weren’t many public swimming pools in those days. It was literally sink or swim, tough love. At least I think he was teaching me how to swim. Come to think of it he had gone when I struggled back to shore… nevertheless, it taught me how to swim.

Then I joined the local soccer club. In those days there was one team for every age group, and if you weren’t good enough, you didn’t get a game, simple as that. For two years I turned up to training twice a week every week, and every weekend I was told I wasn’t good enough and I sat on the sidelines and watched the game. In the third year I finally got on the field and never looked back. If that was now the kid’s parents would have the coach and the club in court for discriminating against junior and destroying his or her confidence. But back then it just made me more determined to succeed.

Then I failed at school and was pretty much kicked to the curb and into the workforce at the age of fifteen. But I went back, night school, college, university, and ended up with a Bachelor of Arts and a Masters’ degree. A PHD is on the horizon.

Then when I got older it took me a number of failed attempts to get the relationship thing together, to grow up and become a considerate partner. As for sex, like most young men I had no idea what I was doing, especially downstairs. So, like many others I experienced that dreaded tap on the shoulder followed by the ego crushing question – “What the hell are you doing down there? Look, come here, f*ckknuckle. This is a clitoris, and this is how it works.”

I’m a better man for it (and eternally grateful to that woman).

Coming full circle (yeah, that is a pun) I failed as a writer. Despite numerous publications which convinced me I could write, I couldn’t. It was only when I turned to other writers for help, in particular these guys at the Australian Horror Writers Association –

http://www.australianhorror.com/

and started giving and receiving considered feedback, that I began to approach a level of competence, and I’m still learning (and occasionally failing) every single day of my life.

That’s what failure teaches us, to pick ourselves up off the floor and try again, try harder, try better, always look for self-improvement. The bottom line is that you won’t be good at most things without working hard, improving your skills, and not giving up.

So parents, don’t lie to your children and tell them they’re all winners, because they’re not. We can’t all be astronauts and entrepreneurs. Some of us have to clean the damn toilets and flip burgers. Just let them know you love them and shove them out the door and let them work it out for themselves.

And never forget that life isn’t fair.

Fergisms

Number 3 – The Curse of the Hammer

Curses are a common theme in both the horror genre and in everyday life. Quite often they are used as an excuse for failure to achieve a certain goal.  Let’s be honest the probable cure for most curses is to stop moaning and work a bit bloody harder. Perhaps 1980s metal gods Manowar summed it up succinctly when they sang:

The spell has been broken

The curse has been lifted

Blaaaaaack is the wiiiiind

On the heels of the gifted…

But I digress. Most often the stigma of the curse is utilised in sporting circumstances to explain the ongoing and systemic failure of that bunch of no hopers you happen to have thrown your weight and hard earned cash behind.

The American baseball team, the Chicago Cubs for example, have supposedly been subject to a curse which has precluded them from winning the World Series since 1908. The Australian men’s football team, the Socceroos, were said to be subjected to the curse of an angry Rhodesian witchdoctor in 1970, which supposedly saw them go to fall at the last qualification hurdle for no less than five World Cups (let’s conveniently ignore the fact they went on to make the 1974 World Cup finals despite the curse).

It may or may not surprise you to learn that I myself am subject to a quite disturbing and unusual curse, which I refer to as (thunderclap) THE CURSE OF THE HAMMER!

Too whit, I follow an English Premier League team called West Ham United, or the Hammers. They can be described somewhat cruelly as perennial underachievers. In over a hundred years of existence the Hammers have won precisely zero English top league titles. ZERO, nil, none, nada, not a sausage, bugger all. To paraphrase the oft quoted former Hammers star winger and manager, the cheepy cheery chirpy crafty canny Cockney crook, Harry (‘arry) Redknapp – ‘Even when we was good, we were still shit.’

‘arry was referring to the Hammers team of the late sixties and early seventies, which despite fielding the backbone of the side which helped England win the 1966 World Cup (Moore/Hurst/Peters – Google if you must), still managed to consistently struggle against relegation most seasons. It didn’t help that most of the team were raging boozehounds, but that is another story.

Too whit, to associate with the Hammers is to wilfully accept a life of happy go lucky failure. Now this is where it gets really spooky. Strap yourselves in. I have a disastrous record of watching my favourite football teams lose in major finals, and I fear I know exactly why this is so.

It started back in 1997 when I got myself a ticket to watch the Socceroos final World Cup Qualifier against Iran at the MCG. Long story short, Socceroos under crafty English master coach Terry Venables (another crafty Cockney crook incidentally), unbeaten in about 15 games, blitzing the field. Drew 1:1 in front of 100,000 men and 0 women in a cauldron in Iran. Just needed to win in Melbourne or draw 0:0 to win on away goals counting double.

As I take my seat behind the goals I notice a bloke in a West Ham shirt standing about 30 metres away and think nothing of it. The Roos, 2:0 up with 15 to go. Iran come back to tie it 2:2 and we lose on away goals. Out without even losing a single match. National tragedy. We had buried them in terms of chances created. They should have put up the white flag and surrendered at half time.

