Raving and Drooling – A lion’s tail

If you’re reading these stories, I recommend you read the story below first, as they appear on the page in reverse chronological order and it makes more sense if you read the “previous” story first, which is the one below this one. So read that first, then come back and read this one.

For clarity, this story is about Nhi the cafe girl, not Nhi the bar waitress.

When I got home from the bar, I got a text message from Nhi’s brother Zhang. It said “Nhi needs your help. Can you meet her ?”

I hadn’t heard from Nhi in over a week. Last time I saw her she had looked miserable and I was sure she was still telling me lies. She had said we would speak again the next day, but I heard nothing from her for over a week and then suddenly she was having her brother contact me and say she needed “help” ? That was too much.

So I ignored it. He rang. I ignored it. He rang again. I ignored it again. He rang a third time and I picked it up and said “What is it Zhang. What do you want ?”

He said “Nhi wants to see you.” I said “Why. What does she need ?”

He said “She needs money. 200,000 vnd. can you help her ?” and I said “What for ?” and he said “Nhi no tell me” and I said “Then I’m not helping”. I mean, that is only about $9 Australian, so it’s not like I wouldn’t have given it to her if she really needed it, but to just ring me out of the blue and expect money after not having seen her for so long was just a horrible thing to do.

She got on the phone, and it was remarkable how much more English she could speak all of a sudden which made me immediately suspcious. She said “Hi David, this is Nhi. Can I see you please ?”

I said “Why ?” but she didn’t know how to say what she wanted and she spoke in Vietnamese. I said “Put Zhang back on” and she did. There was someone else in the background too. Another girl.

I said “Zhang. If she won’t tell me what she needs it for then i’m not helping” and he replied “Nhi won’t talk to me about it. Will you meet her please ?”

I asked “When ?” and he said “Now”. I said “It’s late. I’m very tired and it’s raining outside. No. She can meet me tomorrow”.

He said “No Nhi must see you now. She go home tomorrow. Must see you now” and I said “Then tell me why” and he said “She won’t tell me. Only you”.

I said “Call me back in ten minutes. I’ll think about it”. He sms’d me an address about 2km from here and said she would be there. Then she rang and said “Hi David. This is Nhi” and I said “I know who it is. What do you want ?” and she again spoke in Vietnamese. I said “Put Zhang on” and she did. There was still some girl in the background talking.

I said to Zhang “Ok. I’ll go see her. I’ll be there in 15 minutes”. I went outside and got a taxi to as close to the address as possible (it was down a one way street). I got to the address and it was a cafe. It was closed and shuttered.

I messaged Zhang and said “I come here. It’s closed”. But he didn’t quite understand and replied “You come and meet Nhi now ?” I replied “Zhang. I’m here. Noone’s here. The cafe is closed”. I didn’t get any response for ages and I wandered around for a while.

There was something funny about it all. She had deliberately picked a cafe near where she thinks I live, which was a long way from where she lives, and she wasn’t actually there yet. She could have asked me to pick somewhere, or she could have picked some place she knew would be open until late like KFC, but she picked a bizarre little tiny icecream and coffee shop that looked to have closed up long ago.

Maybe I was paranoid but there was a girl across the street using her phone at about the same moment that I was getting text messages. Probably just coincidence. It was just strange though and my spidey senses were going nuts telling me there was something fishy about the whole thing.

Zhang responded and said “Nhi is with her friend. I can’t contact her”. I waited another ten minutes but it was obvious she wasn’t here and she apparently wasn’t responding to his calls, and I couldn’t help but think that the girl in the background on the phone earlier had sorta sounded like she was giggling almost. I already don’t trust these two, and this whole situation made me trust them even less.

I had imagined that I was going to come here and demand an explanation from Nhi and have her tell me the truth and if she didn’t, I was going to throw her 200,000 dong at her and say “Here’s your money, don’t ever contact me again”. But this situation I found myself in was even weirder and I was fed up.

I messaged back to Zhang “I’m leaving. Don’t contact me again please”.

He tried to ring me. I cancelled it and messaged him “Nhi broke my heart and I don’t want to see her ever again. Goodbye” and switched off my phone.

I knew that eventually if I turned it back on, I would get text messages from him trying to explain what was going on and I just didn’t want any more doubt and fake hope. So I hardened my heart and I pulled out my sim card and threw it in a puddle and took a photo and walked off.

I knew our relationship was going to end at some point, I just didn’t think it was going to end like that. This photo represents the first time I fell in love with a pretty Asian girl and she broke my heart. But it won’t be the last time I do it.

And that’s how my relationship with Nhi from the cafe ended. I threw my last remaining means of communicating with her in a dirty puddle in a Saigon street and walked away from her forever through the dark rainy streets towards my hotel. Bye Nhi. It was still fun while it lasted and I will always remember you fondly even if it ended sadly.

How do I know this ?

Because I’m sleeping on them. I drank until well after 1am because I wanted to be there when Nhi went home and the bar closed. I knew my hotel closed at 11pm, but I figured they answered the night buzzer all night. They don’t. I got home after 1:30am and rang it for like 20 minutes. Noone answered. So I found a quiet alleyway around the corner and huddled in between two roadside vending carts and pulled the hessian canvas from one over myself. I don’t really intend to sleep per se, I’m more just gonna try my best to stay awake until 6am when I think the hotel will either open or at least start answering their buzzer again.

Homeless on the streets of Saigon ? Well.. that’s part of the adventure, right ? Right ? Shut up. It’s not so bad. There are rats here I can eat. Huge ones. I’ll be fine… right now, 6am is only three hours away. I’m just feeling rather tired is all. Gonna watch Doctor Who. I mean… c’mon… I may be on the streets, but I still have unlimited wifi. It’s not all terrible. :”)

I doze off for a bit and get awoken an hour later by a woman shining her mobile phone light at me. She realises I’m a westerner and says “Hello ?” and I just wave back at her and say “Hello” and pull my makeshift hessian blanket back over me. She wanders off, but she starts unpacking the store. Apparently she opens at 4 in the morning so I figure I’d better get out of here. I grab my stuff and head off to the convenience store because it’s open, relatively safe, and I can buy booze there.

I turn up and the attendant is sitting outside on the steps but he sees me and scurries back inside. They’re out of Smirnoff. Have been for days. Lemon cruisers are almost twice the price and I can’t really afford that so I just buy one cruiser, a can of iced coffee and a packet of chips and I go outside and sit on the steps and open the can of coffee.

I chat on IRC briefly, and an old guy is fascinated by my iPad and just stops and watches over my shoulder for a while. I look at him, but he just gives me a hand-waggle like you would in Australia to say “so so”, but here I know it means either “I don’t understand” or “Don’t mind me” so I ignore him and he wanders off. A woman on a motorbike turns up and asks me if I want a lift somewhere, by which I mean she makes an accelerator motion with her hand and says “motorbike ?”. I say “no” and she gets off and points at my chips. I pass the packet to her and she has some and squats down beside me.

She offers me a massage. I know what massage means, and especially on a street corner at 4:30 in the morning it does NOT mean “massage”. I say “no”, but she assumes I don’t understand and she mimes massaging me. I say “no”. She gets out her phone and writes “10″ and I know what that mens too obviously. She pulls out a 10 USD note and shows it to me and says “massage”. I say “no”. She writes 5 on her phone instead and I still say “no”. She maybe figures she’s not being obvious enough and she mimes the act of oral sex and I laugh and say very firmly “NO”. Apparently she still doesn’t think she’s reaching me and she makes a grab for my crotch and I say “tôi hiểu. NO !” which means “I understand, but NO”. She shrugs and gets back on her bike and leaves.

Thank christ for that. Seriously, I’m tired, dirty, a little bit drunk still, and I’ve been sleeping in an alleyway. Oral sex from a strange Vietnamese woman is definitely not high on my list of priorities right now thank you very much. The sun has just risen and it’s suddenly much brighter and I check the time. It’s just after 5am and I figure there’s a good chance the hotel will answer their buzzer now. There’s two very shifty looking dudes who have been staring at me from the other side of the road and I decide to keep my empty cruiser bottle in my hand just in case they follow me, since there’s a couple of dark blocks between the convenience store and my hotel.

I get back to the hotel and press the buzzer. A few seconds later I hear a noise inside and the shutters come up. Oh there is a god. The guy smiles at me and gets my room key and I have never been happier to trudge up the four flights of stairs to my room and put that room key in the slot and turn on the air conditioning and throw myself onto the bed. I’m home. It’s been a long night. It was a hell of a lot of fun at the bar, despite me staying way too late and getting locked out of my hotel for the night and having to sleep on the street, but yet again, I’m alive and I still have all my stuff with me, so I count it as another successful night in Saigon.

Just a warning to others though. If you decide to stay in a hotel in the suburbs and you know it closes its doors early, don’t rely on them answering the buzzer at 1:30am, because they’re just not going to do it. If you want to risk this shit, you’d better be ready to brave a few hours in an alleyway with the rats and the cockroaches until morning. And the rats are fucking huge, let me assure you. Apparently I am the sort of idiot who is willing to brave that though. I just huddle into a corner, pull something over top of me, and tie all my bags tightly around my neck so that noone can steal them without waking me up… or choking me I guess.

