1. I don’t think there’s place in the world any more for Roman numerals.

2. For many years now I’ve been trying to write a song containing the word “meniscus,” but I can never seem to fit it in anywhere.

3. The best thing I’ve done since being in the UK was spend the day in Hathersage, in the Peak District. I’d gladly live that day again.

4. I think it’s wrong to ever blatantly criticise any form of artwork – whether it be music, photography, painting, fashion, theatre, poetry or whatever. Opinions are understandable, constructive critisism is great, but to put down someone’s creation by needlessly slamming them is an act of the devil as far as I’m concerned.

5. It took me four months to realise my paper train ticket could get me onto the tube as well. If I’d have known that earlier, I could have saved £160 on my Oyster card. Dammit!

6. If I chose to study again one day, I would do so in a field such as natural or vibrational medicine.

7. Sarah is going to think I stole this one off her list, but I too am fascinated by the English language, especially its eccentricities. Palindromes, spoonerisms, anagrams, pangrams, oxymorons, sesquipedalians… broufing it oufon!

8. My life seems to be one massive synchronicity, and I’m constantly amazed and intrigued by the coincidences I experience. Following them has led me to where I am today.

9. One of the few immediate things I miss about Australia is the music. We have so much genric diversity and I feel Aussie songs tell an overall more sincere story and have a more appealing sentiment to those written elsewhere.

10. I think much of what we’re led to believe in the world is conspiratory. There’s so much suppressed information out there that the governments are purposefully holding back so as to retain power over the people.

11. My favourite chord is Fmaj7sus2.

12. I think Northern line tube trains are the best designed of all the lines.

13. If there was one place in the world I would choose to travel to, it would be Egypt. I will get there one day, when the time is right.

14. I think one of the best songs ever written is The Last Resort, by The Eagles. You should listen to it.

15. I purchased my first mobile phone in 2001, and on all phones owned since then, I have NEVER changed the ringtone from the Nokia tune.

16. I would do anything to be able to relive the last seven months of my life, knowing what I know now.

17. I wish I could play the piano.

18. I have been lucky enough to meet my musical idol backstage at a theatre, where he showed me how to play one of his songs on guitar.

19. Whilst I still appreciate optimism, lately I have been finding a strange inspiration in hearing other people’s stories of heartbreak and tragedy.

20. I think death is a positive experience for the person going through it.

21. I fear that the music of yesteryear will one day be forgotten. I don’t think we should ever write music off as being “old,” but instead appreciate it for the place it once had in society. It saddens me to think that the youth of today would never have heard of musicians such as Arlo Guthrie, whom I incidentally saw perform tonight, and was extremely impressed with. That kinda stuff should never be lost.

22. Although I do not agree with the consumption of hallucinogenic drugs, I believe everybody should try them at least once in their lifetime.

23. My earliest memory is being on the street in a pram in 1986, watching Halley’s comet and wondering what the big fuss was all about!

24. I think squirrels are cuter than kangaroos.

25. I love London, I love my job, and I love the people I’m surrounded by. You’re all bloody awesome 🙂

Back in the days playing gigs in pubs around south-east Queensland we’d always meet characters. Some people were hilarious, some were drowning their sorrows, some were agressive, some were flirty, some were complete nutters, and some had really amazing stories to tell.

We had a residency on Tuesday nights at the Parkwood Tavern on the Gold Coast, and there was this one girl in particular who was a regular at the pub. I gradually got to know her as weeks went by, and one night during breaks between sets she completely opened up to me about her past. Her story really, really moved me, and later on that night I sat and wrote down everything I could remember about our conversation, with the intention of one day turning her life story into a song. I’m yet to do that, and to be honest I’d completely forgotten about her until the other day when I happened to read over my old notes. A flood of memories came rushing back, and I’m going to share her story here, both because I wonder how she’s doing today, and also because it makes me realise how fucking lucky I am to be living the life I’m living.

Just a warning: it’s a bit explicit.

It was the 20th of March, 2007. I didn’t get her name. Well I’m sure I did at some stage, but I didn’t make note of it, and I definitely can’t remember it. She was in her early 20’s, quite attractive, fairly thin and around 170cm tall with light brown/blondish hair. She exuberated a very honest, friendly personality, and she also had quite a “simple” feel to her, suggesting she wasn’t the academic type and didn’t really have any major ambitions in life. Despite this, however, I got a clear impression from early on that she was vulnerable, and there was something underneath her confident disposition that suggested all was not well.