National Soccer League (NSL) Grand Final 2000. Perth Glory red hot favourites to beat the Wollongong Wolves. As I walk in to the stadium I see a bloke in a West Ham shirt and again think nothing of it. The game goes to form at first. Glory 3:0 up at half time and cruising. I turn to see the guy in the Hammers shirt give the hex sign. Final score 3:3. Glory lose on penalties of course.

2002 NSL Grand Final. Glory again massive favourites, hosting Sydney Olympic. Just prior to kick off I nervously scan the upper tier of the stands and… there he is, the bloke in the West Ham shirt! The truth begins to dawn. I jump around increasing agitation, muttering mythical imprecations the whole match, to no avail. We lose 1:0.

2006 FA Cup Final. Wembley Stadium. This time it’s me beloved Hammers themselves, shock finalists against the mighty Liverpool. Naturally the stadium is full of thousands of geezers in Hammers shirts, but the pressure is off. After all, the Hammers have been given no chance whatsoever of upsetting the mighty Scousers. Just relax, happy go lucky losers, and enjoy your day out.

So what happens? The Hammers play out of their skins of course. They bamboozle the favourites. They take an early 2:0 lead. Even when they are pulled back to 2:2 they still keep coming and take an improbable 3:2 lead, which they hang on to until the dying seconds. Incredibly, unbelievably, West Ham have won the Cup… or not. They manage to concede a ridiculous 45 metre goal in the last 10 seconds and of course, they go on to lose on penalties. 50,000 blokes in Hammers shirts, and hundreds of thousands more watching on television around the globe cry bitter tears into their beer.

2014 W-League Grand Final. The Perth Glory women’s team have a stellar season. They win the league by a massive amount of points. So much so it is a travesty they even have to turn up to play a Grand Final against the unworthy and undeserving Canberra women.

I get to the stadium nice and early. Just prior to kick off I look up and behind me into the grand stand only to be confronted by… a bloke in a Hammers shirt. NO! NO! NO! I scream. Not this time. How dare you be here, cursed Hammer.

To no avail. Glory play their worst game of the season and lose 3:1.

So on this form, you can imagine my nagging doubt on traversing all the way to Sydney to watch the Socceroos play the Asian Cup Final against South Korea. Oh I had been happy, buoyant, confident in the way the lads had performed under the invincible talisman of Ange Postecoglou. Ange, whose record in major finals as a player and coach was an unbeaten 6 wins from 6 finals played.

In Ange we trust.

So I join my friends in drunken pre-match revelry at one of the temporary bars set up outside the stadium. All is going to plan until I turn around and see him, the guy in the 1960s West Ham Toffs replica shirt with ‘Moore’ on the back. No, surely not again!

Forlornly I am swept along in the euphoric crowd toward the stadium. Ignorant fools! Oh do they not see the folly of their joy? Have they not seen the foreboding omen of doom! And there, right before my eyes, another one. Another geezer in a West Ham shirt. Oh cruel cruel fate.  Smiting the Socceroos and me again. Snatching defeat from the very jaws of victory.

To the game, foregone conclusion though it be. Sure enough, the Roos lead 1:0 into the dying embers until sure enough, a shock to everyone in the stadium bar me who is wise to the inevitable, the Koreans equalise with the last kick of the game.

But then a miracle occurs. The Socceroos retake the lead in extra time, and despite the most intense efforts of the dodgy ref, the rampant Koreans, and the blokes in West Ham shirts, the Socceroos win the Cup!

Ange is 7 from 7.

The curse is lifted. Cue Manowar again:

The spell has been broken, the curse has been lifted

Blaaaaack is the wiiiiiind, on the heels of the gifted.

Onward pounding into glory ride

Sign of the Hammer, be my guide

Final warning, all stand aside

Old men and young boys (and bastards in West Ham shirts) it’s my time

Sign of the Hammer, it’s my time.

 

What better way to spend Christmas than curled up in a nice cozy house, maybe with a roaring fire, surrounded by your loved ones? Unless of course the house is inhabited by the undead. In that case, you find yourself smack bang in the middle of one of the most common horror movie tropes – the monster in the house narrative.

As illustrated in Blake Snyder’s Save the Cat: The Last Book on Screenwriting You’ll Ever Need, this premise is simple – the monster is there to threaten the characters, the house is there to contain the threat and give them no place to run. The house doesn’t even have to be a house, it could be a spaceship (Alien), or a secluded jungle (Predator).

But if we are strictly talking houses, one of my favourite games when watching the average American ‘monster in the house’ style horror movie is to play ‘spot the basement.’ In the opening scenes the house comes into focus, then there will be ten to twenty minutes of exposition, but all the while I’m hanging out for the first sign or mention of the basement. Basically, you know that once the presence of a basement is established that the people inhabiting the house in question are screwed. It’s the architectural equivalent of the teenagers in a slasher movie who indulge in pre-marital sex. It’s a no-no. You will die.