Either way, I’m still home again. I still had fun. And I still survived another crazy night in Saigon. It’s all good. Don’t give me a hard time about being crazy. I probably am. Just shut up and let me do what I do. Every day that I wake up with both kidneys still inside my body gives me renewed confidence that I can handle anything, and I’m pretty sure I can. I can take care of myself.

I had a bad dream last night that Nhi tracked me down at my hotel and came and saw me, but then that she tricked me in the most horrible way. It wasn’t a pleasant dream. I know it was just a dream, but right now, I’m not interested in talking to her.

Isn’t it hilarious that a few days ago I said that the best thing about this relationship was that it was going to be simple and uncomplicated ? LOL. Was I ever an idiot. She’s a girl. There’s no such thing as an uncomplicated relationship with a girl. I mean not that that’s bad. Sometimes complicated things are good. It’s just that this one is very complicated and I don’t know how to deal with it right now, so I’m just not going to.

I’m going to watch a movie instead. It’s called “Koizora: Setsunai Koi Monogatari” or “Sky of Love: A sad love story”. I’ve known about it for a long time but I’ve never gotten around to watching it. It’s said to be one of the most bitterly sad love stories you will ever watch and noone who has ever seen it has failed to cry at the end. It’s believed to be an autobiographical story about Mika, the girl who wrote it since that is also the name of the main character. One of the interesting things about the story and one of the things which are credited as a possible reason for its success is that noone knows who Mika is. She has remained anonymous to this day. The story was originally published as a serialised story available to mobile phone users and over 20 million people subscribed to it. It is described as a cultural phenomenon in Japan and it is unlikely that a single Japanese person does not know the story of Koizora.

The movie starts with Mika on a train, after the end of the story. She is folding a paper crane and conducting an internal monologue. She says this, and you know you’re in for a real heartbreaker.

If I had not met you on that day,
then I would not have experienced that pain and sadness,
and memories filled with tears,
but if I had not met you,
I would also have not experienced that joy, excitement, happiness
and memories filled with tears.

The movie stars Aragaki Yui, a very highly idolised young Japanese actress and singer. They played her song from the movie on Yan TV this morning which is why I decided I was going to watch Koizora today and sit in my hotel room and cry lots. It’s a really beautiful song and it’s easy to see why people idolise Gakky for this. She is a beautiful girl with the prettiest smile and an amazing voice and this song is just… well… just watch it. You’ll see what I mean.

I haven’t finished the movie yet, but I had to show you this screen grab. It’s from an awesome scene where Hiro and Mika cut school together and she’s on the back of his pushbike and she keeps complaining that he’s riding too fast, but you look at the smile on her face, and it’s so sweet. This is what people see in Gakky, her smile. A pretty girl’s smile makes it all worthwhile.

After Hiro finds out he has a terminal illness and breaks up with Mika, she tells him she’s going to his favourite spot and wait for him. He turns up but tells he he’s not going to wipe away her tears anymore and he throws her ring back at her. She goes home and says to herself “If ending a relationship is this pain. I don’t want to fall in love again. Not going to fall in love.. again” and she takes off her ring and puts it away in her drawer. When she returns to the spot where Hiro planted her flowers and where they said the would go back to every Christmas Even on the anniversary of their daughter’s death, she finds a tiny snowman there just like they had left there the previous year and she realises that he’s still been coming back to commemorate her death. She meets another guy named Yu at the spot instead and while he says it must have been fate, she thinks that she thinks the baby arranged for them to meet and was saying “Don’t give up on love. If mummy is sad, I will be sad too”. It’s terribly sad and I wept.

Mika listens to her parents arguing about getting a divorce and says philosophically “Before the dessert was put on a big plate and everybody grabbed one. I don’t know when it became, that everyone had their own small plate”. But her and Yu tape back together all the photos that her mother has torn up, and her parents stay together. The following Christmas, she again returns to the same spot and finds Hiro there building another snowman. They talk, but he still doesn’t reveal that he’s sick, even though he’s lost all his hair and is hiding it under a hat. She asks why he is so indifferent and why he won’t talk to her anymore. He turns and leaves without a word. She runs after him, following his footprints in the snow, but when she reaches a fork in the path, she stops and she remembers him throwing her ring back at her. She takes a deep breath and decides to take the other path. The symbolism is simple yet deep. At school on her graduation ceremony, she writes on the small blackboard in the library “Were you ever happy ?” and at the end of the day she returns and underneath it says “I was once very happy”. She touches the words on the blackboard and says “bye bye” as they start playing Aragaki Yui’s song “Heavenly Days”. I cry again.

She goes back on the third Christmas Eve. Before she gets out of the car Yu surprises her with a pledge ring. She promises they will be together forever. I hate him so much for making her love him and making what’s going to happen so much more complicated. But love is complicated. She sees someone bent over making the snowman but when he turns around, it’s not Hiro, it’s his friend Nozomu. He tells Mika that Hiro has cancer and can’t come to see the baby anymore because he’s dying but that he’s been fighting it alone because he didn’t want Mika to suffer. Yu turns up and finds Mika sitting in the snow shivering. She explains why and says she has to go see him. They fight and he won’t let her go but she pulls away and symbolically, the ring falls off her finger. She stares at it and goes to pick it up but he stops her and says he would be a horrible person if he stopped the girl he loves from finding happiness and he tells her to go see him. Finally Yu does something decent. She thanks him, and crying, she leaves. After he watches her go, he picks up her ring and throws it far away and falls down in the snow sobbing.

She finds Hiro in the hospital and he is mad at her for coming. She sees him still wearing his matching ring and she tells him he’s an idiot and to stop acting tough. He makes her promise to be happy and she says that’s impossible. “I can’t ever be happy without Hiro” she says and adds “zuuto zuuto suki desu” which means “I’ve always, always loved you”. She gets her ring out of her bedside draw and puts it on again and spends every day at Hiro’s side as he gets more and more sick. He gets permission to leave the hospital for a day and they go back to the library at their old school and enjoy the memories. Their words are still on the blackboard and he erases the word “once” and changes the meaning to say “I am really happy”. I cry again.

They go on a picnic at his favourite spot beside the river. She sits in silence for a while before asking if he will marry her to prove his love to her. He nods and says he will. They do it right there. He makes a floral wreath and recites his marriage vows and places it on her head. She says “I do” and he says he wishes their child could be there to celebrate with him and then he turns away sobbing saying that he doesn’t want to die and there’s still so much more he wants to do with her. He grabs her by the shoulders and says “I love you”, but he doesn’t say it like they normally say it. He doesn’t say “Daisuki da yo”, he says “Aishiteru”, the much more powerful phrase that is rarely said to someone. She smiles and looks truly happy.

Back in the hospital, Hiro tells her that when he dies, he wants to become the sky so that he can always be looking down at her. He takes a photo of her and is then told he has to go for his checkup. He hands her the camera and asks her to get them printed. She looks at him and you just know it’s going to be the last words they ever speak in person. While she’s at the photo lab, he collapses and is rushed into the ICU. Mika tries desperately to reach him, but she’s not going to make it in time. She makes a video call to him and his sister holds it up in front of him. Mika tells him to hold on and wait for her. She asks him to open her eyes. He struggles to open them and says two final words to her. He says “Mika…. smile”. And she composes herself and smiles for him, and he closes his eyes again with a smile on his face, and a final tear runs down his face and it’s all over. I am absolutely fucking bawling my eyes out.

Mika doesn’t attend Hiro’s funeral. She just sits staring out the window at the sky and not speaking. Her mother comes in and gives her a book and says that it’s things that Hiro wrote for her before he died. She goes into her sister’s room and asks if she can sleep with her tonight and she nods and they get into bed together. The next day she takes the book and goes back to his favourite place. She says “Hiro, don’t leave me alone” and she climbs up onto the railing of the bridge to jump off. But suddenly two doves fly up from underneath her and she falls backwards onto the bridge and drops the book. It falls open to the last page, which is a small drawing of the two of them holding hands with their daughter. It’s a journal from when he first met her, and every sentence starts with her name. It ends with “Mika, keep smiling”. She looks up at the sky and smiles and says his name.

Back on the train many years later, she has folded a second paper crane. A small one for their daughter and a larger one for Hiro. She is returning home to visit the spot whether they commemorate their child’s passing. She says “The happy times I spent with Hiro haven’t become memories. It is because no matter what, I feel you by my side. Hiro I still love the blue sky. From this day and always, this love will last. Forever”. I wipe the final tears from my eyes as the ending credits play and they show many scenes of the sky. Hiro is the sky, and he will always be looking down on Mika.

That was a beautiful, beautiful story. That has to be the greatest love story of all time. “A Walk to Remember” is an absolute joke compared to Koizora. I’m sorry if I ruined the story for you by telling you so much about it, but I doubt any of you were going to watch it anyway, and even if you did, knowing how it ends doesn’t make it any less special. I read the plot on Wikipedia before I watched it and it took nothing away from how beautiful it was.

Now, where is my Mika ? Who knows. I doubt it’s Nhi. I don’t think I’ll see Nhi again. I didn’t contact her today and she didn’t contact me. It’s probably best that way. It’s five minutes until happy hour at Bar Number 5. I don’t have enough money to do anything except drink during happy hour and eat a cheap meal. No cocktails or tequila shots for me tonight. But at least I can drink beer and see Ngan and Nhi (the waitress not the girl I was dating) and have fun as usual. I want to get a USB stick and give a copy of the movie to Ngan. She’d like it I’m sure.