You wouldn’t have known it at a first glance, but she was a junkie. She used to be on ice, speed and ecstacy, although she was adamant she’d been off all that for quite some time and had ceased contact with her suppliers. She still wasn’t off the drugs completely though, and admitted she still smoked a lot of pot and often needed five cones just to get to sleep at night. She smoked cigarettes too, but doesn’t hold her alcohol very well. She had been working on cutting down her overall consumption… it’s been difficult though, and she assured me she’d been trying her best.

She worked part time at a car detailing workshop, but it was hard work, the hours had been very thin lately, and she only ever worked on weekends. In a good week she’d make $180, in addition to the minimal Centrelink benefits she was entitled to. It wasn’t very much to live on at all, but she’d made a deal with her landlord (he was actually the estate manager, not the owner itself), who had agreed to give her a $50 discount off her weekly rent if she gives him a massage.

The landlord was a complete and utter creep. She hated him. Initially he only forced her to hug him, an act of which she bitterly obliged, but gradually his advances became more and more thorough. His hugs were painful, and he would squeeze and grind into her body to the point where it physically hurt. One day he noticed a pimple on one of her breasts, and he used that as an excuse to cross the line. She had no choice but to just let it happen. She lived with him, he was the boss, and she had nowhere else to go aside from the streets. The weekly “massages” weren’t just a back & shoulders, they were the whole deal. Front and down below as well. All the way. But if it meant $50 off her rent, it was worth doing.

It wasn’t abuse, she claimed, just harrassment. She could live with it.

Understandably though, she had a disrespect and mistrust in men like you would never believe, which more than explained why she was a lesbian.

The problem being that her current girlfriend had been very distant lately, and showing signs of schitzophrenia. They’d been getting along amazingly in the inital few weeks of their relationship, but they’d only recently started taking the next step together, and for some reason her girlfriend wasn’t being receptive at all. She was afraid she’d been putting too much pressure on her, because only recently after thinking her girlfriend had finally gotten over her inhibitions, she stopped mid-act, couldn’t take any more and burst into an emotional mess. All this had put a massive strain on their relationship, until just the other day when she found out the real reason why her girlfriend had been showing such a lack of intimacy. She’d admitted that she was HIV positive.

They broke up.

She was devastated. She really liked this girl. But she was determined to keep looking for the girl of her dreams, and despite her lack of confidence in ever finding a suitable partner, she was adamant that aside from the situation with her manipulative landlord, she would NEVER go back to men. Lately she’d been flirting with a few of the female customers who come into her workplace, hoping that one day she’ll see sparks fly with one of them.

She’d had an abusive childhood. Her father left before she was even born, and she was brought up by an uncaring mother, who regularly received (and still does receive) an income by means of prostitution. When she was six years old, she remembers her mother taking her to a bikers bar, where the bikers would make her undress and perform unmentionable acts in return for bags of lollies. Later on in life, she recalled this information to her mother, who flew into a fit of rage and accused her of being a “lying slut.” She will never see eye-to-eye with her again.

She’d been with many, many guys in the past, all of whom had simply taken advantage of her. She never felt loved or wanted by any of them, but at the same time she would do whatever it took to gain their illegitimate trust, or to simply stop them from being violent or abusive, an act of which she experienced many times. Most of these guys provided her with drugs, money or somewhere to sleep for the night, and it was due to this that she claimed at one stage, she slept with a different guy almost every week for the period of about nine months.

She cares so much for her brother. He’s young, and she’s worried, because he’s constantly getting into trouble with the law. She was a little taken aback recently because he asked if he could film some of her lesbian antics and put them up on the internet, as he apparently had contacts who would pay top cash for that kind of material. She’s doesn’t want to say yes, but she hadn’t yet said no. Anything to help her little brother…

* * *

As you can imagine, by this stage I was sitting with my mouth gaping open, listening intently, feeling all her sorrow and pain as she recollected her past traumas. There was a forlorn authenticity to her tone and body language that assured me she wasn’t bullshitting. She was the real deal.

