Fear and Loathing...

I recently discovered that I had become one of those people who would from time to time shoot off bitter little emails from my cramped day job ‘workstation’ to sites like ‘The Age Online’ to lament misplaced apostrophes, point out historical inaccuracies and expose logical inconsistencies. I did this because I wanted to try and show up the ambitious and intellectually under-developed hacks whose hollow ‘content’ had somehow managed to find its way into that bloody rag while I spent my working day writing racy things like:

Click Start.
Select the Insert menu and press Enter.

…at every stolen opportunity browsing my way through a world of interesting subjects, often surprisingly clumsily tackled on the world’s most wonderful news sites – the beeb, The Times, The Guardian.

I stopped doing this when I realised that it showed me up as frustrated, didactic and mean-spirited – rather like that middle-aged woman with the librarian’s bob who wrote ‘Eats, Shoots and Leaves’. Though my own bobbed head was nodding furiously in the affirmative as I read that book, I now see this kind of constipated carping as the literary equivalent of sexual frustration. Lots of practice, not a lot of real action.

My horrible little desk job always afforded me ample time to read through the angry, rampantly, joyously high-brow middle class polemic of my favourite Guardian columnists. Aaah, The Guardian…a friend and I had once pronounced it to be the only workplace we might consider ‘relieving’ Rupert Murdoch to work for ('The Times' always comes!), in a game of ‘what price would you pay for…?’.*

*’What price would you pay for…?’ involved concocting the most horrid forfeits imaginable with which to secure selected dreams. One of our favourite dilemnas was ‘If you could control all content and have your own column at the Guardian (not, after all, the most unrealistic goal in the known universe, but one of my own personal weaknesses) – would you clean your dog with your tongue/provide comfort to [insert name of horrid old man such as Rupert]/scour the floors of Flinders Street station with your toothbrush’…I think my dog Ruby would win out in that lot actually. We decided the game was in bad taste when I admitted I would forfeit my own mother rather than never eat fish and chips again.

Anyway… The Guardian. I wanted to write for it so much that it never occurred to me I might not need to do anything as drastic or unsavoury as the rules of our silly game dictated. I wanted to write for it so much that I deliberately never applied to work as a cadet when I saw an advertisement to do so; just as I deliberately lost the address of a talent scout who saw me singing (feel me blush) up at Airlie Beach one summer; just as we all purposefully ignore the gaze of the ones we want the most, and the glare of any spotlight. Well, the less ambitious, more emotionally flawed and (invariably) more talented of us. N'est ce pas, petite Ro?

Why have I spent my life being drip fed mediocrity over the web, through the tube and in print KNOWING that it is rubbish, KNOWING that I had more to say, KNOWING that, most importantly, I’d like to say it more than I’d like to write a software manual or investigate why some bloke in Glen Waverley paid $27.50 more on his Telstra line rental than he expected to. Why do we wilfully ignore what will make us happy?

Well - it's my maiden flight, but as they say...

...the time always comes...

When the people wake up.
When you shake off the torpor.
When you realise you are needed.
When you add your voice to the throng.
When you have to set it down for the record.
When you have to stare your doubters down.

When you can't sit on your arse producing content for someone else's show any more. When you can't listen to crap without realising you can beat them at their own game. When you realise that if you didn't join them in the first place, you could tell the truth better than they tell their tawdry lies.

...oh yes, the time always comes.

Anyway, enough of the corny introduction to my blog. I was attempting to deploy some of the less subtle marketing techniques I've learnt as a monkey in someone else's machine - have I saturated you with my brand yet? Did I not mention that the time always comes?


I think the Great Bard of Sheffield (the Great Bull Shitter?) and highly hot Mr. Phil Oakey put it far more eloquently in a song that always fills my head just as defiant tears of rejection (professional, never personal) are about to fill my eyes.

Open Your Heart is the greatest song of a generation, spearheading an album which is often touted as 'the White Album' of the 80s, but is in fact far more brilliant... and that is no small praise, for I am no Beatles-basher:

".....but if you can stand the test you know your worst is better than their best......"

Well Phil.... the time always comes to stand the test.