Turns out Ngan was here at the bar after all even though I didn’t see her. She came and saw me on her way out. I told her what had happened today and she opened her arms and hugged me. I got a hug. A nice one. I feel a little better… a tiny fractional infinitesimal bit better. Life still fucking sucks, but maybe it’s not all bad. Maybe sometimes, there are good moments. Tiny, little, special good moments. You put up with all the crap for those little moments. They may not be happiness. They may not even mean anything. They are just moments. Life sucks but you have to live for the few good seconds among the many years of misery.

Or maybe you don’t. I dunno.

The rain finally eases off a bit after 10:30pm and I’m starving and even though I know the hotel closes its shutters at 11pm I am sure they have a buzzer because I’ve heard people using it after hours. I head out, figuring it’s saturday night.. there must be plenty of stuff open. Turns out I’m wrong and Vietnam isn’t like Australia and things actually close earlier on Saturday night. All my favourite restaurants are closed. I even get turned away from Pizza Hut as they’re about to close too. I look at the roadside noodle vendors but I’m just not up to that tonight. It’s not that the food’s not good, it’s just that their menus give no hint what stuff is. At least in a restaurant even if the menu is in Vietnamese, it at least has headings for each section and you can normally understand those and figure out whether you’re ordering noodles or rice or whatever, but at a roadside place, you just have no idea and I’m not in the mood for standing around translating on my iPad because I’d just look like a bloody idiot.

It’s raining pretty heavily and as I cross the road and get stuck in the middle while cars come down the still-busy road I realise that standing in the pouring rain on a muggy Saturday night dodging cars and trucks just seems totally normal to me now. I like this. This is familiar to me and it occurs to me again that I don’t want to leave here. A lot of things may still be foreign to me, but this city isn’t. I feel like I know Saigon. It’s my friend. We understand each other. I wander back up the road and a woman is frying pork strips and putting them into bread rolls. That I can work out how to order. I point to one and she makes it for me and I pay her and eat it as I wander up the road. I pass a fruit vendor and she has cherries. I’ve had a thing for cherries lately ever since Galaxy served them to me in my cocktails and even though I walk past the vendor, I turn around and come back and point at the cherries. She says something I don’t understand and then pulls out a wad of cash and points at a 500,000 dong note and then at the cherries. She has a grin on her face and I’m not sure if she’s just fucking with me and joking about the price, or if she’s suggesting I buy a metric tonne of them but either way I’m not interested so I give her a puzzled look, shrug my shoulders and keep walking.

As I head towards the convenience store to pick up some bottled water, there are quite a few people sleeping in the streets and I realise that I haven’t observed this before because I haven’t been out this late at night. I’m bothered by it, because it’s a miserable night. Earlier today when I was walking around, an old woman held out her hand to me with a sad look on her face and rubbed her stomach and I felt terrible. I want to help her but I am NOT going to open my wallet in a busy street and hand some stranger money no matter how much they need it. It just wouldn’t feel right. It would make me feel vulnerable, and like I was some sort of rich charity benefactor as well as setting a bad precedent that would make them continue to harass any foreigner they saw thinking they would hand over some cash. If I had some smaller change in my pocket, I would hand it over because she does genuinely look hungry, but I have made a decision that I am not opening my wallet in the street for strangers.

But then as I continue down the street I see this young woman huddled over wet and shivering. I keep walking and don’t make eye contact but she calls out something after me that sounds like “wait” but I don’t think it is. My mind races. Do I do something ? What could I do anyway ? I could give her $10 for a hotel for the night, but what’s that going to solve ? She’s still going to have nowhere to sleep tomorrow either. I feel awful but I know there’s nothing I can really do to change her situation so I just keep my stride and continue walking. I am reminded of a terribly politically incorrect quote by John Howard on Urthboy’s “Distant Sense of Random Menace” album in which he spoke in reference to the boat people which says “I wish this problem were not ours”. I mean, I’d like to think that if I were in this woman’s place, someone would help me find somewhere warm and dry to spend the night, but realistically, I don’t have a lot of money and if I’m not more careful with what I have this week, I could well end up in her place, so I just try not to think about it and I walk into the convenience store.

I don’t buy any alcohol this time, both because it’s late and I would just feel bad spending money on booze after what I’ve just witnessed. I buy some water, some orange juice and a small packet of pistachio nuts. I head back to my hotel and get an uneasy feeling as I see all the shutters drawn down. I think to myself that I really should have asked where the buzzer was before I left, and I look around and can’t find it at first, but eventually I see a small button attached to the side of the building and I press it, and a few seconds later the shutters are drawn up and I am let inside to my relief. Phew, no sleeping on the streets in the rain for me tonight.

It’s hard dealing with situations like this. You want to help people… but what can you do… there’s dozens of people out there sleeping on the streets tonight just on my hotel’s block alone. I can’t help all of them, and frankly I probably can’t even afford to help one of them with a place to stay. I almost feel like I should let one of them sleep on my floor, but that would be insane and I’m sure I’d end up with all my stuff gone in the morning. It’s just hard to deal with. I don’t know why. I see this happen in Brisbane too. It’s not like I’m a stranger to seeing homeless people, but for some reason it feels different here. Maybe because it’s a miserable night outside and the rain is pouring down and while I have returned to my hotel drenched to the core, I know that at least I have a warm bed. Still, I can’t get the sight of that woman, huddled over outside a storefront, without even a poncho out of my mind.

Life is tough, but you can’t change that and I’m not a charity. I’m just a regular Aussie guy wandering around Saigon at night with a tiny amount of money to get by on. I wish I could help people… here… in Brisbane… everywhere, but I just don’t have that power and that saddens me, but I have to get some sleep as I have to be up early. I try and put the huddled woman out of my mind as I climb into my warm bed. Sometimes you’re lucky in life, and sometimes you’re not. Just take it as it comes I guess and don’t take what you have for granted.

On the day that I was born, my dad went out and bought Warren Zevon’s greatest and newly released album “Excitable Boy”, both because of course it was a fantastic album, and also I guess because the title was appropriate to represent the birth of his first son and I suppose in retrospect it turned out to be pretty apt.

I found myself craving Warren Zevon last night and at first I couldn’t work out why, and then I realised it was because his most well known song, “Werewolves of London” features heavily in the playlist at Bar Number 5 and I’ve probably heard it hundreds of times in the last few weeks.

Warren Zevon had a mixed career. He had great success with his third album Excitable Boy, which Rolling Stone magazine described as “one of the most significant releases of the 1970s” but most of his later albums had little commercial success and he was dropped from label after label and fell into drugs and alcoholism for many years. Many years later, his second album, “Warren Zevon” was hailed as a masterpiece (again by Rolling Stone). Zevon was good friends with David Letterman and was on the show many times over the years, including directing the CBS orchestra many times over a 19 year period while Paul Shaffer was away from the show.

Zevon had explained that he had a terrible phobia of doctors and it wasn’t until his health deteriorated seriously in 2002 that he was finally convinced to see a doctor and told he had terminal cancer. Letterman featured him as the only guest on an entire one hour show in late 2002 and Zevon stated “I might have made a tactical error in not going to a physician for 20 years”. Letterman asked him if he had any thoughts on life and death and Zevon came out with a classic quote for which he has always been remembered.

He said:
“Enjoy every sandwich”

A great musician and a great man who will be sorely missed. Here’s Zevon performing “Roland The Headless Thompson Gunner” in his last ever appearance on Letterman:

I’ve experienced it a lot lately. I’ve lost two good friends because they had feelings for me but were with or wanted to be with someone else, but when I talked about someone else that I liked, they flew into a jealous rage and told me that I was a bastard and they hated me and they never ever ever wanted to hear from me again.

I would listen to them speak about the men in their lives and how much they loved them, even though it pained me to do so, and when it hurt me to hear about it, that’s all I said.. that hearing about their love upset me a little. But when I turned around and told those same people about minor romances in my life, they would fly off the handle and call me horrible names and message me and email and and ring me to abuse me, which is just so hypocritical it’s almost hilarious.

They insist we’re just friends, even though it’s obvious that we’re more, but when I talk about someone else they go psycho at me. It’s a case of “I’m telling you I don’t love you, but if you dare love someone else other than me, I’ll hate you forever”.

Ultimately there’s a difference between BEING jealous and ACTING jealous. It’s ok to be jealous of someone else. I’m jealous that my Mum is going to be spending time with my daughter this weekend for the second time this year when I haven’t seen her since early last year. But jealousy is ok as long as you don’t act on it. Of course I don’t hate my Mum for being able to visit my daughter when I can’t, it just upsets me a little is all. I wish it were me instead.

People need to wake up and stop acting so damn hypocritical and letting their jealousy get the better of them. Friends are supposed to be there to support each other. They’re supposed to put their own feelings aside and think about the feelings of the other person and let them do what they want to do to make them happy. That’s what we’re supposed to want for the people we care about – for them to be happy, even if it’s with someone else.

Personally, I’m obviously not thrilled that my wife is now with another man and that she’s carrying his child now. When I found that out, it hurt me a lot. But I wouldn’t want her to not have that. If that makes her happy, then I’m happy for her. Sometimes we just need to be mature and want things for others that we can’t always have for ourselves. That’s life. Dealing with it is what being an adult is all about.

Sorry to break up the interesting posts about Vietnam, but I had to throw in a personal observation about life and people.