All I could do was apologise to her. I apologised on behalf of the male gender for turning her life in the hellhole that it clearly was. I apologised for the fact that she’d had the misfortune of meeting so many scheming, scathing, downright fucking pigs who have the audacity to call themselves human beings. I felt embarrassed to be a man, embarrassed that she’d not been given the chance to experience the love and affection a real man could offer, and embarrassed by the fact that I’ve complained about my life, which was in effect, a complete breeze compared to hers. And on top of all this, I didn’t understand why she’d chosen to tell me her story. After all, was I not a man? Was I not one of those same materialistic fuckers who’d ruined her every hope of a normal, happy life? Indeed, she said, I was a man, but I wasn’t like any of the men she’d talked about. She told me she trusted me. We’d met a few times in weeks gone by, and she said she simply felt comfortable and at ease around me. Maybe that was an example of her downside coming through – how she had too much trust in people – but at the same time, I felt honoured for such a tortured soul to admit to such a hopeful statement.

The great shock came towards the end of our conversation, when she told me that she was happy. She was actually happy to have lived an agonizing youth, because she felt it’s moulded her into a strong person, and anything she embarks upon in life from now onwards can only be bigger and better than that of the past.

Why, only the other day she was watching TV and saw a documentary on a six month old girl having to work for a living. Her job was simply to dig through junk, resulting in the cutting and bleeding of her tiny hands, in order to find items of value to sell. Her family earned the equivalent of 20 cents per day, and they owned a traffic island in the middle of a street, where they lived.

“Life isn’t that bad after all,” she told me. “My soul will keep me going.”

* * *

She never came back to another gig after that night, and I never saw her again.

I hope you’re doing well, wherever you are. May your soul keep you going.

I was walking through the city today and noticed a commotion in a little garden near an office building. There was a baby bird who had fallen out of its nest in the tree onto the footpath, and his parents were flying around frantically trying to feed him and keep him out of danger. He seemed physically fine considering he fell from a tree so I picked him up off the ground and put him back in the garden where it was safer and where his parents could keep an eye on him. Unfortunately though the tree was just too high so there was no hope of finding the nest. He was trying so hard to get back up to where mum was, but he just wasn’t old enough to fly.

He wasn’t there when I walked past an hour later. I hope he somehow made it back up. Poor little guy

I was thinking back on past times the other day when out of the blue a memory came back to me of a coincidental occurance that happened a few years ago, which I had long forgotten about. So I thought I’d share it here in my blog, seeing as I have a habit of talking about coincidences.

Back in grade 12 during one of the school holidays our family went for a trip out to Alice Springs / Uluru. Stayed a few days there and saw all the sights, but instead of going straight back home we decided to keep driving down and make an impromptu visit to Adelaide to see the rellies.

I remember on the morning we drove out of Uluru, we stopped at a petrol station which was literally in the middle of nowhere – it was on the main highway that goes straight down the Northern Territory, but it was in the dead heart of the outback, miles away from any kind of civilisation. So we stopped to fill up the car and grabbed a quick feed at the cafe, sitting outside to eat our meal.

A decent amount of tourists pulled up at the petrol station during our time there, but in particular, there was a minibus that grabbed my attention. It was full of what looked like 16-17 year old students from all kinds of ethnic backgrounds on an excursion to the outback, and I remember seeing this one guy walk out of the bus and start dribbling a soccer ball, while his friends watched and marvelled at his ball-handling skills. I wasn’t sure what it was, but there was definitely something about him that kept me watching and got me thinking…

We ate out meal and continued on our drive down south, and I didn’t think any more of my encounter with the soccer player at the petrol station.

Back at school a few weeks later in our music class, we were discussing what what we did and where we went on our holidays, and of course I mentioned our trip to the NT to see Ayers Rock. On hearing this, one of the guys in the class also said that he went to Ayers Rock too, so we got chatting and it turns out he went there with a group of exchange students – because he was an an exchange student himself, from Brazil. And then it clicked… “Do you remember being at a petrol station in the middle of nowhere dribbling a soccer ball?”

He remembered – and he proceeded to describe to me the exact same petrol station, at the exact same time of day.

It most definitley proved to me that it’s a small world.

On a deeper level though – I did think to myself at the time, ‘that guy kinda looks like the exchange student from school,’ but the chances of that being the case were way too low to warrant me wanting to go up up to him and say hi. So I didn’t. But if I had, the experience of coincidence would have been taken to a whole new level because we both would have physically partaken in it, rather than merely relate to it at a later date. Which leads me to conclude that if an opportunity exists for you to take but you’re unsure of what the outcome might be – you’re best to just follow your instincts and take the chance regardless.