Millennial - NOT!

I have something bad to tell you guys.
Those of us born in the early '80s - we are MILLENNIALS.
Why did no-one tell me?!! I've never drawn on Groucho Mark eyebrows or hunted down gunt pants in a mothballed St. Vinnies - I don't feel okay with this classification!
And to make it worse, I graduated the exact year that it was generalised millennials would graduate - 2000.
I didn't surf the web until I was 13! Gen Z, aka, 'The Naturals' should be Millennials. We already got enough slop being called Gen Y.
Sure, I could ignore labels and go on living my life in my usual self-designed fashion, but my inner-contrarian rises up! Like a phoenix from the ashes of a thing that has ashes in it. Currently-known Millenials are wearing the same fashions we lived through in the '90s - this doesn't work! Cast wider this generation thigh gap! Keep your Flume chai latte vegan Tinder top-buns away from me. I'm going over here to yell at kids to stay off a lawn I'll never be able to afford thanks to the Baby Boomers.

Backyard Bandits VS Pub Snubs

I was thinking about how I always miss bands playing at parties. In sheds, backyards. I have a great memory of watching bands blasting a shed ceiling off under a cold inky ocean of stars in a NSW town populated with bored teens. Of a band in an unlikely yard in Albury, just behind Dean St. The air thrilled. People moved to the music. No-one got paid.

Not getting paid sucks.

But no-one gets paid now. Unless they do weddings or functions. And if you do get paid for a gig, it's so little all you can buy with it is a pair of sunnies from Chemist Warehouse and a drink. Many places don't pay at all. Then you're there, performing earnestly to people who aren't necessarily even listening, sipping rieslings, clattering knives on plates, smoking, laughing, scowling, maybe remembering a polite clap, or getting drunk and yell-talking and maybe spilling beer on you during some underevolved attempt at wooing of a human female. The venue makes money, the performer, not.

So, if no-one is making money, and a party provides fun and energy where a pub may only offer disillusionment and ill matching of musical mood to present ears, there should be more yard parties, yes?

I don't know people who have yard parties, but I've always wanted to play one. It'd be like busking, but more intimate and chaotic and safe. I like raves and festivals, but I don't dig the techno and wish more had live music, and that live music festivals and gigs could be happier and more colourful like raves. And every NYE I wish I was on a stage playing a metre from dancing people, howling in the new year. Drums pounding behind me. Whether in a venue, or a cleared shed.

Music for the people, with the people. I lived through the '90s but I crave like someone who has only seen it in films.

DRIVE by Lera Lynn & its memories

I love this song for several reasons.
It reminds me of Berlin, when it flooded my ears daily and I saw Lera sing, just a walk over the old gothic bridge that intersects with the Berlin Wall.
It reminds me of a hotel room bath I lay in at 3am in Stockholm Sweden, where I sipped a pink tea, let the cold of my feet restore to warmth after standing in the dark and wet for hours selling t-shirts and CDs to increasingly drunk Swedes, feeling the pain of my back and damaged rib from sliding down a staircase ease up, knowing I badly, badly needed to sleep, but also needing some alone time after an emotionally testing night and too much time on the road with another human.
It reminds me of a night in a small panel van flying along a freeway in outer-northern Melbourne, vision swiped with the lights of night, a man I loved beside me, and these sounds sailing through the dark with us.
Mostly - it's just an amazing song.

DRIVE

The Quick Kiss Good Day

Shuttled back into the badly-built mold box bedroom with my brother needing the lounge room floor, I found 3 hours of battered sleep as I remembered how badly these windows block sound - especially construction. As the big build nearby angle-grinds its way to completion, another was just demolished. I tried to convince myself the sounds could be part of dreams.
I woke with oedema eyes. You know - when someone has a visible allergic reaction, and the skin around their eyes is puffed with lymph fluid? I heard a click of the front door, and my brother quietly left the house.
I jumped out of bed, trotted out and and stuck a bleary, puffy, unslept face out into the hall.
"You going?"
"Yeah."
"Good bye. Good bye. Good bye. Good bye."
He toddled over and kissed me on the top of the head.
Okay, so he's not totally terrible after all.

Don't Sway My Way

That moment when a crazy/mentally disabled/drunk man staggers to a stop when he sees you, and sways while he debates whether to make an unwanted, semen-loaded cameo in your day simply because you are appealingly female and he is ready to mate now, please, but does a final side-to-side and meanders away, to your utter, and repetitive relief.

Supermarket Beating

What a weird day. Lightning strikes at a south-eastern sky, and a series of PT delays and misses saw me outside a supermarket witnessing a gym-bulked guy beating the shit out of a skinny black dude. I videoe'd it and have to email it to the cops.

 

Funnily, Google Maps asked if I want to add the video to the business's Google page :)

 

Not so funnily was how sick I felt afterwards as the adrenaline wore off, but hard to determine when you already have nausea from tonsillitis. I know I don't feel right after witnessing that. The staff interfered, one brutalised the victim with blows to the head (he still works there - I return his smiles with ice-carved eyes), but none came out to talk to the police. They stood inside. Not just that, one escorted the attacker out the back door while the victim staggered out the front. He was done for shoplifting, but his attackers were there buying Jim Beam.

 

It's sad how often I see this imbalance, this insanity. Even the cops didn't go after the guy who kneed him and kicked him - even after seeing my video. They handcuffed the droopy black guy. 

On the bench beside him - two Crunchies and a tin of meat.

Phoned-In Obsession

They say that in adulthood, you are well-served to look back at the things that you loved as a child. Your favourite book will tell you a lot about yourself - that one you carted around everywhere and insisted everyone read to you until it looked shaggier than a mange dog. We are still that person in a lot of ways.

I was just remembering my love of phones. I always wanted a phone. I was obsessed with how American girls on sitcoms got phones in their bedrooms. Hamburger and lip phones were coveted. I would get an old rotary phone and take it to school - not just primary but high school (different phones). I would be out at dinner with my parents and be pretending to take a call from my agent on my flip-cell in 1994. Once in high school my mum took my fake flip off me and started having phonesex with the guy I was 'talking to'. To this day you can bet your ass I would take a corded phone out in public just to confuse people. 

 

What is it with me and phones? I used to be allured by walkie-talkies and CBs too, which felt like secret worlds. Like electronic psychic power. Broadcasting, long before such a thing was ever handed off to us in the form of the internet.