Sometimes a friend will be horrible to you and say something incredibly hurtful that upsets you incredibly and you will lash out at them and get angry at them for saying it, and instead of them feeling sorry and regretful for saying it, they will get their back up and be even more mean in response. They will make it all about them and imply that you were the one out of line for getting angry and pretend they had done nothing wrong. They will send you horrible, angry emails and SMS’s one after another telling you what an awful person you are and how much they hate you and they may even go so far as to change their email address with their ISP so they can have the last word, tell you you’re a horrible person, and then be gone and you can’t even respond.

Sometimes people will be mean to you and you will lash out at them and your other friends, who claim to be your “best friends” will suddenly turn on you (like a tiger at a Sigfriend and Roy show as I previously described.. because that’s a funny analogy and I wanted to use it again) and will hate on you and abuse you and do very nasty things to you in front of the people that respect you, and thereby make you feel like the worst, most useless, most unwanted, crappy person in the universe.

But sometimes you’ll express that you’re upset, and your best friends won’t even notice. I did this on Facebook recently by saying that I felt like I was stuck at the bottom of a deep well in the pouring rain that was slowly filling up with water and I knew that soon I was going to drown. None of my friends messaged me to ask if I was ok. But random strangers.. people I hadn’t spoken to in 20 years… others that I’d “friended” just yesterday.. even members of the same political activist group who had only met me personally once came forward and asked if I was ok. The most heartfelt was the sentiment from a guy who I had met once at a Wikileaks rally, who surely wouldn’t even remember me if he met me, who spent ages talking to me and asking if I was ok and giving me advice. It’s funny how sometimes support comes from not those who you want it to come from, but from those who you least expect it to come from.

My point is that sometimes, “friendship” comes in weird forms. Sometimes the people you think you can count on aren’t there for you, and sometimes the strangers are. Other times, people that you cared about but haven’t seen in two decades suddenly come out of the woodwork and tell you how important you are to them and how they want you to stay a part of their lives.

Friendship is weird. It’s not always what you want it to be, and sometimes it’s exactly what you don’t want it to be. But occasionally, it’s exactly what you least expect and most treasure at the same time. So nurture every one of them, because you never know which is going to be the important one that saves your life one day.

I’m watching Makoto Shinkai’s stunningly beautiful anime “5cm per second”, which is about how hanging onto relationships and not moving on can leave you feeling empty and depressed. Because I always (and probably choose to) get the wrong meaning out of it, and think that it’s telling me that what you need to do is cling to them like a plank of wood from a sinking ship. This anime makes me cry at the best of times, so tonight, I reckon it’s gonna really, really fucking upset me, which will be awesome and I’m looking forward to it, because apparently I just live to feel pain.

Makoto Shinkai's "5cm per second"

Some people hated what I said here. They took it personally.. they thought it was a direct insult to them when it was nothing of the sort. I just don’t like Facebook, and I’m leaving it. Here are my fucking contact details. Use them or fucking don’t. I don’t care.

Email: pawzlion@gmail.com
Phone: 0451 282 630
IRC server: irc.freenode.net username: pawz
Blog: http://tiny.catpa.ws
Business website: http://hyperspace.net.au

Ok, it would seem that Encyclopedia Dramatica has been forcibly put to death by its founder, Sherrod DeGrippo as reported here. Sherrod is quoted as saying “Shock for shock’s sake is old at this point and we’re looking forward to the future and how things are evolving”. Look, I don’t mind if you hate the site, think it’s loathsome and repulsive and represents the worst side of the internet and culture and should not have ever existed. You’re probably right. Except about the last bit, and here’s why.

 

Life is weird, and people have dark sides and horrible opinions. While these opinions may be downright offensive and hurtful to others, I still think they should be expressed. How can I say that in good conscience ? I don’t know. I know that we should all be good people and not say hurtful things about others and I detest racism and other *isms on principle and in practice, but it’s somehow still meaningful to allow people to express their dislike for things. It’s healthy to admit you hate something sometimes, even when doing it is going to offend others. I know that doesn’t make sense and I am very much aware of how incongruous that is for me to say and I have trouble admitting I feel that way, because I don’t like offending people or denigrating them for who they are or what they believe in.

But you could just as easily say that ED was just “taking the piss” and that it was all tongue-in-cheek and not really about hurting people. Personally, as a member of some obscure subcultures, and indeed as a furry, I was really the number one target of their ridicule. And you know what ? I loved it so much that reading the hate-filled ridicule of furries on ED was my favourite thing to do there, and I would spend hours following links and seeking out new articles on how pathetic furries were because I found it hilarious and I think that if you’re going to be part of such a bizarre subculture, you really need to not take yourself too seriously. One night on IRC when I was talking about this, someone mentioned that they had their own hate-page on ED about them and directed me to it like it was a badge of honour to them. And hell, so it should be. If you’re really that weird and out there that people are going to create a whole page about you to rant about how much they hate you and think you’re stupid and crazy and pathetic – you may as well be proud of that. At least you know you are someone. Personally, I’m jealous that I have never made enough of an impact in the world that I got my own hate-page on ED.

Look, I know it expressed some disgusting opinions, and the ones about Jews and the one Australians all know about Aborigines were detestable and it’s hard for me to defend that. But like Evelyn Hall famously said; “I disapprove of what you say, but I will defend to the death your right to say it”. To the extent that when the Australian Internet Filter was proposed, and we all became aware that ED was going to be their number one target, I proudly joined the Facebook group “I would rather do without Australia than Encyclopedia Dramatica”, though oddly, the group doesn’t seem to exist anymore.

But love it or hate it, Encyclopedia Dramatica was both hilarious, great fun to read (even when it was denigrating you personally or a group to which you identified), and was absolutely unique in the history of the internet. It represented the very worst of human nature, but at the same time, it was a valuable documentation of things we repress and refuse to admit that we agree with or believe in. I’d like to think it was tongue-in-cheek and just wanted to make people take themselves a little less seriously, but if you want to believe it was just an example of hate-filled, narcissistic evil then so be it. You probably just need to lighten up.

I’d be surprised if ED is gone forever though. No matter how much it was hated, it was crazy popular, and there would be countless people ready to put up another site to replace it. I would do it myself except I really wouldn’t want to admit to being responsible for something like that lest people think the worst of me. While the founder claims that it’s gone for good and she wants to move onto less offensive chronicles of internet culture, I truly suspect there are other motives behind this. The most likely would seem to be that there was some sort of serious legal pressure put on the site and the admins decided it need to disappear for a while. It has been suggested by others that it’s just changing servers and will be back soon. But if not, there will probably be an imitator online very soon. But it will never be Encyclopedia Dramatica. ED was the Wikileaks of the darkest side of people’s soul, and it should be cherished for saying what noone else would say.

Encyclopedia Dramatica, I truly hope you’re not gone for good, but if you are, then I as a long time internet denizen salute you, and your presence on the internet will be sorely missed. I think I even shed a tear while writing this. <3 you ED.

There is a parable that’s been used by both Arthur Shopenhauer and Sigmund Freud to describe the problems of intimacy. It’s called “The Hedgehog’s Dilemma”. I won’t quote from it because I’d rather explain this in terms that I understand (all too well), so here goes:

In winter, hedgehogs want to huddle together for warmth like other animals but cannot because they will hurt each other with their quills. So they try and stay distant and find the optimal compromise between warmth and not hurting others. They sacrifice warmth (love) for comfort. Which is why some people (me to a large extent) choose to cut themselves off from society and live alone.. because if you have enough warmth inside you, you think you can live without warmth from others.

But at the less extreme end of things, the hedgehog’s dilemma suggests that what we do is keep the people we care about at distance. We are cautious and reserved, and we form weak relationships that are less meaningful as a result of us trying to avoid the mutual harm that comes unavoidably from truly opening up to someone else and getting close to them. Schopenhauer suggests in his usual pessimistic way, that we should use the hedgehog’s dilemma as a reason for keeping people distant and practicing moderation in our relationships, but I can’t say I agree with him. After all, he also said famously “life without pain has no meaning”. Perhaps it is better to experience the pain of another’s quills for the benefits of being open and intimate with them.

But for the most part, I choose the cowardly isolationist route. I have a fair bit of warmth inside of me, despite suffering from depression. So I can live without friends and I jokingly said recently “I don’t need friends.. I have stuffed animals and the internet”. I appreciate the few close friends I have though, and I adore them. But they don’t understand me. We mostly just have common interests and history. I deeply envy those people who tell me they’ve had friendships since childhood, because the circumstances of my upbringing made that impossible (we were sailors and I didn’t go to school).

But I do crave not so much love, but an affectionate understanding from a partner. I don’t even necessarily have to know them in real life. I have had beautiful relationships online in the past, because when you speak to someone every day, it’s as good as living with them. You’re still sharing your innermost thoughts and idle chatter and everything in between with them. But you can’t share your innermost feelings with someone without those feelings sometimes offending or disturbing the other person.

I fucked up today. I told someone I cared about something she didn’t want to hear. She has been in love with someone for five years, yet he still won’t choose to be with her, and I just came out and said that if he hadn’t chosen to be with her by now he probably never would, and if he suddenly changed his mind, she should be wary that it was a transitory change based on circumstance rather than his true feelings.