Hence, when I saw the first promos for The Conjuring, where the dad and kids are playing a game in the old house they just leased and dad stumbles against a wall panel, breaks through it exclaims, ‘Hey kids, it looks like we have a basement’, that was the moment when I thought, aha, well you’re doomed then, aren’t you! Cue creepy music.

Evil Dead, The Cabin in the Woods, Don’t Be Afraid of the Dark, The Gate, Alligator (okay, that one is down in the sewer, but still subterranean) and Annabelle are a few more which come to mind. There are even films with ‘basement’ in the title (The Basement, Don’t Look in the Basement). It works with attics too (Sinister), but basements are more fun because they’re subterranean, darker, creepier and just a little closer to Hell. There’s also this:

http://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/Main/CreepyBasement

So clearly it’s not just me.

What really interests me about this trope as an Australian horror writer is the absence of the basement in the average Australian house. To me the basement evokes old European or colonial American architecture. Australia is just too new to fall into the basement trap, and basements do not really figure in our architectural history.

Personally, I like to imagine this is really due the inherent Aussie bullshit detector. I picture a real estate agent showing an Australian couple around an old house. She takes them down into the basement and tries to sell it to them:

‘This is a great space for a teenager’s bedroom or even a games room. Remote enough from the rest of the house so as not to afford any disturbing loud noises.’

‘Uh huh. So what’s that weird spinning vortex over on the back wall, underneath the inverted cross that looks like it was daubed in blood?’

‘Oh that. That’s just the gateway to Hell, don’t worry about it.’

‘Woh woh woh! Back up a second. The gateway to what?’

Horror 101 – never go down to the basement.

Australians don’t do basements for good reason.

I started this blog as a means to keep my creative juices flowing in between the more serious business of penning fictional work. That and because I’m pretty lousy at self-promotion and I am told this is a way of getting myself out there into that mysterious world of the Internet, which those of us over the age of 30 have no hope of understanding.

Perhaps the best place to start is with my peripatetic journey into the horror genre itself. I am currently a proud long standing member of the Australian Horror Writers Association (AHWA), an eclectic bunch of authors who have, through the force of their collective will, driven me along the path toward becoming a decent writer. They have cajoled, critiqued, damned, praised, prodded and shaped me into the thing I am today.

It wasn’t always this way. I was once a regular straight edged Bachelor of Arts and Master of Philosophy graduate, a well-rounded reader with a wide range of literary interests. My very first publication, penned as an undergraduate, occurred in the Australian Dictionary of Biography (Volume 13), on the late boozing, womanising and all round carousing Western Australian author Gavin Casey.

Yet even then, the darkness was always calling. The odd Stephen King novel here, a late night zombie film there, and a general obsession with those things that slip through the cracks and dwell in the shadows of life. I’m not sure how it happened. One disastrous love affair too many or perhaps just bumping into a work colleague who was a member of the AHWA, but before I knew what I was doing I was penning nasty tales of death and dismemberment, and now I’m hooked on horror.

One of the questions often asked of the horror writer is: why horror? Or as an ex-girlfriend of mine once remarked before she mysteriously disappeared: ‘Why do you focus all your creative energy on all that negativity? Haven’t you got anything nice to write about?’

On the face of it, it’s a fair question. The obvious response is that the journey through the horror narrative is a cathartic experience. It is the literary equivalent of a roller coaster. We step on at the first page (or opening scene) somewhat tentatively, knowing that it’s going to be one hell of a ride, but gee the adrenalin rush it gives us and the sheer exhilaration, the relief of surviving the adventure makes it all worthwhile. Oh thank goodness, I survived. I went through all that, I manned up and I came out the other end, older, wiser, and still in one piece. I know all literary genres do this in their own way, from crime fiction to romance, but horror does it in an altogether more visceral manner.

For me, the attraction started as a child, watching programs like The Evil Touch, The Night Stalker and my all-time favourite, The Twilight Zone – the original 1960s version. It would be many years later that I would learn the names and appreciate the quality of the storytelling of writers like Rod Serling, Charles Beaumont and Richard Matheson, and subsequently seek out their other works – particularly Matheson with his expositions on the apocalypse (I Am Legend) and the afterlife (What Dreams May Come).

As a child of the television age, my early forays into the horror genre came almost exclusively through television and later video. The extent of my literary forays went as far as exploring the seemingly vast range of horror comics available in newsagents and second hand bookstores. My early experience of the genre was very much more visual than cerebral.

As a Western Australian, my diet consisted largely of American movies and television shows. The concept of SBS (the Special Broadcasting Service – an Australian government funded radio and television broadcasting service with a view to spreading the cause of multiculturalism to a casually racist mainstream audience) and art house cinema being many decades away. As a consequence the voice I found in my first literary musings in the genre tended to be an American voice. It was always American girls who suffered the attentions of psychotic slashers and American houses that experienced visitations by the demonic and the undead.

The power of the AHWA has been to give antipodean horror writers a voice, and as a result we are now seeing the flowering of the Australian horror story. Local characters in local settings battling Australian demons. But that is a tale for another day. Thanks for reading, I hope you will join me again for more musings on horror matters and other things that keep me up at night.

Fergs