Good ole Melbourne. Just when I rule it out as a place I would ever want to live again, it gives me just cause to reconsider the virtue of that oft repeated declaration. Then as soon as I do, it ridicules my particularly curious habit of always wanting to revisit past mistakes to try to learn the lessons I was too self-interested to grasp the first time round. And that's not intended as a reflection on the beautiful city that Melbourne is. It just has the unfortunate distinction of being the place I grew up.
Almost a fortnight of divine blue skies have provided the most scope for outdoor activities that the place has offered me in living memory. All at a time when I wanted to lock myself in a room and work on a book. One cannot state strongly enough how good it is to have the option to do something exciting, and outdoors, if so desired. The absence of choice being a contributing factor to such stress related grief like shingles afflicting my visits in the past. How I wanted to soak up some sunshine, play with friends and live life for the sake of loving it. But under the warm embrace of the freshly sprung Spring sun, laying hidden in its winds were daggers of ice that stab at you in this lower latitude location. (Nice alliteration!)
Surprised at how easily I fell for such deceptive but not unusual conditions, I retired to my room for an entire week and wrote feverishly. The planets must have been auspiciously aligned as the book basically wrote itself. The earth and moon were well aligned one night, offering a beautiful view of a lunar eclipse to anyone lucky enough not to fall foul to Melbourne's unpredictable weather. The only clouds in a 72 hour period happened to blow over for the hour or so of totality.
Whatever auspicious alignment the planets had for the period of intense writing, they fell out of alignment just as quickly. Being so involved with the act of creation, I mindlessly overlooked the necessity of precaution, and failed to back-up anything. My dying laptop breathed its last...whatever they breathe and took EVERYTHING with it that I had written while here. Oh the profanity, the throbbing forehead vein, the bomb threats made to IBM! Every attempt has been made to recover lost data but the hard drive has messed itself for good. And while wanting to blame a cruel God, the probably illegal nude pictures of Dame Edna Everidge I downloaded, or astrological unpredictability, it was largely my own fault that the hard drive now makes coffee grind out of my old files. Who ever thought that a quick sucker-punch to the keyboard could be so damaging to all the vulnerable components that laid just underneath?
So using a very high powered telescope to find the bright side of this disaster, I had to buy a new laptop. Seeing as last years earnings put in me in the lowest possible income bracket, it seems I will be getting a substantial tax return. And Mum was sufficiently persuaded by my pleas and threats of more sucker-punches to lend me the money until my tax return finds its rightful place in the till at the local grog shop.
To alleviate the pain of such a disaster, my sister Kirsten and her partner Squiz, took me to see the Simpsons movie again. The manner in which it came to pass almost outweighed the actual movie experience. We fronted up to the grotty local cinema, smaller than most rich peoples home theatres but almost cheaper than hiring a new release DVD. Most sessions air to a crowd of about 10 people so we figured arriving 5 minutes before the movie started would give us plenty of time to buy tickets and load the wheelie bin full of popcorn.
A young girl stood selling tickets ahead of a queue that lead out the door, while her cohort stood idly by trying to sell snow cones to people too pissed off with lining up so long to even consider food. Kirsten and I resigned ourselves to missing the first hour of the movie but Squiz wasn't prepared to bow down before such a challenge. Pushing his way through the queue, he confronted snow cone man with the question on the lips of everyone waiting in line, “Will Geelong choke before the AFL Grand final?” Ill-prepared to answer any question not snow cone related, Squiz then told him in no uncertain terms that he was going to sell him tickets to go with his popcorn. Assuming someone with such an authoritative tone must be a boss, snow cone man rose to the occasion to sell us tickets, an hour before lining up would have yielded the same result.
Squiz then lead us into the cinema where we faced the daunting task of choosing which seats to actually sit in given the cinema had 2 other punters in attendance. Barely had we finished complimenting Squiz on his bravado, when the manager came in and busted us cracking the top off the alcohol we had smuggled in. Too preoccupied with a projector that had just dacked itself, he politely informed us that the movie won't be showing. We got as far as the counter for a refund before realising we had been sitting in the wrong cinema anyway.
So we finally took a seat in the right cinema just as the movie started. And unsurprisingly enough, it turned out to be even funnier the second time round. And I was finally able to work out that Hairy Plopper the pig never made it out of the Simpsons burning house. What was I on when I asked what happened to the 'monkey', and not the pig, in the 'too much information' post?