The second it was out of my mouth (so to speak, because this was on IRC), I realised how insensitive it sounded and how much she really wouldn’t want to hear that. It was just honest advice. At first I thought maybe I was just being selfish and wished she didn’t love him, but on reflection, that’s not the case at all. I wouldn’t want to get in the way of someone’s true love, ever. I just wanted to tell her that I thought that true love shouldn’t involve five years of indecision, and that if someone comes around after that long, you should be wary of their true feelings.

But I’m the most hopeless romantic ever. I love blowing tiny things like chance meetings with a sweet girl on the train into full blown love, and it’s crap most of the time and I know it. But I love living in ignorant bliss and pretending that there are beautiful romances in my life when in truth, they’re nothing more than a random encounter with a pretty girl who I managed to find something to chat about with. Because it’s fun, and pretending you have romance is better than having none at all, though equally, it can be hurtful when you realise deep down that it’s not as real as you’re pretending it is.

But that’s me and I don’t mean to compare my trivial pretend romance to her situation here, because hers is actually meaningful and I am assured that he does love her, he just can’t commit to a relationship. But she didn’t want to hear that it was not going to work out, she wanted to hear the opposite. A close friend said to me later that “she probably needed to hear it”, and maybe she did, but there were much more qualified people far closer to her that should have said it. It shouldn’t have come from me, because despite having talked for years on IRC, I really don’t know her that well and we’ve only recently become closer as we realised that we have so much in common.

Our “bot” on IRC keeps track of people and produces this image called a “relationship map” to illustrate who talks to each other the most, implying that they have the closest relationships. In our map, her and I are at the centre, joined by the thickest red lines possible, with everyone else circling around us with much weaker blue connections. But, I talk a crapload on IRC, by which I mean, sometimes more than 25,000 words a day, and she would be the first to tell me that the map is meaningless and just because two people talk a lot does not make them close. But she’s pessimistic, and I like to think that it means something, due to my nature of over-ascribing romantic meaning to things as I explained above. But I’m just vain and lonely, of course I would do that.

So while this insult to her true love could be considered a minor transgression (I’m sure she doesn’t consider it that way though), to me, it’s just a symptom of how I always fuck things up with her. She also suffers from depression and like myself, she takes offense to things very easily, and I can be very much a hedgehog due to my intense personality. I don’t know how to deal with this situation and I despise myself for always hurting her feelings. I know the responsible and mature thing would be to give her some time, apologise, and continue where we left off if she forgives me, but I am rarely responsible and mature.

What I really want to do instead, is take the coward’s way out and run away with my tail between my legs. The anime Neon Genesis Evangelion contains an episode called the “hedgehog’s dilemma”. The main character, Shinji has trouble forming intimate relationships without hurting and being hurt by others, and despite him saying repeatedly throughout the series “I mustn’t run away. I mustn’t run away”, run away is exactly what he does most of the time, although to be fair on him, he does man up and return in the end.

Can I do that ? I’m not so sure. I know that she’s not going to respect me if I run away, but hurting her makes me feel awful inside, and despite saying I just don’t want to hurt her, maybe I don’t want to hurt ME, because hurting her makes me feel so wretched. Hard to say objectively. I’d like to think that I would be running away because I’m unselfish and I don’t want to hurt her feelings anymore, but it’s entirely possible that I’m just weak and pathetic and I’m doing it for selfish reasons because hurting her hurts me too.

Ahh, the hedgehog’s dillema.

Shopenhauer, you may have been a cynical, pessimistic bastard, but your words are very wise all the same. We are all hedgehogs, some of us more than others, and when we get too close to others, mutual pain is the inevitable result.

To the person I’m discussing, I’m sorry I upset you. But I hate myself for doing that all the time, so I think I’m going to run away now. At least I’m good at that.

(Note: we are not friends on Facebook, nor does she have the slightest interest in reading my blog, so addressing her was utterly pointless, but who cares… it’s cathartic anyway)

Like most people (I would never use the term “artist” about what I do), I put stuff out there really for my own benefit, rather than that of others, maybe with the exception of street art, which is designed to inspire other people to think about stuff, but when you get positive feedback on what you do, it’s really encouraging and flattering.

After visiting an exhibition on street art at the national gallery last week, I went straight out and spent money I couldn’t afford on a new wide format printer so that I could print colour posters and stickers so that I could create more street art of my own. I knocked up two pieces while I had a couple of friends around who were doing some art of their own. I have included them here on the right. They were both so impressed with the Fukushima piece and kept referring to it as “great art”, and even demanded to buy a copy, but of course I gave them one for free. The Fukushima piece is interesting I feel, as it sends a mixed message, both using scary imagery of turning the “Rising Sun” into a nuclear logo, but at the same time, using words that remind people not to fear Fukushima because it’s not the massive disaster that that media try and make it out to be, and actually represents a very well contained nuclear event under extremely bad circumstances. Hopefully maybe someone will get that interpretation of it when they see it stuck up around the city, but if not, it’s just a pretty poster anyway.

The other one was a more humorous one and was designed to be a general positive message about Japan’s ability to rebuild. So it uses imagery such as Tokyo Tower in the city skyline to represent Japan, Godzilla to represent the destructive forces of nature, and Astroboy to represent a ray of hope – all important parts of Japanese culture. The phrase “We can rebuild you” is from the Six Million Dollar Man and just refers to the Japanese people’s determination to move on from the disaster and become stronger than ever.

Then, I followed a “trackback” from this blog to another person’s blog who had linked to me, and I commented that I liked his style of writing and the stuff that he’d said. In turn, he wrote back to me, raving about about how much he loved some of my articles like the one about the mp3 scene’s history and how touched he was by some of my articles about my daughter Suki. We both have similar themes in our writing – a mixture of technical tutorials, general philosophy about the human condition, and meanderings about what hopeless romantics we are, so it was great to talk to him and have him like my writing as much as I liked his.

And last night, after I somewhat upset this girl I’m fond of on IRC, I decided to put down the keyboard for a moment and pick up my guitar, and as is normally the case when I haven’t played for ages and I’m in an emotional mood, the music just poured out of me, and from the first chord I hit, a song formed. I just briefly nutted out the basic chords and then because it was getting late and I wanted to get it down before I forgot it, I hit record on my webcam and just started playing it in one take and thankfully didn’t make too much of a mess of it. It didn’t have a lot of variation and is probably longer than it should be, but it clearly had a lot of feeling behind it, so I was happy with it and I uploaded it to YouTube and showed it to her in the morning.

It seems YouTube must have featured it somewhere, or it appeared at the top of the music category briefly, because all of a sudden, within about a 20 minute period, the view count shot up and I got dozens of appreciative comments such as “so talented” from two different people.. “dood your teh best” from another.. “good stuff” .. “cool”.. “nice job man” .. “sweet” … “like this video” .. “nice” … “so epic” and more comments, and out of only 15 comments, 11 people hit the “like” button, and not everyone does that on videos, so I guess I must have impressed people. I hadn’t really intended for anyone else to see it, so for dozens of strangers to suddenly come out of nowhere and say how much they liked it and call me “so talented” … well.. that was beyond flattering.. that was amazing. I mean, my self-deprecating nature aside.. it’s just not that brilliant a song in my view. I adore it, but then, I wrote it. But for two different people to call me “so talented” because of something I knocked out in one take in 5 minutes.. wow.. that’s pretty nice to hear. I guess I might post some more music online in the future and see what people say.

So all up, that makes it a very rewarding week for me creatively. I’ve been complimented on my art, my writing and my music, and all from stuff I’ve knocked up quickly in the middle of night over the span of a few days. I certainly didn’t go seeking that sort of feedback, but the fact that I got it anyway is just amazing and makes me feel so much better about my artistic endeavours. I’ll open up the comments on this article just so that I can fish for compliments a little and ask .. what do you think, does getting such favourable feedback in three different artistic mediums make me an artist ? Whether it does or not, I feel pretty good about my creative work now and it makes me want to express myself more. Art has become such a big part of my life in the last few years, when I had previously not had much interest in it at all because I thought I had no talent. But I’m fond of my writing, and I’m becoming fond of my street art too, and the music.. well, I don’t think I’m so great at that, but if people like it, it doesn’t need to be technically brilliant if you can move people with just the simplest chord progressions. I’m not much for thinking that what I do is that great, but to have people tell me that they think it is and that I have talent.. that’s priceless.

I’m sitting at a rest stop in Casino in northern New South Wales sipping a glass of port and reflecting over the last few days. I’ve just done my first border crossing in my new campervan, but let me rewind and tell you how it started. I was sitting around on Friday wondering what I was going to do with my weekend, and I decided it might be nice to take a trip down to the Lamington National Forest and maybe take some photos at Advancetown Lakes, and spend the afternoon there and maybe even the night, although I wasn’t sure how prepared I was for an overnight stay. Since I could find noone to go with me, I just grabbed my camera bag, my iPad, some tins of soup and a couple of bottles of red wine and jumped in my van and headed off down the highway.

I’d had a bit of a disappointing day due to a few reasons I won’t go into, and I was a little annoyed at having to go alone, but hey, I’m about to leave on a road trip around the entire country by myself, so I may as well get used to it. As Billy Bragg says in “Levi Stubb’s Tears” … “With the money from her accident she bought herself a mobile home, so at least she could get some enjoyment out of being alone”. With that firmly in mind, I drove straight past the turn-off to the forest and continued on south down Highway One. I figured I would just keep driving for as far as my funds would allow. I had a vague idea that I probably had enough money to make it to Coffs Harbour, but since I had left pretty late and I hadn’t installed my new taillight bulbs yet, I would have to stop at Byron Bay for the night.

