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:

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…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?