I’m glad I did because Byron is bloody beautiful ! I turned up just before sunset and checked into a van park and got an unpowered site for $15 in a remote corner of the park where I figured I could play my music until late without being bothered. Then I drove down to the foreshore and carried my camera, tripod, laptop bag, a bottle of chilled wine and some cheese and a deck chair down to the beach. First thing I did was go up to the lookout with my 300mm lens attached and take lots of photos of the surfers. I got some pretty good ones, although the angle wasn’t ideal but mum was quite impressed with them. Then as the sun was going down I went back to the main beach area and setup my chair and ate french cheese and drank chilled merlot as the sun set. Couldn’t have been more beautiful and I’m so glad I took the time to drive down here. This was all the confirmation I needed that I’d done the right thing by selling all my stuff and buying the camper in order to travel Australia.

I took some photos of the sunset and chatted online for a bit, bragging about how awesome it was so that everyone would be jealous. By the time I was done it was very dark and I couldn’t find the path back up to the carpark and I stumbled around in the dark a bit using my phone as a torch, when a surfer came along with his board and said “Duuuude, you can’t find the path can you ? Follow me man !” and I followed him back up to the carpark and thanked him and headed back to my van park to spend my first night in my camper. While the camper pretty much came with everything I needed to travel from cooking utensils to toilet paper, it didn’t come with any lights, and while I had bought an LED lantern, I had stupidly left it at home in my haste to leave. Fortunately I had parked near a light pole so I no trouble cooking my dinner. I had a bowl of chicken soup and a hearty piece of porterhouse steak and knocked off another bottle of wine (something I quite regretted in the morning !) while I uploaded my photos. My Macbook Air is currently being replaced with a better, more upgraded one so I only have my iPad with me, but thankfully it does a great job of processing and uploading photos from my SD card with the camera connection kit.

The next morning I woke up at 4am and headed back to the lookout hoping to catch the sun rising over the ocean. After two hours of sitting in the rain freezing my ass off I realised it had already risen behihd the clouds and that I’d missed it, but at least I felt I’d done my duty as a dedicated photographer, so I jumped in my van and headed off towards Coffs Harbour. It was a longer journey than I had expected and I was keeping a close eye on my fuel consumption because I didn’t want to end up stranded away from home without enough money to get home, but the van seems pretty economical. I rested for a bit on the way to ease my aching head and I arrived in Coffs at dusk. I took some photos of the pier and the beach and as I was walking back towards my van I walked past a tourist stacking wood artfully in a pile. I asked “Is that a bonfire or an artwork ?” and he said “Dunno, do you want it to be a bonfire ?” and I replied “If it is, I’ll be right back after dinner to share it with you” and he said “Sure thing man”.

I went back to the van and cooked up some more soup and steak (cheaper stuff this time) and then grabbed my gear and headed back down to the beach. The guy was there with his girlfriend sitting around the bonfire. Their names were Max (the guy) and Charlie (the girl) and they were from the UK and had done exactly the same as me – sold everything and bought a van to travel around Australia. We shared some stories about traveling and nice places to visit. Max was into diving and wanted to dive on famous shipwrecks which I thought was a fascinating thing to do and I told him about some of the WWII plane wrecks I’d seen in the waters around Papua New Guinnea and he told me about this famous wreck in the Whitsundays that he’d dived on.

I asked if they had lots of photos of their travels so far and he said “Actually we don’t have a camera, so we don’t have any photos at all”. I was shocked and said “We can fix that then !” and I pulled my camera out of my bag and snapped off a couple of shots of them sitting around the campfire and then plugged my memory card into my iPad and showed them the photo. Charlie said “That’s so cool” and I asked “Where would you like me to email it to ?” and Max said “You’re fucking kidding… you have internet here on the beach ?” “Of course !” I replied, and they gave me both their email addresses and I emailed it to them on the spot. It’s nice to blow people’s minds like that. Later, I want to get a bluetooth Polaroid printer so that I can print out prints for people on the spot. I’d like to earn a little extra money on my travels by taking photos of people at tourist spots and then printing them a copy. “Drinking money” I guess you’d call it.

I drank too much again it seems, and in the morning I got rudely awoken at about 7am by the groundskeeper tapping on my window saying “You can’t camp here” (which I knew very well because I had seen the signs but I couldn’t afford a campsite and I just didn’t care) so I packed up and headed off back up north. I stopped in Moonee Beach and later Arrawarra Headland both of which were very pretty to take photos. When I got to Grafton I decided to head inland a bit and I took the back road up to Casino. It was pouring down when I arrived, so I pulled into a rest stop and laid down in the back to sleep for a while. Drinking all night and driving all day really takes it out of you ! It finally stopped raining at about six o’clock this evening and I was able to get out and trudge through the sloppy mud to the park benches where I setup my stove and cooked up a beef and vegetable soup. I’m pretty sure “hearty soup” is code for “water, stock, two tiny pieces of beef and half a kilogram of vegetables”, but I’m hungry and poor so I wolfed it down with some fresh bread rolls and cold water.

After dinner I dug out my extension lead and setup my stereo in the park bench to listen to some Nirvana Unplugged and Florence and the Machine and finished the last glass of port, then I uploaded my photos from the last couple of days and paired my bluetooth keyboard and opened WordPress, which brings me up to the current moment ! I looked online to see what there is to do in Casino, and they apparently have a small pond called “Platypus Pool” near the centre of town where you can see Platypii play, which sounds like a perfect thing to take photos of, so I’ll definitely be doing that tomorrow, weather permitting. The local birds are really skwarking up a racket here at the moment and I had to turn Florence up really loud to try and drown them out (it failed). I’m thinking of taking a short walk to see if I can’t buy a cheap bottle of port or wine nearby before it gets dark. Probably be good to stretch my legs after so much time cooped up in the van.

Anyway, this has turned out to be an amazing trip. I went out for an afternoon on the Gold Coast and ended up halfway to Sydney ! I’ve seen amazing things, met amazing people, and taken amazing photos, and I haven’t even officially left on my trip yet ! I think doing this was the best decision I could ever have made, and I’m going to have stories and photos to share with people for the rest of my life. Dad said “I’m so jealous of you being able to explore all these cool towns and see interesting things”, and that’s coming from a man who spent his whole life traveling, so I guess it must be in my blood. I’ll have my proper domain later this week when my new credit card arrives in the mail (my last one was cancelled because some guy in Germany used it to buy a plane ticket !) which will be twentythousandclicks.com which refers to the distance around Australia by following Highway One, so look out for it ! More stories to follow !

Enjoy the photos below. They are of Byron Bay, Coffs Harbour, Moonee Beach and Arrawarra Headland.

I hacked this explanation out for someone on Facebook who I was chatting to when I wished to refer to something to do with 4chan, and before I knew it, I had launched into a massive discussion about the definition of “memes” and various examples of them. I’ve tried to recreate much of that conversation here because this is a subject I have a great deal of interest in and I might possibly have an unusual angle on it. As a result, I won’t research any of this, nor will I reference anything, so this is going to be totally out of my head, so if I get any of this wrong in your opinion, please let me know (not that I intend to change anything, but I may be interested in your opinion).

I wanted to explain what 4chan was famous for, and other than “trolling” (which I’m not going to go into here despite it being an interesting cultural phenomenon), it would have to be “meme creation”. So for those of us who don’t live on IRC or 4chan…

What is a “meme” ?

It’s interesting to note where the term meme came from. Despite being generally thought of as an internet phenomenon, the term was actually coined way back in the 70′s by the famous Athiest and Darwinist, Richard Dawkins (by all rights, he should be “Sir” Richard Dawkins IMHO but the queen would never knight such a blasphemer). The term is a play on the word “gene” which refers to biologically transferred information, whereas “meme” refers to socially transmitted information or concepts, although the term is based on an old Greek word meaning “to imitate something”.

The meme is a tenet of Social Darwinism, and it is a concept I was familiar with in one form or other from before I discovered the internet in 1994. To sidetrack brielfy…

What is Social Darwinism ?

As an example of Social Darwinism, I was commenting to a friend the other day they way social structure and values are formed and passed on by using this example:

“If there are five people in the room, and one of them makes a racist (or sexist etc) remark, and the other four choose to say nothing, then whether they agree with the remark or not, the fact that three of the other four people have chosen not to complain about it will influence a single person to change their opinion slightly to match that of the person originally making the remark”.

This is how social norms are formed over time. Someone says one thing, and if noone else challenges it, it very gradually becomes the norm, because we are predisposed to following our peers, and if our peers appear to accept this comment, then we as a result are more likely to accept it as well, and thus the group changes their opinions and social dynamic based on something as simple as inaction. This is why it is so important to speak up and challenge an opinion you do not agree with, especially an offensive one. Because while you may think it is better to stay silent and “not rock the boat”, your very silence may be seen by your peers as condoning the sort of behaviour you are witnessing.

It works both ways though, for example with respect to the environment, if you see someone throw trash our their window, you may think “Well, he does it, so there’s no point me saving mine, I may as well throw mine out too”, but equally it mabe a case of “Wow, he drives a hybrid. I wish I could do that too”. But some people say “Why should I take my car off the road and ride a bike when there are so many idiots driving around in 4×4′s ?”. Well, because if everyone thought that way, noone would stop driving 4×4′s or throwing trash out their window, would they ? Postitive examples reinforce attitudes just as much as negative ones, and just seeing someone on a pushbike may make you think “Hey, she’s doing it, I should too”. This is how “cultural norms” are created, and is one of the cornerstones of Social Darwinism. So keep in mind that what you don’t say is often just as important as what you do say.

Back to memes !

So, back on topic. What is a meme exactly ? While Dawkins suggested that it was a unit for transferring cultural information, he could not have imagined the explosion of memes that happened in the early 21st century. A meme is basically something that is mimicked (there’s that Greek influence again) by others, without necessarily understanding the meaning or origin of the phrase, image or concept, but which carries a certain “context” that they understand. Just as how reading a book and encountering a word you’ve never seen before, and you may not know its meaning, but by its context, you can figure out what its meaning was intended to be, and by repeating it, you help it to grow and take on new meaning somewhat like a chinese whisper takes on its own form over time.

Markov Chains

You may not know what “batterial” means (I made it up), but if I said “I went to this totally batterial party last night, it was so awesome”, you would infer that it’s some sort of adjective with a meaning akin to “very good”. As a side note, this is somewhat similar to how a “Markov Chains” AI bot works such as the one I run on my IRC network.

By determining the context of a word, you can roughly figure out what it means and when it should be used in a sentence. This is one of the primary ways children learn to speak. They don’t know what words mean, they just know that if you want a cookie you say “i want” followed by “cookie”, because they’ve heard others express a desire for things and then receive them by using this pattern of words.

So what do memes look like ?

This is an easy one. Lolcats are one of the most common memes on the internet and is one that nearly anyone would be familiar with. They sort of started out many years ago as motiviational posters such as the kitten clinging to something with the phrase “hang in there” captioned underneath, and 4chan ran with this idea during “Caturday” (Saturday), and would take a picture of a cat doing something and post a unique and hilarious caption underneath it. As an example, here’s a Lolcat picture I made from my kitten KonKon (meaning “kitten” in japanese, incidentally) sitting on my PS2, shortly after the release of the PS3.

What does it mean ? Absolutely nothing ! Is it a meme ? Not in itself no (unless other people copied either the phrase or the concept of a desperate kitting sitting on something she wanted), but it’s a sub-meme in that Lolcats are a meme, and this is a Lolcat picture. Also it’s a cute picture and I wanted a chance to put it online hehehe.

Rickrolling

You want some more memes ? Sure, how about “Rickrolling” ? If you don’t know what that is, you probably don’t spend much time on the net. The art of “Rickrolling” someone involves sending them to a page on the internet on which they expect to find something else, but instead find a video a Rick Astley singing “Never Gonna Give You Up”. Why ? Noone knows. It was just something someone on 4chan did to someone else on 4chan one day that inspired lulz, and others copied until it became such an internet phenomenon that even huge companies such as Google and Amazon have setup pages dedicated to “Rickrolling” people.

This is the perfect example of a silly internet prank getting so completely out of hand that it becomes a part of popular culture, and no doubt Rickrolls will be popping up in 20 or 30 years time, just to make those of us who remember the practice laugh out loud.

Hacking the Gibson

A friend used this from time to time, and it amused me because I knew he had no idea where it originated, but I did. The term originally refers to not a “what”, but a “who”. William Gibson was an author who wrote the book “Neuromancer” in 1984, which despite coming two years after Blade Runner, is thought to be the most influential book in the history of “cyberpunk” and internet culture. Gibson is widely credited as having coined such terms as “cyberspace”, “the matrix”, “jacking in”, “console cowboy” and others. Some even credit him with creating the concept of the “World Wide Web” which Tim Berners Lee went on to invent in 1991.

As a result of his massive influence on computing culture, many powerful internet-connected supercomputers were known as “Gibsons” out of respect for this amazing visionary, and the term “Hacking the Gibson” later came to mean the art of hacking an incredibly powerful computer with just a tiny microcomputer terminal and downloading the contents onto a floppy disk, a technique popularised by a million movies such as Hackers. But it’s origins are lost on those many “script kiddies” who use the term today and who would have no idea who Gibson was or how influential he was to internet culture, almost a decade before the World Wide Web even existed.

Thank you William Gibson, for giving us an amazing cyber world to inhabit, and a fascinating concept that has inspired so many great (and not so great) movies. I doff my Akubra to you, good sir. At the time of writing, William Gibson is still alive and well at the quite young age of 63, but when he eventually passes, it will be a sad day in internet history, and I for one will be wearing a black armband with a microchip stuck to it. Below is a video which contains footage of various films including The Matrix and the brilliant anime Serial Experiments Lain, all of which have been heavily influenced by William Gibson’s amazing imagination:

“Bork Bork” and “Herp Derp”

This one amuses me also because the people who use this phrase are probably the least likely in the world to know where it comes from. The phrase “Bork” was used in the mid 90′s, particularly on IRC as a general expression of “I have nothing to say, but I wish to liven up this otherwise silent channel”. The phrase “Herp Derp” on the other hand, has become popular only in the last few years, and is used to mean when something or someone is somewhat retarded or stupid, particularly in the form of imitation. If someone says something really dumb you might respond with “herp derp” or “such and such is herp derping”. “But where did this come from ?” you question.

Well, it comes from a cult show nearly 5 years old. “Which one ?” I hear you ask, on the edge of your seats. It comes from Jim Henson’s famous “The Muppet Show” from 1974, or more specifically, the Swedish Chef, who would recite gibberish phrases that sounded vaguely like they might be Swedish, such as “bork bork” and “herp derp”. The fact that this one character’s few small segments spawned an internet meme in the 90′s almost 20 years after its creation, and then another one almost 20 years later is a testament to just how powerful and longlived memes can be and how powerful they can be, despite the original source becoming lost in the mists of time and the people repeating them having no idea what they mean or where they came from.

This is the power of the meme. The Swedish Chef never specifically meant it to mean “this is retarded”, it just gained that meaning all in its own from someone using it in a certain context (remember I used that word before ?) and others repeating it ad nauseum until it became part of popular culture. Below is video of the Swedish Chef making chocolate mousse, and he uses both these phrases extensively.

So what have we learned today ?

Nothing useful, unless you are an anthropologist or a linguist, but I guess that without meaning to, I have become both in a casual sort of way. While studying communication at university I was never overly interested in it, but as the internet became a part of our lives, I saw first-hand how communication and the spread of memes and concepts could rapidly change the world in little or big ways. Back then I had no idea that a little video posted to a site such as the as not-yet-invented Facebook could spread like wildfire and influence thought, speech, attitutdes and culture. As crazy as it may seem, I am sure you could go to a foreign country where you spoke none of the language, but with the mere dropping of a certain meme, people would understand what you meant.

This is the power of memes, and this is the power of Social Darwinism. We are social and moral animals, and our thoughts and opinions are shaped every single day by what we observe and hear around us, so don’t think that saying something or even not saying something has no meaning, because everything is communication of some sort, and everything (even silence) carries meaning. They say that “actions speak louder than words”, but I firmly believe this to be untrue. Actions are not carried from person to person like a virus, whereas words, concepts and memes are. This is the power of communication, and in a world like today’s where communication is about the most powerful weapon of change we have, this can mean everything and can change the world.

Conclusion

While I didn’t intend this little soliloquy to even be read, now it has been, so I may as well end with some sort of message. Communication, be it pictorial, verbal, non-verbal or even sheer silence has a massive amount of power to affect those around you, so consider that in all social situations, and if you hear something you agree with, say so, and if you hear something you disagree with, speak out – it just may mean the difference between others accepting a certain viewpoint or rejecting it. And that joke you make, or that captioned photoshop picture you knock up ? That could be the next meme and could spread like wildfire across the world without your intervention.

Thanks to Ali for listening to me crap on about this in a tiny little Facebook chat window at 2 am last night as I got these thoughts out.

Ok, I’d tried four times to arrange a visit to the Darling Downs Zoo in Picton near Toowoomba in order to see the new white lions they got late last year, but every single time, people couldn’t make it or it was raining, so today, I was determined it was going to happen no matter what. I had been up until 5am again last night watching the news of the quake and tsunami in Japan, and I dragged myself out of bed reluctantly at 9am and looked to the east, where the sun was shining and then looked to the west towards Toowoomba where it was cloudy and stormy, but I wasn’t letting weather turn this into the fifth failure, so I rang up and booked my lion feeding session for 2:30pm and then SMS’d Stefan and Sian a few times until they woke up.

We headed off in Sian’s car, grabbing a bite to eat on the way. When we turned off the Warrego Highway and passed Gatton, I was disturbed to note that despite having devices on THREE (yes, three) different mobile networks on me, none of them had any signal whatsoever. It’s the first time I’d been cut off from the internet since visiting Fox Glacier in New Zealand, and the feeling wasn’t one I enjoyed. I hoped we didn’t break down.

I was a little worried about how Darling Downs Zoo was going to be, because I knew it was a very small regional zoo and wasn’t going to have many animals or much space. When we arrived, that feeling was reinforced as we looked at the dirt carpark and noted that there was no solid buildings on the grounds – just tin sheds. They couldn’t even put up their sign, and had it leaning against the entrance shed. Nevertheless, we paid our (quite reasonable) entry fee and went in and were given a map of the zoo. Why, I can’t imagine because the place is really just about a rectangular acre of land with an oval road leading from the entrance, around the exhibits and back again, although I guess the purpose was to indicate where each exhibit was so that you didn’t miss what you wanted to see.

I’m going to cut straight past telling you about the few birds, ducks, wombats, kangaroos, emus and reptiles they had and get straight to the important stuff – the big cats. We passed the Tiger habitat, which was, while not enormous, still comparable in size to the one at the Auckland Zoo although a lot less fancy. I couldn’t see the resident tigress Shimana anywhere until Stefan pointed and said “There she is, hiding under that bush”. There she was, barely visible, hiding in the shade. I tried to get photos, but it was pointless as all you could see was a tiny bit of stripey orange tail. We moved on to the other side where the regular african lions were.

The lions were, needless to say, awesome. They had a reasonable enclosure, again, just a bit of flat grass with a small mound in the middle and a plastic water trough. But they seemed very content. The male lion, Robbie was on his back in the shade with his legs spread which made for terrible photos unless you wanted a lovely shot of his genitals, so I concentrated on the two lionesses Zena and Delilah, who were gorgeous and laying together on their grassy mound, one asleep, leaning against the other in a cat-pile, as lionesses so love to do. I got lots of great photos of them together, and with a long zoom and manual focus, you can barely tell there was a wire fence between us.

Then we moved onto the white lions. Now as you may know, white lions, while not actually a separate breed (they aren’t albinos either, they have a genetic mutation) have been extinct in the wild for almost three decades, and these two are the only ones in Queensland and among only about half a dozen in Australia, so it was pretty special to see them. Shaka (the male) and especially Shenzi (the female) were both huge, despite being only 18 months old. They were alert, but lazy like you would expect, and they lounged together in a corner. Unfortunately, since they were so close to the fence, I could not pull the same focus trick, and as a result, the wire fence is very visible in the photos.

We quickly photographed the remaining birds (I got some lovely shots of the pretty macaws) before I returned to the front office as my lion-feeding session was due to start. The woman who took me to feed them was lovely and clearly loved the cats very much. We were all led through a gate to the back of the enclosures, and she had a very full bucket of chopped hunks of raw meat. As soon as they saw us approaching, all the cats leapt up and raced to the fence. We fed Robbie, Delilah and Zena first, and I gave Stefan strict instructions to use up all of the remaining 400 photos on my memory card. Robbie was regal and wonderful, but to be honest, it was Delilah and Zena who I found myself obsessing over.

She warned me of course not to put my fingers through the cage, and handed me some meat with a foot long pair of bbq tongs and directed me to put it through the fence up high so that they stood up on their hind legs for the best photo opportunities. To my surprise she said “Now, while you’re feeding them, you can touch their paws and feel how sharp their claws are”. I hadn’t expected to get such an intimate encounter with them as the website had said nothing about this, and I took every opportunity to put my hand up against their massive paws and feel the rough pads on the bottoms and touch their massive sharp claws. She suggested I use two tongs and feed both a male and female at the same time for the camera, but I guess the lionesses were hungrier, because I ended up feeding Delilah and Zena together instead, which was fine by me because they were gorgeous.

We then moved across to Shimana, the tigress’ enclosure to feed her. I was glad I’d chosen to feed them, otherwise I wouldn’t have gotten any good photos of her. Shimana was very small for a tigress, and the keeper explained that it was partly because she was mostly a Balinese tiger rather than a Bengal, and that her lineage had been a little bit inbred which often resulted in a smaller animal. She was still very beautiful, and touching her paws was a real pleasure. Stefan commented that it looked like I was giving her a high five. Shimana made the most incredible guttural growling noises as I fed her. I asked Stefan to get lots of photos of her before and after the feeding since we’d missed her before.

Then we moved onto the final attraction, and the reason for which we had come – the white lions. They were absolutely enormous despite their young age, and I’m told they are always ravenously hungry. Shaka was beautiful, and you could tell he was young, because he only had a short “teenage” lion’s mane. The keeper said they expected him to grow much larger than Robbie and after seeing him, I have no doubts that this will be the case. Shenzi was again my favourite, and she stood up so tall while being fed that she was often higher than I was, especially with her massive paws on the fence. I gave her lots of tasty chunks of meat, although Shaka was pretty insistent that I didn’t forget about him either ! After the feeding, they rubbed up against the cage, and I was allowed to stick my fingers inside and scratch them behind the ears and pat them and feel their manes. The white lions had much softer fur than the regular lions, and unlike Robbie’s mane who was wiry and tough, Shaka‘s was as soft as a plush toy’s fur. After I had finished feeding and stroking them, I got my camera back off Stefan to try a few close up shots, but I only got a couple out before I ran out of memory, so we finished up and headed back out so I could pick up a small stuffed white lion from the gift shop, err shed, as a souvenier.

Well, all I can say is, Darling Downs Zoo did not disappoint in any way and while it was not as fancy as zoos such as Taronga or Auckland, the animals were well housed and appeared quite happy. I mean, if you don’t care about the big cats, forget it, because that’s really what they are about, and if you want to see ‘roos and emus and reptiles, there are better zoos for it. But if you are there to see the lions and tigers – DDZ is a great place for it. Having been to Dreamworld to see their tigers, I can definitely say that DDZ is a much better experience. You’re in the bush rather than some fancy but noisy, man-made facility, and you can get up much closer to the animals. It would be sorta cool if they had some glass viewing screens so that you could get photos without the cages, but I guess they might do that further down the track, since they’ve really only just acquired the white lions which are their main attraction.

And if you go, do the lion feeding. Do not miss it. It’s $22 entry, and $50 per person for lion feeding, and I guarantee you that it is worth every cent. If not for the sake of being able to feed and touch these beautiful animals, but because the photo opportunities that it provides make the extra cost well worth it, and I left feeling that I’d gotten excellent value for money. If you want to see big cats up close and personal, and have them feed practically out of your hand – forget Dreamworld, go to Darling Downs Zoo. It wasn’t just a great day out – it was THE BEST DAY EVAR !!!!

You can view the full gallery of photos (well, 85 out of the 688 that I took) on Facebook here.

Since a picture is often worth even more than what a thousand of the most emotional words could say, I’m going to steal this one from the BBC, and all I’m going to say is:

:”(

The full BBC gallery can be viewed here.

Well, I heard from a friend last night, that when Suki’s mum’s new boyfriend graduated from his police cadetship finally, he proposed to her, and she accepted.

It’s great that Suki now has a live-in male role model to look up to, and I honestly wish Jo and Michael all the happiness in their new life together, and I emailed her and told her that.

Now, to listen to some Bob Dylan, and pour myself a rum and coke. What, 9am too early ? Nawwwww, I’m good :”)

You know what’s a cool and trendy way to show that you are both up-to-date on world issues and prove what a caring and thoughtful human being you are ? Go onto Twitter and rally others to “send prayers” to flood or cyclone ravaged Queensland (or Egypt, or whatever other issue you think your followers will be most impressed by).

It there’s one thing I fucking hate, it’s reading how Justin Beiber or Kim Kardashian just tweeted something retarded like “Everyone pray for Australia ! I am !”. I’m pretty damn sure that none of the Kardashians even know how to make the sign of the cross, let alone do they spend any real time during their day closing their eyes and saying “Hi God, just checking in. Sucks about Queensland. Please keep them safe. I really pray for them”. I’m pretty sure Kim Kardashian couldn’t even find Australia on a map…. of Australia. The thought that some air-head bimbo in the States whose only claim to fame is having had a dodgy sex tape of her released back in 2007 is praying for me, no wait, is TALKING about praying for me, just makes me want to find her phone number, ring her up and say “Oi. Noone cares, bitch. You’re not Nelson Mandella and your fake prayers mean nothing to me, so shut the fuck up about how much you care”.

To put it into a little statistical perspective, according to twitterstats.net, over the last 24 hours, the words “yasi” and “pray” have been used together 917 times. At around 6:30pm EST, this peaked at around 120 fake prayers per hour as shown below:

You know what ? If you want to actually commune with God and have a chat to him about helping out Queenslanders, by all means, be my guest. Ask him if he could arrange for a beer truck to break down outside my house and the driver to be urgently called away while you’re at it. But please, don’t just SAY you’re praying for us. That means even less than nothing. The only people it means anything to are your idiot friends who are following you thinking how cool and aware and sensitive you are. And it’s bullshit. You’re just posing on Twitter, so stop it.

Random dumb tweet of the day:

kaahlikinnss: LETS HOPE AND PRAY. FOR THE QUEENSLANDERS. THAT ARE GETTING EFFECTED BY YASI. #PRAY THAT NOBODY GETTTS HURT.

Dude, I #PRAY that you one day learn to spell, capitalise correctly, and punctuate. But it’s probably not going to happen, is it ?

It’s hot. Farken’ hot. I wouldn’t normally know, because I spent all day in my room in the aircon, sitting on my bed talking on the phone and remote adminning stuff. But when I finally left the house to go and acquire some dinner (Butter Kitten Chicken from the Indian Kitchen) that I realised how ridiculously, unpleasantly hot it was outside. I spent my last few bucks on a giant slushie and walked home to relax in the aircon and watch Townsville get totally f&%ked up by Tropical Cyclone Yasi tonight on ABC News 24 while I work on some documentation.

Gigantic frozen cokes and aircon. That’s how I survived January in Brisbane during 2011. Just sayin’.